A note on reading fragments - or, Why human agency remains important

This week, there has been a lot of publicity around the latest development in the efforts to extract texts from the fire-damaged scrolls from Herculaneum. News outlets tend to focus on the role of AI in the process, not distinguishing between various forms of technology that fall under the broad label of artificial intelligence. As has been pointed out by several commentators on social media, however, the role of artificial intelligence consists of distinguishing ink from papyrus, leaving the actual transcription and identification of the content of the scrolls to human agency. In other words, the main part of the work is done by human researchers with expertise and knowledge. In a post by Dr. Naomi Scott of the University of Bristol, she pointed out that the main work is done by human experts, and posted a quotation from Professor Llewellyn Morgan of the University of Oxford published in a news update from the university in 2025. 

In the quotation from Llewellyn Morgan, there was one particular passage that stood out to me. Morgan likened the pattern recognition by machines to how eighteenth-century copyists who copied what was written on scrolls, but who could not understand the content. This reminded me of an anecdote from my experience with manuscript fragments that really made me understand how experts often need inexpert eyes to help their work progress. 

About nine years ago, I was researching fragments of medieval manuscripts in the special collections at the University Library of Southern Denmark. Most of these fragments were used as bindings, and had been subject to a lot of wear, tear, and years of occasional water damage. Consequently, the texts on these fragments could be very difficult to decipher, as it was often challenging to distinguish a letter from a letter-shaped smudge. In some cases, I also came to realise that my expertise in palaeography and Latin hampered me when the text became too illegible, because I was too focused on the word in its entirety rather than the individual letter, which meant that I often kept searching for one of many possible words that seemed like reasonable option for one specific string of letters. 

In order to better identify the letters, I took close-up photographs of the fragments or parts of the fragments, printed these out, and traced or separated the various letters with a pencil. This method was sometimes successful, but it depended entirely on the state of the fragment, and I was again hampered by the expectations which were leading my gaze. 

I showed some of the pictures to a friend of mine. At that time, he had no experience with medieval manuscripts, palaeography, or Latin. But he is a very good photographer with a keen eye for details, and I thought that he might see things that I did not. This turned out to be the case. As my friend looked at the photographs, he told me very simply what he saw, and I then could focus on that one thing and determine whether this was a letter or simply a letter-shaped smudge. This was a kind of a refocusing, or a recalibration of the gaze, and it was an immense help. In some cases, what my friend saw was irrelevant, but I could only assess this irrelevance after a closer scrutiny, and when transcribing a worn and faded fragment, it is just as important to know which things to ignore. Through his help, I was able to transcribe some lines that had frustrated me for a long time, and I was then able to identify the text itself, which in turn was very important for the general identification of the fragment. 

The exercise was a revelation for me, because it showed very clearly how much help I could get from someone who was not in my academic field or even close to it. In this sense, my friend was doing much of the same job that machines are doing for the Herculaneum scrolls. He was finding patterns, noticing things that I overlooked because I was distracted by the bigger picture. And even though this kind of work would have been done much faster by a machine, the process was also very educational for me and helped me not only to do my work but also to improve my skills as a fragment researcher. As in most things, such research requires a lot of practice, and the kind of slow, incremental progress that my friend and I were doing was what I needed to improve at an early stage in my career as a researcher. 

In many cases, machines are needed to deal with certain aspects of source work, at least for speeding up the process. But sometimes speed is neither of the essence nor very helpful, because it is the slow, trudging pace that helps you improve, making you become an expert through constant practice. In short, human agency is not only still very much needed, it is also to be preferred. 

Saint Julian in a fragment - chance survivals, canonicity, and the cult of saints in medieval Scandinavia

 

Much of my research deals with questions pertaining to the cult of saints in medieval Scandinavia. This is a topic that labours under the double-edged problem of having both very few surviving sources - making it difficult to make strong claims about certain questions - as well as such a wide variety of source types, making it difficult to have the required expertise to use all these sources together. Concerning the cult of saints, we know that there were many more sources used and produced in medieval Scandinavia than those we have access to today. The surviving sources have, therefore, provided a skewed sense of the saints venerated by the medieval Scandinavians, as well as the stories told about those saints. Due to the source situation - combined with the nationalistic tilt embedded into the foundations of medieval studies in each Scandinavian country - we have a tendency to focus on the cult of native saints, especially the royal saints. Aside from the biblical saints and the most famous of the early Christian saints - especially Laurentius, who was patron saint of the Church of Lund, which became a metropolitan see in 1104 - there has been relatively little work done on the veneration of the saints less known in our own time. Judging from surviving materials, we have a pretty good idea of how popular and important these famous saints were. But we cannot really know whether some of the saints that we consider minor today were, in actuality, major saints throughout the Scandinavian Middle Ages, or at least within one time period or within one milieu. 

