Serendipity as method, or - The case for reading broadly

 

Sometimes they stand too near the problem. Often, if a person looks at something very closely he can see a few things more clearly, but the shape of the whole thing escapes him

- Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

 

After close to fifteen years as a professional medievalist, I remain hesitant about giving advice to students and younger colleagues. Academia has undergone so many changes, has seen so many trends come and go, and has sustained repeated damage from governments and funding institutions. Even though I am still relatively early in my career, the factors that helped me succeed when starting out as a freshly-defended MA are not necessarily relevant in the current climate. And as someone who has witnessed a lot of bad, outdated advice – however well-intentioned – doled out to either myself, colleagues or my generation of medievalists, I am painfully aware that such advice can sometimes lead dangerously astray or serve as a testament to the gulf between those who have secured permanent positions and those who might never be able to do so. Giving advice as an academic, therefore, can be something of a poisoned chalice.

 

There is, however, one advice that I will give unhesitatingly, unreservedly, and even unprompted. That advice is to read broadly, no matter your topic, your field, or your discipline. In academia, there is a widespread and often unspoken assumption that in order to become an expert on your topic, you have to dig deep and only dig deep. In an academic environment tainted both by the perverse logic of business and by the centre-of-the-box thinking of funding bodies, it is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you should not waste time reading what is not immediately relevant to what you are working on at the moment – whether it is for a particular course, a dissertation, or a thesis. You dig deep, you become an expert, and you show that expertise by presenting information gleaned both from the sources and from the secondary literature. But the problem of digging deep without also minding the breadth is that you become very isolated.

 

The idea that you need to be laser-focused on your particular topic in order to be a good academic is a misguided approach to transforming information into knowledge, and converting data into understanding. When starting out as an academic, you do not know enough about your topic to evaluate which source texts or which studies are going to be useful for your analysis. Much like you cannot draw a map of a road until after you have travelled to its end, you do not have the expertise at the beginning that you are going to have at the end of your degree. After all, the whole point of doing an MA or a PhD is to expand your knowledge and increase your expertise so that you are better prepared for the work that lies ahead of you, no matter whether that work is related to academia or not. 

 

Because we do not know what aids our analysis until after the analysis is done, the laser-focus approach to reading means that it is very easy to miss connections that can only be made when looking beyond where the laser is pointing. It is not impossible to get good results by myopically staring at the most relevant material – it is, indeed, frequently done – but that approach is absolutely no guarantee that you will get the best result, or even the result for which you are hoping. Due to the uncertainty of how analytical breakthroughs are made – because they are unique events that depend on the material contained in the analyst’s brain – we are best prepared for making such breakthroughs by reading beyond the confines of one’s chosen topic. Reading broadly is a way of shifting focus away from your main object and thereby seeing that object in a different light. It might be helpful to learn, for instance, that there are cases similar to yours in the vast repository of available historical information. It is healthy to be reminded that no matter how unique your material is, the finiteness of human imagination and creativity means that it is far less unique than you at first might be tempted to believe. In short, reading broadly allows you to situate yourself in a much broader context, which in turn enables you to understand how your topic is unique and also how it is not. Good analysis depends on both these types of understanding.  

 

The fact that we do not know from the onset what reading we need to do in order to make fruitful connections can at times be daunting. It is easy to worry that you are going to miss a text that will give you the one connection you need for your breakthrough. It is easy to become obsessive and turn the virtue of reading broadly into the vice of reading everything. Consequently, it is also important to embrace serendipity as method when setting out to read broadly. Because there is no single solution for how you should read in order to do the analysis you want to do, to have those revelations that allow you to move the state of the art a few inches further, and to allow you to say something new and valuable on the topic at hand. This means that instead of reading everything, you read a bit here and a bit there, waiting for the revelations to come. And when they do not come, you make do with good old-fashioned gruntwork. 

Recently, I was reminded of how reading broadly and applying serendipity as method can be immensely rewarding. Earlier this year, I bought El Diccionario de lugares utópicos [Dictionary of utopian places], edited by Juan Pro and published by Silex in 2022. It can be downloaded as a PDF here. This dictionary is a wonderful resource for anyone working on utopian thinking, and I have spent many hours this summer poring over several of its entries. What prompted the purchase of this book was that I am working on an article on violence in utopian societies, co-authored with a friend of mine. Several of the dictionary’s entries have proved very useful, but since I also want to read the book in its entirety I have also spent time on entries further removed from our topic. 

