New publication: En sjælden Tycho Brahe-udgave

 
In the spring of 2019, as I was finishing up my time in Denmark and preparing for new adventures, I was doing research on medieval manuscript fragments in the special collection of Roskilde Public Library, together with my friend and colleague Jakob Povl Holck. At this time, Jakob and I were co-authoring an article on two fragments from medieval Denmark, and we were asked by one of the librarians at Roskilde if we could contribute a short note on the fragment from Roskilde on which we had conducted some of our research. The fragment can be seen below, and is found on the item Karen Brahes bibliotek J.1. It was used to bind a first edition of the astronomical treatise De Nova Stella by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. 

The note was set to be published in the annual journal of the historical association of Roskilde. The journal is titled Historisk Årbog for Roskilde Amt (Historical annals for Roskilde county). Although the text was only about two pages and for the most part a description of the fragment and its carrier, I was very happy to be contributing to this note, since it was a way to repay the library and the historical association of Roskilde for the time and effort that had been offered us in the course of our research.

As I left Denmark and the publication of the journal was delayed, I lost track of the progress. Today, however, I found out, to my immense pleasure, that the note was published, and can be accessed online. The note is in Danish, and can be found here. The issue of the journal can be found in full here (although it should be noted that there is an error on the site containing the overview, as I am listed as sole author, while it was written together with Jakob Povl Holck). 

Despite its brevity, I am immensely proud to have co-written this text, and it feels that this is a contribution that actually goes straight to the community for whom this fragment and this book might have greater meaning than most other scholarly communities.

Karen Brahes bibliotek J.1
(Roskilde Public Library)

Enduring materialities - change and stability in Norwegian rural history

This weekend I visited Oslo Museum of Cultural History for the first time, and I was fortunate enough to be able to visit the medieval exhibition, which is going to be taken down on October 10. This exhibition, which has been in its place since the 1970s, contains an array of various and very different objects from medieval Norway, from a fifth-century runestones to wooden sculptures produced in the 1520s. There are many amazing and breathtaking objects in the collection, and my hope is that I will have the wherewithal to write more about some of them on the blog. For this post, however, I will limit myself to one item that in and of itself is rather simple, but which did absolutely take my breath away as I noticed it. 

The object in question is what we in Norwegian call "tvare" or "tvore" (in my dialect, "tvøre"). Its function was to stir porridge and stews to prevent lumps or thickening, and a friend told me that this kind of object is called a spirtle in Scottish. The "tvore" always ends in a cluster of small spikes, and was a typical implement in historical Norwegian kitchens. 

Pot (no. C9246) from Lom and spirtle (no. C34761/G.26439) from Oslo
The Oslo Museum of Cultural History

The reason why this ordinary household item took my breath away is that I encountered this implement growing up. That is, I have never seen one in use, let alone used one myself, but the generation of my grandparents (born in the 1910s) still used these for cooking, and they have been kept in the house where my grandaunt lived when I was a child.  

What fascinates me about the "tvore" is not so much that it has been in continuous use since the Middle Ages. Several items used in the modern world came into their known shape in the medieval period, even before, but there are two important aspects with these particular cooking implements. First of all, the "tvore" has remained unchanged in form as well as in its material since the Middle Ages, which is something we very rarely observe in household items. When we consider how certain tools and implements have changed over the centuries - such as the saddle, the spade, the hammer, the bucket - such permanence is noteworthy. Secondly, unlike the aforementioned tools, the "tvore" is no longer in use. This means that something in the way we cook our food has changed so drastically as to superannuate the "tvore" as a kitchen item. The discontinuing of the "tvore" should probably be seen as a consequence of electricity and a change in the diet, and in this way, the "tvore" is a testament to the dramatic nature of the changes in everyday life that took place in rural Norway in the early twentieth century. In short, the way we cook and the way we eat changed to such a degree in the early twentieth century that utensils that had been used since the medieval period were no longer needed.

