Songs for the new semester

The new semester is well underway, and for me it has already been a very busy semester with a lot of writing already past me and even more writing ahead of me. This year is the last of PhD thesis, and even though I feel on top of things as of now, I also know that there is a significant amount of work waiting in the months to come. Although I enjoy this kind of work, although I enjoy doing the necessary research, the writing, and the thinking that is required when putting together a coherent academic text, I also need some stimuli to ward off that sense of emptiness which can engulf you when you work on one and the same thing for a longer period of time. For me, one such stimulus is music.

Since I work on materials mostly pertaining to medieval history and the history of the church, I find it very suitable - and soothing - to listen to liturgical pieces from the medieval and the early modern period. I have presented some favourites in previous blogposts (such as here and here). In this blogpost, I offer you a selection of musical pieces which I have been particularly enjoying these past weeks, and which have dominated the soundtrack for my research so far this year.

Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85)
Lamentation

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-94)
Missa Papae Marcelli

Duarte Lobo (c.1565-1646)

Missa Vox Clamantis

Manuel Cardoso (1566-1650)

Missa Pro Defunctis

Return to Nidrosia

Nidaros Cathedral seen from the bridge over the river Nid, Trondheim

I once read a quotation attributed to Jorge Luis Borges that the greatest joy is not in the reading, but in the re-reading. To a certain extent this holds true of travelling as well, and a happy return to a beloved place that was once new and uncharted can in several ways be more pleasant than the first discovering journey. In part, such a pleasure owes its being to the invocation of memories, and to a nostalgic person such as myself memories have a particularly strong grip one's heart. In part, the pleasure comes from the familiar, and the knowledge that one can move about in the area with great ease and not get lost, yet at the same time still be able to discover new things and see beautiful details one has previously overlooked.

This month I'm immersed in this joy of revisiting. Two years after I left Trondheim to begin my PhD in Denmark, I am now back to spend some time as a guest at the department for historical studies at my old alma mater, the Norwegian University for Science and Technology. I have spent seven years of my life in this city, receiving both my BA and my MA here, and I have many friends and acquaintences who in various ways, big or small, have helped me becoming the person I am today.

I arrived in Trondheim on Monday afternoon and have already spent a few days catching up with people, getting settled in at my temporary office at the department, and sauntering about in the old city centre, trodding the familiar streets, viewing the familiar spots, and enjoying my first Norwegian September since 2013, September being a particularly crisp but often sunny month in my home country.

The reason for my return has mainly to do with a requirement in my PhD contract which stipulates that I have to spend a minimum of three months at another academic institution. My choice of Trondheim was an easy one. The primary reason is that I'm working on the cult of Saint Olaf of Norway, whose shrine was situated in the Nidaros cathedral in Trondheim, the seat of the Norwegian archbishop. For this reason, there are many colleagues here who have worked on material relating to the cult of Olaf, and new research is continuously being carried out. I'm here to immerse myself in this research, and to draw on the expertise of friends and colleagues, who have been very welcoming in sharing and wanting to share their knowledge with me, in the best fashion of academic kindness.

The academic network is my primary reason for returning to Trondheim, but a significant pull factor has of course also been the fact that I can now return to a beloved city and beloved friends, a combination that is a joy without measure. Part of this joy comes from the fact that ever since I began working on the material for Saint Olaf, I have had to do a lot of research into the history of the city and its medieval past, and I have a greater knowledge of this now than what I had when I studied here. Therefore, when coming back to the city, I return with a new understanding of the different medieval survivals and the different localities, and this helps me to see the familiar through new eyes and to appreciate even more the many remnants of the medieval past.

I have only been here a few days, but I know that when I leave for Denmark again in October I will leave with an even greater understanding of the material on which I'm working, and of the city I called my home for seven years.

Detours of academic research - Saint Edmund and his reintegrated body

Academic research does not progress in a straight line. This is knowledge than any academic will accumulate in the course of their career, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. At this point I'm halfway through my PhD, and in those years I have been active as a researcher there have been several detours from my main research trajectory. In some cases, such detours have led me to very fruitful results, as when I tried to map the occurrences of the word "decus" in royal hagiography. Other times, these detours have been a complete waste of time, for instance when I spent an entire workday trying to find the origin of a Latin proverb only marginally relevant to my work, without any success at all. In the following blogpost, I want to share a minor detour which in the end put me on the right track, from my current research.

These past days I've been working extensively on the liturgical material for the feast of Edmund Martyr. His cult and the literature of that cult is one of the three case studies for my PhD thesis, and that means examining and translating a lot of material. At this point, I'm working my way through the chants for Matins in the office for Edmund, as transmitted in MS Pierpont Morgan 736, a manuscript from Bury St Edmunds dated to c.1130. This manuscript has, to my knowledge, not been edited, and I have therefore had to transcribe the entire thing myself, which has been something of a baptism by fire in paleography. The process has been very educational, and it has taken a long time. It has also needed a lot of revising, and sometimes my transcriptions have not been correct in the first place. Trying to find out what the original handwriting actually says, is precisely something that precipitates detours.

