New publications, part 3 - Coinage, the Cult of Saints, and the Legitimization of Elites in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway

 

In the present blogpost, I wish to present the third and final of my three co-authored articles that were published in a recent volume (for the previous two, see here for the first one, and here for the second one). All these articles were written during my previous position, where I was a postdoctoral researacher at a project investigating the legitimisation of elites in medieval Norway and Poland, a collaboration between the University of Oslo and the University of Warsaw. 

This last article is titled "Coinage, the Cult of Saints, and the Legitimization of Elites in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway", co-authored with Mateusz Bogucki and Svein Gullbekk. The article takes as its starting-point the disparity in the use of saints on Norwegian coins compared with Polish coins. From this quandary, we examine how both coinage and the cult of saints could converge in the legitimisation of elites, or - on the contrary - had to be kept separate in order to avoid the legitimisation of the wrong kind of elites.    

Since I am a novice in numismatics, I was greatly aided in this article by my co-authors. The writing process was slow and at times agonising because of the very careful balance needed when trying to say something about general historical tendencies based on little and very uncertain material. But it was also a challenge that greatly expanded my horizon. 

New publications, part 2 - Saints and Legitimization of Bishoprics in Poland and Norway until c. 1200

 

In my previous blogpost, I provided a brief presentation of one of my three co-authored articles published last month. All these articles belong to a volume published as part of a research project hosted by both the University of Warsaw and the University of Oslo, and it was at this project I had my most recent postdoctoral position. 

The second of my contributions is "Saints and Legitimization of Bishoprics in Poland and Norway until c. 1200", co-authored with Grzegorz Pac. This article compares how the cult of saints was used by Polish and Norwegian bishops to solidify their position in society, and how their power and authority were legitimised by the bishop's role as guardian of the cult. The article examines how both bishops and saints' cults related to other social elites throughout the eleventh and twelfth century. One of our main questions - to which I believe we have found a very reasonable answer - is why native cults flourished so strongly at an earlier point in Norway than in Poland. 

The article has been a challenge to write because of the many angles from which we approached our material, but precisely because of the comprehensive examination of Norwegian and Polish medieval society, this article is one of the most rewarding texts I have worked on to this date. 

New publications, part 1 - Sacral Strongholds. Nunneries as Sources of Legitimacy in Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway

Last month saw the publication of one of the collections of articles pertaining to the project where I did my previous post-doc. The publication as a whole is in open access, and it is available here. Since I contributed to three of the articles in this volume, I will briefly present each of these here, with a link to the article in question. 

The first of my contributions is "Sacral Strongholds. Nunneries as Sources of Legitimacy in Twelfth-Century Poland and Norway", co-authored with Anna Agnieszka Dryblak. This article compares how nunneries were founded in order to strengthen the legitimisation of both secular and ecclesiastical elites in the two polities. The article contains four case studies, two concerning secular elites and two concerning ecclesiastical elites. It was a challenge to write this article, as I started out with much less expertise on the subject than my co-author, but it was therefore a great opportunity to delve deeper into this particular aspect of Norwegian history, and to consider these institutions both in terms of social networks and topographies. 

New publication: Holy Bishops, Papal Canonisation and the Legitimisation of Power in Thirteenth-Century Norway and Poland

 
As part of the project where I have been employed for the past three years, I have co-authored an article with my friend and colleague Gregorz Pac, titled 'Holy Bishops, Papal Canonisation and the Legitimisation of Power in Thirteenth-Century Norway and Poland: The Cases of Eystein Erlendsson of Nidaros and Stanislaus of Kraków'. This article explores how Norwegian and Polish ecclesiastics of the 1200s sought to increase the status of their patron saints, and emphasise the legitimacy of their cults, through papal acknowledgement in the form of canonisations. 

The article was published last week in volum 129 of Acta Poloniae Historica, and it can be accessed here, and here.

