A macabre coincidence - pen trials and the guts of Saint Erasmus

History is full of macabre coincidences, and I encountered one such case over a week ago, as I was doing some research in the special collections at the University of Southern Denmark. I returned to look at a copy of the 1492 edition of the Lübeck Passionael, a collection of texts on the various feasts in the Latin Christian liturgical calendar, which was ultimately modelled on the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine. This book has been a recurring fascination for me ever since I first set eyes on it nine years ago, and this time I had come to take pictures of those woodcut vignettes that I had not yet photographed. Previously, I have focussed on a particular set of saints, while allowing my curiosity to direct me towards other saints that might be relevant for my research, or which might simply catch my eye. The book in question is comprised of 419 leaves, making 838 pages in total, and several of these pages contain one or more woodcuts. No wonder it has taken me years to photograph them all.

Since I was paying more attention to every woodcut missing from my collection, I suddenly noticed a very curious and macabre coincidence on the page containing the woodcut for Saint Erasmus. According to legend, Erasmus was martyred during the Diocletian persecutions in the early fourth century. Because he was killed by having his guts pulled out by a windlass, he is often depicted with the windlass in his hands, and sometimes with the guts rolled around it. The cutter who prepared the vignettes for the Lübeck Passionael made the most of this arresting and recognisable image, and prepared a woodcut for Saint Erasmus which depicted his passion. This choice is particularly notable because not all of the woodcuts in the 1492 edition are made specifically for the saint in question, and several woodcuts are used for several saints. 

Steffen Arndes, Passionael

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 15, f.33r

The copy now held in the special collections of the University of Southern Denmark was once in the possession of the library at Herlufsholm School, a boarding school in Næstved on Sjælland for young boys. The copy contains marginalia from several readers interacting with the book, but most often these seem to be products of boredom rather than engagement with the actual content. On this page - folio 33r - the interaction had been of a more practical kind. A young pupil had decided to test his quill to see if it was sufficiently well sharpened. This is a common type of marginalia in premodern books, and they are known as pen trials, probatio pennae. In this case, these trials consisted of s-like figures, a shape probably chosen because it would easily reveal whether the quill would need adjusment. As a consequence, the shapes of the pen trials are very similar to how the guts of Saint Erasmus often appear in late medieval art. Granted, in the book itself, the gut is pulled out in a straight line, so there is no reason to think that the pupil would be aware of this similarity, or that it is a conscious decision. As a consequence, the macabre connection needs a third factor aside from the image and the pen trials, and that factor are the eyes of a viewer sufficiently familiar with the iconography of Saint Erasmus to see the similarity. And in this case, I happened to be such a viewer. 

A stranger to someone - a view of Norway from Salamanca

 

los raudos torbellinos de Noruega 

- Luís de Gongora, Soledades 

In the library of the University of Salamanca there are four globes, donated in the eighteenth century. They are known as the "round books", and the story goes that they were called that because the library would only accept donations in the form of books. They are displayed in the main room, available to visitors, and last year I was able to see them again when I was visiting Salamanca for a conference. 

Whenever I see early modern globes or maps of the world, I am naturally drawn towards Norway. Over the years, I have seen a lot of different premodern and early modern depictions of my native country, and I am always fascinated how these depictions deal with the rather complicated outline of the Norwegian coastline. The degree to which the map fits the terrain is an interesting starting-point for understanding what kind of cartographical information existed about Norway at the time, and very often it will become evident that to a lot of continental cartographers Norway was not very well known, at least compared to what one might expect given the relative proximity between the big map-making centres and Scandinavia. 

These maps are sources to Norwegian history, at least as long as we ask the right questions. On a non-academic level, the maps also serve as good reminders that one will always be a stranger to someone, that our known world will seem alien to someone else. In our own age, when information - if not necessarily knowledge - is easy to come by, it can also be easy to forget that our ideas about other parts of the world rarely fit with reality. And to see oneself from the outside, to see Norway from Salamanca through eighteenth-century eyes and map-making hands, is a useful reminder of the gap between perception and reality. And this is a good thing to keep in mind, both for academics and for non-academics alike. 

New publication: The functions of religion and science in utopian thinking in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

Today, I was notified of the publication of an article that is one of the texts that I have had the most fun writing. The article in question is titled 'The functions of religion and science in utopian thinking in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period', and is published in the journal Belgrade Philosophical Annual vol. 37, issue 2. The text can be accessed and downloaded here and here. The article is based on a talk I gave last February, which can be accessed through this blogpost. There are significant differences between the talk and the published article, however, both because of how my thinking has developed, and because of new things I have read since then. 

The article is quite simple, as the title suggests. I explore how texts that can be understood as utopian, broadly speaking, from both the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period utilised religion and science in fashioning the ideal condition. By spanning the medieval-early modern divide, I also seek to reject this divide and point to continuities in the worldviews within which the various utopists formulated their ideal societies. It was great fun to write, because it allowed me an excuse to delve into material that has hitherto been quite peripheral to my research, yet which has held my interest for the better part of a decade. Moreover, the longue durée perspective has made me even more convinced about the need to rethink the artificial divide between medieval and early modern thinking, and also how we understand utopianism.   

Typographic continuity - an example from the novel Antangil

 

In a recent blogpost, I wrote about some of my early impressions and experiences researching the 1616 utopian novel Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes (History of the great and admirable kingdom of Antangil, unknown until the present by all historians and cosmographers). Since then, I have had cause to delve deeper into structure of the book, and the book as an object - mainly in order to compare its thematic division with similar works, and to see how much of the novel was dedicated to military matters. 

One detail that struck me with particular force during this work, was how the typography of the of a book printed in 1616 retained many of the same features of medieval manuscript culture that was carried over into the first printed European books. Granted, I always tend to emphasise continuity and to eschew the common medieval/early modern divide, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how the abbreviations from the Middle Ages were retained. One passage that demonstrated the situation particularly well is the one illustrated below, from a chapter on the exercises of the gendarmerie in times of peace. The passage describes how the soldiers are promised to be liberally bestowed with "[charges] et honneurs, venans à se monstrer de plus en plus braves, genereux et fideles" (responsibilities and honours, coming to show themselves off as more and more brave, generous and faithful). I am amused by this aspect of early seventeenth typography, and especially because this makes it actually easier for me to read the text, unaccustomed as I am to read French and seventeenth-century material. 

I. D. M. G. T., Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes, 1616, p. 90.

Saint Thomas and apostolic succession in the Antipodes

 

When researching the history of utopian thought, one of my main points of interest is when I can map the continuity of an idea or a topos across the medieval/early modern periodisation. My interest stems from the artificial nature of periods, and how these chronological divides continue to impede our understanding of the past. The other day, I encountered one such example of continuity that both pleased me and surprised me. 

