On bad art - play, puns, and the shortcomings of artificial intelligence

But when she parted hence, she left her groome
An yron man, which did on her attend
Alwayes, to execute her stedfast doome,
And willed him with Artegall to wend,
And doe what euer thing he did intend.
His name was Talus, made of yron mould,
Immoueable, resistlesse, without end.
Who in his hand an yron flale did hould,
With which he thresht out falshood, and did truth vnfould 

- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (Book 5, Canto 1, Verse 12)

As the hype concerning generative artificial intelligence is rising and increasingly affecting various parts of society, I have found myself reflecting on the frustrating discussion about its use for the creation of images and novels. Several claims have been made regarding the possibility of using AI for writing novels, and most of these - as far as I know - fail to acknowledge that what is produced is assembled from stolen bits and pieces from existing novels, and require unethical amounts of energy to produce. Another significant point here is that images and texts assembled through generative AI are also bad - not only of a bad quality, but bad because they have no meaning to them. These products are bad art because the badness has no other element to it than badness.  

What I am writing here might at first seem both hermetic and obtuse, yet I do want to distinguish between between art that can be considered bad in terms of its quality, and art that is bad because it has no meaning. These thoughts have been offset by watching episodes of the animated TV series Batfink, a Batman parody that first aired in 1966-67, and my examples are taken from some of these episodes. My main point, however, is that no matter how one evaluates the series Batfink as art, it will always be better than anything produced through the use of generative AI. The reason for this is that the badness of Batfink - to be presented in more detail shortly - has a meaning to it, and that meaning is due to the series being created by human beings. 

 

 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief

Batfink was an animated series that parodied the Batman TV series that ran from 1966 to 1968, and might arguably have been intended to benefit from some of the popularity of the Batman franchise. The protagonist is an anthropomorphic bat (with features that also resemble both a cat and a mouse), who fights against various criminals together with his servant Karate, a human sidekick who follows a well-established trope of being both ethnically other and less intelligent (such as Mandrake the Magician's sidekick Lothar, for instance). The series ran for 100 episodes of around 5 minutes each, and is notable for its ludicrous plots, its pompous dialogue, its myriad of over-the-top supervillain antagonists. Moreover, the series relied heavily on recycled animation. Although this is common in a lot of animation, the Batfink series recycled its scenes with such frequency as to appear as a deliberate lampooning of the practice. When considering what animators were capable of producing in the 1960s, the Batfink series is definitely cheaply produced, and it might also be called bad due to its cheap production. 

However, even if we accept the label bad for the series, Batfink also reminds us that badness - here meaning low quality - is not without depth, and not without creativity. Because of this depth and because of this creativity, a series such as Batfink has a kind of cultural merit that can never be attained by anything produced by artificial intelligence. First of all, the dialogue, the plots, and, perhaps above all, the implausibly lucky escapes from deadly situations, are all part of a satirical tone that serves as a loadbearing beam for the series - it parodies and mocks the superhero genre, something that can only be done with intent, with deliberation. 

Secondly, the series contains a plethora of puns and references to various cultural products and to elements specific to its own period. These are deliberate details aimed at an audience expected to catch them, to understand them, and to appreciate them. While most episodes are full of these, a few examples will suffice here.  

One case in point is episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief. Immediately, the title points to the central reference, namely the story of the wooden horse by which the city of Troy was captured, as recounted in the epic poem The Iliad, attributed to Homer. In the cartoon episode, the horse is a vehicle used by the recurring supervillain Hugo A-go-go to perform robberies. The animated horse is very different from its legendary reference point, in that it is not disguised as a sculpture, it is not given as a present, and it is not brought into a walled city in order to open its gates from the inside. Instead, the mechanical horse is used as a battering ram to break into bank vaults in broad daylight, and although it does contain a human being inside it, that human is its driver, not a contingent of soldiers. If human creativity had not deliberately parodied the legend of the Trojan horse, the appearance of a mechanical horse in an animated series would have no depth to it. Instead, there is a play on a very famous legendary episode.  

  

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 77, The Trojan Horse Thief

A second example is from episode 9, Nuts of the Round Table, where the aforementioned Hugo A-go-go uses robot knights on horseback - living horses this time - to rob banks. Once again, the title indicates the cultural reference that has inspired the plot, namely the legend of King Arthur's knights of the round table. Moreover, the pun on nuts - as in nuts and bolts - is a nod to the robotic nature of these knights. The pun and the reference are both outcomes of human creativity, and they are made deliberately and easily recognisable. 

In addition, it is worth noting that there are two further elements that might also point to topoi from the literary repository to which the stories of King Arthur belong. First of all, the horse - as seen in the screenshot below - is white, a classical image ultimately drawn from Revelation 19:11-16, where the rider on the white horse is a Christlike figure. (Importantly, this is not one of the four horsemen mentioned in Revelation 6.) The white horse is a feature of numerous medieval legends, and has remained a symbol of chivalry in modern cultural parlance. Perhaps the white colour of the animated horse is a nod to this tradition? Moreover, the automaton knight also features in various old stories, be it Talos of Greek legend (mentioned, for instance, in Argonautica), or its early modern version Talus from book 5 of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene, used in this blogpost's epigraph. I do not know whether the animators and script writers of Batfink were familiar with this topos, and I do not know whether the automaton knight is a nod to this literary element. Importantly, however, because the automaton knight was created by human creativity, there is a possibility that we are dealing with a cultural reference. Had this episode been produced by artificial intelligence, however, the question would have been moot, because artificial intelligence does not have intent and can therefore not make use of literary topoi beyond what it copies and cannibalises from other cultural products. 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 09, Nuts of the Round Table

A final example to be mentioned here is period-specific references. These are elements that only make sense because the intended audiences are familiar with them from their own contemporary frame of reference. Once such case is found in episode 11, Fatman Strikes Again (another pun which points to the very franchise that Batfink lampoons). The plot concerns a man in a fat suit who robs the safes of fat men clubs. Such clubs were once a well-known, if perhaps not widely common, feature of American social life, where fatness could be connected to status and wealth. In the twenty-first century, this reference is antiquated as such clubs are no longer a prominent part of the contemporary discourse - I do not even know if any such clubs still exist. Such period-specific references only carry meaning because there is an intent in them, they are meant for the audiences to recognise. 