Saint Florian and the fire

Today, May 4, is the feast of Saint Florian. According to legend, he was killed during the Diocletian persecution, and his main cult centre was at Linz in Austria. His relics, however, were said to be kept at Rome, and from there they were allegedly translated to Krakow in 1183/84. In the later Middle Ages, Florian was predominantly venerated in Austria and Poland, due to the centres of Linz and Krakow.

It was believed that his wonderworking speciality - or his patronage par excellence, as it were - was protection against fire. The belief in Florian's firefighting abilities is clearly demonstrated by this late-fifteenth-century statue from Vienna, where the saint is pouring water onto a towered building which seems to be on fire. As this statue was originally placed on the facade of a house nearby the Church of Saint Stephen, Vienna's cathedral, it is likely that several onlookers would interpret the building at Florian's feet as the cathedral which he was facing.       

Florian's armour marks him as a soldier saint, which was quite common for male saints of the Diocletian persecutions. Tales of Christian soldiers in the imperial army who were martyred for their faith were popular, and the sheer size of the Roman army - at least as that size was imagined in later centuries - provided a near-endless possibility for new stories to be told. Just as the Diocletian persecutions became a time in which it was logical to place unknown saints or saints of an uncertain date, so the occupation of a Roman soldier became a logical marker of male saints killed in this period.

Saint Florian, c.1480-c.1490 

Wien Museum Karlplatz

Plains and deep dells - contrasts of reading

 

As I have often emphasized when writing about reading, I do enjoy those occasions when the contrast between what is being read and the place in which the reading is being done, makes both the reading and the surroundings much more memorable. Sometimes, this contrast is serendipitous, as I noted when describing my reading of Orosius a few years ago, while other times it is deliberately orchestrated in the hope that the contrast will serve to etch the experience more deeply into my memory. I November, I orchestrated such a contrast, and it was a great pleasure. 

The occasion was a research trip to Poland, where I stayed for two weeks. Having been to Poland before, I was familiar with the landscape: largely flat, and sometimes very flat. I prepared myself accordingly, and brought with me a novel whose scenes would be a far cry from the Polish fields. The novel in question was Hubroen roper, 'The eagle-owl calls', which was written in 1971 by the Norwegian author Mikkjel Fønhus (1894-1973), famous for his descriptions of the Norwegian wilderness. The novel chronicles the events of a hamlet in the interior valleys of Southern Norway through the last years of a female eagle-owl. Hubroen roper is a lament of the decline of the eagle-owl population in Norway, a decline caused in part by an aggressive policy onn the part of the Norwegian government, which paid a bounty for any raptors and predators that were shot or trapped. Since the narrative follows an eagle-owl, much of the scenery consists of deep dells, ravines and crags - in other words, exactly the kind of landscape with which I am familiar from my childhood. 

The riven topography of the novel provided a pleasant contrast with my surroundings. I read a substantial part of the short novel while sitting on a train to the village of Teresin, about an hour northwest of Warsaw. It was a late November morning, and outside the fields stretched on to some fuzzy-looking treetops on the horizon, which in turn shone black against a muted sunlight. It was a peculiar day. Quite cold, and with clouds that filtered the sunlight in such a way that the sun itself seemed to have drowned, and it felt like sunrise and sunset at the same time, despite being neither. The November fields of Mazovia had little in common with the pine-covered, ice-carved mountains of Southern Norway, and for that very reason both the mountains on the page and the fields beyond the page took a much larger place in my consciousness than they otherwise might have done. The whole affair pleased me greatly as a reader. 

The affair also pleased me as a scholar and as a medievalist. I am currently hired as a postdoctoral researcher on a project aimed at comparing the medieval past of both Norway and Poland. This is a collaboration between the University of Oslo and the University of Warsaw. For the past two years, the project has engendered a lot of discussion concerning the art of comparing one and the same phenomena in two different areas. Poland and Norway have been chosen in part because they have many similarities as medieval polities, but they also have a lot of differences. One such difference is the very landscape. Although Poland does have mountains, a lot of its most important centres of religious and political affairs in the Middle Ages are cities located on the plains. Norway, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. Throughout this project, the importance of topography has been raised time and again, and the issue has provided a very useful yardstick when analysing how a phenomenon like the foundation of nunneries or the establishment of cult centres unfolded in both Norway and Poland. Sometimes, life and scholarship converge in pleasing ways, and this was one of those times.    