Naturally, it is important to keep in mind that there were other changes in Norwegian rural society that marked a break or a discontinuity with the medieval period long before the twentieth century. Changes in growing techniques, the introduction of the potato in the early eighteenth century, changes in social patterns, the transition to more commercially oriented farming practices in the nineteenth century, all these and other elements of Norwegian history were different from how agriculture and the rural life had unfolded in the medieval period. Yet despite such changes, certain things remained long into the modern world, such as the "tvore". And because the enduring materiality of the "tvore", in form as well as matter, the discontinuation of this item signals a break with the past - it signals that some aspect of society is irrevocably and totally different. And it is this change that the "tvore" represents. 
      

A blogpost about my work in spring 2021, part II

 





One month ago, I posted a link to a blogpost I wrote for Mapping Lived Religion, the project for which I worked as a research assistant in the spring. That blogpost was the first of a two-parter in which I wrote a bit about various challenges that might be encountered when working on fragments of medieval calendars. 

Last week, the last of my two blogposts was published, which can be read here.

In this second blogpost, I explain some of the difficulties with examples from one of the most challenging fragments that the project deals with, as you can see from the image below. It was a lot of fun, but at times also a lot of frustration trying to fill the blanks.

Fr 25608, Sveriges Riksarkiv, MPO

New office, new view, new beginning

 

As I wrote in a short blogpost back in June, this autumn I am beginning a new job as a postdoctoral researcher at the university of Oslo. Since August 15 I have officially been an employee, but it was not until the second week of September I physically moved to my new place of work, and the past two weeks have in large part been spent getting started and have the various practical details sorted. Since a lot of these practical details take time and need to be completed in stages, there is as yet no rhythm to speak of, and there are still many new things to learn, to get used to, and to get around to. But this week I was able to access my new office, and to enjoy the new view that will serve as a backdrop for much of my coming workdays. It is mundane in a way, but to me it is all terribly exciting.   

The price of books in twelfth-century Denmark

 
In a recent blogpost, I wrote about an episode from the Danish town of Ribe which occurred in the twelfth century. The episode is recorded in the Chronicon Ripense, or the Ribe Chronicle, from c.1230. This brief chronicle is a treasure trove of information about medieval Denmark, and although a lot of its details should be accepted only with great caution, it does shed light on several interesting aspects of its time. One such aspect is the value of books. 

Chronicon Ripense is known in modern Danish as "Ribe bispekrønike", i.e., the chronicle of the bishops of Ribe. As is often the case with texts composed in the Middle Ages, we cannot be sure how they were referred to by their authors or by others in their time, and even the Latin title is a modern appellation. The Danish title is perhaps the most accurate, as the book is predominantly concerned with the reigns of the various bishops of Ribe. 

One of these bishops was Homer, who was ordained in 1186. It was customary for newly-appointed bishops to bestow gifts on their new churches, and Bishop Homer turned out to be a lavish gift-giver. The chronicler records a chalice made of gold, a censer or a thurible made of silver, various vessels or bottles made of silver, and a collection of books in six volumes. It is not specified which books these were, but it is likely that they were books of the Bible, as one-volume bibles were rare at this time and the individual biblical books were often bound together according to their connection with one another. It was common, for instance, to group the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. It is possible that this book collection also contained liturgical books, such as breviaries and psalters, but it would be more probable, and more practical, for these books to be bound in single volumes since they were used more frequently during the divine services. 

The chronicler adds that the preparation of this six-volume collection required sixty marks in gold. Thanks to a number of other sums recorded throughout the chronicle, we are able to better understand just how much money this was in medieval Denmark. For instance, it is also recorded that the same Bishop Homer donated one mark in gold for the adornment of the altar of the parish church of Hellevad.

In another section, the chronicler records that after the burning of Itzehoe in Holstein, King Valdemar II (r.1202-41) donated thirty marks - it is not specified whether it was in gold or in silver - to the rebuilding of the Church of Saint Lawrence. In the same period, 700 marks in silver was the ransom demanded for Bishop Tuvo. 