I was reminded of this issue earlier this spring, when I was at the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen to research some manuscript fragments. In one of the boxes I had ordered was the upper part of a two-columned page from a twelfth- or early-thirteenth-century manuscript, the text of which is the saint-biography of Julian Martyr, also known as Julian of Le Mans. The fragment is well known in medieval studies and I have seen it mentioned and analysed several times. It is most likely produced in Scandinavia, probably in Norway, and it is a important witness to the earliest stages of native Norwegian manuscript production. The content of the fragment, however, has received much less attention than its codicological, palaeographical and iconographical aspects. This text provides a very good starting point for reflecting on the state of our knowledge about the cult of saints in twelfth-century Norway.

Rigsarkivet, Fr. 251

Rigsarkivet, Fr. 251

Saint Julian was a third-century bishop of Le Mans. Since he was martyred during the heroic age of Christianity in what was later to become France, his cult and his figure appear to have been important elements not only of Le Mans' own identity but also the identity of France as a kingdom having received special divine attention. This kingdom-wide identity was also propped up by the cults of Saint Dionysius of Paris, of Saint Remigius and the Holy Ampulla, and eventually also the cult of Saint Louis IX. The early date of Julian's life and martyrdom also meant that he was included in several early martyrologies and calendars, and his cult was disseminated far and wide. 

In Scandinavia, there are few surviving traces of Julian in the sources. For example, the only sources from Sweden, as far as I am aware, are twelve calendars that contain his feast-day, which is celebrated either on January 26 or Janaury 27. Since most calendars used in medieval Sweden have survived only as fragments, however, the actual number of calendars containing his feast-day was significantly higher. In any case, no other sources are known - not sculptures, not altarpieces, not wall-paintings. I know of no sources from medieval Denmark, although I have not yet checked whether his feast is included in the late-medieval printed breviaries. In Breviarium Nidrosiense, the breviary printed in Paris in 1519 and aimed at the entire Norwegian church province, his feast is not included. In other words, Saint Julian of Le Mans appears to have been virtually unimportant in the cult of saints in medieval Scandinavia. 

However, Saint Julian was at least known, if only in the monastic or ecclesiastical community in which the manuscript containing his passion story was used. We do not know what community this was, but it is likely that the manuscript was a collection of saints' lives produced for - and perhaps at - one of the leading religious centres of twelfth- or early-thirteenth-century Norway. My own hunch is that the original manuscript was a typical hagiographical collection that was used during the Matins of the feast-day of the saints included in the collection. Matins was the divine service in the middle of the night, and it was during this service that the saint was venerated with a liturgical office which included both chants and readings from the saint's biography. The original manuscript, therefore, is likely to have contained the legends of several other saints aside from Julian. 

What, then, are we to make of the inclusion of Saint Julian of Le Mans in this hypothetical, now-lost hagiographical collection. Probably not much. Such collections were typically compiled from available materials, and those materials tended to contain those stories and legends that were widely accessible rather than those which were particularly important to a specific diocese or church province. Put differently, the legend of Saint Julian was sufficiently widespread that it was easy to get hold of. Its appearance in Norway reflects Julian's general canonicity as a saint in Latin Christendom by the late twelfth century rather than the importance of his cult among Norwegian Christians. 

On the other hand, the fact that Julian's legend was available in Norway and accessible at one - if not more - major religious centre should be taken seriously. What happens at such an institution when the available hagiographical material is limited? Do those stories that are available become more important than they otherwise would be? Can the cult of Saint Julian have been strengthened at this institution simply because the clerics or monastics who comprised the institution's community were familiar with his legend? Very likely, because cults tended to be shaped by the personal devotion of those who were part of the veneration of saints at religious centres. Surges in a saint's popularity could be shaped by events that were interpreted as intercession from that saint, it could be shaped by dreams of individuals, of the constant, long-term pressure from exposure to the saint's story. We see this happen in the cult of Edward the Confessor, for instance, whose main promoter before the 1160s was the figure of Osbert of Clare who believed himself to have been healed due to the saint-king's intercession. Might not a similar causality - however imagined - also not affect the cult of a well-known but otherwise not particularly important saint-bishop? 

