Article - Strategies for constructing institutional identity

Yesterday I received the happy news my article "Strategies for constructing an institutional identity: three case studies from the liturgical office of Saint Edmund Martyr" has been published by the Open Library of the Humanities, Cambridge, in the special essay collection Authors, Narratives, and Audiences in Medieval Saints’ Lives edited by Katharine Handel. The article is open access and is available for download here. The abstract of the article is as follows.

The following article explores some of the ways in which the leaders of a medieval ecclesiastical institution, in this case Bury St Edmund, could construct that institution’s own identity by textual production that was centred on the figure of their patron saint, Edmund Martyr. This textual production, and the formulation of Saint Edmund, underwent a continuous development from 1065 onwards, which can be most clearly seen in the composition of the liturgical office for Edmund’s feast day. By an examination of three examples taken from this office, I aim to demonstrate some of the ways in which the figure of Edmund was altered, how the narrative of his passion story was developed and what audiences these changes were aimed at. The purpose of the article is to emphasise the function of the office as a vehicle for the construction of institutional identity in the Middle Ages.

The living page - marginal notations in the Nuremberg Chronicle

Earlier this week, I went to the reading room of the university library of the University of Southern Denmark to research some of their liturgical fragments. As I was picking up the items I had ordered, I noticed that their copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle was available and I decided to have yet another look through this magnificent historiography. I have leafed through this book several times, but I'm always happy to return to it and notice new details in its beautiful woodcuts. One of the aspects I particularly enjoy about this volume is its many marginal notations. The book belongs to a collection which the university library purchased from Herlufsholm School in Sjælland in 1968, and therefore this volume of the Nuremberg Chronicle has been part of the education of many young Danish boys in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Leafing through these centuries-old pages consequently brings many reminds that these pages are living pages, in that they were actively used and enscribed with notes, presumably to make it easier to find some crucial passage in the preparation for a test or an exam.

The Nuremberg Chronicle

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA M 38

The reading room of Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek

This time I was particularly drawn to this page, which describes the geography and zoology of various parts of the world in a mixture of classical Roman learning and biblical history. As can be seen, this page appears to have held many important pieces of information for a young student, as he (and it must have been a he since Herlufsholm was an all boys school) has taken extensive notes concerning various geographical locations, such as Africa, Ethiopia and Pentapolis (the five North African Roman cities Apollonia, Cyrene, Ptolemais, Taucheira and Berenice). As can be seen in the notation pointing out Africa, the student has also noted the name of Noah's son Cham, traditionally believed to be the one repopulating the African continent after the flood.

 These notations are important pieces of evidence to the reception history of the Nuremberg Chronicle in a specific educational environment, and these notations might be valuable clues into the education at Herlufsholm in the Early Modern Period. And most importantly, they remind us - if any reminder were needed - that old, carefully curated books also once were new and actively used, just as we now make notes in the books of our curricula and reading lists.

Trout - a poem by Seamus Heaney

Trout
Hangs, a fat gun-barrel,
deep under arched bridges
or slips like butter down
the throat of the river.

From depths smooth-skinned as plums
his muzzle gets bull's eye;
picks off grass-sseed and moths
that vanish, torpedoed.

Where water unravels
over gravel-beds he
is fired from the shallows
white belly reporting

flat; darts like a tracer-
bullet back between stones
and is never burnt out.
A volley of cold blood

ramrodding the current.

From Death of a Naturalist, 1966

Saint Bartholomew's devil - on the moon

I'm currently reading Cyrano de Bergerac's satirical utopian novel Voyages to the Moon and the Sun (Les Histoires comique des États et Empires de la Lune et Soleil), the first part of which concerns the protagonist's journey to the moon where he encounters a civilisation of large humans who walk on all fours, and - in the fashion of the topsy-turvy world of utopias - conduct most of their affairs in a very different manner from those of Cyrano's native seventeenth-century France. The novel contains a lot of interesting details, espcecially for its debt to older novels of moon travel and utopian societies and its influence upon later novels. As a medievalist, however, there was one particular detail which caught my attention, and which served as yet another reminder that the stories of the saints as they were told throughout the Middle Ages, continued to be told and to have an influence on writings and story-telling in what we now call the Early Modern Period.

