Synchronicities of reading, part 1 - garum in Lisbon

 

Life is full of synchronicitites, episodes in one's life that bear some kind of resemblance to one another, or that provide a sense of symmetry or of patterns. A reading life is particularly full of them, as the variables at play are much more numerous than in a life where reading plays no part at all, simply because reading allows a person to encounter more topics and travel by page to a wide variety of locations, which provides more elements that can be found to rhyme somehow. I have experienced quite a few of them so far, but I was particularly struck by one such synchronicity this Christmas, one which was centred on Lisbon and which involved garum. 

 

The Norwegian translation of Asterix album no. 41, Asterix in Lusitania

(Text by Fabrice Caro, or Fabcaro, art by Didier Conrad, translation by Svein Erik Søland)

This Christmas, I was reading the latest Asterix album, Asterix in Lusitania, by Fabcaro and Conrad. The biannual publication of the new albums produced after the death of Albert Uderzo in 2009 has become subsumed into the great Norwegian tradition of Christmas comic books, and the album was part of this year's haul. The story revolves around an attempt to prove the innocence of a wrongfully condemned producer of garum, a type of fish sauce, who is accused to trying to poison Julius Caesar. The climax of the scene occurs in Lisbon, and the cover of the album invokes a Lisbon view so characteristic that I was immediately brought back to my trip there last spring. And as I was reading the story, I was again brought back to Lisbon because of the garum. 

Lisbon streetscape near the Castle of São Jorge

View of the Tagus River

Translating the Relics of St. James, edited by Antón M. Pazos (2016)

While I was in Lisbon last year, I was reading up on the medieval cult of Saint James the Elder. I had travelled from Santiago de Compostela where I had spent five days as a kind of research-tourist, and I had brought a collection of articles with me on the journey. The collection included articles on the Compostelan cult, as well as a few texts that sought to elucidate the context of the historical James, the fisherman who became one of the twelve apostles. One of these articles delved into the fishing industry on the Sea of Galilee, part of which included the production of garum. This was not the first time I had heard of this fish sauce, but I had never read about it at lenght, nor had encountered it within the context of the wider Roman world. 

I read this and other of the book's interesting articles at what became my regular café during my brief sojourn in the Portuguese capital, where I drank black tea with lemon and devoured delicious local cookies - and where I was mistaken for the Portuguese politician Rui Tavares. It was therefore a surprising realisation as I was reading the latest Asterix album during the darkness of a Norwegian December that this was the second time in two years that the elements of garum and Lisbon had converged in my life. The great benefit of this particular synchronicity was that I could relive those lovely Lisbon days thanks to the memories spurred on by a key plot device in a comic book. 

Cantigas de Compostela, part 4 - Saint Bartholomew

 

Today is the feast of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle, who - according to Latin medieval tradition - had evangelised in India, where he had been flayed alive as part of his martyrdom. The sensational and macabre manner of his death provided medieval artists of various media with the licence to depict his passion story in varied and inventive ways. To the modern mind, the most famous examples are from Renaissance artists, such as Marco d'Agrate's statue in the Cathedral of Milan, or Michelangelo's Last Judgement scene from the Sistine Chapel, in which Bartholomew - with the face of Pietro Aretino - is holding his empty and dangling skin. These late examples, however, are part of a much longer tradition. One older example can be found from one of the portals of Santiago de Compostela, the Fachada de las Platerías, in which are assembled masonry from various parts of the twelfth-century cathedral. On the side of one of the archways is the haloed and bearded figure, holding his butcher's knife in his right hand and holding his saggy, empty skin in his left, clutching it by the hair. The iconography is immediately recognisable, the masonry is exquisite, and the piece as a whole is a solid reminder of how the iconographical tropes that we often first encounter through canonical Renaissance art have a much older history, and that the Renaissance was a squarely medieval phenomenon. Moreover, it is important to note that there are no straight lines from Compostela to d'Agrate's Milan or Michelangelo's Rome. Rather, these are all dots in an evolving network of ideas and images that connects various places, but where the transfer of influences cannot possibly be mapped or recorded.  