We do not have any evidence to suggest that the knowledge of Julian's legend made an impact on his cult in medieval Norway. And personally, I do not think it did, simply because this possibility hinges on our knowledge of one sole surviving fragment. However, this reflection is not primarily about Julian or his cult, but about how our ideas about canonicity and the cult of sains is shaped by the chance survivals of sources. The fragment containing part of the prologue of Julian's saint-biography proves that he was known somewhere in medieval Norway, and for at least a period, even if that period might only be the generation of clerics or monastics that first made use of this manuscript. 

As scholars we need to be very careful in assuming that the canon of literature that we imagine today based on the survival of sources is necessarily the same as the canon of literature of the Middle Ages. Indeed, we know very well that the so-called bestsellers of medieval Latin Christendom - such as the Imago Mundi of Honorius of Autun, or the Sententiae of Peter the Lombard - receive much less attention from and are much less accessible to modern readers than works such as Beowulf, which only survives in one single manuscript. The modern medieval canon is, in other words, very different from the medieval medieval canon. Similarly, the cult of saints as we understand it today might have been configured somewhat differently in the Middle Ages, with saints now lost to us or ignored by us having much greater prominence than we will ever know. 

Rigsarkivet, Fr. 251

Rigsarkivet, Fr. 251

A year in reading - 2025

2025 began as a limbo. In January I was unemployed and without immediate prospects, but with several obligations to which I had committed myself when I still received a regular salary. As a consequence, although I theoretically should have plenty of time to devote to reading, the many duties that demanded my attention, the many things I had to prepare, and unexpected demands that came along the way, all combined to leave less time for doing the kind of reading I had hoped to do. My pace throughout the year became choppy, and I was unable to follow the parameters that ordinarily guide my literary forays within the calendar year. However, 2025 also afforded me several opportunities for travel, and many of the books I read this year were consumed en route to somewhere.       

Travelling by page   

Every year, I try to explore more of the world through the pages of its myriad literatures. As a bare minimum, I aim to read one book from every country in the world – including Palestine – and I have been chipping away at this goal since I began the project in 2017, inspired by the excellent work of journalist and author Ann Morgan.

In previous years, I have made good use of my access to university libraries and their inter-library loan systems, and although a similar system exists for public libraries in Norway, this year’s limited access to the holdings of universities with departments dedicated to the languages and literatures of other parts of the globe meant that I had to rely on my own reserves. Over the past two decades, I have accumulated a decent personal library with items for future reading, some of which are intended to help in my ongoing quest of travelling by page. However, since I did not know for how long I would remain unemployed, I decided to buy a couple of new books to ensure that I would still be able to keep travelling for a while.

The first book I finished was A girl called Eel by Ali Zamir, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. This novel is an exploration of society and gender roles in the Comoros, and provided an interesting and heartbreaking window into a country about which I know very little, and whose literature is not extensively available to non-francophone readers.

Ali Zamir, A girl called Eel (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

In a bookshop in Bergen, I encountered a Norwegian translation of Scholastique Mukasonga’s 2008 memoir, La Femme aux pieds nus, translated by Agnete Øye as Den barbeinte kvinnen. I am always happy to see Norwegian translations of non-anglophone literature, and as I have been wanting to read something by Mukasonga for some time, I bought it and read its beautiful and harrowing chapters on and off for the subsequent months. As often is the case when I read books by African writers that describe the practicalities of the agricultural year, I was struck by the recognisable aspects of Mukasonga’s upbringing concerning the various duties pertaining to the keeping of crops and the ever-present concern about whether a harvest will fail or flourish. In other words, the book was yet another reminder that shared experiences connect people the world over, and we remain more similar than different in all our fundamental aspects. 

Scholastique Mukasonga, Den barbeinte kvinnen (translated by Agnete Øye)

New places for reading       

Aside from travelling by page, I also did a lot of physical travel, partly thanks to some plans that had been laid the year before, and partly thanks to a surprise short-term employment that brought me out of my village on several journeys. As a consequence, I was able to find several new places for reading this year, too. For instance, a three-week journey that included Hamburg, Bergen, Oslo, Madrid, and Salamanca in late March and early April meant that I could seek out several places in which to sit down and quietly peruse what I was carrying with me for that specific purpose. In a Latin American restaurant in Hamburg, for instance, I followed C. S. Lewis’ imagined Martian landscape in Out of the Silent Planet, while I was reading up on the cult of saints in medieval Italy and medieval England in the bars of Salamanca and of Madrid respectively. 