 

Admittedly, reading entries from a dictionary of utopian places when co-authoring an article on utopian thinking does not qualify as reading broadly, even though some of the entries in question have pertained to times and places very far removed from the scope of the article. But the revelations I experienced when perusing entries on the fringes of relevance for this particular article had nothing to do with it. Instead, I suddenly encountered formulations and key points that allowed me to get a much better understanding of a very different topic.

 

For two forthcoming publications, I am again delving into the cult of saints in medieval Norway. I am particularly interested in the ways in which specific cults enabled elite groups to formulate a vision of a golden age in order to legitimise attempts to recreate that past golden age in the present. This way of manipulating history is a universal feature of human history, and although this manipulation unfolds in a unique way in medieval Norway, its unfolding is not wholly alien to other similar manipulation projects. Consequently, as I was reading about the role of the Inca Empire in modern-day Peruvian utopianism, I encountered a formulation by a Peruvian historian that fitted perfectly into an analytical point that I had tried to put into writing. The contexts of the two topics are of course very different, emerging as they have from unique historical trajectories. Nonetheless, because humans can only seek power in so many ways, the contexts were sufficiently similar that I was able to use one to illuminate the other. 

 

There is a particular joy in embracing serendipity as method. Rather than worrying about whether you are missing any of the important texts pertaining to your topic, you can read beyond your field with a clear conscience, knowing that there is no single revelation to find, and acknowledging that revelations can strike from many different directions. It is impossible to say whether it will come from a study on a very different topic, from a novel, from a poem, or from a comic book. By reading broadly and expanding your frame of reference, you are better suited to catching such connections that might help you strengthen and deepen your analysis. Consequently, there are no wrong turns to make, no wasted pages, no lost hours – everything you read prepares you for receiving the revelations that lurk somewhere in the sum total of human writing. Reading broadly, and aiming for serendipity, are the two best approaches for ensuring that those revelations can be recognised as such. 

Reading-spots, part 7

 

For work-related reasons, I am currently thinking back to one of my favourite reading-spots from the past few years, namely the restaurant Taiga in the neighbourhood of Lista in Madrid, where I spent many evenings in April and May of 2023, reading, writing, thinking, and just enjoying existence. One of the reasons why this reading-spot has such a strong place in my memory is partly that the two weeks I spent in Madrid that spring were two of the best weeks I have had in the past decade, and from my sidewalk table I could enjoy the feeling of being in a familiar and beloved place - feeling at home, of sorts. Another reason why this particular reading-spot is so important to me, is that it was here that I took a huge step in a new professional direction. 

This spring, I had started focusing more on researching utopian literature, a field in which I had long been interested, and which I was now able to pursue with more concerted effort thanks to a friend and colleague with whom I began collaborating. On that sidewalk outside the restaurant, I spent long evenings reading Gabriel de Foigny's utopian novel La Terre Australe Connue (The Southern Land, Known) in David Fausett's English translation. I spent much time thinking and writing fervently on a draft that provided an important foundation for future writing. It felt already then like an intellectual turning-point, and this feeling has since been proven correct. 

But this sidewalk table was also the spot for other types of reading, and other types of thinking. It was a busy spring, and I was also preparing a conference presentation to be held in Rome in a month's time, as well as a speech to be held in a fortnight's time in my home village. Looking back, this table was the nexus of my effort to be a man of the world yet remain a village boy at one and the same time, two roles that I try to connect through my intellectual work. It was also a place where I enjoyed the verses of my friend Raquel Lanseros, one of my all-time favourite poets, whose words have given me so much to be thankful for in this life. 

In short, this was a reading-spot, a writing-spot, and a thinking-spot where much happened, at least in my brain and on paper. It is a place I will always treasure.   

New publication: The functions of religion and science in utopian thinking in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

Today, I was notified of the publication of an article that is one of the texts that I have had the most fun writing. The article in question is titled 'The functions of religion and science in utopian thinking in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period', and is published in the journal Belgrade Philosophical Annual vol. 37, issue 2. The text can be accessed and downloaded here and here. The article is based on a talk I gave last February, which can be accessed through this blogpost. There are significant differences between the talk and the published article, however, both because of how my thinking has developed, and because of new things I have read since then. 