Lost stories - a possible example from Santiago de Compostela

 

As a historian predominantly concerned with texts, I am keenly aware of how important stories are to the shaping of societies, identities - indeed, of history in general. The way our understanding of the world is shaped happens through stories, often in ways we do not notice. This is why it is so crucial to get at the narrative drive behind people's actions, and also why it can be so difficult to make certain people understand that their understanding of historical reality is not built on solid ground. 

My research deals with stories practically every day. I analyse them, compare them, keep track of their variations, and try to examine how they have shaped the historical context of any given period, and - mutatis mutandis - how the historical context has shaped the stories. The stories that I research are usually well known, if only within a specific field of history or literature, and it has never happened that I have encountered a previously unknown story. (I came close once, but that is a tale for another day.) However, sometimes I do come across stories in images which I do not recognise. For instance, several of the full-page illuminations of the so-called Rothschild Canticles - a fourteenth-century religious florilegium - depict scenes that I do not know, and that I cannot decipher. Although these stories are unknown to me, however, I am certain that there are experts who will be able to recognise them.

Last year, when I visited the cathedral museum of Santiago de Compostela, I was struck by a series of carved pillars displayed there. The pillars date to the twelfth century, and are from an early stage in the cathedral's building history. They are exquisitely carved and testify to the skill and craft that went into decorating and constructing the cathedral. Along the winding grooves of each pillar are figures and floral forms that seem to depict episodes from stories - perhaps even consecutive episodes from one and the same story. And even though I looked at them carefully while I was there, and even though I have looked at them even more carefully since, I cannot identify the story or stories they represent. The Compostelans who passed by them in the cathedral, however, most likely understood exactly what these carvings meant. They might have heard the stories from sermons, or they might know the stories on which the related sermons were based, or they might have talked to the masons who carved them once they had received instructions from the cathedral clergy. Perhaps pilgrims from all across Latin Christendom were likewise able to recognise these figures. After all, several individuals, both masons and clerics, who were active in twelfth-centuy Compostela came from France and might have brought stories with them from their native places. To us, or at least to me, these stories are lost. 

The loss of stories is a colossal barrier to our understanding of the past. Without catching the various references that remain in the surviving source material, we are unable to understand parts of the storyworlds of the people in a specific period - storyworlds whose stories might have influenced how they made certain decisions, for instance through fear of becoming like the fool in a story, or through a desire to become like the hero of a particularly beloved story. As an example of such a story that might not be altogether lost - I hope those who know it will tell me - but very much lost on me, I give you a sequence of figures from one of the twelfth-century pillars. 

From the top and downward in a spiral, we see a devil standing behind a mermaid, while holding the tale of a snake which is coiling itself around the rightarm and shoulder of the mermaid. The mermaid is clutching her tail with her righthand and holding her tailfin with her left. From under her tail emerges the serpent's head, and it seems to spew a jet - probably of poison - arches its way behind a pair of human figures. The figure closest to the serpent's head is a man who might be hooded. In his right hand is a knife whose blade lies flat along his right thigh. The other figure has a headdress which suggests that it is a woman, and she has seductively placed her right hand on top of the man's right thigh while the left is equally seductively placed on the inside of the man's left shin. The hem of the man's dress - possibly a monk's habit - can be seen flowing behind the woman's head, suggesting she has free access to the man's body.    

What is the story? From these details, it might appear some kind of clerical warning against the sins of the flesh. The mermaid, or siren, is a typical symbol for lust - always blamed on the women - and the devil holding a serpent might be a reference to the temptation of Adam and Eve. The two figures, however, are clearly not Adam and Eve, because they are already dressed - at least partially - and the man is holding a knife. Is he about to castrate himself in order to avoid the temptation of carnal congress? Perhaps in recollection of Christ's words in Matthew 18:9 about cutting out the eye that tempts you to sin? Or is he about to kill the woman, just as we read in stories about some saints to whom the devil appeared as a seductress? The story unfolding along the pillar might draw on all these references mentioned here - after all, they were part of the Latin Christian storyworld. But even if my interpretation of the individual elements is correct - and it might not be - the story itself is no clearer. Are we dealing with a legendary episode? Or perhaps something from Galicia, something even witnessed by those who commissioned the carvings to be made? Or is it more a collection of semiotic signs that together are meant to remind clerics of key aspects of their supposedly chaste way of life, rather than a story as we commonly think of it? It is easy enough to ask these questions, but the story that is likely to be behind this sequence of carvings is lost to me. 