A mark is a notoriously imprecise unit of currency, as it depends on the material and also the measurement, since various cities, city-states or kingdoms could have different definitions of marks. This becomes clear when the chronicler records how King Valdemar II was taken captive together with his son, and ransomed for 60 000 Lübeck marks of silver.  

Together, these instances provide some points of orientation for understanding the price of books in twelfth-century Denmark. Granted, these points are vague and imprecise, but the chronicle does offer an interesting insight into the cost of binding books, and the value of such books as gifts bestowed by a newly-ordained Danish bishop. 

A blogpost about my work in spring 2021

In the period March to the middle of June this year I worked as a research assistant for the project Mapping Lived Religion at Linnaeus University. My work consisted mainly of transcribing calendar fragments and inserting them into the project database, and it provided me with a great opportunity to learn more about Swedish medieval manuscript fragments.  

I have not yet written much about this work, except some general remarks about methodology in this blogpost. Today, however, the first of two blogposts about my work for Mapping Lived Religion was published on the project blog. In this blogpost, I provide an overview of how my work routine has been and what challenging aspects in the sources that have dictated such a routine. For those who are interested, the first blogpost can be found here.

To take the dragon by the nose - the iconography of dragonslaying by Paolo Uccello and Francisco Ibáñez

 
One of the great joys of being a medievalist is to explore how aspects from the Middle Ages - such as ideas, literary topoi or iconography - continues to work in culture long after the end of the medieval period (even by the most liberal estimate). This longevity of cultural aspect is of course unsurprising given the continuity in cultural transmission, or the occasional rediscovery which brings something back to the cultural consciousness after a period of oblivion. Moreover, this continuity is yet another example of how periodisations are fictions of practicality rather than natural entities, and continuity thus reminds us how cautious we should be in dividing time too neatly into compartments. 

Leaving aside the definition of the Middle Ages, and its problems as a scholarly construct, it is very clear that because there exists an idea of the medieval, that idea can be used aesthetically to connect with the period meant to be covered by that term. This connection can be serious or playful, or a mix of both, and it can serve a number of different purposes, all depending on the combination of author/sender/transmitter and audience.  

One medieval iconographical topos that has had a substantial impact on modern popular culture is that of the dragonslayer, which can be found in a range of media, from commercial fantasy to church art. I have touched on the development of this topos in earlier blogposts (here, here, and here), and I recently came across one scene that reminded me again how this ties into the cultural output of the medieval period. What the scene in question reminded me of was the famous depiction of Saint George and the dragon by Paolo Uccello, completed around 1470. In the contemporary imagination, this is perhaps one of the best known and most resonant renditions of the motif, and I was struck by the similarities between this and the scene by which I was reminded of Uccello's painting

Paolo Uccello, Saint George and the dragon (c.1470)
National Gallery, London, NG6294
Courtesy of Wikimedia

The scene in question is part of a dream sequence in the comic book El estropicio meteorológico (The meteorological fracas), which was serially published in 1987. The comic book is an instalment in the classical series Mortadelo y Filemón by Francisco Ibáñez, a series in which several famous works of art and literature have been parodied through the characters of this fictional universe. The similarities between the scene in the dream of Mortadelo and that of Uccello's dragonslaying are notable, especially the lance piercing the dragon's nose. Naturally, I cannot claim that it is Uccello who has provided Ibáñez with the model for the scene in El estropicio meteorológico - the scene might be inspired by any number of Saint George renditions, so we should be cautious in pinpointing influences too exactly. Even if the connection between the painting from c.1470 and the drawing from 1987 might be indirect at best, the scene with Mortadelo as the typical dragonslayer points to the impact of the medieval imagination on the modern, and we are reminded that so much of our modern cultural output is in some way part of a continuity that goes back centuries into the past.   

Francisco Ibáñez, Mortadelo y Filemón no. 17, El estropicio meteorológico (1987)