The example in question comes from the 1616 novel Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes (‘History of the great and marvellous kingdom of Antangil, unknown to historians and cosmographers until the present day’). On the title page of the 1616, the work is attributed to a certain I. D. M. G. T, whose identity is, as far as I know, still a mystery to us. The work was part of a growing vogue that followed in the wake of Thomas More’s Utopia, published one hundred years before Antangil, where authors described ideal societies found in faraway locations, which could also be used to satirise or criticise the real-world societies of the author’s own time. While the main form of this vogue – a novel about an invented ideal society – had Thomas More’s work as its starting point, both More and later authors belonged to long strands within the history of ideas, and therefore ensured a great deal of continuity in thought and form from both the medieval and the pre-medieval cultural frameworks.   

 

At the point of writing this blogpost, I have not read Antangil in its entirety, and I hesitate to say much about its content, as most of my knowledge about the work comes from secondary sources – especially David Fausett’s excellent 1993 monograph Writing the New World. What I can say, however, is that this marvellous kingdom is located south of the tropic of capricorn, and south of Great Java, the latter being a common point of orientation in late-medieval travelogues. The reader is not only provided with coordinates, but also a woodcut map made with incredible detail, where the main villages and rivers are numbered, and these 129 numbers correspond to a list of three columns where the names are provided. The capital of the kingdom, Sangil, is located at the bottom of a long, narrow inlet akin to a fjord.  

The great kingdom of Antangil

Courtesy of Gallica BnF

Table of the main cities and rivers of Antangil

The capital of Sangil

I hope to delve more deeply into the world of Antangil in the future, but at this point I am most interested in the fifth book, which describes how Christianity was brought to Antangil, and how the kingdom got its first martyr. The events are summarised in the header of chapter 1, which states that the holy gospel was proclaimed the capital of Sangil by Byrachil, who is described as a very sage ‘Braquemane’ who was the disciple of Saint Thomas the Apostle. As I have yet to read how Byrachil met his martyrdom in chapter 16, I can only focus on what the information from chapter 1 tells us, and how this connects to utopian thinking from the Middle Ages. 

Header for chapter 1, book 5

If we start with the description of Byrachil as a ‘Braquemane’, this points us to the tradition of medieval travelogues exemplified in particular by Marco Polo and John Mandeville, two figures whose works remained impactful and widely read well into the seventeenth century. (I say this with full awareness that it was Rustichello of Pisa who gave Marco Polo’s account the shape by which we know it today, and also that John Mandeville might never have existed.) In these accounts, we read about non-Christian sages who are given variations of the name ‘Bragmanni’, which in turn comes from ‘Brahmin’. The descriptions of these sages drew heavily on the so-called Alexander tradition, a long line of fantastical accounts of the exploits of Alexander the Great that comprise the legacy of the Alexander romance by Pseudo-Callisthenes rather than any contemporary accounts from Alexander’s own time. What interests me here, however, is that the figure of the Brahmin was well-established as a marker for the positive ‘other’, and also as a representative of the far east. That the author of Antangil has decided to use such a figure as the apostle of their fictional utopia shows that they were familiar with the traditions of the Middle Ages, and that they expected the medieval traditions to be known to their audience. In short, we see that the idea of the Brahmin was still a figure of contemporary resonance in the early seventeenth century, and that markers of the ideal society established in medieval writing still served that function centuries later.  

 

Another point of importance is that Byrachil was the disciple of Saint Thomas, the apostle of Christ whom the post-biblical apocryphal literature claimed to have evangelised in India. Thomas’ missionary activities were accepted as historically true in the Middle Ages, and there are to this day those who believe that this account is based on historical reality. As Saint Thomas was the apostle of India, it only makes sense to use his activity as a historical reference point for the introduction of Christianity in the antipodean kingdom of Antangil. A similar idea can be found in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624/27), where the society in question is converted to Christianity through a letter from Saint Bartholomew (who was also credited with evangelising in India). In terms of continuity of ideas, however, the use of Saint Thomas as a marker of an ideal society located on the far side of the world – albeit vicariously through his disciple – is also seen in medieval literature. In the mid-twelfth century, members of the court of Frederick Barbarossa forged a letter claiming to be from Prester John, a Christian king in the east, who ruled over an ideal kingdom, which became a fixture in Latin medieval thought well into the sixteenth century and beyond. In the letter, the king states that the tomb is Saint Thomas the Apostle is located in his realm, and that he undertakes pilgrimages to this holy site. Moreover, the king’s own palace is modelled on the palace that Saint Thomas built for King Gundoforus of India, which means that the connection to the apostle is both one of architectural emulation and continuous contact by way of his relics. In other words, Saint Thomas, as apostle, saint, and biblical figure, a marker that proves the ideal condition – the utopian quality – of Prester John’s realm. This same function is fulfilled by him – by way of his disciple – in the novel Antangil.         

 

The Christianisation of the kingdom of Antangil by Byrachil also rhymes with the medieval thoughtworld in another way, namely that apostles of new members in the Christian oikumene had a connection to a biblical figure. Such a connection provides a link to biblical history, and when the figure in question is an apostle, the Christianisation of the new location takes the form of apostolic succession. Such a succession was not always the case in the Christian histories of Latin medieval kingdoms – Latin is here used about the liturgical language, not about the vernacular – and there are plenty of medieval polities where the apostolic mission is not traced all the way back to the Bible. The native France of Antangil’s author, however, had several traditions concerning such biblical connections. In the ninth-century Vita Dionysi by Hilduin, Saint Dionysius – or Saint Denis of Paris – was conflated with two other individuals by the same name, one of whom was Dionysius the Areopagite, who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, which recounts his meeting with the apostle Paul. Through this conflation, the apostle of the Paris region was linked to the apostolic activities of Paul. Similarly, around the year 1000, Ademar of Chabannes, a historian at the abbey of Saint-Martial in Limoges, rewrote his chronicles to claim that Martial was also a first-century figure. It is tempting to see the apostolic succession from Saint Thomas in India to Byrachil in Antangil as a variant of the theme represented by Dionysius and Martial.          

 

The novel Antangil is very much a work of the seventeenth century, in that it belongs to a contemporary vogue in utopian writing. However, it is also steeped in ideas and traditions that run through the Middle Ages, and which showcase how ideal societies have been imagined or represented in medieval writings. The connection with the Brahmins is a utopian strand where an ideal society is located in the far east. The connection with Saint Thomas is a utopian strand which also places the ideal society in the far east, but which also includes biblical history, and, by extension, the figure of Prester John, the ideal Christian king. The connection with the idea of apostolic succession might be seen as stemming from similar ideas in French medieval hagiography. These medieval strands have remained forceful and important by 1616, and they continued to be so for centuries afterwards. The novel Antangil, therefore, is a good reminder that ideas have a long and often curious life, and that there is more that connects the so-called modern world with the Middle Ages than what separates it.

The edge of knowledge – sixteenth-century cartography and the North

 

The sixteenth century is one of the most dynamic periods in the history of European cartography. Not only did the voyages of the era provide new knowledge that was transmitted through maps, but experimentation with projections and ways of transmitting knowledge about the world led to a wide variety of maps. However, in some cases the cartographers got things wrong. In some cases – as I hope to blog about at a later point – it was because the sources were faulty, and this is the explanation for why we find a lot of non-existent islands of some of the most cutting edge maps of the period. In other cases, knowledge got warped in transmission. It is one such case I want to write about here.      