Compostela by night

This month, I have spent much time writing about the cult of Saint James the Elder in medieval Europe, as he was formulated and disseminated at and from the cult centre at Santiago de Compostela. Today, April 29, most of my work day was dedicated to writing a one and a half page summary of the cult-making process of the twelfth century. While the writing itself only took a few hours, those hours were founded on long periods of reading, travelling, writing, discussing and researching spread throughout 2024. In order to write that page and a half, I relied on notes and memories, and in order to reach this particular point in my work I have read three books, numerous articles, travelled to Santiago de Compostela twice, prepared and given two conference presentations, and expanded my personal library. This preparatory work is part of the pleasure of writing academic texts, but it is work that is rarely acknowledged by funding bodies or by universities. But today, I could relish in all those hours spread across 2024 that I had dedicated to researching the cult of Saint James and the history of Santiago de Compostela. And part of that relish rested on some of the glorious views of the city that I was able to witness in the course of my travels. Below are some of those views, taken a late evening in December, on a day that cemented my love for Santiago de Compostela even more strongly, and made me feel even more at home in its confusing and confounding streetscape. 

 

Saint James the Elder in Skive

 

These days, I'm preparing for an upcoming talk at a conference in Spain, where I will once more delve into the history of the cult of Saint James the Elder. The cult of Saint James is one of the most remarkable iconographical metamorphoses, as the apostle became a pilgrim and then became known as such throughout the entire medieval Latin Christendom. The signature hat, staff and scallop shell are all part of a recognisable iconography that continues to resonate to this day, and that can often be found in small places far away from the cult centre in Santiago de Compostela. One such place is Skive in Northern Jutland. 

Saint James the Elder

Skive Church

In my upcoming talk, my focus is on the cult of Saint James - as Santiago, which serves as a useful shorthand for the Compostelan iteration of the saint - and his medieval cult in the Nordic sphere. One of the examples of his cult is a wall-painting in the Church of Our Lady in Skive, which is part of a fresco cycle that was completed in 1522. The cycle consists of several saints, some of whom I have written about in other blogposts. Saint James appears as his pilgrim self on the side of the archway that separates the choir from the nave. This archway and the choir are dedicated to the Trinity and the apostles, except Saint Matthias who for some reason is not included.  

That Saint James the Elder appears as a pilgrim is only to be expected, given that saints were depicted in ways that would make them recognisable. It is, however, a fascinating testament to the flexibility of medieval temporal imagination that a saint is placed in a distinctly biblical context, yet is depicted as what would be a post-biblical figure representing the later development of his cult. There is no contradiction in this, at least from the point of view of medieval venerators, since once a saint entered Heaven they were atemporal and existed in all time periods postdating their deaths. What we see here, therefore, is not so much anachronistic a achronic - an example of how time exists on a different plane than mere history, at least within the perspective of the medieval cult of saints. 

Cantigas de Compostela, part 3: Saint Sebastian

 

Around 1450, a chapel was built in the cathedral complex of Santiago de Compostela, dedicated to the Holy Spirit. The chapel contained stone statues of various saints, one of whom was Saint Sebastian. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, Sebastian was one of the most ubiquitous figures of the collegium of holy men and women venerated in Latin Christendom. According to tradition, he was a Christian soldier who was arrested for preaching the Christian faith, tied to a pillar and shot through with arrows. He survived, and was healed back to life by Irene, a fellow Christian. Later, when he had resumed his preaching activities, he was clubbed to death. This was part of the Diocletian Persecutions, c.300-c.303.