The article is quite simple, as the title suggests. I explore how texts that can be understood as utopian, broadly speaking, from both the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period utilised religion and science in fashioning the ideal condition. By spanning the medieval-early modern divide, I also seek to reject this divide and point to continuities in the worldviews within which the various utopists formulated their ideal societies. It was great fun to write, because it allowed me an excuse to delve into material that has hitherto been quite peripheral to my research, yet which has held my interest for the better part of a decade. Moreover, the longue durée perspective has made me even more convinced about the need to rethink the artificial divide between medieval and early modern thinking, and also how we understand utopianism.   

Utopia closed - encountering a literary topos in Pontevedra

 

Every once in a while, reality corresponds with fiction, and sometimes in delightful ways. These are the brief moments that remind us that even though literary topoi have often come to be seen as signs of literature being divorced from reality - relying instead on cliches and intertextual games to express things - these topoi do resonate with reality. To paraphrase Siri Hustvedt in The summer without men, something that never happens in modern fiction might still happen in modern life. Conversely, just because something is a literary topos does not mean that it cannot echo the real world in some way or another. I was reminded of this puzzling relationship between truth and fiction during a visit to Pontevedra in Galicia. I took a bus from Santiago de Compostela in the morning, and around midday I found myself walking the quiet streets of a town preparing for the mid-afternoon rest. 

Not far from the bus station, I happened upon a bar with the promising name Utopia. For me, having dedicated much of my research time to utopian literature, this felt like a lovely example of synchronicity, where two elements of your life come into contact by chance rather than design. I would have felt professionally obliged to visit this bar, but unfortunately it was closed. However, although I was disappointed not being able to enter Utopia, there is also a delightful aspect to my misfortune. After all, utopian spaces - broadly understood as locations where life is better than elsewhere - are typically closed off for the majority of people. Only those who are selected or who otherwise fit the criteria for entry are allowed to access Utopia. We find this restriction in classical literature, medieval formulations of ideal spaces, and the more purified literary versions in early modern texts. In other words, this chance encounter at the wrong time of day enabled me to live a literary topos.  

Typographic continuity - an example from the novel Antangil

 

In a recent blogpost, I wrote about some of my early impressions and experiences researching the 1616 utopian novel Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes (History of the great and admirable kingdom of Antangil, unknown until the present by all historians and cosmographers). Since then, I have had cause to delve deeper into structure of the book, and the book as an object - mainly in order to compare its thematic division with similar works, and to see how much of the novel was dedicated to military matters. 

One detail that struck me with particular force during this work, was how the typography of the of a book printed in 1616 retained many of the same features of medieval manuscript culture that was carried over into the first printed European books. Granted, I always tend to emphasise continuity and to eschew the common medieval/early modern divide, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how the abbreviations from the Middle Ages were retained. One passage that demonstrated the situation particularly well is the one illustrated below, from a chapter on the exercises of the gendarmerie in times of peace. The passage describes how the soldiers are promised to be liberally bestowed with "[charges] et honneurs, venans à se monstrer de plus en plus braves, genereux et fideles" (responsibilities and honours, coming to show themselves off as more and more brave, generous and faithful). I am amused by this aspect of early seventeenth typography, and especially because this makes it actually easier for me to read the text, unaccustomed as I am to read French and seventeenth-century material. 

I. D. M. G. T., Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes, 1616, p. 90.

A year in reading - 2024

 

For me, 2024 was the closing of a chapter, as my forty-month postdoctoral contract came to its end. The knowledge that this would quite possibly be my last year in a long while having access to a university library, did have a significant impact on how I went about my reading. While most of my reading in any given year is a balance between the structure and chaos, between plans and whims, the struggle between these opposing forces was felt more keenly as I sat out to prioritise like someone saving books from a burning building.

 

Luckily, 2024 was a busy year for me, one that provided a lot of opportunities to travel, and a lot of opportunities to delve into new material and expand my horizon in many different directions. As I always enjoy how travel and books serve to reinforce the impressions from either in my brain, there turned out to be many memorable moments throughout the year.