 

Knowledge could be warped in a multitude of ways along the chain of transmission. In some cases, the knowledge could be faulty from the start, whereas in other cases something might get lost in translation, seeing as knowledge often passed through several different languages on its way from observation to the map itself. In the present case, the main reason appears to be a mixture of unfamiliarity with the territory in question, combined with unfamiliarity with the language(s) of that region.  

Septentrionalium partium nova tabula (1561)

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

In 1561, Girolamo Ruscelli, a cartographer based in Venice, printed two maps of the North Atlantic theatre – one detailed, one rather stylised. The detailed map is known as Septentrionalium partium nova tabula, a new map of the northern parts. This map contains a lot of placenames, including settlements, rivers and islands. These names are often imprecise, suggesting how difficult it could be for those from – for example – the Netherlands or Italy to accurately render the Icelandic, Danish or Norwegian pronunciations. In the case of Iceland, this difficulty is in part suggested by the choice of using Latinised names of the island’s two dioceses, Skálholt and Hólar, rendered as Scalodin and Olensis. While the accuracy of these names can be discussed, the names themselves are correct insofar as the identification of the diocesan sees is concerned.     

 

What is more puzzling, however, is to consider the correct identification of the detailed map with some elements of the more stylised map, the so-called Schonladia Nuova, new Schonladia, issued in the same year. There are several interesting differences in the presentation of Iceland and Greenland in these two maps. The detailed map contains both names, respectively Islanda and Engronelant, the latter suggesting that information was transmitted through Dutch interlocutors. The stylised map, however, does not provide a name for Greenland – and indeed seems to suggest that Greenland is linked with the Kola peninsula – whereas Iceland is identified as Thyle, an alternative spelling of Thule. That Iceland is given the name Thule is not surprising, as these two names were used interchangeably about the island throughout the Middle Ages. Another interesting difference, however, is that the stylised map includes a stretch of frozen sea, the ‘mare congelatum’, which forms a belt of ice along the coast of Greenland.

Schonladia Nuova (1561)

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

The most surprising difference between the two maps, however, is that the stylised map contains a strange duplication of names – a duplication of sorts. In this map, there are two place names on Iceland, namely the two dioceses. However, the names are not the same as those found in Septentrionalium partium nova tabula. Instead, the dioceses are called Skalholten and Holen. These are Danified names, and suggest that the information has been transmitted through Danish informants in Venice. A direct Danish contact would not be all that surprising, considering that several Scandinavian ecclesiastics were in exile following the Protestant reformations in Denmark-Norway and Sweden. Given the accuracy of these names, it is therefore curious to see that the Latinised and less accurate names found on the detailed map are still included in Schonladia Nuova, but not where we would expect them to be. Rather, the two Latinised names have been moved to Greenland, where they are rendered as Scalholdin and Holenses, the placements of which do not correspond to any placename in Greenland in Septentrionalium partium nova tabula. We seem to be dealing with some kind of overcorrection, where an attempt to include the vernacular names of Iceland’s two dioceses in the new map has replicated the error elsewhere. This is, of course, presuming that Schonladia Nuova was produced after the other map, which seems likely given the confusion in question.    

 

The case of the duplicated Icelandic names is a good example of how certain parts of the sixteenth-century world were, in effect, the edge of knowledge. Along this edge, some certainties existed – such as the fact that Greenland and Iceland were real places – and so did many uncertainties, such as how to accurately and correctly render the names of these places. The confusion in Schonladia Nuova is not only due to the fact that Venice is a long way away from Iceland and Greenland. It is also indicative of how Greenland was falling off the European edge of knowledge in this period. Throughout the fifteenth century the contact between the Norse settlements in Greenland and the rest of Europe dwindled and eventually stopped. Bishops continued to be appointed to Greenland’s diocesan see, Garðar, but these were bishops in name only and never set foot on the island itself. Greenland was still known, if mainly as a memory or as a landmass occasionally seen by voyagers who traversed the Greenland Sea. Consequently, instead of knowledge there was a lot of information about Greenland, and most of it appears to have been incorrect, as seen in the confusion regarding Scalholdin and Holensis. In this way, knowledge warped into information, and information was tainted by hearsay, legend, and fiction, but became common misconceptions through the medium of maps.

Schonladia Nuova (1561) (detail)

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

Schonladia Nuova (1598) (detail)

The sea monster is a decorative embellishment in the 1598 edition of the map

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

Birds in Antwerp Cathedral - centre and universality in a Christian space?

Last week I spent a few days in Belgium, a journey which included a trip to Antwerp and its cathedral. As this was my first time in both the country and the city - and as the excursion to Antwerp was something I had not planned in advance - I was completely unprepared by the lavish decorations to be found within the church space. The cathedral is perhaps most famous for its marvellous paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, but I was even more struck by a pulpit situated in the nave, which probably dates to the seventeenth or early eighteenth century.  

The pulpit is made from wood, and it is a masterpiece of woodcraft, whose components are made to look like a living forest. While its most sumptuous side is the front, I first saw it from behind, and even that was enough to stop me in my tracks. What caught my attention most firmly was its array of birds in extremely lifelike details that perched along the pulpit like a guard of honour. More than the vivisimilitude, perhaps, I was also struck by the types of birds, which include an eagle, a peacock and - even more delightfully - a turkey.  

These birds might have had various functions in the decorative programme of the pulpit. Partly, they no doubt served to amaze its spectators and demonstrate the wealth of the cathedral - perhaps even of the bishop himself. But perhaps they also serve to make a point about the universality of Christianity and the place of Antwerp in this universal space. After all, eagles, peacocks and turkeys were exotic birds to seventeenth-century churchgoers in Flanders, and still are to this day. And while this exoticism might have been sufficient in and of itself to have them commissioned for this pulpit, it is nonetheless tempting to see these birds as signifiers of different parts of the world: The eagle in the far north, the peacock in Asia, and the turkey in the still relatively new world of the Americas. And in the middle of all this: Antwerp. If this orientational function of this wooden menagerie was not one of its original function, I very well imagine that it made several of the cathedral's congregants see themselves as part of a much wider world. 

Trondheim without worms - echoes of a lost legend of Saint Olaf?

In medieval art, Saint Olaf of Norway is commonly depicted standing on top of a figure. The nature of this figure appears to have changed over time, although I myself have not mapped the evolution of this iconography, and I should emphasise that there might be several parallel iconographical traditions. In any case, very often we see that in images from the thirteenth century, the figure in question is a human being, the interpretation of which is uncertain. Later on - I hesitate to be precise - the figure takes the shape of a serpent or a dragon, very often with a crowned human head. It is very common in medieval art to see saints standing on such figures, presumably because of Psalm 90:13 in the Vulgate, where God is verbally depicted as trampling lions and dragons underfoot. Consequently, the shift in Olaf's iconography might be part of a wider trend, or perhaps a more localised offshoot that came to take on a life of its own in Northern Europe. The interpretation of this human-headed serpent has been subject to much debate, and I will not enter into here. However, I was reminded of this iconography while I was reading passage from a text written in the seventeenth century, and which might represent some sort of echo of a lost legend of Saint Olaf, or perhaps rather a confusion that ultimately has its root in this late-medieval iconography.   

