Saint Michael in Tønsberg, part 2 - the church on the mountain

 

Today, September 29, is the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. In the Middle Ages, Saint Michael was an important figure in Latin Christian cosmology, as he was the one who would fight Satan at the end of the world, and as he was the one who weighed the souls of the dead. He was often associated with summits and high places, and many - but not all - of Latin medieval churches dedicated to him are found in such places. One example is the Church of Saint Michael in Tønsberg, which is located atop the crag called "Slottsfjellet" (literally, Castle Mount). 

The ruins of the Church of Saint Michael 

In the background is the Castle Mount Tower, built in 1888

The earliest mention of the church is the narrative account titled Profectio Danorum in Hierosolymam (The Journey of the Danes to Jerusalem), which describes a joint Danish-Norwegian failed attempt to travel to the Holy Land to participate in the Crusades. The reference is dated to 1191, but it is likely that the church had already been active for several decades. It was part of a small castle complex, as Tønsberg was one of the residences of the Norwegian kings. This fortified complex is mentioned in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum (c.1206), concerning an episode dated to 1165. Despite the date of the episode, the later date of the account itself provides us no certainty about whether the church had been erected as early as 1165. It is, however, very likely, given that the church would have been a natural part of such a royal fortress as what we find in Tønsberg. The church is believed to have been destroyed during a Swedish attack in 1503

The Church of Saint Michael in Tønsberg raises some important questions about the general cult of the archanagel in medieval Norway. Was the church dedicated to Michael because it was placed on a summit, or should it rather be seen as an indication of Michael's importance to the secular warrior elite of twelfth-century Norway? Was the cult an elite phenomenon in the early phase, or was it always widely popular? The inimitable Professor Judith Jesch has reminded me that there are seventeen runic inscriptions that mention Saint Michael, ranging from Greenland to Gotland, and this points to Michael's wider popularity. Similarly, the sermon for Saint Michael and All Saints in the Old Norwegian Homily Book, probably written in Bergen c.1200, demonstrates that the story was available in the vernacular. Although the text was only available to the clerics for whom it was composed, the sermon itself could be disseminated broadly, providing the populace with the key details of Saint Michael's importance. But this, in turn, leaves us wondering whether the elite cult of Saint Michael - possibly represented by the church in Tønsberg - had a different focus than the popular cult. It has been suggested by Siân Grønlie - in her article '‘Ok er hann sannheilagr’: The Role of Saints in Remembering and Representing Iceland’s Conversion' from 2022 - that one of the strands in the cult of Saint Michael, his martial aspect, might have appealed especially to warriors and crusaders. The general populace, on the other hand, might have favoured his role as the weigher of souls. 

Model of the medieval Church of Saint Michael

A saint is a mosaic of qualities and the venerators might focus on a few or just a single one. Therefore, it is important not to generalise too much when trying to map the cult onto the social fabric of a historical period. The Church of Saint Michael in Tønsberg is connected to the king and his retinue, and the veneration of the archangel might here have been fuelled by his role as the leader of the Heavenly armies. But since there are other churches dedicated to Michael and placed on summites in medival Norway - one example being the church in the monastic complex of Selja in Western Norway - it is possible that the placement of the church in Tønsberg guided the choice of dedicatee rather than the other way around. 

View of Slottsfjellet from Tønsberg city centre

Saint Michael in Lübeck

 

Today is the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, famous in medieval art as a fighter against the Devil and as a weigher of souls. Often, these two roles converge in medieval iconography, such as in the woodcut presented below, where the soul-weighing archangel is lifting his sword to strike at a devil who is climbing into one of the scales. When a person had died, their sins and good deeds were weighed in Saint Michael's scales, and if the good deeds outweighed the sins the person would go to Heaven - if not, they were headed in the opposite direction. In the woodcut below, the good deeds weigh more heavily than the sins, so a devil is climbing into the scale containing the sins of the departed soul in order to weigh it down and ensure that he can take the soul with him to Hell. 

The woodcut is from the first folio of Das Leuent der Heiligen, a collection of saints' legends and other stories pertaining to the Christian year, printed by Lucas Brandis in 1478. Such stories were popular in late-medieval Europe, both owing to the increased literacy rates and because more people could afford books. Brandis' edition appears not to have been a great success as only one edition of the collection is known, and as both the book and the woodcuts were bought by the printer Steffen Arndes who subsequently re-issued the work in 1488 and in several later editions. 

Lucas Brandis, Der Heiligen Leben 

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- 2 Inc.s.a. 780, f.1r

Saint Michael in Santiago de Compostela

Today, September 29, is the feast of Saint Michael and all angels, and for this occasion I give you one representation of Saint Michael that I encountered in the cathedral museum of Santiago de Compostela earlier this year. In this granite statue, made in Coimbra in the fifteenth century, Michael is shown weighing souls in order to decide whether the souls are allowed into Heaven, or whether they will be sent to Hell. As is typical in such depictions, we see demons or devils hard at work tampering with the scales, so as to claim the souls that would otherwise go to God. In the scene depicted here, they seem to be partly succeeding, given that one of the two souls - this one belonging to a woman - is weighed down and appears to be sentenced to damnation.  