 

Travelling by page   

While I have been fortunate enough to do a lot of travelling during my recent employment, most of my travelling is by page. I always try to travel as widely as possible, but this year I was particularly anxious to explore new countries through their books, since I wanted to make the most of the university library’s holdings, as well as the interlibrary loan system. In the end, I think it would be an overstatement to say that I made the most of it, but I did manage to tick several countries off my list.     

 

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, By night the mountain burns

(Translated by Jethro Soutar)

The first country I visited was Equatorial Guinea, through Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s novel By night the mountain burns, which describes life on the island of Annobón. The book was a steadfast companion during my wanderings in Madrid, and by a lovely coincidence I was still reading this novel by the time I visited the anthropological museum and beheld some artefacts from Equatorial Guinea (although the mainland, rather than Annobón).            

 

Several of my paginated peregrinations this year were directed to the Arab-speaking world, partly by deliberate choice since I saw an opportunity to fill in the blanks on the Arabian peninsula. Unlike the synchronicity of reading By night the mountain burns, the three books in question contrasted notably with my surroundings as I was reading my way through them. The best example is perhaps Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh, which is a fantastic portrayal of social stratification and gender roles in turn-of-the-century Saudi Arabia. I read most of this book during a train journey between Bergen and Oslo that was delayed by several hours, and where the snow-covered mountains were a world away from urban life in Riyadh. The contrasts were less striking when I read Wajdi al-Ahdal’s A land without Jasmine (a crime story from Yemen), since I was then travelling through the Netherlands and Belgium. This was also the case when reading Sarah A. al Shafei’s Yummah (a sort-of historical novel from Bahrain), as I was then in a relatively warm Oslo. Nonetheless, the differences between the read and the travelled worlds were notable. I learned a lot through these books, especially Girls of Riyadh, which should be read by most men due to its various insights into the vulnerability of women in a patriarchal society.        

Rajaa Alsanea, Girls of Riyadh

(Translated by Rajaa Alsanea andMarilyn Booth)

Wajdi al-Ahdal, A land without jasmine 

(Translated by William Maynard Hutchins)

Sarah A. al Shafei, Yummah

As for the remaining three countries, the contrasts were also notable. Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias provided fascinating views of Guatemalan folklore, as well as social history, and most of this book was consumed en route to and from the narrow and extremely beautiful village of Flåm in the Western Norwegian fjords. Mother’s Beloved, a collection of short stories by Laotian author Outhine Bounyavong depicted a world very different from December in Western Norway. Similarly, the dry desert vistas and narrow vales of Azerbaijan in Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino (in a Norwegian translation) was in many respects alien to my own frame of reference. Yet all these novels did provide an inroad that allowed me to sense a deep-running vein of familiarity, namely because they all dealt with aspects of rural societies. Even though life on a farm is significantly different in Norway compared to these countries, the concerns and much of the work remain startlingly similar in various aspects, and I felt I could immerse myself more deeply in these books than I might otherwise have been able to do, had I not had a farming background.    

Outhine Bounyavong, Mother's Beloved

(Translated by Bounheng Inversin, Roger Rumpf, Jacqui Chagnon, 

Thipason Phimviengkham, and William Galloway)

 

New places for reading       

Luckily, 2024 was a year of travelling, both for work and for my personal pleasure. For me, part of the pleasure of travelling consists of finding new places for reading. The very act of moving through pages in a new location makes me connect more strongly to that place, and what might otherwise have been a very fleeting and difficult-to-remember occasion, instead becomes lodged in my memory in a very positive way. Such memories are important, as they are part of the arsenal to wield against those dreary days where routine and overwork make time feel like a grey stodge.    

 

Some of the most memorable reading-places of 2024 are connected with my foray into the history of the cult of Saint James the Elder in Santiago de Compostela. Not only did I travel to Compostela twice in the course of the year, I also read several books about the cult and its development. Reading some of those texts in Compostela made it easier to envision the past about which I sought to learn and write. I found it particularly thrilling to read part of the liturgical repertoire of Saint James – as contained in the first book of Codex Calixtinus, a mid-twelfth-century collection of texts pertaining to that cult – while staying in the place where this repertoire was put together. Relying on a translation of the liturgical texts, I read them both at what became my regular haunt in Compostela during a five-day sojourn, and also in the nave of the cathedral itself. Reading liturgy hits very differently when you imbibe the words in the very same location where they have been performed for generations, and, perhaps more importantly, where they were intended to be performed.