Screenshot from Batfink, episode 11, Fatman Strikes Again

These examples are not many, but hopefully enough to illustrate my main point, namely that even art that is mass-produced, cheaply made, and that has rather limited entertainment value has more depth than anything produced through generative artificial intelligence, simply because the human-made art in question has intent, is deliberately bad, and contains elements that are included on purpose, and not because the elements in question just happened to be part of the trove which was plundered for parts when assembling a product through generative artificial intellgience. TV series such as Batfink might be bad art, but the badness is playful, subversive, deliberate, parodic, and there is entertainment to be had in this. This intent is what makes the series art, however bad it might be deemed to be. If the series had been created through generative artificial intelligence, however, it would not be art, but a simulacrum of art, and it would be bad because of was just that, a simulacrum without any depth, meaning or intent whatsoever. 

Dubious quests for a king - fantasies about the burial place of Olaf Haraldsson of Norway

For many people, history revolves around its kings and princes. This fascination seems to be a constant in recorded history, and it has not released its grip on human imagination even in our modern times, as evidenced by the many biographies, movies and of course gossip magazines in which kings have their premier seats. As a historian who works on medieval kings who were later claimed to be saints, I am frequently exposed to the often obsessive interest some people – both lay and learned – cultivate for royalty of ages past.

In recent years, this fascination has now very often moved its focus to the bones of these royal dead. This in itself is not new, as royal tombs and graves have been the subject of great interest throughout recorded history. For medievalists, one of the most famous cases of such interest is King Arthur, whose bones were said to have been found at Glastonbury Abbey in 1198 together with those of Queen Guinevere, and whose remnants were re-interred in 1278 by Edward I. Here, the earthly remains of the legendary king served as evidence for the king actually being dead and therefore not a rallying-point for the Welsh. The question of Arthur’s burial place is a recurring issue for certain amateur historians and enthusiasts, and it was raised again as late as May 2016.

It is easy to understand why the bones of kings hold such a grip on popular imagination. They are tangible vestiges of the past, and reminders that the things you read about in books have a connection to the real, physical world. This is probably part of the reason why the case of the Greyfriars Skeleton, discovered under a car-park in Leicester in September 2012, gained such massive attention. When the skeleton was identified as King Richard III in February 2013, media erupted with enthusiasm and interest, and it the fascination which had long been in place among many members of the global audience became immensely visible. The Greyfriars Skeleton was something of a milestone in the popular history of royal bones, as it proved to the world that lost historical kings could in fact be found. In the years following, we have seen people urging for a search for both King Alfred and Harold Godwinsson.

Miniature of the statue (1973) of Olaf Haraldsson by Dyre Vaa, Stiklestad Centre

In my native Norway, the interest in dead kings is also significant. Only about eight months after the Greyfriars press conference, a Norwegian made the claim that King Magnus VI Lagabøte (Law-mender), who died in 1280, was buried in the wall of Bergen Cathedral. Following a georadar examination of the walls, objects were located inside it. But the case will not be pursued until the cathedral is due for restoration in 2018.

The Norwegian king who has gained the most attention throughout history, and who continues to do so today, is Olaf Haraldsson, the Viking-turned-Christian who died at Stiklestad north of Trondheim in 1030 in an attempt to regain the Norwegian throne. Olaf was proclaimed to be a saint in 1031 by Bishop Grimkell, and in the twelfth century Olaf’s body was moved to the new cathedral in Trondheim which was begun by Archbishop Eystein Erlendsson.

The death of Olaf Haraldsson

Here from the old exhibition at Stiklestad Centre

Olaf Haraldsson is an important part of the Norwegian imagination, and part of this imagination has been concerned with the bones of the saint-king. The fascination with Olaf’s bones re-emerged in July 2016, when Bodvar Schjelderup – a professor emeritus of architecture – made the national press with the claim that Olaf Haraldsson did not rest somewhere in Nidaros Cathedral, but in the castle Steinvikholm further north in the Trondheim fjord. The castle was built in 1532 by Archbishop Olaf Engelbrektsson, who was the last of the Catholic archbishops of Norway. The background for Schjelderup’s claim is that the shrine of Olaf Haraldsson was indeed removed to Steinvikholm when the archbishop fled Trondheim during the Reformation. However, as professor of medieval history Steinar Imsen and archaeologist Øystein Ekroll both have pointed out, there are contemporary sources from the mid-sixteenth century saying that the reliquary of the saint-king was brought back to Nidaros Cathedral in 1564, and all historical evidence points to the conclusion that Olaf is still buried somewhere in the cathedral.

Steinvikholm Castle

Photo by Frode Inge Helland

Courtesy of Wikimedia

Around mid-August 2016, just a few days ago, the matter of Olaf’s burial site was again raised, and again it made the national press. This time, the claim was put forth by Joralf Gjerstad, a healer from the town Verdal north of Trondheim. Gjerstad has gained national attention for his alleged ability to heal, and in an article in one of the leading Norwegian newspapers he claimed to have had a vision which showed that the royal saint was not buried in Trondheim but rather at Stiklestad, the place of his death in 1030. According to the vision, the king was taken away after the battle and buried in a small hill.