The detail in question comes at the very end of the novel, where the protagonist discusses the existence of God with the master of the house in which he is lodging. This master is a young man, because on the moon the reverence for age is turned upside down and so he is the sharpest wit of the house and treats his father as unpleasantly as a father in Cyrano's France might treat his son. Cyrano used this device of the contrary world to explore matters of theology, statemanship and sexuality in his own time by using the quadruped men of the moon as a mirror to his own society and a mouthpiece for his own ideas. The young moon-man lambasts the novel's protagonist for the latter's belief in God, and delivers an argument against it. After the main point of the lecture is delivered, however, a knock on the door is heard and in enters - in the translation of Richard Aldington - "a large, black, hairy man" who "approached us, seized the blasphemer by the middle and carried him off up the chimney."

The protagonist grabs hold of the moon-man out of pity and attempts to draw him back, but is himself carried off and follows the devil and the damned moon-man back to earth, where the protagonist manages to let go just before the devil enters Hell in the earth's interior. This devil serves both to ward off any potential censorship of the novel and of Cyrano's person, since Cyrano's lunar mouthpiece is sentenced to eternal damnation for his atheism. Yet at the same time, this damnation is only set in motion after the main argument has been delivered and before the protagonist has a chance to rebut it and thus prove God's existence, thus leaving the matter on the side of Cyrano. Moreover, the devil serves as a useful device for sending the protagonist back to Earth in a speedy manner.

Bartholomew inspecting his knife

Beaune - BM - ms. 0039. f.070, psalter, 13th century

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

The reason why this detail caught my attention as a medievalist, however, is the description of the devil as a black man, indeed as an "Ethiopian". This description of the devil has its root in early Christian apocryphal literature, and there are in particular two episodes of early Christian hagiography that has helped disseminating this image into the popular imagination of later centuries. The first instance is found in the Life of Antony of Egypt written in the mid-fourth century by Athanasius of Alexandria. Here, Antony encounters a being called the "spirit of fornication", which is described as an ugly black boy. A slightly more elaborate description, however, is found in the legend of Saint Bartholomew (discussed in this previous blogpost), which was a legend popularised through various collections of the stories of the saints, perhaps most importantly Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea. In the legend of Saint Bartholomew, we read how he travelled to India to convert its inhabitants to Christianity, and there encountered a devil who was worshipped as a pagan god. This devil is described as having the guise of an Ethiopian, just as the devil visiting Cyrano's blasphemer on the moon. The appellation of "Ethiopian" echoes a long-standing confusion in ancient and medieval geographical learning in which India and Ethiopia were situated very close to one another and were sometimes talked about as neighbouring countries, or as an interchangeable shorthand for a distant, exotic place.

Cyrano does not mention Saint Bartholomew, and neither does he have to. The imagery of the devil as an Ethiopian is clearly influenced from the apocryphal legend, and its survival well into the seventeenth century is an important testament to the endurance of these stories of the saints, and the impression they exert on the literary imagination.

Judith beheading Holofernes - a medieval gallery

The story of the widow Judith who is captured by the Babylonian general Holofernes is one of the biblical books now largely considered to be apocryphal. It is a famous story, often summarised in art by the depiction of how Judith decapitates the drunk and sleeping general, helped by her maid. Some of the most famous paintings of Judith have been executed by artists such as Caravaggio and Botticelli, and we are today perhaps most familiar with the various renditions from the Renaissance and early Baroque. But there is also a wealth of depictions from medieval bibles, portraying the resolute widow with all the intensity and vivacity you could want in a picture. As these medieval illuminations are less well known, at least to a general audience, I have here compiled a very small gallery with images taken from this website, to give you a taste of the gory good stuff of medieval Judith.