 

My regular haunt in Santiago de Compostela

The nave of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

Antón de Pazos (ed.), Translating the Relics of St James – From Jerusalem to Compostela

Santiago de Compostela

My regular haunt in Lisbon

In the course of two trips, I spent ten days in Compostela last year, and this was not enough time to get through all the texts pertaining to Saint James that I read throughout 2024. After leaving Compostela, I went to Lisbon. There, I found another regular haunt – as is my habit when staying somewhere for several days – and at this café just beside the entrance of where I was staying, I continued the literary journey that had reached its zenith in Galicia. This was in May, and a few months later I continued this particular theme when travelling to Belgium, where the chance encounter of a chapel dedicated to the Compostelan patron reminded me that this particular cult was an important phenomenon in the Middle Ages.     

John Williams and Alison Stones (eds.), The Codex Calixtinus and the Shrine of St. James

A charming café in Lier, Belgium

Even though the cult of Saint James the Elder loomed large in last year’s reading, there were many other books, and many other travels which brought about new places for reading. A trip to Vienna in January allowed me to read about medieval European perceptions of otherness while sharing in the Austrian penchant for apricot juice. Moreover, as I was in Vienna for work, and as my colleagues and I were working in a converted post office which now houses the Austrian Academy of Sciences, I occasionally withdrew to the ground floor café where the architectural grandeur of a bygone age became a pleasant framework for both reading and writing. My travels in the Iberian peninsula also provided good opportunities for finding new places. Aside from those examples that I have already noted in relation to my reading about Saint James the Elder, I also took great delight in reading about the cult of saints in medieval France while eating traditional Galician cooking in both Compostela and Pontevedra, especially because these were places frequented by the locals. Similarly, as cancelled plans provided me with a very quiet December Saturday in Madrid, I could read about relics in the medieval Nordics at an almost empty little café in one of the barrios on the outskirts of the capital.       

Shirin A. Khanmohamadi, In light of another's word

View from the café in the old post office, now housing the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Thomas Head, Hagiography and the cult of saints

Pontevedra

 

Thomas Head, Hagiography and the cult of saints

Santiago de Compostela

Lena Liepe, Reliker och relikbruk i det medeltida Norden

Madrid

Reading by lists       

While I am a chaotic reader, driven by impulses to a far greater degree than I would like to admit, I do try to follow a set list of twelve items each year, divided by four categories: a) Nobel laureates, b) Norwegian books, c) academic books, and d) books from a list I put together during my first year at university. However, since I was painfully aware that my current chapter was coming to a close, and since I own many of the books in category d, I neglected this category completely, and instead focussed especially on academic books. Consequently, I did a lot of learning as I delved into a number of fascinating monographs and article collections, several of which pertaining to the cult of Saint James the Elder. Other academic books, however, were chosen for different reasons, and partly owing to my unwillingness to be too logical about my chosen reading. It was on an unrestrained impulse of this latter kind that I ended up reading Jennifer Nelson’s wonderful Disharmony of the Spheres, a brilliant analysis of the theological, scientific and art-historical zeitgeist of the 1530s. This is a book that has little to do with my own work, at least for the time being, but it was very inspiring, and a true eye-opener.    

 

Jennifer Nelson, Disharmony of the spheres

This year, I also mostly neglected Nobel laureates, with the exception of Asturias’ Men of Maize. On the other hand, my work allowed me to delve into a number of Norwegian historical sources, both medieval chivalric romances, and medieval laws. The deep-dive into the laws was prompted by the 750-year-anniversary of the Norwegian law of the realm of 1274. This anniversary was an event that presided over the public discourse throughout the country, and it provided me with a good opportunity to incorporate the law material in my teaching as well as in public lectures. Moreover, a friend and I were commissioned to write the script for an exhibition at the historical site of Moster in Western Norway, where we provided a longue durée perspective in Norwegian law history. Naturally, 2024 was the year when I finished reading the Law of the Gulathing province (written down in the mid-twelfth century) and the Law of the realm. As interesting as these books are as sources, they are nonetheless slow reads, and therefore they came to play a big part in my year of reading.  