Saint Olaf stepping on the beast 

Image from the right-hand door of a winged altarpiece, Bygland Church (after 1470) 
Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, C6113

The text in question is the utopian novel La Terre Australe Connue (1676) by Gabriel de Foigny, which David Fausett has translated into English as The Southern Land, Known. Foigny, a Franciscan-turned-Protestant who published the book while living in exile in Switzerland. The novel records the life and travels of Nicholas Sadeur, a hermaphrodite who ends up in a utopian society called Australia in the Southern Land, which in this case refers to the hypothetical southern continent - Terra Australis - which came to give its name to modern-day Australia. As most of the novel's fascinating content is superfluous to the subject at hand here, I will refrain from most of the details. However, in the opening of one of its chapters, there is a claim which becomes very interesting in light of the debate about the iconography of Saint Olaf. When reflecting on the marvellous properties of various landscapes and regions, Foigny - through his narrator Sadeur, mentions that "in Norway's Trondheim worms are unknown". At the time of writing, I have not checked what kind of worm is meant here, whether the serpent-like animal, or the earthworm. It is likely that the worm in question is a more formidable beast than the earthworm, yet later in the novel a note about the positive consequences of the absence of insects might suggest that the more humble creature is meant here. 

Whichever animal Foigny had in mind when writing this passage, it is a claim that I have not encountered elsewhere. The claim is not to be found in Latin medieval chronicles from Norway, even though these books do mention various marvellous properties of various Norwegian locations. It is possible that the claim appears in Olaus Magnus' Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (History of the Northern peoples) from 1555, which was printed in Rome and - due to being in Latin - would have been accessible to a man like Foigny, but such a connection remains to be verified. At the present, I remain at a loss to explain the inclusion of Trondheim in this list of marvellous topographies. What is possible, however, is that there is a connection with the legends of Saint Olaf, and that the absence of worms in Trondheim is based on some now-lost miracle story.    

From David Fausett's translation of Gabriel de Foigny's La Terre Australe Connue (The Southern Land, Known)

During the Middle Ages, several miracle stories were told about Saint Olaf. The earliest of them are likely to have emerged among the Norse mercenaries who had followed the living king into battle, and became some of the most effective disseminators of his cult. Sometime around 1180, a number of these stories were collected and recorded in Latin in a text now known as Miracula Olavi, the miracles of Olaf. This work contains a broad range of miracles that God is said to have brought about in order to prove Olaf's holiness, and the selection includes both old and contemporary stories. However, it is important to note that this collection was never complete, and that several stories are likely to have emerged after this particular text was compiled. Miracula Olavi does not mention any worms or serpents, so even in the unlikely event that Foigny would have had access to this text, it would not have provided the basis for this idea. Other stories might have circulated, however, and it is possible that there once existed a story about how Olaf had liberated Trondheim - which was the centre of his cult and the place of his shrine until the Danish-Norwegian Reformation of 1536/37 - from worms. Such a claim might be based on the beast frequently seen under Olaf's feet in late-medieval art. There might have been some inspiration from the story of Saint Patrick in Ireland, who was believed to have chased the serpents out of the island - a story available to Norwegians in the thirteenth-century book Konungs Skuggsjá (The King's Mirror), which contains a description of the marvellous properties of Ireland. Similarly, a story of how Saint Hild of Whitby chased away the snakes - a legend believed to have been confirmed by the ammonite fossils often found in that region - is also likely to have been available to late-medieval Norwegians. These various elements, as well as others that I have not thought about, might have mixed in the Norwegian mind and produced a story about how Trondheim had been liberated from worms by Saint Olaf. 

Now, Gabriel de Foigny does not mention Saint Olaf, just as he does not mention Saint Patrick when he mentions the absence of spiders and worms in the forests of Ireland. Consequently, if there is a lost story in the distant background of this claim, it was also lost to Foigny. It is very likely that he had never heard about Saint Olaf, a saint whose cult never gained any strong following outside of the Nordic Sphere, eleventh-century England, and the late-medieval Baltic theatre. Some echoes might have arrived, however, possibly in the form of Catholic exiles from Norway, historical figures about whom we know practically nothing, yet of whose existence we can be certain. Such a surmise is hypothetical, however, and I must emphasise that I do not suggest that such a tenuous transmission of stories actually did appear. Yet the possibility remains - the possibility that some warped version of such a legend did reach Foigny, albeit a version evacuated of its explanatory content, a version where the cause - divine intervention on behalf of Saint Olaf - was divorced from the effect, namely the absence of worms in Trondheim.   

Other explanations also exist. The absence of worms - if these are earthworms - might be based on the perceived coldness of the land, the cultural trope of a frozen North willingly believed by someone who had not ventured into that North themselves. Ultimately, however, we do not know, and most likely we will never know. Such a lack of certainty does not give licence to completely free and unbridled speculation. On the other hand, the lack of certainty does force us to reflect on the intangible yet forceful nature of stories - their ability to subsist on very little and to be transported far and wide, even if not always in their original form. 

Utopia, technology, and the nebulous borderlands of truth

 

In the past few months, I have tried to keep up with the ongoing discourse concerning the phenomenon inaccurately labelled ‘Artificial Intelligence’, and its potential for warping our sense of reality and further obscuring the already-nebulous boundaries between reality and fantasy. Whenever I have come across an article or news report related to this issue, I have bookmarked it in a folder in my browser, hoping against historically attested practice that I will some day return to these texts and have some intelligent thoughts about them. The folder in which I put these bookmarks is labelled ‘Utopia’, and the folder was created as a way to collect materials related to my current teaching. I thought it fitting at the time, but did not take the time to articulate why I thought so, and so I continued to use this folder while the justification for using this particular folder continued to grow in the back of my mind. In this blogpost, I will try to formulate some of the ideas that have crystallized in the course of this week.            

The connection between Artificial Intelligence and utopian thinking seemed at first intuitive, obvious, and so I did not bother to formulate it properly. However, as I am now reading David Fausett’s 1993 monograph on utopian literature in the seventeenth century – Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopians of the Great Southern Land – a few aspects have become much clearer to me. Fausett makes a compelling point about how utopian literature of the 1600s came to employ textual elements belonging to news reports, pamphlets and broadsides, causing readers to often confuse texts of prose fiction with texts claiming to present factual content. Naturally, the motif of authenticating elements has a long history in fiction, perhaps best illustrated by the topos of the found manuscript (as in Don Quijote), or the now-lost written report translated from another language (as in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain). What was new about this obfuscation of the boundaries between true reports and novels in the seventeenth century, was the changing media landscape. As knowledge of the wider world expanded through journeys of exploration and the growing networks of trade that brought European powers into contact with cultures across the globe, increased literacy and a broadening market for literature gave rise to a greater circulation of information about the distant regions of the world. Since there was an expectation of new encounters and new discoveries, audiences were better disposed to accept fantastical tales as either true or at least based on true events. The knowledge that there was new information to be had, conditioned readers and listeners to blunt their scepticism and become more receptive to the claims of authenticity utilized by authors of utopian fiction.  