The cult of Saint Sebastian appears to have emerged in the late fourth century, but it is uncertain whether he was a historical figure or one that was retroactively imagined or created after Christianity had become legal and had undergone some institutional solidification in places such as Rome and Milan. Sebastian's popularity, however, was not steady until the late thirteenth century, and then surged significantly in the fourteenth century. One of the main factors in this development was the inclusion of his story in Legenda Aurea, a collection of legends by the Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine, later archbishop of Genoa. The collection was disseminated across Latin Christendom, and appeared in numerous translations and vernacular adaptations and imitations. Another main factor for the surging popularity of Sebastian was that Legenda Aurea identified him as a saint who was particularly effective when praying against plague.  

The statue in Compostela, perforated and blood-soaked, followed a typical contemporary iconography established in Italy, where Sebastian is muscular, beardless, and shot trough with arrows. It is uncertain whether the artist operating in Compostela was familiar with the Italian tradition, or whether the similarity in execution is due to indirect influence mediated through workshops in Catalonia or Burgos, for instance. In any case, for the artisans working on this chapel around 1450, it was a modern, trendy rendition of the saint that was taking shape.  

Cathedral museum, Santiago de Compostela

Saint Nicholas in Compostela

Today, December 6, is the feast of Saint Nicholas. After the removal of his relics from Myra to Bari in 1087, his cult became more popular than before as it entered into the geographical ambit of the Latin Church, and thereby became more accessible to Latin Christian pilgrims. I do not yet know of any monographs that explore his cult in a longue durée perspective, and I only have a piecemeal overview of how his cult was received, what impact it made, and where the various parts of his iconography were embraced. In art, there were particularly three aspects that could be employed in the fashioning of statues or paintings, namely seafaring, a golden coin (which he gave to poor women in order to enable them to marry well), and his resurrection of three children that had been killed and placed in a tub. These last two episodes are rooted in his legend, whereas the seafaring might have had more to do with the voyage through which his relics were taken to Bari. Consequently, while several guilds came to embrace Saint Nicholas from the twelfth century onwards, depictions of him in art often appear to draw on his legend (although I should emphasise that this suggestion might be incorrect, and I encourage the reader to correct me if I am wrong).  

Two days ago, I was reminded of the miracle of the tub, since I was attending a guided tour of the cathedral museum of Santiago de Compostela. Among the many treasures of medieval art that have been made and used in the liturgical space of the cathedral since at least the twelfth century, is a fifteenth-century statue that is badly damaged yet completely recognisable thanks to the surviving iconographic feature, namely the tub. The statue shows Nicholas carrying the tub, while one of the three murdered boys climbs out of it. The boy is rendered in diminutive stature, perhaps both to emphasise his tender age, but also the greatness of Saint Nicholas. As this iconography was both widespread and common, it is likely that it has contributed to the metamorphosis of Nicholas towards the modern Santa Claus. Traditionally, the gift of golden coins is more directly linked with this trajectory, but as that story pertains to young girls rather than children more generally, it is tempting to suggest that both these episodes from Nicholas' legend have played their important parts in the eventual making of Santa Claus. 

One of the resuscitated children climbing up form the tub

Reading-spots, part 5

In May of this year, I was in Santiago de Compostela for the first time. While the primary aim of the trip was to visit a dear friend, the journey was also marked by my increased fascination with the cult of Saint James the Elder, known as Santiago, one of the most famous cults of the Latin Middle Ages. The cult was responsible for a phenomenal output of architectural and textual artefacts, such as Compostela's cathedral - now mostly Baroque but with some Romanesque features retained - and the Codex Calixtinus, a manuscript containing five books that collectively are known as The Book of Saint James (Liber Sancti Jacobi). All five parts of this book have now been translated to English, and for the trip to Compostela I had brought with me translation of the first book, which is a collection of liturgical texts and sermons. The translation is by Thomas F. Coffey and Maryjane Dunn, and was published by Italica Press in 2021.  

