Evil cast triumphantly to ground - dragonslayers in Odense

It is roughly a month since I came to Denmark to start my PhD, and in this time I have had some opportunities to explore the city centre with its charming streets, its lovely old-fashioned houses and its beautiful churches. Odense is one of the best preserved medieval cities in Denmark, and although much of today's cityscape is predominantly early modern, we find everywhere sundry reminders of the city's importance in the Middle Ages, like the statue of the sainted King Canute IV, the streets named after Franciscan and Dominican monasteries and the preponderance of places and institutions named after Saint Alban, whose relics were taken from England to Odense in the 11th century by the Danes.

Denmark has long been a Protestant country and the medieval vestiges are now mostly kept within a larger Protestant nostalgic framework, a framework of regional pride and romanticism towards the past. However, there is also the Catholic Church of Saint Albans, built in the early 20th century, and several streets still bear the name of saints such as Anne and Clara, illustrating that the medieval past is still a living part of the city. I have also found two dragonslayers in Odense, and in this blogpost I wish to present them to you.

St Alban's Church, Odense

St George and the dragon

The dragonslayers I encountered were different renditions of St George, the legendary fourth-century martyr from Cappadocia who became increasingly popular in the west from the 12th century onwards, and who became the patron saint of England in 1351. I have written a bit about him earlier (here, here and here), and he continues to fascinate me, largely because of the evolution of his iconography. In Scandinavia he is referred to as Sankt Jørgen (in Denmark and Norway) or Sankt Göran (in Sweden), and although his cult in the north is not yet fully examined, there are several tantalising hints about his popularity. One of these hints can be found in St Alban's Church in Odense, a Catholic church that was begun in 1906 and consecrated, although unfinished, in 1908 to St Albans, the Virgin and St Canute IV. The church became in this way a successor to the medieval St Alban's church where Canute IV had met his martyrdom in 1086. The church possesses some beautiful stained glass windows, which were crafted by Georg Schneider from Regensburg, the royal glass painter. One of these windows depicts Saint George. The window can be found to the far left as you enter the church, situated at the end of one of the side parts of the nave (German: Seitenschiff; Norwegian: sideskip). As can be seen below, George is here depicted as a blonde, clean-shaven knight, an iconographic composition harkening back to the Middle Ages which invokes the ideas of George as a virgin martyr, and at the same time conflating his office as a soldier with the image of the miles Christi, the soldier of Christ. (For more on this church - in Danish - see here.)

The iconography of Saint George is probably influenced by the iconography of Saint Michael, the slayer of Satan in the battle at the end of times as prophecised in the Bible. To some people, perhaps especially soldiers, George may have become a more accessible helper in the Middle Ages, in part because he had been a human, not an archangel and therefore differently placed in the celestial hierarchy, but perhaps also because his past as a soldier made it easier for knights to identify with him.

The second rendition of George and the dragon can be found on a house corner at the junction of Klaregade (St Clare's street) and Skt Anne gade (St Anne's street). The statue of Saint George is cast in bronze, but I don't know by whom or when. The state of the metal suggests a fairly late date, and as can be seen below it is masterfully positioned which gives a very good three-dimentional effect. That the statue in question is of Saint George rather than Saint Michael is suggested by the statue's lack of wings.

Sunset in Denmark

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

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

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

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

Perseus and the devil

One of the most iconic medieval depictions of a saint is the scene of Saint George slaying the dragon, perhaps most famously rendered by Paolo Uccello. This is a popular motif, although it goes against the original legend in which the dragon is tamed by the saint and paraded around as a living proof of God's power. The dragonslayer-motif was given a perhaps inevitable chivalric twist in the later Middle Ages, as George became a paragon of knighthood in popular imagination. It was no wonder, therefore, that the garter-knights, established in the 1300s, should take Saint George as their patron, and that he became the patron saint of England in 1351. This iconographic evolution was also facilitated by the iconography of Michael the Archangel, often depicted while fighting the devil in the shape of a dragon. Although Michael has a higher rank in the hierarchy of saints, his angelic nature made him less suited for an equestrian depiction, and this might have helped to bring George into the culture of chivalry.