 

The confusion about truth and fiction in seventeenth-century Europe is not unique to that time or that place, and it is not an indication of people being stupid or less critical in their thinking. The more I research historical matters, the more convinced I am that humanity has neither become more intelligent nor more stupid as time as passed, only that intelligence and stupidity have played out in different ways and through different means. What is crucial about the confusion described by David Fausett is that the confusion came about through developments in mass media. The confusion, I believe, was a consequence of rapid technological development that did not fit with the slow maturation and the incremental adaptation to novelty that humanity as a species requires in order to understand things. It is this contrast between humanity’s need for slowness and the rapidity of technological innovation that highlights the utopian aspect of the contemporary discourse on Artificial Intelligence.  

 

Those who champion the virtues of Artificial Intelligence and the use of AI in writing, journalism, research and so on, are themselves proponents of a utopian vision, one in which humanity has released themselves of the drudgery of knowing and thinking to the machines. Not all these champions view the future in this framework, but even the more restrained and reasonable among the AI enthusiasts still tend to demonstrate attitudes towards art, critical thinking and factual knowledge that lean very strongly in this direction.  This utopian attitude towards technology is nothing new. One of the hallmarks of utopian thinking is exactly the high levels of technology that are available in utopian societies. Perhaps the most famous example of this idea is Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), which lists a long range of technological advances, including artificial meat and laboratories for all kinds of different research. The motif goes further back in the history of utopian thinking, however. In the Middle Ages – a period not widely accepted as one of utopian thinking, yet nonetheless rife with examples of it – the idea of technologically advanced societies in faraway places appear in several texts. In the Letter of Prester John, a hoax from the 1160s that purported to describe the realms of a Christian ruler in distant India, the technological marvels of this imaginary kingdom are expounded in great detail. Similarly, the Alexander tradition – a collection of texts claiming to narrate the life and deeds of Alexander the Great – contains several descriptions of technological marvels, such as Alexander’s submersible for exploring the depths of the ocean. Other medieval texts that were less fantastical and which had a stronger claim to truth, similarly spent much detail in recording the technological marvels of distant, exotic places. Liutprand of Cremona (d.972), in his chronicle Antapodosis, describes a mechanical throne in the court of the Byzantine emperor. William of Rubruck, who travelled to the court of the Mongol khan in Karakorum in the 1250s and wrote an account of his experiences, tells about a fountain of marvellous ingenuity, built by a French smith who had lived among the Mongols for some time. Similarly, Marco Polo’s famous account of Kubilai Khan’s empire contains a number of examples of advanced technology. There is, in other words, a long-standing expectation that utopian societies – whether they are ideal or just simply better than the point of comparison – are technologically advanced. The presumption is perhaps strengthened by changes in the media landscape, and the idea that technological improvement is the same as social improvement is easily accepted when one is condition to connect technology and utopian thinking, and also when one is living through a changing media landscape that one does not have the time to properly adjust to.    

 

That technological change requires adjustment on the part of the humans affected by that change is perhaps a fairly straightforward claim. Often, this adjustment has been a core aspect of the enthusiasm and the justification surrounding technological change. There is talk about transhumanism, of technology allowing humans to transcend their humanity, of technology ushering in a new era in the evolution of the human species. Technology is often seen as the key to unlock Utopia, and in our contemporary discourse that technology is Artificial Intelligence. Yet the utopian aspect of technological change is two-sided. On the one hand, it is absolutely indisputable that technological change has allowed a vast number of people opportunities for a better life than they would otherwise have. The best argument for our current level of technology is that it allows those who are handicapped in one way or the other to reduce that handicap, to open up new opportunities for living that would have been impossible without the technology in question. On the other hand, technology can be used to either oppress or numb the critical faculties of people, and when that technology is controlled by someone with authoritarian tendencies, the technology in question can easily be used to obscure the distinction between reality and fantasy, between truth and fiction, between veracity and lies. The potential for abusing technology is strengthened when technology means changing how we receive information. Changes in the media landscape means that we, humans, need to reflect on how we can use our faculties to convert the information given to us through this changing landscape into knowledge. We need to learn how to distinguish between claims and facts, between lies and truth. If we do not reflect on this challenge, if we forfeit this process of critical reflection, or if we outsource it to those who control the changing technology, we become less able to understand the basis of truth and the signs of duplicity.            

 

With the current proliferation of AI programmes that can create images and texts by stealing from existing works of art and existing texts, we are becoming less well-equipped to ascertain what is true and what is false. This blurring and warping of the already nebulous borderlands between truth and falsehood can be, and is already, weaponized by various individuals and groups with authoritarian motives. The utopian scenarios presented by these would-be dictators and hobby-authoritarians might seem appealing, but we do well to remember that several works of utopian fiction have already highlighted the inherent risk of abuse in utopian societies. One example is Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Austral Connue (The Southern Land, Known, translated by David Fausett), where the novel’s narrator lives thirty-five years among the Australians, a people of highly advanced technology. However, these technologically advanced people, who consider themselves and their society perfect, tolerate no other form of human life than that of their own. Since Foigny’s Australians are giant hermaphrodites, this intolerance means that they commit genocide on their non-giant, non-hermaphrodite neighbours, and use their advanced technology to obliterate the very ground on which their neighbours sought to establish a living. In the novel, the Australians have also employed their combination of technology and force in numbers to establish an ecosystem that is devoid of insects. Such a manoeuvre stems from an idea of gardens as locus of perfection, where insects are seen as noisy intruders, and fits perfectly well within a branch of utopian thinking that equates perfection with homogeneity. While the realistic consequences of this insect-less world are not touched upon by Foigny, our twenty-first century perspective – an era of mass-disappearance of bees and other insects, and where the consequences of extensive and often unbridled use of pesticide have made themselves clear – notifies us of the impending ramifications of technologically crafted homogeneity in Foigny’s Australia.  

 

Utopian thinking and utopian literature often rely on a blurring of the border between truth and fiction, between the possible and the impossible, in order to make rhetorical points, or in order to push an agenda or proffer suggestions for how to improve society. On other occasions, utopian thinking and utopian literature showcase how illusory the perfection of utopian society actually is. Thomas More’s Utopia is a slave society, relying on prisoners of war to do the most basic tasks of a functioning commonwealth. Tommaso Campanella’s city of the sun in distant Taprobane is a eugenicist society where the individuals are governed to such an extreme degree that the leaders decide which individuals should have children together. And Foigny’s narrator, the hermaphrodite Sadeur, returns from Australia completely disillusioned with a society that believes itself to be perfect, and allows that perfection to justify horrible acts.         