This ongoing discussion concerning the remains of Olaf Haraldsson is testament to the importance of studying medieval history, because the past will always remain relevant and for that reason we will always need experts who can sift the nonsense from the truth. Unfortunately, however, this discussion concerning Olaf Haraldsson’s bones also reveals the almost liminal place which the expert inhabits on the national stage, and this is a matter of great concern.

In the two cases reported here, the news outlets have given precedence to the claims of amateurs and put them on the same level as experts. This is a trend which is quite common in today’s media world, and it perpetuates the notion that experts and non-experts are to be listened to equally. Such a notion is false, and it can be very damaging in certain cases. As for the discussion about Olaf Haraldsson’s bones, there is not much immediate damage to be made. However, it helps solidifying a very dangerous trend, and as such it should not be taken lightly.

Nidaros Cathedral

There are no good reasons to pay attention to the claims put forth by either Schjelderup or Gjerstad – or for that matter Gunnar Rosenlund who made claims about Magnus VI. While experts like Steinar Imsen and Øystein Ekroll have dedicated much of their professional lives to gain a thorough understanding of the Norwegian Middle Ages, the counter-claims are made by men driven by ideas well beyond the empirical and well beyond historical science. For instance, Gunnar Rosenlund consulted a psychic in order to find the tomb of King Magnus. Bodvar Schjelderup is a pyramid enthusiast who imagines that the bones in the shrine taken back to Nidaros Cathedral had been swapped, and that Olaf’s actual bones still reside in the castle. Furthermore, his claim that Olaf Haraldsson resides at Steinvikholm is ultimately founded on a numerical game with the angles of the Kheops pyramide, as he himself stated in an interview in Trondheim's student magazine Under Dusken in 1997. Joralf Gjerstad has formulated a vision which is contrary to every single medieval source dealing with the death of Olaf (and there are many of them). That Gjerstad had a vision is probably a historical fact, many people experience visions in the same way that people dream. But just like a dream is a reality only within the mind of the dreamer, so there is no reason to think that the mental images in Gjerstad’s head should have any consequence for the physical world.

Stiklestad Church

Talking about Gjerstad’s claim, a relative of mine then said that it was only to dig up the area. And it is true, the easiest way to deal with these claims is to follow the logic of them to the bitter end and actually perform the searches. But such a solution is itself deeply problematic. First of all, if we are to dig up a place because a local healer has had a vision that goes contrary to professional consensus, we are letting amateurs dictate the priorities of historical research. I don’t think I speak too harshly when I say that that is intolerable. Secondly, to perform searches in order to debunk the fantasies and imaginings of amateurs will cost money, time and energy that could be much better spent following the priorities of experts who know which excavations are most needed.  Thirdly, if the whims of amateurs are to be heeded in this way, amateurs are not only dictating the priorities of historical research but also of the national attention. In a time when it has become increasingly challenging for non-experts to filter out the facts from the dubious, the voices of experts should not be obscured by such searches – because even though experts are allowed to speak against such claims, it is the amateur’s claims which will always be the loudest because it is that claim which dictates the search.

For a medievalist, there will always be struggles against poorly founded notions and wild claims. The on-going discussion about the bones of Olaf Haraldsson is a good reminder of to what lengths these claims can go.

Narrative and Saints' Lives, part II - Saint-collectives and their figureheads

 In a previous blogpost I wrote down some reflections on the structuring of the narrative in stories about saints. This post was prompted by a reading group I've been arranging at the Centre for Medieval Literature in Odense where I work, in which we've read excerpts from Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine. The present post follows in the same vein, but while the previous post considered narrative in stories which were very brief, I here wish to consider what happens to the narrative when the story contains a great multitude of characters. The post in centred on the story of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins of Cologne, parts of which legend we translated in the last reading group session of the semester.

I'm also happy to know that the reading group inspired my colleague Alaistair Matthews to blog about his thoughts on the Ursula legend and medieval German literature, which can be read here.

Ursula shielding the virgins in her cloak
Amiens - BM - ms. 0203, f.045, book of hours, use of Rome, 15th century
Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

The Legend of Ursula

The legend of Ursula has been long in the making, and the story has received elaborating impulses at various points over a long stretch of time. The earliest evidence for a veneration of the virgin martyrs of Cologne is found in an inscription in an old basilica which states that a certain Clematius built this chapel in honour of the martyred virgins of the city. The inscription is believed to be from the fourth, or possibly the fifth, century, and is the foundation for the rest of the legend, although it provides neither names, dates or numbers.

The next step in the development of the legend came in the ninth century, when a sermon was written in natali sanctarum Coloniensum virginum, for the birthday of the holy virgins of Cologne. This birthday refers to the day of their death, considered in the theology of sainthood to be the heavenly birthday of the saint, the day when the saint entered, or was reborn in, Heaven. In this sermon we are for the first time given names and numbers, and it is stated that there were several thousand virgins, foremost of whom was the virgin Pinnosa. The high number of virgins is repeated in the martyrology of Wandalbert of Prüm, c.850, where it is said that there were several thousand of these virgins. This source might have been the Sermo in natali, for the martyrology of Usuard, c.875, only gives the names Martha and Saula and adds that there were several others, and this suggests that the high number of the Sermo had not yet become consensus. However, only a few decades after Usuard the number is set at eleven thousand and this became consensus for the centuries to come.