While in Compostela, I focussed on reading the liturgy, and the book was a steadfast companion on my various excursions throughout the city. One of the most memorable reading-spots, however, was when I visited the cathedral itself, and sat down on a bench in the nave, reading through some of the texts that have been performed in this space throughout centuries. It was an awe-inspiring sensation, a feeling that heightened the experience of reading the book and also of sitting in the cathedral where the ostentatious gold and silver stand in marked contrast with the more humble witnesses to the history of the cult's lived religion, namely the various mason's marks that can still be seen on several of the pillars in the nave. 

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 James the Elder in Lier

At any given moment, I have a number of topics at the forefront of my mind, topics that I have to, or ought to, give special attention to because of my current work. This year, one such topic is that of the cult of Saint James the Elder, centred on Santiago de Compostela, but disseminated throughout Latin Christendom from at least the twelfth century onwards. Because the cult - as it was formulated in Compostela - was so widespread, and has retained a significant impact on the culture of later centuries, including our own, I encounter this figure on several occasions. One such occasion was on a recent trip to Belgium. 

In the town of Lier, a little to the southeast of Antwerp, there is a chapel dedicated to Saint James the Elder, close to the city hall. The chapel was consecrated in 1383, and suffered some damage in the course of the Reformation, which in the Lowlands - roughly corresponding to modern Belgium and the Netherlands - often took a strongly iconoclastic turn. Perhaps this is the context for the loss of the original statue in the tympanum above the entrance door, which is now replaced by a more patriarchal-looking James from more recent times, his apostolic status highlighted by a book. The horizontal figure below, however, points to an older statue, possibly one that has shown the saint as a pilgrim, an avatar championed by the cult centre in Compostela. The pilgrim iconography is suggested by the horizontal figure, who has taken off his own pilgrim hat, one of the key symbols of James' patronage of pilgrims. As for the original symbolism of this figure, however, we are left to surmise. Perhaps he represents the pilgrims who support and serve Saint James the Elder. Or perhaps he represents those fallen pilgrims who fail to keep their promise of pilgrimage - in acknowledgement of which his hat is now removed.   

While Northern Belgium was still under Spanish Habsburg control in the early seventeenth century, the chapel served as the parish church of the Spanish troops stationed in Lier. Saint James was also formulated as a soldier as early as the twelfth century, and he was widely regarded as a protector of Christian, and especially Spanish, soldiers. Perhaps the now-lost figure in the tympanum was a representation of Santiago Matamoros, the Moor-slayer who became a popular iconography in the Later Middle Ages.  

Due to Compostela's new golden age as a pilgrimage site, the connection between the cult centre and the chapel in Lier have been renewed - a connection illustrated by a trail of metal conch-shells fashioned to resemble arrows, which point the way through Lier's streets to the chapel of Saint James, marking the town's belonging on the Europe-wide network of pilgrim routes.  

Cantigas de Compostela, part 2: Santiago the king?

Today, July 25, is the feast of Saint James the Elder, whose main cult centre is Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The establishment of Compostela as the cult centre of an apostle whose death in Palestine is recounted by the Acts of the Apostles appears to have begun in the ninth century, and flourished into one of the main pilgrimage centres of Latin Christendom in the early twelfth century. One of the reasons for the success of Compostela's emergence as the location of the burial of Saint James the Elder is the plasticity of saints, and how this plasticity was applied to the figure of Saint James, or Santiago. The term 'plasticity' in this context means that the saints can take on a wide variety of roles, and a wide variety of stories can be written about them. Few saints have had such a successfully varied iconography as Santiago, as he is known and venerated as an apostle, a martyr, a pilgrim, and a soldier. I have written a brief summary of this iconography here. Santiago was, however, also subject to other iconographies. In the Miracula Jacobi, the second instalment of the collection of material pertaining to Saint James which is commonly called Liber Sancti Jacobi, we read a miracle account where a Greek bishop, Stephen, claims that James should be called a fisherman and not a soldier, as was then evidently in vogue. The account continues to narrate a vision of Stephen's, in which Santiago appears to him dressed as a soldier, in order to prove that he was wrong to dismiss those who called the apostle a soldier also. This particular story both shows that there were several ideas about how Santiago should be understood in circulation, and also that the authorities at the cult centre saw the need to convince some audiences that Santiago was also a soldier. 