 

In our contemporary discourse, the utopian implications of Artificial Intelligence tends to dominate. Yet utopian societies can often be illusory, and more often than not they are deeply authoritarian. One way of perpetuating authoritarian government is to confuse people’s perception of reality, whether it is through mass delusion or through a blurring of fact and fiction. Nowadays, the media landscape is changing too rapidly for us to easily adjust to the new ways of ascertaining truth and discovering lies. In such a confusion, utopian solutions might appear more realistic than they actually are. Indeed, these utopian solutions are based on the perpetuation of a tool – Artificial Intelligence – that is programmed to create an alternate reality from stolen fragments from the real world. The question we need to ask at every juncture when AI is lauded as the key to the future is as follows: Whose utopia is being heralded by AI’s warping of reality? The answer is most likely going to be very unpleasant.  

        

The vanity of exploration - or, The discovery of Bouvet Island prefigured?

This spring, I am teaching a course on utopian thinking in the Middle Ages. The course is designed for MA students, and to prepare a good foundation for delving into details and focusing on specific themes within the vast umbrella of the course's main topic, my co-teacher and I have dedicated the first seminars to a chronological walkthrough of utopian material, ending with the Early Modern Period and stopping around 1750 for purely practical reasons. One important reason for bringing the early modern material into discussion with the medieval texts, was to highlight how increasing geographical knowledge affects the way utopian places are imagined, and where they are placed on the map.  

Thinking about the development of cartography and geographical knowledge, I was reminded of a detail I noticed in a painting I had the pleasure of seeing up close in January, namely Antonio de Pereda's allegory of vanity, exhibited in Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The painting is an exquisite example of the vanitas genre, one of my favourite types of paintings, as it combines the exuberant display of skill typical of the still life with the sombre and melancholic note of the memento mori artwork of the Late Middle Ages. The genre takes its name from the Book of Ecclesiastes, which is an immensely beautiful and human reflection on the pointlessness of human endeavour: All is vanity, all is in vain. Since part of the point of a vanitas painting is the juxtaposition of numerous and often contrasting pursuits, the genre also offered artists an opportunity to show how skilled they were at drawing complicated things, while also adhering to the iconographical standards of the genre (such as a skull, an extinguished candle, and an hourglass with all the sand in the bottom).       

Antonio de Pereda (1611-78), Alegoria de la vanidad (1632-36)

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Inventory no. GG 771

One detail that particularly fascinates, and pleases, me about Antonio de Pereda's rendition of the vanitas motif, is the way that he has rendered the globe, a detail I only properly realised when I was standing right in front of the painting. As seen below, the globe is placed on its side - its imagined side, rather - with north facing east and the west facing north. The hand of the genius representing the passing of time and the eventual pulverisation of all things mortal and temporal, is pointing towards the tip of the African continent, to a point between Africa and Antarctica. 

The detail is particularly interesting to me in light of the time when the painting was made, namely the 1630s. At this time, the Portuguese had spent generations mapping the coastlines of Africa and the Indian Ocean World, and there had been great strides in cartography. Madagascar - which was merely  a a rumour to medieval Europeans, if even that - is slowly receiving its actual shape, and the interior of Africa is mapped in the minds of European traders through stories encountered in the great Swahili trading cities such as Sofala and Mombasa. Indeed, if we look very closely on the globe in Pereda's painting, we see that the map of Africa represents two cartographic stages, with an earlier phase rendered in a strong green colour - reminiscent of the way Africa is depicted in early sixteenth-century maps - and a more modern, broader outline in weaker grey-green colour, which seems to represent the extent of Africa as known by modern cartography. Further south, moreover, is the great southern continent that was hypothesised by numerous cartographers throughout the medieval and early modern periods. This was a continent expected to exist to the south of Africa, based on the knowledge that the earth was round, and that the lower hemisphere should resemble the upper in climate, and perhaps also in having a large continent that would correspond with Eurasia. It is important to note, however, that by the time Antonio de Pereda painted this allegory, no European had been far enough south to ascertain the existence of this continent.   

In light of Antonio de Pereda's own times, and the increasing cartographic knowledge of the era, how are we to understand the way that the globe is included and rendered in the painting? While I do not know for certain, I suspect that in an age when voyages for trade, domination and conquest were still an important part of the geopolitical and even everyday life of Europe, the mapping of distant shores would be a natural part of the register of motifs that could emphasise the pointlessness of human endeavour. That the outline of Africa is rendered in two versions might be understood as a shorthand of the recent cartographic development of Pereda's times, which, ultimately, is as pointless as the game of cards or the possession of jewelry, since it does not ensure humans that eternal peace and afterlife which can only be attained through spiritual pursuits. Essentially, the painting seems to say: Yes, we know more about the world, but so what? 

 

One detail in the rendition of the globe is particularly amusing to me, as it is a pure coincidence. The finger of the genius is pointing to a location between the southern tip of Africa and the great southern land, the Terra Australis, that corresponds roughly to what we know now to be Antarctica. If we look at a modern map of this area, the finger is placed on, or at least very near, Bouvet Island, known as one of the most isolated places in the world. The first known sighting of Bouvet Island, currently under the jurisdiction of Norway, happened in 1739 during a voyage under Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier (1705-86), and the first known landfall happened in 1822 by American whalers. Consequently, Antonio de Pereda did not know about Bouvet Island, and the placing of the genius' finger is purely coincidental. But it pleases me to think about how human speculation and imagination very often does manage to envision the real world despite lack of certain knowledge.      

Lecture: Science, faith and superstition in Utopia

 

Last Tuesday, February 20, I had the honour of giving a lecture in the lecture series of the Science, Faith and Superstition seminar series, hosted by the University of Belgrade. My lecture highlighted various continuities in the way that medieval and early modern texts about ideal societies or exotic locations were imagined or formulated. The lecture was recorded, so I'm pleased to share it with all of you.  

Science, faith and superstition in Utopia

Saint Sebastian in Vienna Cathedral

Today is the feast of Saint Sebastian, a saint with whom I am inexplicably fascinated - inexplicably because I cannot define exactly what fascinates me about him and his cult. While his historicity is widely regarded as doubtful at best, at least by modern scholars, his iconography has left a massive imprint in the history of medieval and early modern art. Part of the success of his cult - success here understood as longevity and widespread fame - can be explained by his status as a plague saint, a patronage that continued to be relevant in Europe throughout the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Consequently, I am always happy to see a representation of Saint Sebastian on my travels, but very rarely surprised by such encounters. Today, I met him again. 

As I am writing this blogpost, I am in Vienna for a work trip, and this Saturday is the first day where I have been able to do some real sightseeing. One of the main sights that I wanted to see was the Vienna Cathedral, the Stephansdom, dedicated to Stephen Protomartyr, which was consecrated in 1147, ten years after the building work commenced. The cathedral is an overwhelming and beautiful building, with a lot of wonderful architectural and iconographical details, and one can easily get lost if one tries to see all of them. Since this is my first time in Vienna, and since most of my time has been taken up by work, I had not planned my visit very carefully, and ambled about the church space as someone coming into a different world, not really knowing what to expect. This kind of exploration by accident, as it were, has its benefits, because sometimes you see details that are not necessarily highlighted by the available literature. One such figure was that of Saint Sebastian, placed in a niche high above the floor of the nave, not difficult to notice yet also not difficult to miss. 