The Law of the Gulathing province

(Translated by Knut Robberstad)

Reading while waiting outside a lovely Tamil restaurant in Oslo

The Law of the realm

(Translated by Absalon Taranger)

Read on the train en route to a conference in Bergen

 

A meeting in Madrid           

The greatest book-related highlight of the past year was a meeting in Madrid, where I caught up with Raquel Lanseros, my favourite poet of all time. Her verses are deeply important to me, and they have been so ever since I first encountered them in the first spring of the pandemic. At the time, I was cooped up in a small barrack on the edge of a Swedish wood, and translating some of her poems into Norwegian became a way of keeping relatively sane. Thanks to her immense generosity, moreover, I was allowed to put these translations on the blog, and share them with readers. This generosity laid the foundation for a treasured friendship, and in 2024 we finally managed to meet up. I was then gifted her latest collection of poetry, namely El sol y las otras estrellas (The sun and the other stars), which is a powerful meditation on love in its myriad iterations. This collection became a treasured companion that I read at my regular haunt during my Madrid sojourn, in Compostela, and finally in the Western Norwegian fjords, where I finished it.

Raquel Lanseros, El sol y las otras estrellas

Read at my regular haunt in Madrid (April/May 2024)

Santiago de Compostela

 

Utopian literature   

As in 2023, last year I immersed myself in utopian literature, aiming to read a number of texts related to this topic. Part of the motivation for doing so was a course I co-designed with a colleague and friend, where we traced certain themes in utopian thinking from Antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern Period. However, I have also been able to work on this topic for articles, lectures, and conference presentations, and it has been a great pleasure to immerse myself in a wide variety of such texts. As part of this work, I have read The Letter of Prester John, a forgery made at the court of Frederick Barbarossa, which purported to be sent from a Christian king who ruled a fantastical kingdom in the middle of India. The figure of Prester John had a massive impact on Western European utopian thinking form the twelfth century onwards, and continued to provide a touchstone for several generations of utopists.    

 

Other texts in this theme have been Anno 7603 (1781), a time-travel theatrical play by Johann Herman Wessel, Denis Veiras’ The History of the Sevarambians (1675), A Narrative of the Life and astonishing Adventures of John Daniel (1751) by Ralph Morris, and The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes (1708) by Hendrik Smeeks. Even the last finished book of year, The First Men in the Moon (1901) by H.G. Wells falls into this category. These books have been very enjoyable in their own right, but also immensely useful as I continue to research utopian thinking and how this aspect of the human imagination continues to impact the current discourse.

Denis Veiras, The History of the Sevarambians

Hendrik Smeeks, The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes

(Translated by Robert H. Leek)

H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

A book in every language

As with every year, small mini-projects of reading materialise along the way. In the autumn of 2024, I realised that I was on my way to read one book in each of the six language in which I have reasonably fluent in both speaking and writing, and so I decided to complete the set, especially as I have not managed to do so in many years. Norwegian and English were easy to tick off the list, as these are the two main languages of my reading in any given year. Spanish is likewise a language I engage with a lot, but it is far rarer that I finish an entire book. One Spanish book that I finished in 2024 was El porque de los mapas (literally The why of maps) by Eduard Dalmau, a very fascinating account of the history of cartography until c.1500. Despite its shoddy treatment of the Middle Ages, it was a pleasant companion on several of my travels last year.         

Eduard Dalmau, El porque de los mapas

In Danish, I read the novel Spionen fra Atlantis (The spy from Atlantis) by Erik Juul Clausen. This is a delightful fantasy novel which describes a mission to find and steal a secret weapon in Egypt and bring it back to Helgoland, the centre of an Atlantis populated by proto-Danish speakers. Swedish was represented by Lena Liepe’s wonderful account of the cult of relics in the Nordic Middle Ages, Reliker och relikbruk i det medeltida Norden (Relics and the use of relics in the medieval Nordics). I do, however, feel that I have cheated with regards to German, as I read Alberto Manguel’s Sehnsucht Utopie (Utopian yearning), which was a translation from French that I encountered in a Vienna bookshop.  

Alberto Manguel, Sehnsucht Utopie

(Translated by Amelie Thoma)

Lena Liepe, Reliker och relikbruk i det medeltida Norden

 

What made me particularly happy about this mini-project was that I was able to finish my first book in French, namely Voyages en Utopie (Travels in Utopia) by Georges Jean. Granted, this book is very well illustrated, so it did not require a lot of reading to finish it, but I nonetheless felt a delightful pride in what is my first proper step in the further exploration of untranslated Francophone literature.