C. S. Lewis, Out of the silent planet 

Hamburg

Edward Schoolman, Rediscovering Sainthood in Italy 

Salamanca

Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to relate 

Madrid 

At home, I also found opportunity to read in new locations. In April, my family and I launched the rowing boat on one of the lakes in my village, as we do each year once the ice has drifted off over the waterfall and returned to liquid again. My first trip of the year led me to one of the promontories where I often go searching for blueberries – or what I have recently learned are technically called bilberries. Since most of my journeys to this promontory involves getting my hands dirty with the fruits of the harvest, I rarely bring any reading material with me, knowing that bilberry stains are hard to remove. This time, however, since it was long before berry-picking season, I brought with me a collection of poems by one of my favourite poets, Raquel Lanseros, and ventured up a brook to a waterfall and found a lovely spot for reading.

Raquel Lanseros, 'Ese lejos tan cerca'

In the summer, I took another boat for a ride, this time on the fjord, and went ashore on a small promontory. This journey was eventful, as I hope to explain in a later blogpost, but for the present purpose the main point is that I also brought with me a book to read. Strictly speaking, the promontory itself was not a new place for reading, as I had been here before, but this time the oppressive sun drove me and my youngest sister’s dog into the refuge of some shady foliage, and after a refreshing swim I lay down to read Old Norse chivalric romances translated into modern Norwegian. 

Birgit Nyborg (ed. and trl.), Tre riddersagaer

Reading by lists       

Each year, I steer my reading in accordance with several lists. Aside from the ongoing attempt to read a book from every country, I also aim to read at least three books in four categories: a) academic books; b) books by Norwegian authors; c) books by Nobel laureates in literature; and d) books from a reading-list I put together during my first year at university.

Due to the pace of this year’s reading – dominated in large part by editorial tasks that tired my brain too much for reading as much as I would have liked – I was unable to complete this particular goal. However, some headway was gained in each of the categories. 

Raquel Lanseros, El sol y las otras estrellas 

Diktet om min Cid (translated by Eva M. Lorenzen)

The year started auspiciously with the completion of the Norwegian translation of Cantar de mio Cid, translated by Eva M. Lorenzen as Diktet om min Cid, which I bought during my BA studies and have been meaning to read for years. This was, however, the only book from my old to-read list which I was able to complete. 

When it came to academic books, I was much more fortunate, and I feel greatly enriched by the various titles I managed to read as I was doing research for various articles and mini-projects. For instance, Niamh Wycherley’s The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland was a particularly interesting foray into a part of medieval Latin Christendom that I keep feeling I should know more about, and this book was a joy to read. I was also happy to finally get an opportunity to read Audun Dybdahl’s monograph on the runic calendars of Norway and Sweden, Primstaven i lys av helgenkulten (runic calendars in light of the cult of saints). I was glad to be able to prioritise this book both because it is an interesting topic on a source type that bridges the medieval storyworld with the early modern one, but also because Dybdahl was one of my lecturers at university. As he passed five years ago, it felt like a fitting if belated tribute to his work. 

Niamh Wycherley, The Cult of Relics in Early Medieval Ireland

Dybdahl’s monograph also ticked the box for a third category, namely books by Norwegian authors. For much of my life, I have prioritised non-Norwegian authors, and as a consequence I feel I do not know the literature of my primary homeland as much as I ought to do. The upside of this neglect is that I now have an excuse to roam widely within the vast flora that is Norwegian literary history. To this category, I also added Olav Bø’s short monograph on Norwegian feast-days, Norske årshøgtider, which examines traditions and superstitions that have survived in some form or other since the Middle Ages. A third example from this category is Johannes Heggland’s Folket i dei kvite båtane (The people in the white boats) from 1962, which is a children’s book set in early Bronze Age Norway, and which aimed to bring a distant part of the Norwegian past to life to young children based on archaeological findings available at the time.

As for Nobel laureates, I only managed to read one this year: Albert Camus’ The Outsider, translated by Joseph Laredo. While a very interesting window into colonial Algeria from the vantage point of the colonising people, and a very easy read, it was also an annoying reminder of prejudices that should be of the past but which are still very much of the present.