Antiphons of the second nocturne of the office for Saint Edmund

Photograph of a photocopy

MS Pierpont Morgan 736, f.94r

Today, my challenge was an antiphon from the second nocturne in the office for Saint Edmund. Antiphons are brief chants performed after each psalm during Matins. Each psalm can have its own individual antiphon. In some cases, the antiphons are taken from a common repository known as the commune sanctorum, the common of saints. In other cases, such as in the office for Edmund, the antiphons are composed specifically for that saint.

Since antiphons are musical pieces and sometimes have notation, as seen above, it is sometimes challenging to decide whether the space between strings of letters indicate a change to a new word, or whether it indicates a liturgical elongation, i.e. a word made longer through song (as when you sing "can't" as "caaaan't" and write it "ca an't"). This problem tricked me many times during my first round of transcribing, because I was not used to this phenomenon.

The antiphon I'm talking of here is the one marked as #57 in the picture above. Its text tells about the translation of the body of Edmund which was incorrupt and entire, despite Edmund being beheaded by the Danes. The text goes like this:

Translato thesauro signum divinum incorrupti et redintegrati corporis enituit vena tantum resplenduit sanguinea quo daret indicium illo sanctum pertulisse martyrium

[In the translation of this treasure, as a divine sign the incorrupt and reintegrated body shone and a bloody vein radiated so much as to give an indication of this holy one who had suffered martyrdom. (My rough translation)]

Translation of Edmund's corpse, guarded by the wolf

MS Harley 2278, John Lydgate's life of Edmund and Fremund, England, between 1434 and 1439

Courtesy of British Library

The problem for me was that I had not been careful enough when transcribing, and I had been fooled by the space which is set between "redinte" and "grati", making one word seem like two. When I was sitting down to translate this I hit one major obstacle, namely the fact that "redinte" is not a word in the Latin lexicon, at least not according the comprehensive but incomplete database of William Whitaker's Words. "Grati" was not a problem as such, since it is a possible form of "gratia", which can be translated as "favour", "goodwill" or "gift", but it did not help at all when "redinte" could not be translated.

After racking my brain a bit and still not realizing that the two words were actually one, I googled the line "redinte grati corpori", hoping that there would be some text or other that contained the same combination of words. The search did not yield any direct hits, but it did send me to a digitized version of Augustine's De genesi ad literam, a commentary on the book of Genesis. This particular version which I was lead to, is the third volume of an edition of Augustine's works, edited in Lyons in 1586. The phrase which led me to this particular book was "redintegratus corporibus", the renewal or revival of the bodies. This made me finally realize what was going on in the liturgical manuscript.

Augustine's use of this phrase has most likely no connection at all to the use of "redintegrati corporis" in the office for Saint Edmund. It is of course possible that the composer or composers of these chants was/were familiar with Augustine's commentary on Genesis, and it is even possible that they had that particular book in mind when putting this antiphon together. But without any more tangible proof of such a connection, I hesitate to make any such conclusions. Instead, the fact that a similar phrase to the one in the antiphon is found in Augustine, is a useful reminder that such detours in research can end in surprising and at the same time helpful results.

Similar blogposts:

Methodology of negatives

Edmund's hedgehog iconography

The finding of Edmund's head in a twelfth-century satirical poem

Time in medieval liturgical thought

 

City of Books, part IV - A Temporary Library

 In my life as a student I have not been as nomadic as many of those who have followed the same path as I have. In the past eight years I have only lived in four different places during my studies, two of them have been long-term residences, others have been temporary arrangements lasting only two-three months. Currently I'm residing temporarily in a small room in a student house in York, where I'm spending about two months for the purpose of getting out of my home university to focus on some pressing tasks. I selected York as my destination because the centre where I work, the Centre for Medieval Literature, is a joint venture between the University of Southern Denmark and University of York.

I've now been here for about one and a half months, and I'm nearing the end of my time here. However, the brevity of my stay has not kept me from accumulating a library in my room. I find that this is a recurring pattern for me: Wherever I stay for a longer or shorter period of time, I always end up accumulating a library.

To me this is an inevitable development since I'm a massive bibliophile, and since I don't feel quite at home anywhere without books. In this particular case, the accumulation of the library is also helped by the fact that there are many bookshops in York, and I usually tend to drop by and leave them in turn with less money than when I came in but infinitely richer. Another factor in the current mass-accumulation is that I've taken the opportunity to buy a lot of books - especially academic books - online. As a result, my temporary library in this city of books is bigger than I first had imagined.

My current temporary library

Most of these are booty from recent bookshop explorations

Due to number of books I manage to buy in a relatively short period of time, it goes without saying that I don't manage to read the books I buy before I leave a place. But this year, however, I've happily found that I have managed to combine work and spare time in such a way that I've read at least some of the fiction I've acquired, as seen below.

