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

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

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

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

The Legend of Ursula

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Narrative and characters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concluding thoughts

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

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

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

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

Literature


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

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

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

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

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

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

For thou emongst those Saints, whom thou doest see,

Shalt be a Saint, and thine owne nations frend

And Patrone: thou Saint George shalt called bee,

Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree.

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

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

Paolo Uccello (1397-1475)

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

The Beginning: the 12th Century

Saint George

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

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

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

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

Edward the Confessor

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

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

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

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

The Consummation: the 14th Century

The Knight

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

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

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

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

The Virgin

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

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

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

The Lancaster Years: the 15th century

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

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

Concluding remarks

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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