Olav Bø, Norske årshøgtider

Johannes Heggland, Folket i dei kvite båtane

Binging sagas

Towards the end of October, I picked up pace in my reading thanks to an earlier discovery that a five-volume set of translations of Icelandic sagas into Norwegian has been made available online. Ordinarily, I do not like reading on a screen – and the fact that I have done so quite often this year is partly why my sense of my own reading is rather muddled. However, at the end of October, this particular medium suited me very well as I was travelling and had not brought enough books sufficiently small to make for suitable travel reading. Additionally, a lot of the sagas are rather short, so at a point when I was feeling hopelessly behind in my annual reading, these tales were perfect for catching up and I devoured fifteen in the course of two months, with a handful others having been finished in the course of spring and summer. This became a veritable binge, both because I read so many of them in such a short time, but also because I eventually could not keep track of all the plots and all the characters once I had finished a given saga, partly because of the speed but also because several of the plots of the sagas share many of the same features, and because there are numerous characters in them. Despite the overindulgence, it was also very satisfying because as a medievalist I have been in arrears with my saga reading for years, and it has been immensely rewarding to finally fill so many of these gaps. 

 

Science and fiction  

Another theme that emerged for this year’s reading was science fiction. This is another genre where I feel I have a lot of catching-up to do, but I have done so rather circuitously. Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra by C. S. Lewis are unsurprising contributions to this theme, seeing as they are classics, albeit not necessarily widely famous in the current age. A more unconventional choice was the 1945 Norwegian novel Atomene spiller (the atoms are playing) by Hans Christian Sandbeck, which describes the world of the year 2250, and which evolves into a meditation on the perennial nature of human violence. What fascinates me the most about this novel is that it was one of the first books to be published after the liberation of Norway on May 8, in a time of general shortage. Moreover, it provides a reflection on the horrors of nuclear warfare at a remarkably early date, seeing as it was published only a few months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Hans Christian Sandbeck, Atomene spiller

Most of my reading within the theme of science fiction has taken place within a medievalist framework. I read E. R. Truitt’s excellent monograph Medieval Robots from 2015, which deals with automata in Latin Christian literary culture, and which provides several great examples of how the concept of immaterial objects with an agency seemingly of their own fascinated the imagination of medieval writers and readers. It was thanks to this book that I also picked up the collection of three chivalric sagas translated into modern Norwegian which I had purchased several years ago. I was particularly pleased with delving into these medieval manifestations of science in fiction, since the topic dovetails nicely with utopian thinking, which was one of the main themes of last year’s reading. 

E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots

Towards the end of the year, I also added two further books to my repository of science fiction. First up was Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons, which is a wonderful adventure story following a natural historian in a fictional world modelled on Regency and Victorian England. Secondly, I read John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes from 1953, which is both fascinating for keeping its flavour of its age without being dated and also an eerie novel to read in an age of advancing climate change. This novel is also delightful for having one of the most functional married couples of fiction, at least based on my limited experience.

Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons

John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

A meeting in Salamanca

In March, I spent a few days in Salamanca for a conference. This is one of my favourite cities, and an important literary location. Aside from being the setting of Lazarillo de Tormes, typically regarded as the first picaresque novel, it is also the workplace of one of my favourite poets, Maribel Andrés Llamero. I have been in touch with Maribel for several years, and this year we were finally able to meet up in person. She kindly signed my copy of her previous poetry collection – Los inútiles (the useless ones) – which had bought the year before in Santiago de Compostela. As an homage to Maribel, I subsequently crossed the river Tormes – which I had never got around to do during my previous trips to Salamanca – and stopped halfway to read some of her poems with the city’s skyline as a backdrop. As Maribel’s poems have enabled me to connect more deeply with my native landscapes for several years, it was a particular joy to also weave my own history of reading more tightly to the city of Salamanca through her work. 

Maribel Andrés Llamero, Los inútiles

The river Tormes

Lazarillo de Tormes and his blind master

Sundry highlights    

Due to my bibliophilia, I encounter book- and reading-related highlights in many forms, and some of these are collected here to give a more expansive overview of this year in reading.

Book-buying in Hamburg, which included this German translation of an Italian Donald Duck parody of Der Nibelungelied. I bought the copy even though I have copies of this story in both Italian and Norwegian already.

 

Visiting the university library of Salamanca during the conference, and being shown a fourteenth-century copy of Legenda Aurea, as well as a fourteenth-century copy of Liber de Sancti Jacobi. 

My haul from three weeks’ travel. 

Discovering Bergen public library’s tribute to the author Tor Åge Bringsværd, who passed away in 2025, and who was one of the most beloved literary voices of the past fifty years.