One of the great surprises this time around in York was the discovery of a fairly new bookshop, The Grimoire on High Petergate, which was a welcome sight after having lost a couple of the bookshop I used to visit before. This bookshop has a lovely selection of fiction, and it was here I found a copy of Brian Jacques' novel High Rhulain, a book in the Redwall series. I was first introduced to this series five years ago when I studied in York as part of my MA, but it was not until now I got around to begin reading it. It stands as one of my best reading experiences I have ever had, and it was suitable that I should read it here in this very city. The books in this blogpost have mostly been acquired at Minstergate Books and The Grimoire.

we close our eyes to Anselm and lie calm
- Geoffrey Hill, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England, part 10, Fidelities

The above selection is exactly that, just a selection of my temporary library, but it gives a good representations of some of the books that occupy my mind these day. I find that some books I start reading right away, and some books I need around me for some time, tempting me, before I give in and start devouring them. This is one reason why I see it as a necessity to be surrounded by more books than I manage to read, even when I know my stay will only be a short one, and my time for reading non-academic material is severely limited. Yet as a bibliophile, it is sometimes less about the reading as the inspiration to read that can be drawn from a temporal library, and this is perhaps the case this time around.


For previous blogposts in this series, see:

City of Books, part I

City of Books, part II

City of Books, part III

Back to the beginning, in a way

Five years ago this month I arrived in York as an exchange student to spend a term at the University of York as part of my MA degree. I was very excited about this, both because by that time I was already deeply in love with York, but also because the road there had passed through a lengthy and detailed bureaucratic process in which there were enough uncertainties to make me think at some point whether it was all worth the trouble. Fortunately, the two administrative secretaries at the York Centre for Medieval Studies were very capable ladies and guided me through the process successfully.

This year I'm back in York as an exchange student, spending a term at the University of York as part of my PhD thesis. I have been looking forward to this for quite some time, especially since this possibility was partly why I decided to do my PhD at the Centre for Medieval Literature, which is a cooperative enterprise by the University of York and the University of Southern Denmark. I'm excited to be back, and although I've spent most of my time at the work space I've been allotted on campus, I've spent enough time walking about the town to see what has change and to appreciate what is pretty much as it was back when I first came to study.

With this short blogpost I'm going back to the beginning of things, in a way. I started this blog five years ago this month, and when I started my posts were mainly updates of what I was doing and things I had seen on my many wanderings in town or on short trips to various places, such as Whitby, Edinburgh and Durham. My emphasis back then was to share with my friends those things great or small which interested me, fascinated me or which simply were there, like some snowdrops in churchyards. I thought of this blog as a way to share things that were relevant to my time in England, and this is reflected both in the name, in the brief description of the blog and the quotations in the margins which I still have kept. The blog has come a long way since then, and so have I. To some extent, there is still a strong presence of the kind of everyday minutiae which draw my attention from time to time, but my emphasis now is on the academic side of things. Most of my blogposts now are concerned with my work, and I spend more time doing research for the things I post now than I did five years ago, although even back then I had embraced the importance of research.

In the present blogpost I return to the beginning of things since I now allow myself the kind of personal reflection which marked some of my earlier writings, and in a way it feels right to do so five years later. I do this kind of thing less now, in part because I think there are much more interesting things to talk about than myself, but also because I have gained a much wider audience in these five years, an audience which is here predominantly for the academic stuff.

I'm very happy to have this blog as an outlet for my many fascinations and my sundry experiences in research and in life outside it (if such a thing can exist for a medievalist). I try to maintain a balance between academic and accessible, and also between academic and non-academic material, such as poetry, music or nature, and this allows me to tie together elements in my spectrum of interests which lie relatively far apart. All this, of course, hopefully without becoming too careless about the question of audience.

I have changed a great deal in these past five years, and things have changed a great deal for me in many ways, and this blog, too, has undergone some changes although these changes have been primarily additions rather than alterations. It's nice to look back at those five years, thinking of what I've done, what I've achieved, what I have yet to achieve, and of course there are many things I wish I would have known back then which I know now. Many things have changed, but at the core this blog remains a mixture of personal and academic journalism, and although the balance between those two has shifted, I'm happy to think that the blog is only improved, not markedly altered since I first began writing it five years ago.

Soundtrack of spring term research

With the spring term coming to a close, and in order to keep up a minimum of regularity in the posts on this blog, I now wish to share with you some of the music that has kept me company through the spring term. Since February - the beginning of the Danish term - I have spent most of my weeks preparing my lectures, writing scripts for my classes, read through the material and more, and then prepared the texts for the week. Since I have designed the course and put together its syllabus myself, I have been required to spend even more time making due preparations than I might otherwise have done had I taken over some existing course, and this has resulted in some long days in the office. To help me in this process, I have had a number of musical pieces which I have had running in the background for hours on end. 

When I'm working with medieval history in its sundry forms, I usually listen to music from the sixteenth century and earlier, although occasionally moving into the early decades of the seventeenth. This was a habit I began during my MA research, as I had by then been introduced to a much wider variety of early music than I had previously known, thanks to some courses designed by my MA supervisor, to whom I owe my knowledge of Guillaume Machaut, Guillaume Dufay, Palestrina and others. 