Monastic typology and institutional identity in Tyniec Abbey

 

As part of a sojourn in Krakow, I joined an excursion to Tyniec Abbey, a Benedictine monastery a short distance southwest of the city. The abbey is beautifully located on a hill overlooking the Vistula River, and was established around the turn of the twelfth century. While the abbey contains many interesting and exciting historical treasures, there was one detail that struck a particular chord in me, and that I wish to highlight here, namely a set of fifteenth-century frescoes from one of the chapels of the abbey church.  

The frescoes in question are located, as can be seen below, in the narrow space between the arc of the chapel entrance and the vaults of the ceiling, and they depict episodes from the life of Saint Benedict. The first scene, starting from the bottom, features a monk holding a book, probably Saint Benedict and his rule. The middle shows a building complex, which is probably intended to be Montecassino, founded by Benedict and the antecessor of all later Benedictine abbeys. The top scene shows Saint Benedict throwing himself into a thorn bush to fight his sexual desires. 

What we see in these frescoes in Tyniec is how the monks understood their institutional identity. As they were Benedictines, the abbey of Tyniec was a descendant of the motherhouse of Montecassino, and they themselves were the spiritual descendants of Saint Benedict. Through these frescoes, the monks were reminded of this bond of kinship which was part of the abbey's history, and they were also reminded about their typological bonds to Saint Benedict, since they were expected to be his imitators. These scenes were educational, both in the way that they situated the abbey within a greater historical narrative, and in the way that it reminded the monks of their duties and their identity as Benedictine monks. Exactly how the historical and the typological connections were activated - either during sermons, in individual contemplations, during teaching, or all of these and more - the frescoes were part of the identity formation that was a continuously unfolding element in the daily life of the abbey of Tyniec.   

Signs of our times - details from a week in Warsaw

During my stay in Warsaw this week, I saw numerous displays of Polish solidarity with the Ukrainians in the ongoing invasion. These ubiquitous displays served as hard-hitting reminders of how sheltered my life has been, and this is the closest I have physically been to a war zone. Despite the gravity of the situation, there was something heartening about these shows of solidarity, but they also opened up for some reflections about how to decode these impressions. For instance, I was told that with the continuous economic pressure, the material support that Ukrainian refugees in Poland need is dwindling, so even though these various displays of solidarity capture both public and private initiative, I was also reminded that to show solidarity is easy enough, but such shows do not always capture the more complicated truth of everyday life. Moreover, once I had first allowed myself to be impressed with the signs of Polish-Ukrainian kinship, I reflected on how little I actually know about the life on the ground in countries so close to an ongoing war, and how some of these signs were very good indicators of grassroot feelings. While the flags of the two countries flying at the gates of the humanities campus of Warsaw University is clearly a decision by the university leadership, some drawings hung on the wall of a pub in a Warsaw suburb Friday evening represent a much more visceral emotional strain. 

There was something good about these displays and especially in their great variety which better served to capture the attitudes of the Polish people. Yet I also could not help reflecting, time and again, on the dissonance between display and action, and how little I know about the actual support. Displays of solidarity are sometimes grandiose because they are meant to create pathos and stir people to the right actions, but sometimes they serve as window-dressing, as distractions and disguises. During my week in Warsaw, I was constantly reminded of my lack of knowledge, of my lack of a solid foundation for correctly interpreting these signs of our times. And aside from teaching me a lot about current sentiments in Poland, these signs also reminded me to be careful and slow when analysing a situation, and not to get carried away by enthusiasm when it first sets in. Put differently, the very public nature of some of these displays alerted me to my deep-rooted scepticism of public uniformity, which is a great hindrance for the nuance that everyday complexities contain.