It was during the course of the tenth century that prose narratives emerged in which the basic story was established: The daughter of a Christian English king, Ursula, is asked for her hand in marriage by a pagan prince. Ursula wants to avoid the marriage, so she asks for a delay of three years, and in this time she summons ten fellow virgins and each of these eleven have a retinue of thousand virgins. They set off in a ship and are borne by the winds to Cologne, and from there they undergo circuitous route which takes them via Basel and Rome back to Cologne again where they are martyred by the Huns. This story is probably derived from an old legend, a version of which is also found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the British Kings, where we find Ursula, eleven thousand noble virgins, and their retinue of sixty thousand young women. 

The ships sailing to Cologne
MS Egerton 3028, f.7, Wace, Roman de Brut, 14th century
Courtesy of British Library

By the thirteenth century, in the time when Jacobus was compiling the Legenda Aurea, the legend had become very elaborate. In the version recorded by Jacobus, Ursula demands that her bethroted is baptized, and she wants to bring the non-Christian virgins of her retinue to baptism as well, thus giving Ursula a more active and apostolic role. As in the above-mentioned legend, Ursula demands ten virgins to follow her, and a retinue of thousand virgins for each of the eleven. The virgins are then brought in from all over the world, and a special mention is made of Gerasina of Sicily who joins Ursula - though not herself a virgin - and brings her five children with her. This is a crucial point in the story, that in addition to the eleven thousand virgins there is a multitude of followers of both sexes who, as it is said, joins this new knighthood of Ursula, all bent on martyrdom.

The virgins and their followers then set out on the route described above and when they arrive in Rome they are greeted by Pope Cyriacus who is British and also fictional. Cyriacus joins up with the virgins and they all leave for Cologne, together with a number of other bishops who had held offices in cities as diverse as Ravenna, Lucca and Antioch. In addition, we learn that Ursula's husband-to-be, Ethereus, is also compelled by an angelic message to leave Britain where he has been residing and go to Cologne to meet his martyrdom.

At this stage in the story we are introduced to the first antagonists of the story, two scheming pagan commanders of the Roman army called Maximus and Africanus. They are concerned that this massive array of Christians "would make the Christian religion flourish overmuch", and so they plot to bring about the death of Ursula and her companions. They therefore communicate with their kinsman Julius, who despite his name and familial relations is the chief of the Huns, and he agrees to march on Cologne and slaughter the Christians. When all the groups of people finally converge on Cologne, it is Justus who plays the role as the traditional tempter as we find it in the classical accounts of virgin martyrs. For as the Huns are slaughtering the Christians, Justus becomes so dazzled by Ursula's beauty that he asks her to marry him. She refuses, and Justus shoots and arrow through her.

The last section of the legend as recounted by Jacobus tells of one virgin, Cordula, who had hidden in the ships during the massacre, but gave up herself and was martyred on the next day, leaving her outside the celebration of the martyrs.

Ursula's martyrdom by a Hun's arrow
Mans (Le) - BM - ms. 0688, f.028, book of hours, c.1435-1440
Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

Narrative and characters

The account in Legenda Aurea reads more like a chivalric romance rather than a saint's life, and this has been the case since the earliest prose narratives about the virgins of Cologne. The level of elaboration, however, the numerous characters, the profusion of sub-plots and the gathering of people from a wide-ranging geographical spectre, all these are typical of the chivalric romance as this genre came about in the twelfth century, the century which also saw a new surge in the cult of the eleven thousand virgins.

It is interesting to note the strategies employed to make the narrative more accessible to the reader or the listener. The various sub-plots of Gerasina of Sicily, Pope Cyriacus, the Bishop of Greece and his widowed sister, and others, all contribute to make the narrative more episodic. This in turns creates a different curve of suspense than what we find in most other narratives of Legenda Aurea, where the trajectory is more straightforward, more formulaic. Ursula and her companions, however, do not follow the typical trajectory, but rather a trajectory which might be said to bear greater resemblance to that of errant knights in the romances - except that the journey of the virgins are guided by divine power and angelic messages.

Another aspect which emphasises the similarity between chivalric romance and the Ursula story is the wide geographic scope. Ursula's followers come from all over Christendom, from locations which are both exotic and more familiar, at least to the continental audience. Ravenna, Lucca, Sicily, Antioch, Britain, Greece, all these are place-names thrown in seemingly to provide that blend of familiar and exotic which is so typical of the chivalric romance. For example, in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, written in the early 13th century, we find figures like Morholt of Ireland, Lot the king of Norway, Count Lanzidant of Greenland, Kingrisin king of Ascalon and Ipomidon of Babylon, to mention only a few of the most exotic members of the cast. This wide-reaching geographic blend is a staple of the chivalric romance, and in the abovementioned History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, we read how King Arthur subdued a wide range of kingdoms, as illustrated in the chronicle of Peter Langtoft, seen below.

Arthur standing on the crowns he has conquered
MS Royal 20 A II, f.4, English miscellany, c.1307-c.1327
Courtesy of British Library

It is of course natural that a narrative containing such a multitude of characters is in dire need of figureheads and focal points. This explains for instance the various sub-plots of the story, which I suspect should be seen as a sign of inspiration taken from the numerous chivalric romances written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Through these sub-plots, Ursula maintains her role as the architecture of the grand scheme, but it also allows for some pauses from the main action and the introduction to new characters which adds faces and thus personality to a massive blob of around seventy thousand persons marching on Cologne. However, it is worth noting that Ursula is the only protagonist character who is featured throughout the story. Eutherius, her husband, appears twice but is largely inactive, while Gerasina, Cyriacus and the unfortunate Cordula are given their time in the limelight and then never mentioned again - with the possible exception of Cyriacus who is mentioned leaving Rome, but as he has also been featured in the preceding paragraph it might still be said to be a continuous sub-plot. In this way, we are given a long list of names which allow us to create some mental images of the characters involved, but they are treated very briefly. However, since Ursula is the only properly recurring character, she is the one most easily imprinted on the mind of the audience. In a way, it seems like the secondary character are there to lift up Ursula as the main protagonist, like a choir is meant to bring out the soloist more strongly in a musical performance. In this way, the multitude is given several heads but only one figurehead.