Another iconographical branch of Santiago can be suggested by a thirteenth-century stone sculpture currently housed in the cathedral museum in Compostela. Here, the apostle-pilgrim-soldier-fisherman saint is depicted in a different way, namely as a seated king. The staff on which he rests his hand is probably the pilgrim's staff rather than the sceptre - as it looks nothing like typical depictions of sceptres from contemporary art - so the figure is not solely regal. Perhaps we should understand the crown as signifying Santiago's status as a martyr, since the crown was regarded as the prize for obtaining martyrdom. Yet it is also possible that those who commissioned this statue and accepted its appearance - namely the episcopal authorities - aimed to imbue their patron with a more royal aura. Perhaps, as the royal authority of Castilla and León was undergoing increased centralisation - especially under the reign of Alfonso X (r.1252-84) - the episcopal court of Compostela sought to use this current to evoke the historical kingdom of Galicia, and to make Santiago even more relevant than before.  

Ultimately, I must leave it to the experts on the cult of Saint James the Elder to provide some explanation of this rendition. In any case, it serves as an excellent example of how so much of the cult's success relied on the ability to adapt the iconography to new contexts. 

 

Cantigas de Compostela, part 1: Saint Stephen or Saint Lucy?

In May, I spent a few days in Santiago de Compostela, a city rich in history and a place important to my own academic interests. In future blogposts, I hope to share several details from the Compostela's multilayered past, and I am collecting these posts under the header 'Cantigas de Compostela', an admittedly clumsy alliterative pun on the famous thirteenth-century collections of songs known as the Cantigas de Santa Maria.  

The first instalment in this new series is a reflection on a type of mystery specific to the scholarship on the cult of saints. As I was exploring the impressive museum of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, I noticed a headless statue carrying two items in a bowl. According to the sign in the museum, the statue is one among several that once decorated one of the cathedral's chapels, and it was made in the middle of the sixteenth century, possibly in a Flemish workshop, or by Flemish masons working in Spain. 

The statue has been identified as Saint Lucy, a virgin martyr from Sicily who was believed to have been killed during the Diocletian persecutions of the early fourth century. Her cult was revivified following the publication of Legenda Aurea written by Jacobus de Voragine in the 1260s, and she features in many works of late-medieval art. At the time of writing, I do not know whether the identification of this statue rests on any information outside what the statue itself provides. For instance, whether there are archival material referencing these statues, earlier descriptions of the chapel from when the head was still attached, surviving fragments, or any other indicators that point in this specific directions. If we consider the statue itself, however, things are less clear.  

The best argument for Lucy as the saint in question is the the bowl containing two items. According to legend, Lucy was blinded, and her eyes became her defining attribute in art, often shown as presented on a plate or a bowl, as in the case of this statue. However, there is also another candidate, namely Saint Stephen, who was stoned to death according to the account given in Acts, and his main attribute in late-medieval art is a selection of stones. The display of these stones can differ according to the medium or the choice of the artists. In statues, the stones are typically held, whereas in paintings or frescoes the stones can be placed elsewhere, as in the case of Carlo Crivelli's rendition, where the stones are balanced on the saint's head and shoulders. In short, we have two saints who are known by their presentation of round or roundish items, and this is all we have to go on in the case of the statue in the cathedral museum. (The clothes do not yield any clues, as without the original paint, which might have included patterns that could have pointed to a specific gender or social position, they are too generic to allow for any conclusions.) 

What about the items themselves? This is, perhaps, the only clue to which we can reasonably cling. Although we should be mindful of the choices of individual artists, or at least different traditions of individual workshops, the number of items is significant. Naturally, Lucy is typically depicted with both her eyes on a plate - even though she is also typically depicted with her eyes in their original place at the same time, because she is a saint and therefore posthumously healed. The stones of Saint Stephen, on the other hand, ordinarily come in slightly higher numbers, either as a pile whose total number is only hinted at by the stones on the top and at the front of the pile, or as three or four held in the saint's hands. While it is possible that an artist or a workshop would depict only two of Saint Stephen's stones, the number does suggest that Lucy might be the correct identification. 