Arles - BM - ms. 0001, f.217v, third quarter of the thirteenth century

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

 

Amiens - BM - ms. 0108, f.144, Bible, Northern Spain, 1197

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

Alençon - BM - ms. 0054, f.152, Bible, c.1240-50

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

 

 Autun - BM - ms. S 197, f179v, Bible, North-Eastern Italy, thirteenth century

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

Beaune - BM - ms.0023, f.169, Bible, c.1270-80

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr) 

 

A poem by Lenrie Peters

I am continuously seeking to expand my literary horizon and explore works from every part of the globe. Among the geographical areas with which I am most fascinated is West-Africa, in particular the literature of the immediate post-colonial era in which African writers sought to establish a literary traditions for their own countries. In so doing, the writers were aiming for a double purpose. On the one hand, their literature helped to expand the country's own cultural scene and thus distinguish this country's cultre from that of other countries, especially its former colonisers. But on the other hand, this literature could also connect the culture of the newly independent country with the rest of the world, for instance by drawing on cultural expressions and modes from countries such as their former colonisers. This duality is not paradoxical or contradictory but rather a very common dynamic in cultural histories all over the world.

One example of the first generation of post-colonial West-Africa is Lenrie Peters (1932-2009), born in Gambia and educated in Sierra Leone's capital Freetown - both of which were British colonies at the time - before studying in Cambridge. Peters was a pan-africanist, meaning that he emphasised what he considered African values and sought a united Africa. In 1967, two years after the country's independence, Peters published his collection of predominantly untitled poems, Satellites, which comprises a range of intensely poetic reflections that draw on the wide vista of world history for its content - alluding to events in Europe, Asia, Africa, etc. - and thus demonstrating Peters' international approach both to literature in general and African literature in particular. In this blogpost, I present you with poem number 2 from this collection. The edition used is that of Heinemann's African Writers Series.



Satellites, no. 2


Autumn burns me with
primaeval fire. Makes my skin
taut with expectation,
hurls me out of summer fatigue
on to a new Bridge of Sighs.

Somewhere I feel the heart
of the earth pumping, and down below
it bleeds in a million ripples.
I drop a sweet memory into
the flow and the cascading grips me with fascination

Great trees in transit fall
are made naked in langour of shame
solitary like actors on a stage
like stars, orphans, celebrities,
politicians, uncomfortably mysteriously like you and me.

But I will not mourn the sadness.
I will go dead-leaf gathering
for the fire in a slice of sunlight
to fill me lungs with odours of decay
and my eyes with mellowed rainbow colours

I will go creeping down tasselled
latticed tree-avenues of light
and listen to squirrel tantrums
punctuate the orchestration of autumn silence
and hold in my hand the coiling stuff of nature

Then I will love
Yes love; extravagantly under
the flutter of dying leaves
and in a shaddow of mist
in wonder; for autumn is wonder and wonder is hope.

  

Changing images of Saint George, c.1100-c.1340

One of my several ongoing scholarly obsessions is to emphasise that in the medieval cult of saints, one saint could be depicted differently at various points in time, in various geographical regions, and also at one and the same point in time - to mention just a few factors - and through this variety demonstrate and remind people that the iconography, the reception and the veneration of saints is not something static, but something that is continuously adapted through history, for instance by expansion of the legend, abbreviation of the legend, and through the emphasis on different aspects of the saint's story.

Yesterday, February 21, I was reminded of this when I saw the first of this blogpost's images tweeted by @red_loeb. This image is the initial for the opening of the passion of Saint George contained in a Cistercian passionary from Weissenau in the Diocese of Constance, Germany. We here see George placed on a wheel of knives - a method of torture nowadays most famously associated with Sainth Catherine of Alexandria. This was one of several stages in his passion story, and it emphasises the willing sacrifice and martyrdom which signifies George's imitation of Christ, and which was perhaps the most important marker of his claim to sainthood.

At the time the image from Weissenau was drawn, the legend of George was well-known in the Latin West and his feast was celebrated in calendars throughout Latin Europe, but it was before the image of George as a knight had become widespread in this part of the world. It is generally thought that George's chivalrous iconography was brought to Latin Europe from the sphere of the Greek church in which the cult of warrior saints had by the early twelfth century had a long-standing popularity (see White 2013). It is not known when the image of the knightly Saint George gained a foothold in the Latin West. In England, the earliest known depiction of this kind is a wall-painting dated to the twelfth century in the church of Saint Botolph, Hardham, which also features George's torture on the wheel. While dated to the twelfth century, the idea that the painting is from the earlier rather than the later end of the century is possible but not an inevitable conclusion.   