In medieval iconography, the weighing of souls was but one aspect of Michael's duties, he was also the leader of the angelic host and can often be seen battling Satan in a scene that might have inspired the iconography of Saint George. Due to his importance in the cosmology of Latin Christendom, he is a ubiquitous feature in Latin medieval art, and his iconography is shared throughout medieval Latin Christendom. For the pilgrims of the fifteenth century, he would have been a recognisable figure, no matter where those pilgrims were coming from. 

Saint George in Vienna - the protector and the shield

 

Today is the feast of Saint George, who, according to his legend, was a Roman soldier martyred during the Diocletian persecutions of the early fourth century. The early history of his cult is obscure, and scholars have yet to piece together something close to an overview of the cult's trajectory throughout the medieval period. What we do know, however, is that from the twelfth century onwards, George became increasingly popular in Latin Christendom, and in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the image of George as a dragonslayer became dominant in his iconography. I have written a short piece on this trajectory here. That George was both a soldier and a dragonslayer made him a very suitable patron for knights and other soldiers, and we often find his image in a military context. One such context I encountered by chance while I was visiting the Wien Museum on Karlsplatz in January, which has a small but very interesting selection of artefacts from Vienna's medieval past. Among these artefacts is a late-fifteenth-century shield featuring Saint George in the act of slaying the dragon, standing atop it and piercing the beast with a spear - a posture inherited from the iconography of Saint Michael the Archangel.   

The image of Saint George is quite typical of the period and resembles a number of contemporary depictions in church art, such as a wall-painting from Sanderum Church in Denmark. However, it is the first time I see the dragonslayer on a shield, an object which really highlighted the close ties between the cult of saints and the military life of the Middle Ages. The shield is called Setztartsche, or in English a pavise, and was developed by the Hussites during the Hussite Wars of the early fifteenth century. The shield featuring Saint George, however, was used in Vienna, and was part of the city's own armament efforts of the late 1400s.   

The ubiquity of the cult of saints in medieval life is a continuous source of fascination for me, and the many ways in which the saints were present in people's lives - if only as images - is a good reminder that we are still a long way away from understanding the full impact of the the cult of saints in medieval society. 

Pavise featuring Saint George 

Wien Museum Inv. 126100

Saint Michael in Tønsberg, part 1 - the dragonslayer in the cathedral

 
Today, September 29, is the feast of Saint Michael and all angels. For this year's feast, I present you with a modern representation from the city of Tønsberg in Eastern Norway. In the nineteenth-century cathedral, we find a series of exquisite stained glass widows created by Per Vigeland in 1939. The windows contain depictions of a number of saints and biblical figures, including Saint Michael and Saint Lawrence, as seen below. The pairing of the two saints is curious, as is the fact that they feature in a Protestant cathedral. The cult of saints was abolished in Norway following the Reformation in 1536/37, but there survived numerous references to saints in folklore, stories, as well as historical narratives. In the first half of the twentieth century, the strongest anti-Catholic currents of the 1800s had receded, and Catholicism was becoming somewhat more accepted, despite several strands and pockets of more Puritan-like versions of Protestantism.  

What has made saints so ambiguous in the religious landscape of modern Norway is not only their place in surviving traditions from the Middle Ages, as in the case of using the feast of Saint Peter's Chair (February 22) as a marker of the shift from Winter to Spring. Part of the ambiguity also comes from the surges of interest for medieval aesthetic, not limited to the convoluted carvings of the Norwegian stave churches - the so-called Urnes style - but also the statues and the symbolism of surviving medieval art. There came, in other words, a greater acknowledgement of the Middle Ages as part of Norwegian heritage. The stained glass figures in Tønsberg cathedral might be understood in light of that acknowledgement. 

There is one further aspect that explains the representations of Michael and Lawrence, namely the historical connections of these cults to the city of Tønsberg. In the Middle Ages, a church dedicated to Saint Michael was located on the top of the crag that rises above the city. Today, only its foundation can be seen, but enough to give a good impression of its original size and its importance as a landmark. Its earliest reference in the surviving sources dates to the 1190s, but it is possible, perhaps even likely, that the church is several decades older than that. Its position on the top of the crag shows that medieval Norwegians were familiar with Michael's association with peaks and summits. 

Similarly, medieval Tønsberg also housed a Church of Saint Lawrence. This church was torn down in the 1800s, and the current cathedral was built in the same area. By pairing together the dedicatees of two of Tønsberg's lost medieval churches, Per Vigeland is invoking the city's past, reminding the congregation about what these figures once meant for Christians in Tønsberg. 

In the case of these stained glass windows, moreover, we are also witnessing a form of medievalism. When it comes to saints, it is always difficult to assess whether a modern expression of veneration of a saint - either a medieval saint or a form of veneration expressed through means available in the medieval period - can be considered medievalism, or whether we should understand this as a form of continuity. For Protestant countries, however, we are on somewhat safer grounds, as we can very rarely talk about continuity in the case of saints - although there are exceptions - and in the case of such an elaborate and finely crafted use of saints, the case seems even more certain. 

Saint Michael and Saint Lawrence by Per Vigeland, 1939