Another explanation for the various characters might be to add some verisimilitude to the story by mentioned geographical localities which exist in the real world and which therefore act as guarantors of the account's veracity. To such a strategy it is of no significance that in the temporal setting of this narrative - which Jacobus argues must be set in the mid-fifth century, there was no queen of Sicily, and there was no pope called Cyriacus.

Regardless the explanation for the multitude of secondary characters, the need for a primary protagonist is evident. We can ask ourselves why Ursula ended up as this figurehead rather than Pinnosa mentioned in Sermo in natali sanctarum Coloniensum virginum, but ultimately it is only to be expected that an unwieldy mass of virgins needed at least one named figurehead so that the faithful can direct their prayers more easily, or so that the story is lifted out of mere myth, which is what happens easily when no names are attached to such a massive body of saints.

Ursula and Gerasina
Châteauroux - BM - ms. 0002, f.376, breviary, use of Paris, c.1414
Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

Ursula and the virgins
MS Royal 13 A IX, f.4, Francesco Roseti of Verona, before 1547
Courtesy of British Library

Concluding thoughts

In the medieval calendars and collections of saints' lives we find several feasts which commemorate groups of saints, men and women grouped together because they had shared eminence in their holy works. In the Legenda Aurea alone we find for instance chapters titled "The Seven Brothers", "The Seven Sleepers", "Saint Adrian and His Companions", "Saint Cyriacus and His Companions" (not to be confused with the character in the Ursula legend", "Saint Hippolytus and His Companions", "The Four Crowned Martyrs", and a few more. In most of these stories there are some saints who are more prominent than the others, and the often low number of companions makes it easier to accept these groups, yet even they have their figureheads.

The need for such figureheads can be exemplified not only by the fact that Ursula has become the leader of the group even though hers is not the oldest name featured in the legend. Another instance can be found in a Norwegian legend most likely based on the story of Ursula. This legend is that of Sanctorum in Selio, the holy of Selje. This legend tells of an Irish princess who escaped marriage to a pagan prince by fleeing to Norway. They were brought to the coast of Selje, which is a small portion of the the Western Norwegian coast. When the pagans came after them, Sunniva prayed for deliverance and the holy were buried in an avalanche of rocks. We don't know exactly how old this story is, but we know that the story was known in the mid-eleventh century from references in Adam of Bremen's History of the Diocese of Hamburg. The name of this princess, however, was not given until the twelfth century, when the relics of these men and women were translated to Bergen. She was then called Sunniva, and she is now one of Norway's four saints. That Sunniva emerges as the leader for the group as a late development in the legend is similar to what we see in Ursula, and points to the need for a figurehead in a group of saints as a phenomenon not limited to the legend of the virgins of Cologne.

This need for figureheads is probably not limited only to the medieval cult of saints, especially since there are plenty of postmedieval collectives of saints that are officially recognized. We have for instance the forty martyrs of England and Wales, or the martyrs of Nagasaki in 1622, but I'm not sufficiently familiar with these cases to know whether any figureheads emerged. It will, however, be interesting to see the development of the collective of saints canonized by the Armenian church earlier this year. In commemoration of the genocide of the Armenians in 1915, the Armenian church canonized all 1.5 million victims of the persecution, and the question is whether anyone, and if so who, will emerge as leaders and figureheads of the possibly biggest saint-collective in Christian history.

Ursula and the virgins in the most traditional depiction
Mâcon - BM - ms. 0003, f.003, Jacobus de Voragine, Légende dorée, c.1470
Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

Literature


Farmer, David, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, Oxford University Press, 2005

Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, translated by William Granger Ryan, Princeton University Press, 2012

Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, translated by A. T. Hatto, Penguin Classics, 1980

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15225d.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/armenia/11559613/Armenian-Church-makes-saints-of-1.5-million-genocide-victims.html

He was an errant knight

Mylde answer made: he was an errant knight
- The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser

A few days back I was roaming the Internet for Pre-Raphaelite paintings, when I happened to come across this beautiful piece by John Everett Millais (1829-96) from 1870 titled "Painting the Knight Errant". The title is a little misleading since, at least to the modern mind, it implies a meta-dimension, but this is not the case. The painting is a lovely composition and showcases the enthusiastic and fertile medievalism embraced by the Pre-Raphaelites.

Millais has chosen has his subject the errant knight, an important figure from medieval romance and renaissance epic. The most famous examples from English literature are found in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, modelled to a significant extent on the great 16th-century Italian epics like Orlando Furioso by Ariosto (1474-1533) and Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso (1544-95). Spenser's well-wrought allegory features several of these knights errants, who were armed soldiers roaming the world for quests and challenges, but not all of them are honourable or protagonists. What defines a good errant knight appears to be the nobility of the quests he agrees to undertake, and sometimes the grand, overarching quest which leads him through the world, such as The Redcrosse Knight's quest to liberate the Faerie Queene from a monstrous dragon.

The notion that the errant knight could have a potential for evil was also picked up by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his Idylls of the King, where he notes that before Arthur gained proper control of the land, many an errant knight could be found throughout it, and Tennyson uses them as one of the symbols of anarchy and chaos preceding the golden age of Arthur. The errant knights of Idylls of the King are markedly different from Arthur's knight in that they leave Camelot first when they have a quest, rather than sauntering throughout the world on the prowl for one. It is also emblematic that Geraint, after he has fallen prey of jealousy and succumbed to the intrinsic darkness, takes his wife Enid and wanders aimlessly about just like an errant knight.