Ultimately, however, we do not know, but the case does serve as a good reminder of how crucial iconography is to the navigation of medieval art, and how sometimes the attribute of a saint might be the only thing that allows us to pinpoint the saint's identity.    

No soy peregrino - a first encounter with Santiago de Compostela

Sunday morning I arrived in Santiago de Compostela after a long and arduous journey on the night bus from Madrid. I had underestimated the need for planning far ahead when travelling to Santiago, so when I sat down to buy the tickets I had to forego the quicker and more comfortable train. Looking back, this was effectively a foreshadowing of the lesson I came to draw from my first encounter with the city itself. This first encounter came about when I was leaving the bus station. A man accosted me and asked me for money to travel, and because I am stupidly unaccustomed to carry small cash, I had nothing to give him. One thing that struck me was that as he was explaining his situation, he included the defence "no soy peregrino", I am not a pilgrim. This very simple disclaimer carried a lot of context, and it was a glimpse into local attitudes about pilgrims, a glimpse with more clarity than I would have expected. However, I was only surprised by the clarity of the statement, not what the statement alluded to, because as one of the foremost pilgrimage sites in Western Europe, Santiago de Compostela is full of pilgrims of all sorts. 

That evening, when meeting up with a dear friend of mine who is herself from Galicia and lives in Santiago, I mentioned this encounter, and she confirmed my suspicions about local attitudes. It is quite common that modern pilgrims ask for money and argue that they should receive it because they are performing a pious endeavour. This is an argument that would be perfectly legitimate in the Middle Ages, when many people would not have had the means to cover every expense of the journey to Santiago and back home. Nowadays, however, when a lot of the pilgrims are dressed in outdoor gear that is certainly not inexpensive, carrying modern-day walking sticks and other paraphernalia, the idea that some of these people ask for money does leave a bad taste in one's mouth. 

I am writing this on my third day in Santiago, and I very much sympathise with the locals in their distaste for the tourism connected with the pilgrimage. Every day, I have seen numerous people with their backpacks - which are not permitted when entering the cathedral - their walking sticks, and, occasionally, some odd headwear that seems borderline farcical. I try very much not to be a pilgrim, at least not in this sense, and so far it seems that I am succeeding in not appearing as a tourist. I wear a shoulder bag rather than a backpack, I am dressed in ordinary clothes, and I speak a passable Spanish. On the other hand, I am also both a tourist and a pilgrim. This is my first time in Santiago, and I have already got lost while trying to exit the labyrinth that is the old town. Moreover, going to Santiago has been a dream of mine for years, and my scholarly interest in the cult of Santiago himself, Saint James the Elder, is one of the primary reasons for being here. Yesterday, for instance, I bought my first Bible in Spanish, something I decided years ago that I would first do in Santiago de Compostela rather than in any of the other places in Spain that I have visited. And as I have been sauntering about town for a couple of days now, I am very much feeling like some sort of pilgrim. But I also have a very strong feeling that if I ever came in a situation in which it were relevant, I would also add the very useful disclaimer: I am not a pilgrim. 

View of the historical centre of Santiago de Compostela from the outskirts of Sar 

The towers of the cathedral can be seen in the centre of the picture

Saint James the Elder and Saint Olaf - a brief comparison

 