 

Working on an article draft that allowed me to delve deeper into the cult of Saint James of Compostela.

Myriam Moscona, León de Lidia

Trondheim

Nils Holger Petersen et. al. (eds.), Symbolic Identity and the Cultural Memory of Saints

Odense

Returning to old haunts in Trondheim and Odense. 

Researching a book bound in manuscript fragments at the Odense Cathedral School.

Working on descriptions of manuscript fragments at the University of Southern Denmark, the place where I got my PhD some eight years ago.

Breviarium Othoniense (1482) 

København Kongelige Bibliotek LN 29 4to

Breviarium Othoniense (1497) 

(København Kongelige Bibliotek LN 30

Abbo of Fleury, Passio Sancti Eadmundi

København Kongelige Bibliotek GKS 1588 4to

Researching at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. I was finally able to see the first to editions of the Odense Breviary – from 1482 and 1497 – in the paper, having pored over their pages digitally for years. I also revisited an eleventh-century manuscript containing a copy of Passio Sancti Eadmundi by Abbo of Fleury, as well as the earliest known copy of the liturgical office for the feast of Saint Edmund.

 

Returning to the University Library of Southern Denmark to work on a fifteenth-century collection of saints’ legends.

Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard et.al. (eds.), Royal Blood

Receiving the editor and contributor copy of the volume Royal Blood.

Related blogposts (2025) 

Reading-spots, part 6 

A three-week book haul 

Reading-spots, part 7 

A lesson in similarities 

Reading-spots, part 8 

Reading-spots, part 9 

Synchronicities of reading, part 1 

Edmund Martyr and the curious case of the black cross

 

Today, November 20, is the feast of Saint Edmund Martyr, king of East Anglia, who was killed by Danish raiders in 869. His cult was one of the most popular and widespread native cults of medieval England. The foundation of the cult’s success was established in the course of the eleventh century. The church at Bury St Edmunds was reformed into a Benedictine abbey in 1020, and due to the patronage of successive kings throughout the century, the abbey became a centre for text production which bolstered the its institutional identity with Edmund as the identity’s focal point.            

 

The rise of Edmund’s cult coincided with a period in which English ecclesiastics were closely involved with the establishment of church organisations in Scandinavia, especially in Norway and Denmark. Since these burgeoning organisations had not yet developed the infrastructure with which to produce their own books, English ecclesiastical centres provided the Scandinavian churches with liturgical material, including calendars. This English influence continued throughout the twelfth century, even after the establishment of native book production. Calendars and books were still given as gifts or purchased as the expansion of ecclesiastical infrastructure necessitated more liturgical material. Due to the influx of English liturgical material, the cult of Edmund also became a part of the religious life of medieval Scandinavia.        

 

One example of Edmund’s presence in medieval Scandinavia is a calendar fragment, that also opens up for a discussion about the degree to which Edmund was a mere import or someone who was more actively venerated outside of England. The fragment in question is from a thirteenth-century calendar that was produced in England and used in Sweden, most likely in Strängnäs diocese. (For more information about this fragment, please visit the Mapping Saints database.)        

Sveriges Riksarkiv, Fr 25596 

Sveriges Riksarkiv, Fr 25596

The fragment, Sveriges Riksarkiv Fr 25596, contains the feasts for the month of November, and Edmund’s name and titles are written in black ink. The colour of the ink suggests that in the centre where the calendar was produced, Edmund was not regarded as particularly important. Those feasts that were important – such as Martin of Tours on November 11 or Catherine of Alexandria on November 25 – are marked in red. This high liturgical rank meant that during the liturgical celebration, more time was spent singing and reading aloud from their legends in the course of the office for Matins, which was performed in the middle of the night.           

 

However, in the fragment that has come down to us, a black cross has been added to the entry for Edmund’s feast. This black is something of a mystery, because it opens up for many possible interpretations. What we can say for certain, however, is that the cross was added to raise the liturgical rank of the feast, as we see similar crosses – albeit in red and part of the original design – behind the feast-days written in red ink. The questions of where and by whom, however, remain open.            

 

One possible interpretation is that the cross was added before the calendar left England for Sweden. The question then is by whom it was done. It is possible that we see the action of a single individual devoted to Edmund, who felt that the saint had not received the rank he deserved and therefore sought to fix this problem. However, changing the liturgical rank also had practical consequences in the performance of the liturgy, and it was important that the church in question had the sufficient material to perform the office according to the rank of the saint. If Edmund was not particularly popular at that centre, they might not have been equipped to perform the office according to its rank. Moreover, the community of monks or clerics had to accept this raising of the rank.           