The selection of this blogpost does not contain the totality of songs to which I worked this term, but it is a representative selection, including pieces I first discovered this spring and therefore became an intrinsic part of this season's soundtrack. 

Palestrina (1525-94) - Missa Assumpta Est



Palestrina - Missa Nigra Sum



Annibale Padovano (1527-75) - Mass for 24 voices



Roland de Lassus (1530-94) - Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah



Alessandro Striggio (c.1536-92) - Mass for 40 and 60 voices

Notes on productive procrastination

Nick, this is not life experience, this is procrastination at the zoo.
- Winston Bishop, New Girl S02E09

One day, probably in 2012 while I was in my last year of my MA studies I overheard a student telling another student about the word procrastinate, except she called it "procrastrinate", and this novel information was received with what seemed to be amusement and perhaps also recognition. I consider this to be one of the most emblematic encounters I have had with student culture and its early 2010s zeitgeist. This is not to say that I consider my fellow students not to work hard - in fact most students probably work harder than I did during my MA - but at this time "procrastination" had become an emblem of academia, a household term, as it were. This was in no small part thanks to the popularity of PhD Comics, which despite being set in the sciences also resonated with the everyday life of students in the humanities. I remember several print-outs from this comic strip taped to the doors of the cubicles designated for MA students, and Facebook was full of links and updates. In a sense, procrastination appeared to be not only accepted but also expected of someone who wished to take part in the life of higher education. To me, at least, an ambitious MA student with hopes of advancing in the system, it seemed that I was obliged to spend time not being productive, and this was adopted into my MA studies quite early on. For me this was quite easy as both some of my friends and myself had often spent time socialising while we ought to have been working on our dissertation. The first term of the MA in particular, the autumn of 2010, we usually had two-hour breaks with short bouts of research thrown in between. We were already good at procrastination, although it was not until 2011, I believe, that we started to fully embrace the concept or to put the precise word to our way of not working. Around this time, when we adopted the culture of procrastination, it seemed as if many people did the same. This is only natural, as most people will probably have experienced that when you learn a new word you find significant, you suddenly start noticing this word all around you, as if the whole world was also having the same discovery.  

Tomorrow, tomorrow! the crows cry
Woodcut illustration from Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools, attributed to Albrecht Dürer
Courtesy of University of Houston

The central place of procrastination in academia is only natural. Much of the day of an MA or PhD student is spent in a small room perusing books or writing stuff on a computer. There is a certain monotony in this that invites escapism of sundry sorts, and if the day happens to be a bit unstructured, or if the progress is hampered by things like faulty or quarrelsome technology or books that are not as helpful as you had hoped, it is easy to fall into procrastination mode. There are various ways to go about this procrastination, and it is frightfully easy to find reasons to do so. In some cases, faux reasoning does not even get a chance to play its part, as it is also easy to merely descend into ennui while staring at your computer screen, blindly giving in to postponement and letting time pass you buy. Other times, you get a helping hand from fellow procrastinators who pick you up into its fold, and with whom you pick up others to form what Jorge Cham has termed the Vortex of Unproductivity.

Courtesy of Jorge Cham

Although it is terribly easy to give in to the sweet allures of procrastination, there are also ways to avoid it, or at the very least procrastinate in a way that is not entirely unproductive. One of the easiest ways to do this if you procrastinate with others is to turn your bacchanalia of not-working into an academic discussion of some kind. Most likely it will not be entirely relevant to your current research, but since it is always good for academics to root around a bit beyond their immediate concerns, such a discussion can be a good way to engage critically with something. If you are procrastinating in your office and left to your own devices, it can seem slightly more difficult to avoid the clutches of non-productivity, but only apparently. One of the tools to escape this is Twitter, either by entering into a discussion with members of its growing academic community, or by tweeting about your latest research that you are currently not doing. As a medievalist it is particularly easy to choose this route, as the medievalist section of Twitter is full of bright and interesting people and also has an interested lay audience, both of whom might be receptive to your reflections on some medieval topic. I for my part spent some of my procrastination time today tweeting about Saint Remigius, the apostle of the Franks, whose feast day is October 1st. This led me to rediscover parts of his legend that are somewhat relevant to my work, and it also allowed me to track down a few great medieval illuminations to attach to my tweets. While Remigius is both temporally and geographically far removed from my own focus on 12th-century Northern European cult of royal saints, he is nonetheless an important figure in the religious history of high-medieval France and its mythology of kingship. Remigius therefore makes for a good point of reference in the construction of sacred kingship, and my bout of procrastination became surprisingly akin to actual research.