In medieval romance and in renaissance epics, the trope of the errant knight is a brilliant pretext for action and an excellent way of making the adventure move from one location to another, and this was exuberantly taken advantage of by the epic poets of the 16th cenutry.

The Knight and the Virgin - St. George and Edward the Confessor in late medieval England

For thou emongst those Saints, whom thou doest see,

Shalt be a Saint, and thine owne nations frend

And Patrone: thou Saint George shalt called bee,

Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree.

- The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser (book 1, canto X)

April 23 was the feastday of St. George and the medieval section of twitter was all ablaze on this occasion, which is only natural since George occupies a very interesting role in the religious life of the Middle Ages, particularly the later centuries. Despite his enduring popularity, the historicity of St. George is highly dubious. He is reported to have died a martyr c.303 in Palestine - i.e. about the time of the persecutions of Diocletian - and he was allegedly a soldier of the Roman army who turned his back on soldiery once he converted to Christianity. This is a common trope in early Christian hagiography, and saints who committed this renuciation were very popular since the Roman army at that time was the ultimate symbol of Roman paganry. This was also the case with saints Christopher and Sebastian, saints whose historicity is as dubious as that of George and who retained a widespread popularity throughout the medieval centuries.

Paolo Uccello (1397-1475)

There are already many interesting blogposts on the subject of St.George on the Internet - in particular by A Clerk of Oxford which can be found here and here, and the British Library manuscript blog - and the topic is too complex and rich for me to go into great detail. Consequently, in this blogpost I aim to compare the standing in England of a knight and a virgin, namely St. George and St. Edward the Confessor.

The Beginning: the 12th Century

Saint George

The story of Saint George taming a dragon to save a virgin is well known and needs no elaborate retelling here. It is an old story and it became widely disseminated through Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea from the mid-13th-century, a compilation of saints' legends which engendered many localised adaptations both in England and France throughout the Later Middle Ages.

George had been a part of the religious consciousness of England since the 7th and 8th centuries through martyrologies - such as Bede's - and Ælfric of Eynsham's Old English prose rendition. It was, however, not until the 12th century the popularity of George really flourished in England, and the reason for this was the Crusades.

In the 12th century, as a consequence of the Crusade Movement, there was a shift in the saint paradigm of Western Europe. While the preceding centuries had seen the genesis of several royal martyr cults throughout Europe - Edmund in England, Olaf in Norway and Ladislas in Hungary, for instance - the new ideal was the chivalric holy king who embraced asceticism and gave himself to the Church. This ideal paradigm shift was a consequence of two contemporary strands of conflict: first of all the militant religiosity following the first crusade, secondly the conflicts between the secular and spiritual powers. From these strands of conflict emerged the chivalric saint, an ascetic, monkish saint modelled on the legend of Alexis of Odessa and which may very well have served as an driving force in the establishment of the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers. This chivalric ideal mixed with the Byzantine iconography of Saint George - and also other warrior saints - and the result was that George evolved into an equestrian and a dragonslayer. Although his legend clearly stated the dragonslayer aspect from the beginning of his cult, it was not until now this became a part of the representations in art. It is therefore no wonder that the purportedly earliest representation of George in English art is a wall painting from the 12th century showing him as a lancener.

From St. Botolph, Hardham, with thanks to Damien Kempf

Edward the Confessor

Roughly at the time of George's entry into English iconography, Edward the Confessor (d.1066) was himself on the verge of becoming a saint. I have expounded the genesis of his cult in greater detail elsewhere so I will be very brief on the matter here.

In 1138 Osbert of Clare, prior of Westminster Abbey, wrote the first purely hagiographical account of Edward the Confessor's life and miracles. The work was presented to the papal legate in England, but due to insufficient support from the English church the motion was denied. In 1161, however, the canonisation of Edward was again requested by the English clergy, and this time the unity of the church was satisfactory to the Pope. The hagiography which set the tone for later renditions of Edward's legend was composed by Aelred of Rievaulx in 1163, but he based his work to a great extent on Osbert's piece, although he decided on some interesting omissions. One of these was a reference to the legend of Alexis Odessa - paragon of the chivalric sainthood - and another omission is a reference to Edward the Confessor as an athlete of God.

The epithet "athlete of God" was already an old topos of Christian literary iconography by the 12th century, but it did receive a new burgeoning during this period. For instance, a new hagiography written for Saint Oswald of Northumbria referred to him in the same manner. Although Frank Barlow argues that these elements omitted by Aelred of Rievaulx were not Osbert's inclusions, they nonetheless point to a desire by someone to align the old Anglo-Saxon king with the modern sensibilities of the 12th century. However, since Osbert's text was merely the foundation for the main text rather than the main text itself, these aspects did not become a part of the Confessor's iconography, but were rather left as waste themes.

Edward the Confessor and Edward Martyr, from MS Royal 2 B VI (13th century)

The Consummation: the 14th Century

The Knight

During the rule of Henry III the cult of Edward the Confessor reached its summit. Even after Henry's death, the cult of the Confessor was fairly popular - albeit with some competition from Thomas Becket - but in the course of Edward I's reign the devotional focus of the royal family started slowly to shift towards a more martial agenda. Since Edward the Confessor was lauded as a Solomonic peacemaker, he was not the right saint to turn to for aid against enemies, and Edward I displayed the banner of St. George - among others - at the siege of Caerlaverock in 1300. Furthermore, Edward I embraced the Arthurian mythology, and in an attempt to subdue the Welsh he proclaimed Arthur a saint. The implication of this was of course that Arthur as a saint would be dead and not sleeping on Avalon preparing for the final battle. The chronicler Peter Langtoft (d.c.1305) pursued this idea by weaving the arthurian mythology into the lineage of the English kings.