The martyrdom of George

Weissenau Cod. Bodmer 127, f.48r, twelfth century

(Courtesy of @red_loeb and e-codices, virtual library of Switzerland)

That the image of George on the wheel had a strong tradition in the Latin West can also be seen in the picture below from a Cistercian psalter from Rhineland, dated tothe middle of the thirteenth century, several decades younger than the Weissenau passionary. While the emphasis on the image in the psalter is on the angelic help that stopped the wheel from killing Saint George, rather on the executioner setting the wheel in motion, the main focal point of the image is the same in both cases: George wrapped among blades with only a loincloth to cover him, given over to the sacrifice that proves his willingness to die for the sake of Christ. It is the passion story that is being conveyed, not his life, his deeds or miracles performed for him by God.

Martyrdom of George

Besançon - BM - ms. 0054, Cistercian psalter, c.1260

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

Roughly contemporary to the image from the Cistercian psalter is one from a gradual - a liturgical book containing songs for the mass - from the Abbey of Notre-Dame in Fontevraud, home of the Fontevraud Order founded in the early twelfth century. Here, we see Saint George as a knight ready for battle, carrying the cross of Saint George as his standard. This image is found in the initial for the chant Protexisti me Deus in the mass for George's feast day of April 24. It is in every respect a different formulation of the image of Saint George: He is shown both alive and prepared for battle, not at anyone's mercy, and with his militant role emphasised rather than completely omitted as in the two images shown above. In other words, in the Cistercian psalter and in the Fontevraud gradual we have two contemporaneous representation, albeit from two different geographies, of the same saint that displays him in two markedly different ways.

St George 

Limoges - BM - ms. 0002, f.129, Graduale, Abbey of Notre-Dame, Fontevrault, c.1250-1260

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

When comparing the images from the psalter and the gradual, it is important to keep in mind the many contextual differences that prevent us to draw any more wide-ranging conclusions from the comparison.

First of all, while both images are from liturgical books, they do not play the same role in their respective codicological contexts. In the psalter, the entire page is dedicated to the martyrdom of Saint George, giving it a prominent role that was meant to be easily seen and recognised. In the gradual, however, the image much smaller and appears to serve first and foremost as a visual reminder of the saint for whom the mass is being sung. While it is likely that the initial would have been seen by several of the singers who could view the open page, its function as a mnemonic device is less prominent than George's martyrdom of the Cistercian psalter. In other words, while George in the psalter seems to have as its purpose to command focus and precipitate the beholder's meditation on the saint's imitation of Christ, the mnemonic function of the initial is more practical or mechanic, he is depicted to remind the beholder for whom the mass is being sung. This might also have to do with the fact that the chant in question is taken from the common of one martyr, a repertoire of chants that could be used in the liturgy for any martyr.

Secondly, it is important to keep in mind that the two books come from two different religious orders. I do not know enough about the order of Fontevraud to comment on their use of Saint George, but as for the Cistercians they were a conservative order. It is therefore possible that their use of the martyrdom has to do with the conservative nature of the order, and that we cannot take this appearance of the martyrdom motif in the iconography of Saint George as evidence for the widespread endurance of this motif in mid-thirteenth century Latin Europe as a whole.

Thirdly, aside from the differences between the orders and the codicological contexts, it is important to keep in mind that the psalter is from Rhineland while the gradual is from France. These geographical locations might have their own traditions from which they draw, and we must therefore be careful in drawing conclusions when comparing them.

However, one case demonstrates that the two images of Saint George - the martyr and the knight - were in use side by side in the thirteenth century. We turn now to a martyrology from Abbey of Notre-Dame des Prés of Douai, dated to the last quarter of the thirteenth century.