An even better way - and I would argue the best way - to be productive while procrastinating is simply to read. This is not to say that any reading is productive procrastination, far from it, but for a medievalist - especially - there is a vast range of literature that can in some ways qualify as research. Academics are required to read widely in order to increase their horizon, and for scholars immersing themselves in the worldview of a culture separated from ours by centuries, it is particularly important to be aware of the complexity and the cultural heritage of that period. Furthermore, a medievalist should be interdisciplinary, so if you are tired of your own part of the field of medieval studies, it is easy enough to pick up an article or a blogpost that touches on medieval history but in a way different from your own. And if this seems too similar to actual work, it's easy enough to find a medieval text that might be far beyond your immediate research interest, but that still might give you some interesting knowledge that you might be able to employ later. Today, for instance, I indulged in Jerome's highly interesting account of Paul of Thebes. Since this is one of the oldest saint biographies, and one which concerns such a central figure in medieval history as Anthony of Egypt, it is a text with which I was required to be familiar. Carolinne White's excellent translation combined with its blissful brevity made it a quick read that also opened up for some reflections of themes such as the monastic renunciation of the world, or the various forms of suffering found in Christian martyrdoms. In other words: what started out as procrastination turned out to be some kind of productivity, and I came away with a clearer conscience.  

Anthony meeting the centaur
Francesco Guarino, 17th century
Courtesy of this website

Sunset in Denmark

Mother, give me the sun!
- Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen

To be a Norwegian in Denmark requires a lot of adjustment. It means adjusting to new customs and new ways of doing things, like riding a bike everywhere or being tempted with diabetes because of the country's enormous candy industry. It also means adjusting to a new scenery, especially for a Westerner like myself, born and raised among tall, narrow mountains. Denmark is not mountainous in the least, and for that reason I find it very amusing that "bjerg" is such a widely used toponym, particularly because back home a "berg" (the Norwegian spelling) is a rocky protrusion in the terrain, often of somewhat significant height. In Denmark, however, "bjerg" appears to be used for the summit of a slope or minute elevation in the terrain, a place from which the bike will roll on its own accord if you let it.

The Danish flatness of ground is not a bad thing, it is indeed quite charming, especially with its numerous woods and some beautiful fields. There is also a great benefit about this feature, namely that it brings the sun much closer to the earth, unlike in the Norwegian fjords where the mountains push it away into the void. I discovered the full extent of this yesterday evening as I was riding my bike back home after a long day at university. The sun was about to set, and I was standing at the end of a field which opened the scenery to me. I had never seen the sun so big as it set among a distant row of oaks and chestnut trees. Sadly, I had not brought my camera. Today, however, I decided to rectify this, and the following series of pictures is from my trip back from campus this evening. I've already become very fond of Danish sunsets.

Solen er rød og rund
- Svantes Lykkelige Dag, Poul Dissing

Methodology of negatives

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there

- Antigonish, Hughes Mearns

To a young scholar in training, there are certain things for which he or she can not fully prepare but rather has to experience when the time comes. One of these things is to deal with negative results in the humanities, which can become something of a problem when one line of inquiry yields almost more negative results than positive ones. For me this problem first arose in my research for the paper to IMC Leeds this year, in which I looked at sources for the cult of Edward the Confessor in France and Normandy. The following is a reflection/complaint/whining on some of the problems I faced when trying to make a case from more negative results than I had expected.

The purpose of my paper at Leeds 2014 was to look at three case-studies for devotion to the cult of Edward the Confessor as suggested by three types of source material in the period 1161-1480. These sources were a set of 12th-13th-century liturgical books from the archbishopric of Rouen and the Abbey of the Holy Trinity of Fécamp, a series of stained glass window from the same abbey dated to c.1307, and finally an antiphon found in a book compiled by a German Carthusian around 1480. From this material, scattered among several centuries, I tried first to compile a concise overview of the cult of Edward the Confessor in France following his canonisation in 1161. This were to prove very difficult, and it was here I was faced time and again with a number of negative inquiries.  

The Abbey of the Holy Trinity, Fécamp

Courtesy of Wikimedia

During my MA studies, I had often heard the dictum of one of the history professors at NTNU: Negative results are also results. This is of course well and true, but I was also aware that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and therefore it can be very difficult to extract a picture of historical development when there are gaping holes in the timeline. Given the unknown and unfortunately high number of medieval sources lost to us, we are not permitted to make bold claims when we face a lack of material, and at best we can make an educated guess about the possible scenarios such a dearth of evidence may signify.

To give an example: In order to attempt mapping the cult of Edward the Confessor in France, I sought to find out how he was represented in sources beyond hagiography and liturgy. I therefore had a look through one of the greatest works of historiograhpy from medieval France, namely Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum Historiale written in the 1240s and -50s, a vast encyclopedia drawing on a number of sources and covering a big range of historical events. Since Vincent's work was completed about eight or nine decades after Edward the Confessor's canonisation, I assumed that the monk of Beauvais would have been able to get hold of one of the hagiographies about Edward. At the very least I presumed Vincent would have read Aelred of Rievaulx's popular and influential Vita Sancti Edwardi. I was excited to find this out, because Vincent's source for Edward could tell a lot about the dissemination of hagiographies for the Confessor. 