 

Consequently, it is unlikely that a single individual has taken it upon themselves to alter the liturgical calendar, and so we should expect the cross to be added on the initiative of the authorities at the centre where the change was made. The question then is whether the cross was added in England or in Sweden. England is perhaps the most reasonable answer, as we know that Edmund was widely popular, and he has a high liturgical rank in several calendars. However, if the cross was added in England, the calendar has most likely been in use at a different religious centre than where it was produced. Such a scenario is possible, and we can easily envision how a scriptorium at a larger centre produced a calendar for a smaller centre.       

Yet this explanation has two main flaws. First of all, if Edmund was important at the smaller centre, why would they not specify this at the larger centre? Or why would they not order the calendar from a centre where Edmund was venerated with a high liturgical rank? It is not impossible that a smaller centre received it as a gift and therefore had to make whatever changes were necessary to fit their own liturgical year, so this might have been the case. However, this brings us to the second main flaw of this scenario. Since the calendar ended up in Sweden, it is unlikely that it came via a smaller English centre instead of a scriptorium that produced liturgical material on a larger scale. It feels more realistic to suggest that the cross was added in Sweden.           

 

If we accept the hypothesis that the black cross was added to the calendar at a Swedish institution – most likely in Strängnäs – the question is then what this can tell us about the status of Saint Edmund in thirteenth-century Sweden. It might be that the black cross is the result of an effort to align the new calendar with an older calendar that had been in use at the Swedish centre in previous years. If this was the case, the high rank of Edmund’s feast might mainly reflect the status of the saint in the older calendar, and might not point to a living cult in thirteenth-century Strängnäs. However, this explanation is not very satisfactory, since a high liturgical rank affected the way that the office was celebrated, and why would the Strängnäs clergy elevate the rank of a saint that was not particularly important to them? If the celebration of Edmund was a relic of a past calendar, why not take the opportunity to trim the dead wood and leave the saint on a lower rank? Such changes were common in medieval churches, and sometimes we see entire feast days removed from the calendar if they came to be considered antiquated.  

 

This leaves us with the following scenario: The cross was added by a scribe in Sweden on the order of the religious authority at the centre where the calendar was used, whether it was the cathedral, a parish church, or a monastic community. The addition of the cross suggests that there was a thriving cult of Saint Edmund at this institution, one that had probably been initiated during the establishment of the Swedish church organisation in the mid-twelfth century, and one that had been sustained into the thirteenth century. 

On minor saints and priorities

 

Every now and again I return to the Swedish medieval calendars that I used to work on in the spring of 2021, and I am reminded of how utterly fascinating it is to put one’s research skills to the test in order to sort out a question of identity, and to sift through available materials in order to advance one step forward. The plethora of names contrasts frustratingly well with the dearth of solid details, and each puzzle provided by the often fragmentary survivals of the calendars is a reminder of a now-lost historical context from which these puzzles emerged, either as veneration of historical persons – however altered by generations of cult activity – or as a scribal error or confusion.

While I have already reflected on the tantalizing opportunities of knowledge and speculation offered by these minor saints (here), today’s work has highlighted to me that much of our current dearth of information is the result of modern-day research priorities. Since research necessarily must be funded, those organizations that provide that funding need to be convinced that a proposed project is worth both the while and, above all, the money. Moreover, since the funding bodies in questions are rarely familiar with the gaps in knowledge or where we need to spend more effort in order to get one, albeit one important, step further, the acquisition of research money requires convincing arguments. Such arguments are typically made using well-known topics or figures, or even buzzwords that are in vogue at any given moment.

Arguing for the funding required to track minutiae in a vast body of surviving medieval manuscript materials that pertain to the cult of saints, however, is difficult to do, because by their very nature such minutiae are not well known, and neither do they have a notable impact on later historical events. Yet these minor saints can still teach us a great deal about the mechanics of cult-making, distribution and dissemination, about the tenacity of stories or the placeholders or echoes of those stories, i.e., the hard-to-identify names, about specific historical moments when the hand of a scribe unwittingly created the starting-point for a non-existent saint through conflation or confusion. In short, knowing more about these minor saints might allow us to understand the cult of saints as a phenomenon in much greater detail.