Martyrdom of George

Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0838, f.078v, Arras, last quarter of the thirteenth century

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

George the knight

Valenciennes - BM - ms. 0838, f.078v, martyrology, Abbey of Notre-Dame des Prés de Douai (Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

The two images above are from the same page in the martyrology of Notre-Dame des Prés, showing three images of Saint George: The standing soldier, the charging knight, and the unhurt, victorious martyr sitting on top of his would-be torture device. This shows clearly that by the end of the thirteenth century, both the martial and the christological image of Saint George was in use and had become established in the saint's iconography. It is here of particular interest that the abbey of Notre-Dame des Prés is a Cistercian house, and we see that this order has embraced the idea of George as an armed knight, a development possibly influenced both by the crusades of Louis IX of France earlier in the century and the ongoing efforts to have Louis IX canonised as a saint. Another point of interest is that the representation of the martyrdom has changed radically. While the images from the Rhineland and the Weissenau books emphasised George's complete lack of control on the wheel - his hands thrown out, in the first image at the mercy of the executioner, in the second image helped by angels - the image from the Cistercian martyrology is that of a triumphant matyr. He is still naked, but sitting atop the instrument of his passion with his arms stretched upwards in prayer or thanksgiving in front the pagan ruler and his priest, he appears undaunted and unafraid. Saint George is not unharmed as we see bloody cuts on his thigh and leg and his imitation of Christ is therefore clear, but he is not helpless, he rather appears to be petioning for divine help of his own strength. It is tempting to see this triumphant martyrdom as belonging to the same tone set by the two other - militant - depictions of George on the same folio. In other words, both George the knight and George the martyr are examples of triumphant Christians.

The two depictions of Saint George shown in these images demonstrate how one and the same saint can be presented in different ways, even on one and the same page, thus invoking different aspects of the saint's qualities - both the soldier and the martyr. Moreover, the different representations of one and the same motif - the martyrdom - also testify to the non-static nature of the iconography of saints.

The question then naturally becomes: How do we explain these changes in Saint George's iconography? Naturally, the present blogpost is not the right forum for drawing any conclusions, but I do want to point to some of the factors that must be taken into consideration when dealing with this question, namely that of the religious order for which the image was produced, the geographical location in which it was produced, and the time period in which it was produced. Here we have seen three examples of Cistercian representations of George's martyrdom from the twelfth to the late thirteenth century and from the German sphere as well as from France. Together they might show a chronological development from Weissenau to Rhineland to Douai, thus allowing us to follow the development of the image in time. However, the three images represent two different geographies and are too few to allow for any conclusions regarding the trajectory. It is possible that we see here two different traditions rather than one tradition developing over time.

I would like to see a more overarching, thorough, detailed examination of the available iconographic source material for the cult of Saint George in Germany and France from the twelfth to the thirteenth century. What I have shown in this blogpost is not nearly sufficient for anything but a pointer to a potential interesting development. The overall question here is whether, and if so when, the popularity of the image of George the martyr was replaced by the image of George the knight. The material I have gone through here point towards a change happening in the course of the thirteenth century, culminating in the fourteenth as suggested by two examples shown below. However, this is insufficient data for drawing conclusions, and it might be that the image of George the knight had been present in France much longer than seen in these examples.

By the end of the fifteenth century, however, the image of George the knight seems to have more or less completely replaced the image of George the martyr, both in France, in England and even in Italy. Why this is, and when we see the break with the depiction of the martyrdom, is something that remains to be argued and remains to be discovered, and I hope to be able to return to this at some future point.        

St George

Paris - Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève - ms. 0588, f.113, Vie de saints, c.1290-1310

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

George and the dragon

Auch - BM - ms. 0020, f.001, Ruralium commodorum opus by Petrus de Crescentiis, c.1330-1340

(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

 

Similar blogposts

A carol for Saint George

A liturgical chant for Saint George

A nineteenth-century Hungarian imitation of George and the dragon

On the cults of George and Edward the Confessor in England

Saint George in the Old English Martyrology

Two depictions of Saint George in Odense

Bibliography


Gaposchkin, Cecilia, The Making of Saint Louis, Cornell University Press, 2008

Good, Jonathan, The Cult of Saint George in England, Boydell & Brewer, 2015

Riches, Samantha, St George - Hero, martyr, myth, Sutton, 2000

White, Monica, Military Saints in Byzantium and Rus, 900-1200, Cambridge University Press, 2013