Image allegedly of Vincent of Beauvais

Courtesy of Wikimedia

However, when I opened the big, heavy, yellow 1964 reprint of a Douai edition from 1624 - a book as big as my torso but not as thick - and finally found Vincent's chapter on Edward, I was much disappointed. In short, Vincent draws chiefly - and perhaps exclusively - on the Gesta Regum Anglorum of William of Malmesbury, completed in the 1130s, several decades prior to the canonisation of Edward the Confessor. As a consequence, Vincent of Beauvais writes something about the miracles and dreams of Edward - indeed he allots a surprising length to his dream of the seven sleepers - but the Confessor is not referred to as a saint for obvious reasons. I was a bit disappointed with this discovery. Although it did suggest that the hagiographies of Edward indeed were not widely disseminated in France, I couldn't suggest that this was the case unless it was corroborated by several other inquiries, which I didn't have the time to undertake.

After my dead-end-foray into Speculum Historiale, I turned my attention to sources more directly relevant for the cult of St Edward, namely liturgical books. The antiphon handed down to us by the 15th-century Carthusian from Cologne is an adaptation of an antiphon composed for St Louis around 1300. (For more on this antiphon, see here.) In order to see whether this adaptation did suggest exchange of cult material between the cult centres of the two confessor kings, Louis and Edward, I looked through the Westminster Missal and the liturgical material from Saint-Denis as treated by Anne Walters Robertson. What I had envisioned would be a time-consuming investigation into primary sources, was concluded in about fifteen minutes, most of which were spent taking the book from spot A to spot B. I still remember the slightly dejected sensation when I realised that Abbot Lytlyngton's Westminster Missal of c.1380 did not contain a single reference to Louis IX. 

Angels receiving the soul of Louis IX

Paris - Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève - ms. 0783, Grande Chroniques deFrance, 13th-14th centuries

Courtesy of enluminures.net

Of course, the negative results from the liturgical books were of a different nature than that of Speculum historiale. The fact that Louis was not celebrated at Westminster, nor Edward at Saint-Denis, pointed to a deliberate omission, since the contact between France and England was strong enough to ensure that both these monastic institutions knew of the other's patron saint. Consequently, this allowed me to build towards a conclusion in my paper, but - as in the case of Vincent of Beauvais - it was of course slightly frustrating to have to relegate so much research into footnotes that could not be included in my talk at Leeds.

In the end, I believe the paper itself went rather well and I managed to keep some coherence in my argument, but it was a long and arduous road to get there - and one that is not easily traced in the footnotes or in the text itself. This was something for which I was not prepared, despite having heard anecdotes and despite my experience from my MA dissertation. As stated above, it is the kind of experience you have to tackle head-on when it arises, and sometimes it can be very frustrating. It helps, of course, that there are several kinds of negative results. Vincent of Beauvais' reliance on William of Malmesbury was an omission of later material that may not have been deliberate but caused by limited available material. The fact that Louis IX did not appear in the Westminster Missal, composed more than eight decades after his canonisation, suggests a deliberate omission and can yield some ground for positive claims - i.e. that Louis' cult was not adopted at Westminster. A third kind of negative result is the lacunic absence of evidence which may be due to a loss of material or that the material sought was lacking form the start. This is the most frustrating kind, for this leaves only tentative conjectures.  

Performing Medieval Text, an Oxford Conference

In April last year I attended my first academic conference as a participant. The conference in question was titled Performing Medieval Text and was held at Merton College, Oxford, arranged by Merton's own Pauline Souleau and Henry Hope. I was very excited to go, not only because it was an important academic experience, but because I have a long-standing fascination with Oxford, fuelled by the TV-series Inspector Morse, Lewis and now recently Endeavour. These series are not the best advertisement for academic life in Oxford, however, as academics in these series are either murdered, murderous or generally unpleasant beings. A good friend of mine noted that I should take care to deliver a mediocre paper, for according to the series, only good or bad academics were at risk. I'm still alive, so it would appear I managed to follow his advice.

Edward the Confessor carrying a cripple into Westminster Abbey

From MS Egerton 745, a French collection of saints from early 14th century

Courtesy of British Library

During the two days of the conference I lodged at Balliol College, a college that vies with Merton (and presumably others) for the title of Oxford's oldest. Originating in the 13th century - according to a flyer in my room - they do at least have a very good basis for this claim. As a resident guest, I was allowed not only access to the college quad - which was like entering the court of a medieval castle - but also inside the college buildings, taking my breakfast in a rather magnificent dining room with stained glass roundels in the windows, and watching the evening settle over Oxford from a terrace right outside my room.

The Canadian novelist Robertson Davies once pointed out that the universities originated in the Middle Ages, and much of the Middle Ages remained in them still. Architecturally speaking, this is very true of Oxford. It was all very different from what I had grown accustomed to at NTNU in Trondheim, where the humanities are gathered in one single campus which was built in a modern - but not unappealing - design in 1996. As I navigated the streets and lanes finding my way from Balliol to Merton, I must admit I felt more academically significant, more academically capable. Like in the case of that old cliche that some people make you feel smarter by their mere presence, the atmosphere of Oxford made me feel grander. 

