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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Histories from home, part 4 - an object lesson in wishful thinking

 

Yesterday, I went for a hike in an uninhabited and uninhabitable valley close to the family farm in my native village of Hyen in the Western Norwegian fjords. As far as we know, the valley - named Skordalen, or Cleft Valley - has never been settled by humans, and the main reason for this is the harsh winters that make it very difficult to travel in and out of the valley. Yet as most parts of my native village, this valley has been used by generations of farmers to collect fodder for the animals and food for themselves. Several generations ago, it was common to build various storage buildings throughout the non-arable parts of the village. In these buildings, fodder or turf was placed after it had been gathered, and in the winter, when the snow allowed for easier transport using sleds, the hay or the turf would be brought back to the farm. Each building had its particular use, and so a hay barn was placed in a different place, and also built differently, than a turf house. (Turf was used either for the roof or crumbled up and placed beneath the livestock in the byres to soak up the piss and shit, and to make them have a softer surface on which to lie.) 

Throughout my upbringing, my family has encountered the stone foundations of several such outdoor barns. These stones are all that is left, and can be sometimes difficult to recognise in a terrain already dotted with rocks that have either been left by the ice or a rockslide. Whenever I go hiking in this valley, I always keep a look out for traces that could point to a now-lost outdoor barn. Yesterday, I thought I found one - or rather, I thought I found two - but I also know from experience that I have been wrong about such assessments before. The case about which I am most convinced is pictured below, and I will eventually have to return in order to assess whether these stones are likely to have been moved about and placed against one another by human hands, or whether it is merely a matter of nature running its course. What always makes this a difficult question, is that the farmers would have used stones that were already lying close together, and so the subsequent natural processes will easily shift the stones to such a degree that they look as if they are naturally placed. In this particular case, as pictured below, further studies are required. 

New publication: Legitimizing Episcopal Power in Twelfth-Century Denmark through the Cult of Saints

In my previous blogpost, I announced the publication of a new volume of academic articles, of which I am one of the co-editors. Information about the volume, its content and its general argument can be found here, while the open access edition of the book can be found here.   

Aside from being one of the co-editors, I also contributed with a chapter of my own, titled 'Legitimizing Episcopal Power in Twelfth-Century Denmark through the Cult of Saints', which can be downloaded here. The article is an examination of how the bishops of Odense, Ribe and Lund used the cults of Saint Knud Rex, Liufdag, and Thomas of Canterbury respectively, in order to strengthen their legitimacy vis-à-vis other elite groups of twelfth-century Danish society. The article brought together a number of my academic interests - chiefly the cult of saints, the construction of identity, and Danish history - and was great fun to write, as it allowed me to pursue some old topics and explore some new ones as well. 

This blogpost is prompted by my trip to the post office in my village in the Norwegian fjords, where I picked up my author/editor copy of the book today, and could finally get a physical sense of the labour that took three years to complete. 

 

New publications: The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe up to 1300

In 2021, I was hired as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, working as part of a project that was a collaboration between the University of Oslo and the University of Warsaw. One of my tasks in this period has been to co-edit a volume of articles together with Grzegoz Pac and Jon Vidar Sigurdsson, based on a conference we co-organized in Warsaw in the autumn of 2021. The volume collects a number of articles that explores how various elites in East Central and Northern Europe. The scope of the volume, and the comparative aim, served as a backdrop for the core purpose of the project itself, which was to explore the way elites in medieval Norway and medieval Poland sought to legitimise their positions in society. The volume includes case studies from both Norway and Poland, but also from several other countries.  

The process has been immensely educational, and, although often tiring and frustrating given the nature of such editorial endeavours where there are so many details to keep in mind, a phenomenal opportunity for seeing how much interesting and novel research is being undertaken in our section of academia. Seeing this book published is both a relief and a joy at the same time. 

A description of the book can be found on Brepols' website, and the book itself is freely available in open access. Each individual article can be found here.  

There are numerous reasons why I am deeply satisfied with this book, and very proud of it. One of these reasons is the introduction - to be read here - which provides both a broad historical context for the cult of saints, and a discussion of the various forms of legitimisation to which the saints were used in the newly-Christianised polities of Northern and East Central Europe.  

I also contributed with a chapter of my own, but this is the subject for a future blogpost. 

The Cult of Saints and Legitimization of Elite Power in East Central and Northern Europe up to 1300

After the interview - or, Correcting a big mistake

This post is in response to a very big mistake I made last month. I should have known better, and it has bothered me profoundly ever since. The mistake cannot be undone, but I am writing this as a way to correct the record, as it were. 

In the middle of April, I attended a conference organized to mark the millennium of the so-called Moster assembly. According to twelfth-century sources, such as the Law of the Gulathing Law Province, which covered most of what is today Western Norway, it was at this assembly that Saint Olaf and Bishop Grimkell introduced the Christian law to Norway. The date of this assembly is traditionally set to 1024, and although the dating is debated, there are good reasons for accepting that such an assembly did indeed take place. What is more contested, however, is the importance of this assembly in its own time, and much of current scholarship is of the opinion that the importance for the Christianization of Norway was rather limited, partly because much of Norway was already Christian at that time. The importance of the historical assembly was much greater for the twelfth-century Norwegian Church, as this event became a historical point of reference that the clergy could use to formulate its institutional identity and provide an anchor point in the country's past. In other words, the assembly became a tool of legitimization for the Norwegian Church.  