 

Georges Jean, Voyages en Utopie

Sundry highlights    

In addition to these main themes, there have also been several other highlights, both small and large, that have comprised the reading year of 2024.

 

 

Writing the last entry in the guest book at the family shieling, and whose first entry was written in 1957.         

 

Dropping by the Madrid book festival.        

 

Purchasing a collection of medieval sources pertaining to Portugal at a metro station bookshop in Lisbon.

 

Contemplating my book haul after two weeks in Iberia.     

 

Seeing the local bookshop in my native municipality advertising a multivolume work of local history with the slogan ‘You don’t need Google when you have the hamlet book’ (a hamlet book being a historical overview of all the families and farms of each local hamlet).           

 

Receiving author and editor copies of a co-edited volume of articles.

 

Working on articles at the shieling.              

 

Encountering a mini library at the train station in Lier, Belgium.  

 

Visiting the exhibition on the Law of the realm of 1274 at the National Library in Oslo (several times).     

 

Spending some last sessions of reading and writing at one of my favourite haunts, namely the library café at the University of Oslo.

 

+++   

Related blogposts (2024) 

My quest for Austrian poetry 

Synchronicity in Madrid 

A Dutch haul 

Reading-spots, part 5 

Saint Thomas and apostolic succession in the Antipodes

 

When researching the history of utopian thought, one of my main points of interest is when I can map the continuity of an idea or a topos across the medieval/early modern periodisation. My interest stems from the artificial nature of periods, and how these chronological divides continue to impede our understanding of the past. The other day, I encountered one such example of continuity that both pleased me and surprised me. 

The example in question comes from the 1616 novel Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a present à tous historiens et cosmographes (‘History of the great and marvellous kingdom of Antangil, unknown to historians and cosmographers until the present day’). On the title page of the 1616, the work is attributed to a certain I. D. M. G. T, whose identity is, as far as I know, still a mystery to us. The work was part of a growing vogue that followed in the wake of Thomas More’s Utopia, published one hundred years before Antangil, where authors described ideal societies found in faraway locations, which could also be used to satirise or criticise the real-world societies of the author’s own time. While the main form of this vogue – a novel about an invented ideal society – had Thomas More’s work as its starting point, both More and later authors belonged to long strands within the history of ideas, and therefore ensured a great deal of continuity in thought and form from both the medieval and the pre-medieval cultural frameworks.   

 

At the point of writing this blogpost, I have not read Antangil in its entirety, and I hesitate to say much about its content, as most of my knowledge about the work comes from secondary sources – especially David Fausett’s excellent 1993 monograph Writing the New World. What I can say, however, is that this marvellous kingdom is located south of the tropic of capricorn, and south of Great Java, the latter being a common point of orientation in late-medieval travelogues. The reader is not only provided with coordinates, but also a woodcut map made with incredible detail, where the main villages and rivers are numbered, and these 129 numbers correspond to a list of three columns where the names are provided. The capital of the kingdom, Sangil, is located at the bottom of a long, narrow inlet akin to a fjord.  

The great kingdom of Antangil

Courtesy of Gallica BnF

Table of the main cities and rivers of Antangil

The capital of Sangil

I hope to delve more deeply into the world of Antangil in the future, but at this point I am most interested in the fifth book, which describes how Christianity was brought to Antangil, and how the kingdom got its first martyr. The events are summarised in the header of chapter 1, which states that the holy gospel was proclaimed the capital of Sangil by Byrachil, who is described as a very sage ‘Braquemane’ who was the disciple of Saint Thomas the Apostle. As I have yet to read how Byrachil met his martyrdom in chapter 16, I can only focus on what the information from chapter 1 tells us, and how this connects to utopian thinking from the Middle Ages. 