George is among the early Christian saints whose historicity is doubtful, and seems more to be a myth having grown out of earlier stories, possibly based to some extent on the Persian hero Rostam. In this blogpost, however, I focus on another mythical conflation, namely a depiction of the classical hero Perseus in the manner of St George. The image in question is an illumination from BL MS Harley 4431, an early-fifteenth miscellany of works by Christine de Pizan, including Épître d’Othéa, which includes among other things a selection of moral musings on mythological motifs. One of these motifs is a depiction of Perseus saving Andromeda from a sea-monster. Curiously, however, Andromeda is not present, and the scene is left entirely to the hero and the monster - here rendered as a dragon - and a handful of birds.

Perseus and the dragon

Courtesy of British Library

I am indebted to Robert Miller for introducing me to this image and thus facilitating this blogpost

The episode is well-known and antedates the legend of Saint George, but in this early-fifteenth-century rendition - which in turn antedates Uccello's famous painting - the episode has taken on the chivalric features so typical of the legend of Saint George. Perseus is a knight with a coat of arms, a sword at his side and full armour. The sea-monster has become a land-based dragon presumably intended to represent the devil rather than the brute beasts void of any cosmological purpose found in Greek mythology. That Perseus is on foot rather than on horseback makes no difference in this regard, as George also was depicted on foot from time to time, as seen below in a mid-fifteenth-century stained glass window from Holy Trinity Church, York.

George the knight

From BL MS Royal 2 A XVIII, prayers to the saints, c.1401-15

This chivalric appropriation of Perseus is furthermore not a unique occurrence, but a part of the late medieval and early modern formulation of the hero, and this can perhaps be seen most poignantly in Ludovico Ariosto's use of this myth as the basis for his episode in Orlando Furioso where Ruggiero astride on the hippogriff saves the beautiful Angelica from an orc. Ruggiero is essentially Perseus as a soon-to-be Christian knight (Ruggiero is raised among Saracens), and in a sense this is the apogee of the chivalrisation of Perseus which is suggested in the illumination from Épître d’Othéa above.

Ruggiero saving Angelica by Gustave Doré

Courtesy of Wikimedia

For more on Saint George, see this blogpost on the high-medieval evolution of his cult, and this blogpost for a nineteenth-century appropriation of his iconography by Hungarian artist Károly Lotz.

The Humility of Snails, part 3 - Houses of the Humble

Snail wheeled by a fox (?)
Cambrai, MS 102, c.1290
With thanks to Damien Kempf

Last year, inspired by a blogpost by Sarah J. Biggs at British Library's medieval blog, I wrote a two-part essay about snails in medieval marginalia (here and here). These fantastic gastropods have captured the imagination of modern scholars for generations, and many suggestions have been proffered in the attempt to explain what they meant to their audience. I was dissatisfied with a lot of the suggestions as they sometimes seemed to be too geographically specific to explain a widely disseminated phenomenon, and sometimes seemed to be presented without any solid foundation in research. 

I mean, how the hell do you explain this?
MS Neuchâtel A28, Flemish book of hours, Bruges, c.1500
With thanks to Sjoerd Levelt

As a thought experiment, I offered a scholarly new explanation for what these snails represented, namely that they were symbols of humility, reminding the reader through different situations what was expected from a good Christian. I furthermore tied this symbolism into the mendicant sanctity that came into vogue in the 13th century and continued through the 14th, a model of sanctity based on good works, self-abnegation, and humility, to name some of the key virtues of this saint-paradigm. Through an examination of the snails in a handful of medieval manuscripts, I came to the inconclusive conclusion that the idea of the snail as a symbol of humility made very much sense in a number of religious or religiously informed books from the period 1290-1430.

St Lawrence, and a marginal snail
MS Neuchâtel A28, Flemish book of hours, Bruges, c.1500
With thanks to Johan Oosterman

I was content with such a result. In the field of medieval history, the scarcity of material allows very seldom for conclusive proof, and very often the best we can hope for is a plausible conjecture that can stand the test of time. I was therefore greatly and pleasantly surprised, when I was notified of a 15th-century poem that proved that snails did serve as a symbol of humility in the Middle Ages.