This shift gained momentum further into the 14th century. Edward II had three banners of Saint George made in 1322, and Thomas, Earl of Lancaster and cousin of Edward II, is shown standing beside the saint in Douce Hours (1320s), as shown here. When Edward III came to power in 1327 he had already had a long-standing devotion to the chivalric George, and this, together with the military climate of his reign, makes it no wonder that he came to conclude the devotional shift towards George. In 1348 Edward founded the Order of the Garter which worshipped Saint George as its patron, and kept its headquarter at Windsor Castle. Interestingly, the chapel dedicated to Edward the Confessor was rededicated to George and the Virgin, and a statue of the knight-saint was erected at the altar in February of 1351. August 13 the same year, Saint George was proclaimed the blessed George, the most invincible athlete of Christ, whose name and protection the English race invoke as that of their patron, in war especially (according to the Patent Rolls). This was the consummation of the shift that had begun in the 1290s.

It is of course interesting to note that George is here referred to in almost the same way as Edward the Confessor in Osbert of Clare's hagiography of 1138. This shows how enduring the topos of athleta Christi really was, but although both these instances point to the same ideological current, they are probably not directly linked. Osbert's vita had been surpassed by that of Aelred of Rievaulx and there no reason to think that the formulation of George as an athlete of Christ was done to outshine Edward the Confessor. Edward as an athlete of God was a waste theme of his hagiographical image, not something that had survived into the 14th century.

Edward III from MS Stowe 594, a garter book from c.1430-40

The Virgin

By 1351 Edward the Confessor had become eclipsed by a different type of saint, one better suited to the military pursuits of the English king. However, Edward the Confessor does not wane into irrelevance in this period, and although strongly devoted to the cult of Saint George, Edward III had not forgotten his namesake saint. During a fight against the French at Calais in 1349, he is reported by Thomas Walsingham to have cried out Ha Sant Edward, Ha Sant George. Furthermore, when the Order of the Garter had been founded the year before it had not solely been dedicated to Saint George, but, as Samantha Riches puts it, "under the joint patronage of the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary and St Edward the Confessor as well as St George". Nonetheless, despite Edward III's vestigial loyalty to the Confessor, this appears to have changed somewhat dramatically when the Saint Edward chapel at Windsor underwent a rededication. Whether this in fact does signal a dramatic shift in devotional loyalty, can not be ascertained, and the trajectory towards this conclusion may be less sudden than we may believe from the source materials. After all, we do not know the thought processes of Edward III.

However, Samantha Riches argues that the patronage invoked in the Patent Rolls pertains not to George as patron and protector of England, but as that of the English king. Furthermore, Saint George often appeared together with the Confessor. The figure erected in the newly rededicated chapel at Windsor was flanked by a figure of Edward, while an image of George from c.1360 at Heydor depicts both the knight-saint and the two royal saints Edward the Confessor and Edmund. It is therefore obvious that we cannot speak of an eclipse of Edward's cult, especially since it may have thrived very well in other echelons of society than in the king's inner circle. This, however, remains conjecture as we have, to my knowledge, to few sources to make assertions. Nonetheless, given the Confessor's renaissance in the 1390s it is evident that he was not completely outshone by Saint George.

George receiving his armour from the Virgin, from MS Yates Thompson 13, book of hours of the Sarum Use, 2nd quarter of the 14th century. With thanks to A Clerk of Oxford

The Lancaster Years: the 15th century

Despite the widespread effect of Richard's devotion to the Confessor, Edward's primacy proved short-lived following the coup by Henry Bolingbroke. The Confessor remained a relatively important saint in the 15th century - testified to by the inclusion of his life in the legendaries of the period - but he came nowhere near the ubiquitous devotion towards Saint George which was sustained throughout the period thanks to the Hundred Years War. Even after the war had ended and turmoil began to brew on English soil, Saint George's position remained strong and unparalleled.

From Church of the Holy Trinity, Goodramgate, York, donated in 1471 by John Walker

Concluding remarks

In this blogpost we have seen briefly the parallel courses of the cults of George and Edward the Confessor in England throughout the Later Middle Ages. There are interesting similarities and equally interesting differences which all serve to demonstrate the complex set of parallel strands which comprise the landscape of medieval religiosity. They were both virgin saints, but one was a knight and the other a peacemaker. They both were referred to as athletes of God/Christ, but for one this became a waste theme, for the other it became a key aspect of his iconography. They both endured and left a considerable impact on the cultural landscape of medieval England, but they did so to different degrees. Both saints deserve a comprehensive study of their cults, but until that has been undertaken, this may serve as a superficial primer.

References

Barlow, Frank, Edward the Confessor, University of California Press, 1984
Bloch, Marc (ed.), “La Vie de S. Edouard le Confesseur par Osbert de Clare,” Analecta Bollandiana 41, 1923
Farmer, David, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, Oxford, 2004

Klaniczay, Gabor, Holy rulers and blessed princesses: dynastic cults in Central Europe, translated by Éva Pálmai, Cambridge University Press, 2002

Nairn, Ian, Pevsner, Nikolaus, Sussex, printed in The Buildings of England series, 1965: 234 (according to wikipedia).