Some of the displays of Ukrainian flags were certainly heartwarming - the paper ones containing the words "solidarity with Ukraine" that colleagues at the history department had placed in the window, the sticker in a taxi, the drawings in the pub - all these rang true to me and seemed to reflect genuine emotions, although I have no right to speculate about the exact pitch of those emotions. The display of the Ukrainian flag at a car sellers conference at the hotel where I stayed had a very different tone to it, and it was difficult not to sense the impulse of capitalist adaptation to exigencies.     

In all, it has been an educational week in more ways than one, but the most important consequence for me has been the exercise in nuanced thinking that these impressions have opened up for me.  

The gates to the humanities campus of Warsaw University

The history department

A window in the history department building

The elevator of the history department

A pub in a Warsaw suburb

A view from the common room - some brief reflections on a week in Warsaw

 


One of the benefits of the project where I am currently working is that the collaboration across borders allows for some long-awaited travel. This week I was in Warsaw to work on an article that I am co-authoring with a friend and colleague, as well as to meet up with a few other colleagues at the university. Looking back, I realise it was quite a varied week with a lot of different tasks that required my attention and energy, but in the midst of the work itself, I was mostly focussed on the work pertaining to the article, namely the writing, the planning, the organising, the discussions, and the copious notes we took along the way, all carried out in daily meetings of varying length. Granted, since this article work was something that we dealt with each day, it is no wonder that it is at the heart of my recollections. However, there is also another reason why I think of this week mostly in terms of that particular workload.

On Monday, I went to the Warsaw University campus for the humanities together with another friend and colleague from Oslo who is also a part of the project. My co-author met us and showed us around in the department, and guided us into the department's own library, and to the library's common room which is often used as a workplace. Here, in this relatively small room with a very high ceiling tucked away in the bowels of the classicist department building - carefully rebuilt after World War II - the three of us sat down to our different tasks, the two of us writing and discussing together, the third working on his own. We sat like this for various periods throughout the week, sometimes talking through details of content and structure, sometimes quietly tending to our own immediate tasks. 

The view from the common room's high windows, the noticeable scents of spring - for instance by some wafts of flowering chestnut - and the sense of calm that pervaded the entire room infused these sessions with a sense of community that is the lifeblood of academia. This was not a grand, overpowering feeling, nothing bombastic or pathos-filled, but a simple description of what the three of us were quietly building in that common room, and what the entire project is building in the many different nodes of collaboration that comprise it. It was a reminder, a very useful reminder, that as an academic I am dependent on what community I manage to partake in and maintain, and when academia works as it should, it fosters these communities. While academia is in a very bad state in general - no matter which country or tradition you are talking about - it is also helpful to be reminded that despite the frailty of our general academic framework, we are at times able to create pockets of communal work. And it was a great relief to have that experience. 

Conference: The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central Europe and Scandinavia until 1300

 
Next week, from Monday November 8 to Tuesday November 9, I am co-organising a conference as a part of the project where I am currently employed. The project, ELITES: Symbolic Resources and Political Structures on the Periphery: Legitimization of the Elites in Poland and Norway, c. 1000-1300, is a collaboration between the University of Warsaw and the University of Oslo. The conference will be held in Warsaw. 

The title of the conference is 'The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central Europe and Scandinavia until 1300', and can non-participating audiences can follow this conference by livestream from the University of Warsaw's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO3-bjLxBShHeZQQWUn19Ew. 

All are welcome!

Surrounded by simulacra - my first encounter with Warsaw

This week I spent two days in Warsaw for a work trip. Since we – my colleagues and I – had a short timeframe for discussing professional matters, most of the time I spent in Warsaw was taken up with discussions, later followed by talks and even later by chats. It was invigorating, inspiring and pleasant, as good work trips are in academia, but one consequence of this tight schedule was that my encounter with the city itself was relatively brief. However, thanks to the generosity of some of my Polish colleagues, those of us who had travelled to Warsaw from Norway were given a guided tour from the outskirts of what was once the early modern city to the interior what was once the medieval city. It was a crash course in the city’s history. It was very interesting. It was also profoundly moving.