The poem in question is a long political meditation by John Lydgate (1371-1451) called The Truce of 1444. It was brought to my attention by Jenni Nuttall (who has a great blog), and can be found together with a number of other poems from the period collected and edited by Thomas Wright in Political Poems and Songs relating to English History (also thanks to Jenni Nuttall for this link). Lydgate wrote this poem as a political meditation following the truce between France and England of May 1444, which stipulated a two-year armistice, which later was extended to five years, and saw the bethrotal between Margaret of Anjou and King Henry V. Although the title given to the poem - at least in Wright's edition - refers to the truce, the poem itself is more a meditation on politics in general, seemingly an exhortation for people outside the court not to meddle in the politics of the court. Lydgate himself was no stranger to politics. As a monk of Bury St Edmunds, he had prepared his Livesof SS Edmund and Fremund for the young King Henry VI's visits at the monastery in 1333-34. Lydgate had furthermore written extensively on kingship and chivalry in other texts.

However, the tone of the poem suggests a more politically withdrawn monk who has become wary of the world of courtly politics. The text is interspersed with several moralistic animal fables and similes, and referring to the prudence of ancient men like Cato and Socrates, and advicing the lowly to be still lest they face the wrath of princes. One of these animal fables is of particular interest to us as it treats a lobster's attack on a snail:

I sauh a krevys, with his clawes longe,

Pursewe a snayl, poore and impotent;
Hows of this snayl, the wallys wer nat stronge,

A slender shelle, the sydes al torent.

Whoo hath no goold, his tresour soone spent;

The snaylis castel but a sklendir coote;

Whoo seith trouthe, offte he shalle be shent;

A good be stille is offte wel wourth a groote.

This short fable - concluded with one of the repeated lines in the work - is a tale of oppression and abuse of power by the mighty, while the snail represents the lower estates, the poor, and quite likely the humble. Although the word humble is not used, the poor and powerless snail stands in contrast with the long-clawed lobster in a way much similar to the humble snail and the powerful knight in so many marginal illuminations. This is not to say that Lydgate's lobster is a symbol specifically of chivalry, it is more likely representing all kinds of secular power. Nor is it to say that Lydgate draws on the marginal snail for his inspiration, we don't know if Lydgate even knew this (though it is very likely that he did). The reason this use of the snail is interesting to my case, is that the snail is here used as a symbol of those who suffer from abuse of power, the lowly, those who do not belong in the secular court. In short, the snail is the opposite of military might. We do not know whether such a representation of the snail was widespread in medieval Europe, or whether it was in any way connected to the tradition of marginal snails - we simply lack the decisive evidence for such claims. However, Lydgate's use of the snail is symbolically in tune with the snail as a representation of humility as hypothesised by myself in the two previous blogposts. It is therefore reasonable to claim that within the symbolic range of the snail in the Middle Ages, could be found the snail as representative of humility. 

Humility (perhaps) under attack
MS. W.45, The Fieschi Psalter, Flemish, 13th century
With thanks to  @bxknits, courtesy of Walters Art Museum

Literature

Edwards, A. S. G., "John Lydgate's Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund: Politics, Hagiography and Literature", printed in Bale, Anthony, Saint Edmund King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint

Wagner, John A., Encyclopedia of the Hundred Years War

Wright, Thomas (ed.), Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History

University of Alberta's Lydgate project: http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/edmund/edmund.htm

University of Michigan's Middle English Dictionary: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/


Post Scriptum: A big thank you to all who have helped me with suitable images, insights, feedback and help in the process of these blogposts. 

That Catholic Round World - flat earth as counter-medievalism

JESPER BAILIFF: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, let us talk of something else. That is some disturbed nonsense, it can make you Catholic in the head
- Ludvig Holberg, Erasmus Montanus (Act 3, Scene 2) (my translation)