Ormrod, Mark, "The Personal Religion of Edward III", printed in Speculum, vol 64, n. 4 1989

Prestwich, Michael, Edward I, Yale University Press, 1997

Prestwich, Michael, Plantagenet England 1226-1360, Oxford University Press, 2005

Riches, Samantha, St George - Hero, Martyr and Myth, Sutton Publishing, 2000

Riley, H. T. (ed.), Thomae Walsingham, quondam monachi S. Albani, historia Anglicana, 2 vols., pt 1 of Chronica monasterii S. Albani, Rolls Series, 28 (1863–4)

Summerson, Henry, ‘George (d. c.303?)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn

Vauchez, Andrè, Sainthood in the later Middle Ages, translated by Jean Birrell, Cambridge University Press, 2005

Wright, Thomas, The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, London 1866

http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/whgeointro.htm

Flores Historiarum, pt. 4 - The Ethics of Historiography

In short, they are often deceived and deceive by their guesses, though these are quite sophisticated, but by means of trickery in their predictions they lay claim amongst naive people to a foreknowledge of the future which they do not at all possess.

- Prologue to Book 1 of Historia Rerum Anglicarum, William of Newburgh

I was first introduced to the Augustinian canon and historian William of Newburgh (b. 1135/6, d. in or after 1198) in a course on literature in the Anglo-Saxon world I took at the University of York. The course, England in Europe, aimed to explore the literary influences and connections between England and the continent from the early Anglo-Saxon period until the Anglo-Norman era of the 12th century. William's History of English Affairs marks the tail-end of the period covered by this course as it was, probably, begun in 1196 and apparently never completed due to his death two years later. Historia Rerum Anglicarum, which I have already mentioned in part two of this series, is famous for its commitment to truth and the ethics of historiography. In his prologue to book 1 - the only part of the book covered on the course - these ethics surface in William's vicious attack on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. To me it is a great delight to read these attacks because through his indignation and ferocity William serves a scholarly - albeit severely ungenerous - critique of what he considers imagined history, a critique that is as valid today as it was in the 12th century and - in some cases - equally necessary. In this blogpost I will present some of the highlights from William's prefatory attack on poor historiographical scholarship.

William dedicates most of his prologue to castigate Geoffrey of Monmouth's dishonesty, a dishonesty mirrored by the excellence of the historians Bede and Gildas whom William praises for their research and truthful account. Gildas, William claims, "does not hesitate to write as a Briton about Britons that they were neither brave in war nor trustworthy in peace." This is one of the cruxes of William's antipathy for Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain is very much concerned with how great the old Britons were and, as we shall see, especially King Arthur. This is how William describes his fellow historian:

But in our own day a writer of the opposite tendency [of Gildas and Bede] has emerged. To atone for these faults of the Britons he weaves a laughable web of fiction about them, with shameless vainglory extolling them far above the virtue of the Macedonians and the Romans. This man is called Geoffrey and bears the soubriquet Arthur, because he has taken up the stories about Arthur from the old fictitious accounts of the Britons, has added to them himself, and by embellishing them in the Latin tongue he has cloaked them with the honourable title of history.

Aside from the ethical problems of Geoffrey's rendition of history, William also accuses him of blasphemy or at least irreligion. One of the perhaps most famous passages of History of the Kings of Britain is the prophecies of Merlin, the offspring of a woman - some say a nun - and an incubus. It is Merlin's demonic heritage that allows him to see into the future and to William this is highly troublesome:

In fact we are instructed by both true reasoning and the sacred writings that demons are shut out from God's light, and are wholly unable to have prior knowledge of the future by mentally observing it, though they apprehend certain future events by guesswork rather than knowledge, through signs better known to them than to us.

To a modern mind this might appear petty and pedantic, and I recall two of my fellow students at York being quite amused by this emphasis. To William of Newburgh, however, demons of various kinds - incubi, succubi and the like - were parts of reality and evil parts at that. No wonder, then, that William found Geoffrey's claim preposterous. Geoffrey, he maintains, "has not learnt the truth about events, and so without discrimination he gives space to fables without substance."

Merlin reading his prophecies to King Vortigern

William also finds it hard to swallow Geoffrey's unabashed representation of the British kings as heroes mightier than those of Antiquity. To William this is a perverse distortion of the truth found in the historical accounts he treasures greatly and he does not hold back:

But even a person of dim mental vision can observe how much the unadulterated historical truth preempts the falsehood which has been compiled at this point. Geoffrey makes Arthur himself outstanding and remarkable above all others; he seeks to present him in his achievements according to the free rein of his fancy.

"[T]his is doubtless", William complains, "to make this Briton's [i.e. Arthur] little finger appear thicker than the mighty Caesar's loins." Our Augustinian canon goes further and points out not merely wild heroic fantasies but also grave historical inaccuracies by pointing out that at a feast in praise of Arthur "[t]hree British archbishops, of London, Caerleon and York, are present, and this at a time when the Britons never had even a single archbishop, for Augustine was the first to receive the pallium from the Roman pontiff and to become archbishop in Britain."

After listing a range of Geoffrey's unbridled exaggerations and fantasies William deals his adversary the following blow:

Is he dreaming of another world containing kingdoms without number, in which the events took place which are mentioned by him earlier? Certainly in our world nothing of this kind took place; for how could the historians of old, who took immense pains to omit from their writings nothing worthy of mention, and who are known to have recorded even modest events, have passed over in silence this man beyond compare and his achievements so notable beyond measure?

It is this precise refutation and the ones above, which make me greatly appreciate William of Newburgh as an historiographer. He shows in this prologue commitment to truth, to a work-ethos and to Orthodoxy that to my mind appears staggeringly precocious in comparison with Geoffrey's more far-fetched imagined past. This is not to say, however, that William himself is singular in his ethics and nor does it mean he was precocious to his age - although it may appear thus to modern historians thoroughly familiar with the advent of the humanist ad fontes approach of Lorenzo Valla. Medieval historians, it is true, did not have the benefit of methodological tools burgeoning from centuries of academic evolution, but - as we can see in the case of William of Newburgh - they were far from indifferent or careless in their commitment to the transmission of history.