The beardless, contorted, perforated figure was a familiar sight. I have as yet found no information about when this figure was made, or by whom, but it looks perfectly in tune with the ideals of sixteenth-century Mannerism with its slightly exaggerated movements and bending bodies. In its iconography, the Sebastian figure in Vienna Cathedral follows the typical standard established in fifteenth-century Italy, and which continued to be followed well into the seventeenth century, and arguably into our own times. The figure was a lovely, if grotesque, reminder of the ubiquity of Sebastian's cult, and the iconographical continuity with which he is represented.     

 

The violence of Peter Wilkins - violence and Utopia in an eighteenth-century novel

For years I have been fascinated with Utopian fiction, i.e., stores that depict ideal societies, usually serving as a form of contemporary social commentary. In what we might call self-labelled Utopian fiction – that is fiction directly or indirectly inspired by Thomas More’s novel Utopia and thereby written after its publication in 1516 – the key recognisable elements of such societies are often well developed and used in a variety of different ways. However, similar forms of social commentary through imaginary places are found in abundance prior to More’s novel, and to fully understand the genre of Utopian fiction and its many complex components, it is often necessary to cast a very broad chronological net to see how the invention of, or reflections on, non-existent places function within a given discourse. I am currently dedicating some time to this kind of literature, and I hope to be able to develop my thoughts on various subjects pertaining to Utopian societies in the coming months.

Recently, I finished reading one such Utopian novel, published in 1751, namely The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock. The novel describes the eponymous protagonist’s journey from England to Africa and onwards to a land far to the south, in which he encounters a country of winged humans. Through his familiarity with metal and firearms – above all cannons salvaged from the ship on which he arrived – Peter Wilkins aids the king of the flying people to quell a rebellion and once more unite the vast kingdom. Desirous to spread Christianity and abolish slavery, Wilkins reforms the society of the kingdom, and continues to extend the territory of the king right to the very edge of the continent (which is the hypothesised southern land which was not yet documented by 1751). The novel is a troubling mix of imperialism, evangelism and abolitionism which really captures the complexities of eighteenth-century discourse, and provides an interesting and worthwhile read.

For my current purposes, my main interest in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is the function of violence in the making and sustaining of the Utopian society. The aspect of violence is an integral part of many Utopian stories, and violence serves different functions in how the ideal society is understood. In some cases, an ideal society is marked by the absence of violence, in other cases the ideal society is brought about through violence, and in yet other cases the ideal society is sustained by violence. Not infrequently, violence serves both a creating and a maintaining function in a Utopia. (I have written on the role of violence in Utopian societies in this blogpost.)

The case of The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is somewhat peculiar, because it belongs to a particular sub-genre of the Utopian story that combines elements of the Robinsonade. In other words, the plot of the novel revolves around one – sometimes more – individuals shipwrecked and cast ashore in a strange and unknown country, whose society is in many ways radically different from their own. Such stories differ from the general plot of Thomas More’s Utopia, in which the reader receives a travelogue from a traveller who has arrived at the ideal society and then left it without any trouble or hindrance. The style of the travelogue renders the story more descriptive, and the polemical edge of this description is perhaps sharper in other, more adventure-like stories.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Utopian stories that employ elements of the Robinsonade is that like Robison Crusoe his island, so the protagonists of these stories often employ their technological knowledge and/or political precepts from their native countries to transform Utopia. In some such cases, the Utopia in question might be an ideal society that is destroyed by the application of the protagonist’s programme, perhaps most famously in Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s Undeground Travels. In other Robinsonade-cum-Utopian stories, it is the protagonist who creates the ideal society by transforming the Utopia – the no-place or imagined place – in accordance with their principles and their ambitions. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins belongs to the latter category.

Peter Wilkins becomes acquainted with a society where the people are noble, industrious, clever, and have obtained a high-level intricate society of complex rituals, traditions and administration. Yet their primary technology is stone, they are a slave society, and their form of religion consists of what the Anglican Peter Wilkins deems idolatry. By the end of Peter’s time in this country – Normnbdsgrsutt [sic!] – the society remains a kingdom, but all slaves are now free, its territories are vastly extended, they have colonised previously uninhabited areas, taken up the use of metal, and adopted a version of their religion that does not contain idol-worship. This transformation comes through battles against rebellious subjects and through the conquest of a country of slave-holders. At the heart of this transformation is Peter Wilkins’ use of cannons and pistols, against which the pike-wielding armies of flying men stand no chance.

The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins provides an interesting and disturbing example of how envisioned ideal societies are heavily intertwined with the use of violence. The grand reforms of Normnbdsgrsutt and other neighbouring kingdoms are first of all made possible through violent means. Even if, as in this case, the violence is a response to extraneous violence, this response is not the end. Instead, Peter Wilkins goes further in his ambitions and takes advantage of the newly-established peace to control resources and initiate the production of metalwork. While the fabrication of armament is not mentioned as one of the pursuits of this metalwork, the cannons and pistols brought by Peter Wilkins would provide suitable models for copying should the flying people so desire. There is perhaps a hint of regret about this possibility in an aside comment in which the protagonists darkly questions whether his efforts of civilising have been all that positive.

The role of violence in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins is a curious reminder that ideal societies are not necessarily brought about or sustained through ideal means, and that a potential for rot exists at the heart of most, if not all, of these Utopias. Robert Paltock’s novel is an importance case study in this regard, because it combines violence used to obtain goals with which few would not sympathise – the abolition of slavery – with violence used to extend territory and evangelise. Moreover, the possible future fabrication of firearms and cannons lurks as a devouring shadow at the edges of this transformed society, notwithstanding a prophecy of prosperity for 1500 years.

The violence in The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins forces us to grapple with the following question: how ideal are our visions of ideal society? Moreover, how do we avoid violence? How do we prevent the rot of violence at the heart of reforms and transformations? These questions are especially important due to the polemic function of Utopian stories. They are meant as social commentary, as a way to help us recognise errors in our own society and help us envision ways to deal with those errors. The question is whether we recognise those of our solutions that carry the rot within them, or whether we employ those faulty solutions only to end up with faulty replacements. 

New publication: Randmerknader som levd religion?

Earlier today I was notified about the publication of the article "Randmerknader som levd religion?" (Marginal notations as lived religion?" in the latest issue of the Swedish journal of history Scandia. This was a special issue dedicated to the subject of lived religion in premodern Northern Europe, guest edited by Sara Ellis Nilsson and Terese Zachrisson of the project Mapping Lived Religion hosted by Linnaeus University and University of Gothenburg.

I was kindly invited to participate in this special issue, which led to the writing of my most speculative article yet, an article that aims to make a case for interpreting marginal notations as expressions of lived religion. My case study was a late-medieval Catholic legendary housed at the Protestant school Herlufsholm in Denmark at the turn of the eighteenth century. The article is in Norwegian, but an abstract in English can be found here. Abstracts of the other articles of the issue can be found here. The articles will become open access late in the spring of 2023. 