Today, July 25, is the feast of Saint James the Elder, one of the most famous saints of Latin Christendom, and arguably the most famous saint of Spanish history. One of Christ's apostles, medieval legend placed his shrine in Compostela in Galicia, Northern Spain. At the beginning of the twelfth century, Compostela was the locus of one of the most intense bouts of mythopoiesis - myth-making - in the Middle Ages, where the clergy at Compostela created a legend that tied their place with biblical history, the legend of Charlemagne, and with the contemporary, twelfth-century world. This myth-making process created one of the three main pilgrim sites in the Latin Christian consciousness, with Rome and Jerusalem being the other two. Part of that process was the erection of the great Romanesque cathedral of Compostela, which is now largely supplanted by a later Gothic one, and the corpus of hagiographical material that is compiled in the Liber Sancti Jacobi (Book of Saint James), whose main textual witness is the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus. Since James the Elder was known throughout Christendom due to his appearance in the Bible, and since his sanctity was accepted by all Christians, Compostela's claim to be the apostle's resting place resulted in durable myth that has continued to work its effect into our own times. Saint James, or Santiago, has become in effect a patron saint of Spain and of Spanish imperialism. The historical development of the cult is complex, but a very simplified summary of the evolution of Saint James' iconography can be found in this old blogpost. In short, however, we should note that Saint James goes from being an apostle, to a pilgrim, to a battle-helper. This is an evolution that demonstrates, in a typical fashion, the plasticity or malleability of saints.   

From a Norwegian perspective, there are notable similarities in how Saint James the Elder became a focal point of myth-making in Spain and how Saint Olaf became a focal point for a similar process in Norway. The myth-making centred on Saint Olaf gained momentum from the 1150s onwards, after the establishment of the Norwegian Church Province in 1152/53, where Trondheim - Saint Olaf's resting place - became the metropolitan see of a church organization that stretched from Oslo to Greenland. By the mid-twelfth-century, the sanctity of Olaf had become an accepted part of Scandinavian historical thought, and he was venerated throughout the Norse world, largely thanks to the Nordic diaspora whose members continued to tell stories about him. From the 1150s onwards, however, these stories became more fixed as they were committed to writing, and the clergy at Trondheim used the legend to anchor Norway and the Norwegian Church both locally within Norway, within a wider European context, and also within a universal history that reached back into biblical times. Saint Olaf became the patron saint of Norway, and his cult enjoyed a stable and widespread popularity well beyond the Reformation, and he remains an important point of reference in our own time. (He is even featured - although as a historical figure rather than as a saint - in the TV series Beforeigners.) Like Saint James, Olaf has also undergone an iconographic evolution, being presented as a warlord, a battle-helper, and as a Christian ideal king. Also like in the case of Saint James, while these representations accrued over time, they also co-existed and made for a very composite and complex image of the holy figure.  

The two saints were both important focal points in their respective geographies, although the similarities between the two cults are out of balance due to the much more widespread fame and status of Saint James the Elder and of Compostela as a holy site. Many of the mechanisms between the two cases of myth-making are similar, however, and it remains an academic fantasy of mine to have those two myth-making processes carefully compared through an international project. For the time being, however, I will have to be content with noting, as people have done before me, that these similarities exist, even though there are very few zones of contact between the two cults. While Saint James was venerated in Norway, there is little reason to think that Olaf was known in Spain, even though the twelfth-century miracle list, known as Miracula Olavi, claims that a Galician knight came to the shrine of Saint Olaf to be liberated from his chains.   

As far as I know, the Norwegian mythmakers drew inspiration from the general practices of Christian mythmaking, and not from one single cult in particular. It is unclear whether any of the clerics and monks involved in the Norwegian mythmaking drew on the corpus of legends connected to Saint James, but the gist of this corpus was indeed known in twelfth-century Norway. This knowledge is demonstrated by a detail from a reliquary in Hedalen stave church, which contains a relic of Saint Thomas of Canterbury (d.1170; can. 1173). One of the short sides of the reliquary contains two figures, namely Olaf and James the Elder, the former recognizable through his axe and crown, the latter recognizable through his pilgrim's garb. This depiction of James shows that the Compostela legend - which formulated him as a pilgrim - was known in Norway. 

The Hedalen reliquary 
Photo by Nina Aldin Thune; courtesy of Wikimedia

Detail from the Hedalen reliquary 
Photo by Trond Øigarden
From an exhibition at the Oslo University Library curated by José Maria Izquierdo, autumn 2021