Header for chapter 1, book 5

If we start with the description of Byrachil as a ‘Braquemane’, this points us to the tradition of medieval travelogues exemplified in particular by Marco Polo and John Mandeville, two figures whose works remained impactful and widely read well into the seventeenth century. (I say this with full awareness that it was Rustichello of Pisa who gave Marco Polo’s account the shape by which we know it today, and also that John Mandeville might never have existed.) In these accounts, we read about non-Christian sages who are given variations of the name ‘Bragmanni’, which in turn comes from ‘Brahmin’. The descriptions of these sages drew heavily on the so-called Alexander tradition, a long line of fantastical accounts of the exploits of Alexander the Great that comprise the legacy of the Alexander romance by Pseudo-Callisthenes rather than any contemporary accounts from Alexander’s own time. What interests me here, however, is that the figure of the Brahmin was well-established as a marker for the positive ‘other’, and also as a representative of the far east. That the author of Antangil has decided to use such a figure as the apostle of their fictional utopia shows that they were familiar with the traditions of the Middle Ages, and that they expected the medieval traditions to be known to their audience. In short, we see that the idea of the Brahmin was still a figure of contemporary resonance in the early seventeenth century, and that markers of the ideal society established in medieval writing still served that function centuries later.  

 

Another point of importance is that Byrachil was the disciple of Saint Thomas, the apostle of Christ whom the post-biblical apocryphal literature claimed to have evangelised in India. Thomas’ missionary activities were accepted as historically true in the Middle Ages, and there are to this day those who believe that this account is based on historical reality. As Saint Thomas was the apostle of India, it only makes sense to use his activity as a historical reference point for the introduction of Christianity in the antipodean kingdom of Antangil. A similar idea can be found in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624/27), where the society in question is converted to Christianity through a letter from Saint Bartholomew (who was also credited with evangelising in India). In terms of continuity of ideas, however, the use of Saint Thomas as a marker of an ideal society located on the far side of the world – albeit vicariously through his disciple – is also seen in medieval literature. In the mid-twelfth century, members of the court of Frederick Barbarossa forged a letter claiming to be from Prester John, a Christian king in the east, who ruled over an ideal kingdom, which became a fixture in Latin medieval thought well into the sixteenth century and beyond. In the letter, the king states that the tomb is Saint Thomas the Apostle is located in his realm, and that he undertakes pilgrimages to this holy site. Moreover, the king’s own palace is modelled on the palace that Saint Thomas built for King Gundoforus of India, which means that the connection to the apostle is both one of architectural emulation and continuous contact by way of his relics. In other words, Saint Thomas, as apostle, saint, and biblical figure, a marker that proves the ideal condition – the utopian quality – of Prester John’s realm. This same function is fulfilled by him – by way of his disciple – in the novel Antangil.         

 

The Christianisation of the kingdom of Antangil by Byrachil also rhymes with the medieval thoughtworld in another way, namely that apostles of new members in the Christian oikumene had a connection to a biblical figure. Such a connection provides a link to biblical history, and when the figure in question is an apostle, the Christianisation of the new location takes the form of apostolic succession. Such a succession was not always the case in the Christian histories of Latin medieval kingdoms – Latin is here used about the liturgical language, not about the vernacular – and there are plenty of medieval polities where the apostolic mission is not traced all the way back to the Bible. The native France of Antangil’s author, however, had several traditions concerning such biblical connections. In the ninth-century Vita Dionysi by Hilduin, Saint Dionysius – or Saint Denis of Paris – was conflated with two other individuals by the same name, one of whom was Dionysius the Areopagite, who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, which recounts his meeting with the apostle Paul. Through this conflation, the apostle of the Paris region was linked to the apostolic activities of Paul. Similarly, around the year 1000, Ademar of Chabannes, a historian at the abbey of Saint-Martial in Limoges, rewrote his chronicles to claim that Martial was also a first-century figure. It is tempting to see the apostolic succession from Saint Thomas in India to Byrachil in Antangil as a variant of the theme represented by Dionysius and Martial.          

 

The novel Antangil is very much a work of the seventeenth century, in that it belongs to a contemporary vogue in utopian writing. However, it is also steeped in ideas and traditions that run through the Middle Ages, and which showcase how ideal societies have been imagined or represented in medieval writings. The connection with the Brahmins is a utopian strand where an ideal society is located in the far east. The connection with Saint Thomas is a utopian strand which also places the ideal society in the far east, but which also includes biblical history, and, by extension, the figure of Prester John, the ideal Christian king. The connection with the idea of apostolic succession might be seen as stemming from similar ideas in French medieval hagiography. These medieval strands have remained forceful and important by 1616, and they continued to be so for centuries afterwards. The novel Antangil, therefore, is a good reminder that ideas have a long and often curious life, and that there is more that connects the so-called modern world with the Middle Ages than what separates it.