The article gave me a chance to explore some books familiar to me from previous projects, but from a new angle. Hopefully, this pilot study will contribute in some way to new knowledge being extracted from the book collection of Herlufsholm, which is currently kept in the special collections of the University of Southern Denmark. 

On statues, and how not to defend them

 
June last year, I wrote a blogpost in response to the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol. Since then, I have followed the ongoing discussion concerning statues and whether they should be kept or removed, and from time to time there are new incidents where protests usher in new removals. Earlier this month, for instance, statues of Queen Victoria and Elizabeth II were brought to the ground in Winnipeg, in response to discoveries of mass graves of indigenous children at the sites of residential schools in Canada. As I’m writing this, reports from protests in Brazil show that in the city of São Paulo, protesters have set fire to a statue of the explorer Borba Gato (1649-1718). No doubt, there will be more statues to add to the roster in the coming weeks.

The debate about the role of statues is, as we see, still ongoing, and will remain ongoing for the foreseeable future. In some cases, the debate is ongoing precisely because the statues have not fallen. One such example can be found in Oxford, where Oriel College decided not to remove the contentious statue of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes.

There are many ways to approach the question about statues and whether or not to keep them standing. I have, I hope, made my own thoughts quite clear in my previous blogpost, and they have not changed since I wrote it. However, I do think that the public discourse benefits from disagreement and differing views, and I am therefore always interested to hear the arguments put forth in favour of keeping the statues in place. Last autumn, I had a seminar with two groups of first-year students on the use of history, and since the seminar was part of a module on early modern history, I decided to focus on the statue debate. My students were asked to find a statue, research any controversies – actual or potential – concerning the person in question, and then we discussed the individual cases. The students responded very well to the assignment and had found a number of interesting examples. Since this course was in Sweden and since I was the only foreigner in the virtual room, it was particularly educational for me, both to see the statues they had chosen to discuss, and also to see how they responded to the global discussion from a Swedish vantage point. To my surprise, and indeed dismay, I noted that most of them accepted some of the most frequently presented arguments in favour of keeping the statues in place. The argument that the people in question were products of their time, and the argument that removing a statue is to remove history were both invoked quite frequently. While I disagree with this, I limited myself to presenting a general rebuttal of the core of each argument, while also explaining why these arguments were not very good. Some of the students did indeed come around to a different point of view towards the end of each seminar, but as I felt that this was a discussion they needed to develop further on their own, I did not insist on the matter. This was one of those cases where I was very glad that the students were not graded according to their efforts, because if so, it would be easy for the students to adopt my view and ostensibly agree with it. Since all that was required was attendance, they were at full liberty to agree and disagree as they saw fit, and I came away from the seminars with a lot of impressions and food for thought about how this discussion is viewed through eyes different from my own.

I have not changed my views about statues, but I am always looking for good counterarguments in the event that I will be discussing this issue with future groups of students. For this reason, I was interested to find a link to an interview with a scholar at Oriel College who was not in favour of removing the statue of Cecil Rhodes, and I was curious about the arguments that would be put forth. Unfortunately, I found that the website that had conducted and published the interview regularly publishes pieces that seem to take a lot of left-wing issues in very bad faith, and I also found that the interview was couched in a similar vein of bad faith, dismissive and misrepresentative language, and I saw that neither the interviewer nor the interviewee had really grasped the core of the debate. For these reasons, I will not link to the interview, nor will I name the site or the scholar. Should you wish to read the interview, I imagine that some efficient googling should produce the required results.

I am not linking to the interview, because this blogpost is not really about the interview itself, but rather about the tendency that I saw represented there. This is a blogpost first and foremost about how not to argue in favour of keeping statues of problematic historical persons.

As I mentioned above, when talking about my experience with Swedish students, the arguments of being of one’s time and removing history are both unacceptable arguments. The first argument is based on the expectations that humans are homogenous in different epochs, and that human nature changes. There have always, in each epoch of recorded history and also before that, been a plurality of opinions about important issues. While many previous historical eras are now known for their violence and instability – often a reputation caused by the interpretation of future generations rather than an accurate representation of the time – we should also keep in mind that ideas that it is wrong to kill people, and that one should not treat others the way one would not wish to be treated, are thousands of years old. We also know that dissent has been one of the key themes of recorded history, and that revolts, revolutions, rebellions and riots have flared up in the face of injustice or abuse of power as long as power has been wielded. We therefore need to abandon the argument of someone being of their time.

Similarly, the idea that removing a statue is to remove history is wrong. History is recorded in many forms, especially in our current times, and while there have been cases where removal of statues had the deliberate purpose of removing people from history through the so-called damnatio memoriae, statues are not vehicles for learning about history. David Olusoga has written very well about this already. Another version of this argument is that the statues are products of a historical period and are therefore imbued with some degree of venerability. This is a better version of the argument, but it is nonetheless deeply problematic. There is a reason why we do not have statues of some historical transgressors, namely because there is a sufficiently wide consensus that the people in question have committed crimes too monstrous to allow for statues. Granted, there are some historical persons whose crimes are still not subject for sufficient consensus as to facilitate the removal of their statues, but this consensus might change, and then there is a very good reason for removing the statues in question. For instance, it was only two days ago, July 23, that a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of Ku Klux Klan, was removed from the Tennessee capitol building in Nashville. We then see that it might take time before a requisite number of people acknowledge the crimes of historical individuals, but once those crimes are acknowledged we also see why it is unacceptable to keep statues of those people in place.

The main reason why these two aforementioned arguments are insufficient is that statues are by their very nature celebratory. As history progresses, we change whom we choose to celebrate, and it therefore makes little sense to celebrate people who are acknowledged as transgressors. We should of course have a lively discussion about who gets to stay and who has to go, but for any such discussion to be in place it is crucial to be aware of the fact that the primary purpose for a statue is celebration.

Another argument that I have often seen levelled – and which had a central place in the interview I mentioned earlier – is that toppling these statues are acts of hysteria, that they are tantrums and overreactions. This is a disingenuous response, and it is not so much an argument in favour of keeping the statues in place as it is a thinly veiled ad hominem attack. We should of course acknowledge that such protests that have resulted in the felling of statues have a degree of group effect to them, that those who commit these acts are energised by being part of a large group of people. But this in itself is not the same as hysteria. There are often long-running tensions that come to the surface in such moments, and these reactions must be understood against backdrops of social inequality, racism, imperialism and the long-felt effects of past injustices. It is simplistic to dismiss such actions as the toppling of statues as mere tantrums, especially because in those groups that pull down the statues there are numerous people whose combinations of incentivising factors are different from person to person. If we are to treat the matter of statues with nuance, we cannot lazily label large groups of individuals with derogatory terms such as “hysteria” or “tantrum”.

There might be good arguments for keeping statues in place, and this is why we need to have a thorough discussion for each statue. However, I have not yet been convinced by any such arguments that I have encountered, and if we are to move this discussion in a fruitful direction, it is at least important that none of the three responses listed here are brought into play. Once these rhetorical cul-de-sacs are discarded, we might find good arguments in favour of keeping statues in place. I am not holding my breath.