Warsaw is in many ways a complex city, as it blends elements from late medieval cityscapes, the vulgar Baroque of the eighteenth century, the seemingly French-inspired neoclassicism of the nineteenth century, the vestiges of the Communist past, and the scattered skyscrapers of a modern city. But this complexity is in its way deceptive. Or perhaps I should rather say that this complexity is deepened by the illusory sense of history that envelops the flaneur as they make their way through the broad streets of the early modern city into the squares and alleys of the medieval city. This illusory sense of history is then shattered whenever one remembers that all of this – or at least almost all of it – is simulacra.

The medieval town, Warsaw

The great watershed in Warsaw’s history is the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, a sixty-three-day struggle in which Polish resistant fighters tried to take Warsaw from German control. The uprising failed, and on orders by Hitler almost all of the old town was levelled to the ground. The city was later rebuilt, and from photographs and paintings the individual buildings were replaced with replicas of astounding likeness to their originals. The effort was so successful that when walking through these streets, it would be impossible – at least for the non-expert in, say, architectural history – to see that what surrounds the viewer in as good as every direction is a collection of simulacra. 

It was a very eerie experience walking through these replicated layers of history – layers that were in one sense coeval with one another, but which alluded to different epochs and created an impression of layers that once existed. It was on the one hand marvellous, because the recreation was done so immensely well – I could definitely sense something of the same atmosphere that I have sensed in cities where such layered history is preserved and strongly visible, cities like Rome, York, Salamanca, Split. Yet once I noticed that feeling of giddy joy that overtakes the enthusiast, that feeling was immediately followed by a strong note of sadness. The sadness came from the realisation that this was, despite an incredible effort, not real. There was something not quite genuine, something that was not quite guaranteed about the verisimilitude of this assortment of simulacra: buildings, streets, horizons, nooks and crannies. 

It is not that cities like those mentioned above are not also grappling with some of the same issues. Wherever history is preserved in layers, there is a degree of uncertainty connected to it. There is always some restoration that has gone into the work, there is always a selection and discarding that has been done in order to decide what to preserve and what to give up to the changes that must happen in a cityscape. The preservation efforts are also hostage to the whims of human judgement, and it can be difficult to assess whether a restoration is actually a restoration or a creation: whether the past is presented on its own terms – whatever they might be in any given situation – or whether what we see is in actuality the fantasy image of the past as envisioned by an individual or several. Such uncertainties abound, even in the most historical of cities, however we want to understand that term. But in Warsaw, that uncertainty is different. Because on the one hand, we are certain that this is a reconstruction, and on the other, we cannot be certain about the number of liberties taken, or the number of gaps of knowledge that had to be filled by educated guesswork. This uncertainty is in a different configuration as that of other cities with a long history, and it makes for a very different experience when brought face to face with the city as it stands now.

The royal palace, Warsaw

The Trinity Church, Warsaw

There is no doubt that the reconstruction of Warsaw is impressive and based on materials that can be checked and compared with, and this post is in no way intended to denigrate that effort. Quite the contrary, I wholeheartedly applaud the effort, and it has given visitors to Warsaw an immensely beautiful scene. But it does come with a feeling I have never felt before, because never has the unreality of my surroundings been so clear, so well-known, so overt. These simulacra entice emotions that are similar to when I visit other cities as those mentioned above, but there is that constant and ever-returning knowledge that these emotions are based on replicas. (I studiously avoid the term “fake”, because that is not what these buildings are.) These feelings, brought on as they are by reconstructions, make me wonder what the difference is between the original and the reconstructed in terms providing that kind of emotional connection with a place and its past that people often encounter – willingly or unwillingly – in certain locations. These feelings also remind me that there is a very complex discussion to be had about the reality of the past, and about expectations, and about the value of simulacra in the absence of the original – and whether such differences matter all that much in certain situations.

My encounter with Warsaw often caused me to become stunned at various moments as I reflected on this resuscitated reality and the sadness that lingered in the very fact that what I saw around me on every side was an attempt to preserve what had been irrevocably lost, at least from the material point of view. 

The Church of the Holy Spirit, Warsaw