The conference itself was also a great and pleasant experience. It was a small conference with attendees from far and wide, which ensured that there was a wide array of perspectives and experiences, but also that there was only one session going on at any given time, so when you stepped up to speak, the audience was as complete as an audience can be, allowing of course for the odd absentee. I met a great number of interesting people, I was exposed to that generous kindness which I have realised is more typical of academia than most people are aware, and I learned a great number of things from the other papers, all of which were to some degree fascinating, providing me with valuable insight in the field of medieval studies. The papers were interspersed with two excellent keynote lectures, a brief presentation of medieval books from Merton College's collection, a beautiful concert in the college chapel and the various food breaks required to keep at it for eight hours.

The gateway to Merton College

It was an interdisciplinary conference, bringing together people from history, musicology, art history and literature to reflect on medieval texts from a performative perspective. I talked about texts for medieval saints, using as my case study Edward the Confessor, whom I had worked extensively on during my MA. In my paper I compared hagiographical texts with a liturgical item from the office material of Edward the Confessor, arguing that the distillation and compression of hagiographical material in liturgical texts owes to the performative aspects of liturgy, that liturgical items are shorter and more compact because they are performed in a set architectural setting, and for a set liturgical purpose. 

Merton College Chapel

The reason I bring up this conference now, more than a year later, is that a recording of my talk from the conference is now available on youtube, and so are the talks of many of my fellow attendees. They are all highly recommended.

 

Histrionic Historicity - or Why We Need Historians

In this orgy of rhetoric one almost loses sight of another very important statement

- In the Presence of the Dead, Karsten Friis-Jensen (2006)


As every historian learns to know at some point, the conveying of historical fact and historical narratives is fraught with numerous challenges and difficult choices. To write about historical issues is therefore a delicate matter, and to navigate and negotiate vast chronologies or to assemble a bric-a-brac of historical material, require great care and sobriety. It is therefore always frustrating and saddening to me when an unprofessional decides to dabble in history and present it to an audience, without the proper methodological schooling or awareness. This blogpost is a response to a recent example of such dabbling, a piece on the Vikings written by Irish journalist and Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn, published in The Independent. The piece in question was a response to the current Viking exhibition at British Museum.

In my response, I do not wish to be facetious, nor do I wish to be ungenerous, and I will therefore state rightaway that I sympathise and agree with Cockburn's major point, namely that the Vikings were a band of brutal warriors who were responsible for great atrocities, and that in our times there is a certain revisionism that tends to downplay this aspect of the Viking culture. This basic point is true. Murder, rape, enslavement and pillage were all part of the job description for a Viking, and these are not to made a trifle of. The problem is that Cockburn commits so many methodological fallacies and descends into rhetoric and ahistoricity that this central point disappears in comparisons that are obfuscating rather than clarifying, in a rhetoric that is histrionic and in a presentation of history that is grossly imprecise and simplistic.

Danish Vikings attacking England
From Morgan Pierpoint Library Ms. M. 736, Life, Passion and Miracles of St. Edmund, King and Martyr
Courtesy of Wikimedia

Category mistakes

Things go awry from the very beginning, as the lead paragraph states that "Norsemen carried out atrocities to equal those of the German SS". This is problematic on several levels, and if one of my students had written this in an essay, I would have refused to let him pass and given him a severe scolding for such anachronism. And this is the first issue, namely the juxtaposition of two phenomena separated by almost a millennia, which arose in widely different cultural and political contexts and that overall are not in any way connected by historical developments. There is no trajectory that ties the Vikings and the Waffen SS together, and a juxtaposition of these historical categories are consequently pointless and vastly problematic.

Furthermore, it does not make sense to juxtapose these the Vikings and the Waffen SS because they do not belong to the same historical categories. First of all, a Viking denotes a man with a certain modus operandi, working in teams, but initially not as a part of a codified or unified programme. The unification came to some extent later, when Danish kings like Ivar Boneless or Canute the Great organised mass pillaging in Britain, but they were not bound together by an overarching ideology. The Waffen SS, on the other hand, was a group of people united by a common codified political programme and vision.

Moreover, the term Viking denotes people inhabiting a long chronology and a large geographical area. The traditional dating for the Viking period is 793-1066 and this period was marked not only by Viking raids but also by Norse settlement and interaction. Every series of raids and every large-scale invasion was a response to circumstances that were specific to its contemporaneity, dependent on concerns, personal choices and a thousand factors that were impossible to map back then, and more so in our time. The Waffen SS, however, was comprised of a group of people from a limited geography and a very short period of time. Even though each member of Waffen SS had his own personal reasons for joining, each member was suffused by an ideology that presented a specific world-view and operated within a nationalistic construct. In short, the genesis of Waffen SS was driven by a political purpose at a specific cultural and geographical point in history. The Vikings, however, were driven by very material concerns, namely food and riches. In other words, the Vikings and the Waffen SS are not comparable categories at all, and Cockburn's juxtaposition is therefore pointless and fruitless. 