These reflections are partly the result of the time and effort spent looking for details about saints such as Victor Maurus, Primus and Felicianus, and the elusive Januarius whom I have not yet managed to identify. Some of these are well known in some places (such as Victor Maurus in the Milanese tradition, thanks to Ambrose and his cult-making efforts). Some are widely, if not well, known thanks to their inclusion in canon-making texts such as Legenda Aurea (such as Primus and Felicianus). And others remain difficult to identify (such as Januarius, whichever Januarius he might be). Since relatively little scholarship has been expended on these saints, what available information there is must often be treated with caution, especially because it can be difficult to assess where a specific identification comes from, or what is the basis of a specific claim. The effort with which details about these and other such saints are found and assessed is a constant reminder of how the small things suffer in the shadow of bigger, more shiny ones, and that academia is still very much steered by the attraction to shiny things.  

Detail from Sveriges Riksarkiv Fr 25548

Entries for May 8, May 10, and May 12; these saints are, respectively:

Victor Martyr (Victor Maurus), Gordianus and Epimachus, and Nereus and Achilles

Detail from Sveriges Riksarkiv Fr 25603

Entries for the first halves of May and June

Back to the old haunt - a brief note about a workshop in Odense

 

A little over a week ago, I was able to travel back to Odense in order to participate in a workshop on fragments of medieval manuscripts. The occasion was immensely joyous to me for several reasons. Most importantly, I got to meet up with old friends, and I was able to revisit some of the places I used to frequent when I was living there. The workshop was also a great opportunity to present some of the material I started working on during the last year of my PhD, and which I have been dealing with on and off ever since then. In particular, it was a true delight to give my presentation in the research reading room of the university library, where I had conducted quite a lot of my research and where I had gathered most of the material for my work on fragments. Another very pleasant detail was that my colleague and friend - with whom I had worked together on a pilot project right after completing my thesis - had put out a few of the books that had fragments in their bindings, some of which I mentioned in my talk. It was great to see those fragments in the vellum again, and it was very much a nostalgia trip. In one sense the workshop was the culmination of research that has been going on for five years, and it was wonderful to share my findings with colleagues who were able to both appreciate and add to the work that had been done. Additionally, however, the workshop was also a reminder that this work is not yet complete - that there are conclusions that need to be questions, hypotheses that need to be calibrated, and an ever-increasing stream of new fragments that come to light in the library's special collection. In other words, the workshop was a reminder of the long processes in academia - the good type of long processes, the ones that mature thoughts into substance and make things come out in a clearer light. I have been very fortunate to have been able to keep up this kind of long-term work despite the vicissitudes of my professional life in the past five years, and for that I remain very grateful, especially to my friends and colleagues who enable me to conduct this work in the middle of everything else.  

Unfortunately, in all the excitement and the discussions with friends and colleagues, I was sidetracked from the photographing I had hoped to do, so I only have a few pictures to commemorate the event - including the library's strict prohibition against dancing on the tables.  

New publication: En sjælden Tycho Brahe-udgave

 
In the spring of 2019, as I was finishing up my time in Denmark and preparing for new adventures, I was doing research on medieval manuscript fragments in the special collection of Roskilde Public Library, together with my friend and colleague Jakob Povl Holck. At this time, Jakob and I were co-authoring an article on two fragments from medieval Denmark, and we were asked by one of the librarians at Roskilde if we could contribute a short note on the fragment from Roskilde on which we had conducted some of our research. The fragment can be seen below, and is found on the item Karen Brahes bibliotek J.1. It was used to bind a first edition of the astronomical treatise De Nova Stella by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. 

The note was set to be published in the annual journal of the historical association of Roskilde. The journal is titled Historisk Årbog for Roskilde Amt (Historical annals for Roskilde county). Although the text was only about two pages and for the most part a description of the fragment and its carrier, I was very happy to be contributing to this note, since it was a way to repay the library and the historical association of Roskilde for the time and effort that had been offered us in the course of our research.

As I left Denmark and the publication of the journal was delayed, I lost track of the progress. Today, however, I found out, to my immense pleasure, that the note was published, and can be accessed online. The note is in Danish, and can be found here. The issue of the journal can be found in full here (although it should be noted that there is an error on the site containing the overview, as I am listed as sole author, while it was written together with Jakob Povl Holck). 

Despite its brevity, I am immensely proud to have co-written this text, and it feels that this is a contribution that actually goes straight to the community for whom this fragment and this book might have greater meaning than most other scholarly communities.

Karen Brahes bibliotek J.1
(Roskilde Public Library)