At the conference, I gave a presentation called 'Stories of a Violent Triumph – The Conversion of Norway in Light of the Hagiographical Tradition'. My aim was to show how our ideas about Norway being converted by the sword was established in the twelfth century, and is largely exaggerated, although not completely wrong. I sought to problematize our willingness to subscribe to simple narratives, and to show that our understanding of the history of eleventh-century Norway is hugely influenced by the way in which the Norwegian Church sought to establish its identity. 

During the conference, I was contacted via email by someone from a Norwegian conservative Christian media outlet. They asked if I would give a written interview about my talk, and sent me a number of questions about the topic and about our own contemporary approach to this part of Norway's past. It took a long time for me to decide on what to do. I had never heard of this outlet, and after checking some of its texts I was disgusted but not horrified - disgusted because I could see that they were conservatives of a type that I both dislike and disrespect, but not horrified because from the samples that I made, they did not seem to espouse the more militant views typical of American conservative Christians, such as a blind and militant support of the Israeli government in their effort to commit genocide on the Palestinian people.  

After mulling it over in my head for a couple of days, I said yes, and wrote some responses to each of the questions I had been sent. I said yes, because I thought I had found a way to both take this opportunity to do some outreach, and also to challenge their conservative views. As I am myself a Christian, I thought I could use my familiarity with the Christian frame of reference and the Norwegian Christian tradition to make my points in a way they could understand, and in a way that would be familiar to them. Consequently, in my responses, I talked about how the Christian law did not suddenly and radically improve the life of those members of society that were at the bottom of the hierarchy, such as slaves and the mentally or physically handicapped. I also explained that while I do not believe Norway to have been converted predominantly by the sword, there are plenty of examples of how Christians became persecutors once they had attained power, drawing on the case of Archbishop Ambrosius of Milan, who ordered the torture of Arian Christians, and also emphasizing that the Crusades led to unimaginable atrocities committed against Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. I stated that I do not believe that milestones in Norway's Christian history should be celebrated, even though they should be acknowledged and be used as opportunities to reflect on our understanding of the past - i.e., that they could be commemorated, but not celebrated. I also made sure to make reference to the ongoing genocide in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli government in two of my responses. 

I hoped that my interview would provide a small measure of balance in a media outlet that espouses a Christian nationalism that I find revolting. I hoped that I could enter into this territory and provide a countervoice that could potentially lead to some readers less mired in the myopic and simplistic understanding of reality to distance themselves from the outlet's grand narrative. I hoped that I could make a difference. I was utterly, completely and gut-wrenchingly wrong. 

After the interview was over, the whole affair escaped my mind for a while, as there were other things to think about. However, a few weeks later, I decided to check how the person who contacted me had rendered the material that I had given. After all, they had said that they had only made some teeny-tiny changes to the text. The changes, however, were not teeny-tiny, as both my references to the ongoing genocide had been deleted. All that remained of my effort to counteract Christian supremacism was the reference to the atrocities of the Crusades, and that they had been committed against Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. To increase my utter dismay, it seems that the outlet has also ramped up its Zionist rhetoric in the past few weeks - or perhaps I only now have managed to notice it properly. 

I feel very stupid for having agreed to participate in the interview. I feel very stupid for having lent my name to this outlet in a way that only serves to legitimize it. I feel very stupid for thinking that I could make a difference when the outlet was in control of how the final product would appear. I abhor Christian supremacism, conservatism, nationalism and Zionism, and I have contributed to the outlet in a way that only strengthens. For this, I am both deeply ashamed and deeply troubled. Hopefully, I will know better than to engage with such people in terms that are so in favour to them a second time.        

No soy peregrino - a first encounter with Santiago de Compostela

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

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

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

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

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

Saint Florian and the fire

Today, May 4, is the feast of Saint Florian. According to legend, he was killed during the Diocletian persecution, and his main cult centre was at Linz in Austria. His relics, however, were said to be kept at Rome, and from there they were allegedly translated to Krakow in 1183/84. In the later Middle Ages, Florian was predominantly venerated in Austria and Poland, due to the centres of Linz and Krakow.

It was believed that his wonderworking speciality - or his patronage par excellence, as it were - was protection against fire. The belief in Florian's firefighting abilities is clearly demonstrated by this late-fifteenth-century statue from Vienna, where the saint is pouring water onto a towered building which seems to be on fire. As this statue was originally placed on the facade of a house nearby the Church of Saint Stephen, Vienna's cathedral, it is likely that several onlookers would interpret the building at Florian's feet as the cathedral which he was facing.       

Florian's armour marks him as a soldier saint, which was quite common for male saints of the Diocletian persecutions. Tales of Christian soldiers in the imperial army who were martyred for their faith were popular, and the sheer size of the Roman army - at least as that size was imagined in later centuries - provided a near-endless possibility for new stories to be told. Just as the Diocletian persecutions became a time in which it was logical to place unknown saints or saints of an uncertain date, so the occupation of a Roman soldier became a logical marker of male saints killed in this period.

Saint Florian, c.1480-c.1490 

Wien Museum Karlplatz