How to die in the Viking age
Illustration to the 1899 edition of Heimskringla by Christian Krohg
Courtesy of heimskringla.no

A troublesome insistence

The fundamental problem in Cockburn's piece is, as stated, a matter of category mistakes. Another, and equally problematic issue, is his insistence on being topical. Throughout his text, Cockburn suggests similaritites between the Anglo-Saxon victims of the Vikings and the victims of the current strife in Iraq and Syria. While the human trauma of both these historical situations are not to be underestimated, it makes little sense to juxtapose them. Again, they grew out of completely different historical circumstances, and to compare these circumstances will add nothing to our understanding of either.

Another problem about this insistence on topicality, is that Cockburn fails to realise that certain terms and concepts are, because of their historical uniqueness, fraught with subtexts that can not be transmitted to other historical phenomena. The Waffen SS committed atrocities directed and subsumed by an imperialist, anti-semitic, eugenicist, nationalistic agenda, and these atrocities are still within living memory. The term Waffen SS, therefore, brings to mind an orchestrated genocide that lacks parallels prior to the 20^th century, and which evokes great personal trauma that creates a lense which colours any juxtaposition in accordance with these memories. We are, in other words, coaxed into imagining an 11th-century Norseman carrying a swastika and killing people in the name of the Third Reich. This is a manipulation of historical memory which is ludicrously imprecise. It is also extremely disrespectful towards those who were the victims of such trauma, since historical phenomena are jumbled together and assembled in a way which removes them from their own contemporary contexts. Such a strategy is effective, especially in light of the adoption of Norse symbols and culture into Nazism and Neo-Nazism, but it is dishonest.

Propaganda poster showing the Norwegian Nazi party's adoption of Viking culture
Courtesy of this website

Incongruities

Having established the fundamental methodological weaknesses and injustices committed by Cockburn, it is time to turn to some of the stylistic incongruities of the piece.

The chief stylistic incongruity is one perhaps most easily detected by the professional historian, and I say this without smugness or arrogance. The chief incongruity is namely the histrionic pathos that emerges from Cockburn's repetitive insistence on topicality, where the Viking raids – gruesome and pitiless though they were – are evocatively but fraudulently presented as the architects and perpetrators of one of the worst genocides history has ever seen. It is reminiscent of Christopher Hitchens' terrible highfalutin bathos whenever he would use the term "medieval" or talk about religion. In other words, Cockburn's tone of voice in his piece is incongruous with the sobriety demanded by a careful historical riposte against revisionism, which he states himself is at the heart of the matter.

Another incongruity is the succession of points made by Cockburn towards the end. After describing the death of Alphege of Canterbury and thus having established the ferocity of the Vikings, Cockburn then moves on to the St Brice's Day Massacre to further his point of the barbarity of the Norsemen. This is a very strange choice, since this was a massacre perpetrated against the Danes by the Anglo-Saxons. Cockburn is aware of this, however and comments that this was the case, which only goes to befuddle the reader, for surely, this does not strengthen his case.

After this incongruity, Cockburn opens his next paragraph by saying "[o]verall, the Scandinavians have a lot to apologise for", and here I will allow myself to be a little facetious, for it sounds as if he criticises the Norsemen for the inconvenience of dying on British soil. Of course, this is not what he means and I do understand his point, but it is so poorly put that it does little service to his central argument. This makes it the final incongruity I will touch upon here, for even though every discerning reader understands what Cockburn is getting at – that the Vikings were responsible for many atrocities – it would nonetheless, considering how he jumbles historical elements about, be very surprising if he were to mean modern-day Scandinavians. In short: Cockburn's anachronistic juxtaposition of historical elements disrupts chronology and presents a simplistic view of how complex history really is, thereby removing all credibility he has in the matter.


Concluding points

As a person who, by virtue of a master's degree in history, is a professional historian, I'm often forced to justify my value to a society increasingly blind to immaterial gain. I don't find this a difficult thing to do, providing I'm given time and place to speak, but it is nonetheless a concern that is constantly at the forefront of my mind. Consequently, I react very negatively when a person who is not professionally trained in the art of history presents a narrative which distorts chronology, ignores fundamental methodological concerns and is void of any humility and nuance. The heart of the problem is when complex historical issues are stripped down to a ludicrous juxtaposition without taking into account historical context, and then presented in a histrionic manner ill-suited for the kind of sober reflection needed when aiming to give an accurate rendition of a historical epoch. Cockburn's piece is a poorly written, highfalutin text that has little value in a debate on historical matters. This is very sad, and especially because I agree with Cockburn's central point: that the atrocities of the Vikings should be at the core of any presentation of their culture. However, because the piece is written the way it is, and because he fails to engage properly with the material, he fails to create a good arena for a debate. To my mind, this is an excellent example of why we need professional historians, lest we sacrifice accuracy and complexity for imprecise simplicity.