Ludvig Holberg, c.1747 by Johan Roselius
Courtesy of this website

One of the most pernicious myths about the Middle Ages remains the idea that medieval people held the earth to be flat. This myth was perhaps most famously propagated in a 19th-century novel about Columbus, where the belief in a flat earth was deployed as a foil to enhance Columbus' intrepid greatness as an explorer and trailblazer. The belief in the medieval belief in a flat earth has stuck resiliently to the collective consciousness, and even today it lingers more strongly than medievalists would like to think.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of the flat earth myth. In a previous blogpost I offered a possible source for the idea that this was a medieval conviction, but the trajectory is difficult to map. However, in this blogpost, I want to present a very curious case from the 18th century, in which the idea that the earth is flat is presented as a firmly Protestant idea, and in which the idea of a round earth is frowningly labelled Catholic (and as such practically medieval), and also Atheist. (The tendency to conflate Atheism and Catholicism in Protestant countries reaches back to the 16th century.) The case in question is fictional, as it comes from the comedy Erasmus Montanus, written by the Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg in 1722-23. However, despite the fictionality of the story, the way the roundness of the earth is treated is a funny and unusual affair, and one that I as a medievalist find very pleasing. The translations of the quotes from Danish are all mine.

Scene from Erasmus Montanus
Wilhelm Marstrand (1810-73)
Courtesy of this website

The plot of the comedy is the homecoming of Rasmus Berg who has been studying in Copenhagen and there taken the Latinised name Erasmus Montanus. Upon his return, he starts exercising his prowess as a debater and both proves and disproves that his mother is a stone. It all goes wrong when he claims that the earth is round, because his fellow villagers can all see that the earth is "as flat as a pancake", and to claim otherwise is "disturbed nonsense" which "can make one Catholic in the head" (act 3, scene 2). It is further remarked that to believe in a round earth "is nothing else than turn all religion on the head and lead people away from faith. A heathen can not preach worse" (act 3, scene 4). By defending his words and beliefs for the glory of philosophy, Erasmus Montanus antagonises his father-in-law-to-be and various other persons of note. When Erasmus tries to prove the roundness of the earth by various scientific observations, he is met with scorn bred from common sense, and the bailiff comments that Erasmus "is quite close to become an Atheist" (act 3, scene 5). The debate enrages his father-in-law-to-be so much that he ends the bethrotal between his daughter and Erasmus on the grounds that his family has always been good Christian people. In the end Erasmus is tricked into enrolment in the army by a local lieutenant, and to escape from this predicament he rescinds his opinions and professes loudly and desperately that the earth "is as flat as a pancake".

Erasmus Montanus disputing with a local parson
Wilhelm Marstrand, 1843
Courtesy of this website

In 1722 when Holberg wrote Erasmus Montanus, Denmark had been Protestant for almost two centuries. It is therefore difficult to tell whether Catholicism was still seen as something of the old order, something of the very distant past, or something whose presence in Denmark was seen as newfangled and novel. Traditionally in Protestant countries around this period, Catholicism is seen as a vestige of an old world, an ancient superstition, an echo from a dark age. This view is made very clear, for instance, in John Milton's Paradise Lost, where the fallen Adam witnesses the future history of mankind up to the point of salvation and the second coming. We can't tell whether this was also how Holberg's fictional farmers, bailiffs and lieutenants would have seen things, and therefore we don't know whether the round earth is considered an ancient superstition, or a newfangled invention of the universities. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see a feature so widely regarded as belonging to the Catholic Middle Ages as the flat earth presented as a Protestant tenet, and as such counter-medieval (although of course Holberg himself does not suggest this). It is a useful reference for people who still believe that men and women in the Middle Ages held the world to be flat as a pancake.

The steadfastness of Erasmus Montanus
Wilhelm Marstrand, before 1869
Courtesy of this website

Methodology of negatives

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there

- Antigonish, Hughes Mearns

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

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

The Abbey of the Holy Trinity, Fécamp

Courtesy of Wikimedia

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

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

Image allegedly of Vincent of Beauvais

Courtesy of Wikimedia

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

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

Angels receiving the soul of Louis IX

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

Courtesy of enluminures.net

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

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

Call for papers - Renewal in the Cult of Saints, 1050-1300

Renewal in the Cults of Saints, 1050-1300
Leeds IMC, 2015

We are seeking proposals for papers on the topic of renewal, reinvention and reinterpretation in the cults of saints in the period 1050-1300. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

The reinvention of saints across cultural, national, or linguistic borders
The impact of church reform on the cults of saints
Reinterpretation of a saint's cult within cult practice, saints' texts, liturgy and art
How a saint's cult might be renewed or revitalised for a new audience

Papers dealing with renewal in the cults of Anglo-Saxon or British saints in this period will be particularly welcomed. 

Proposals for papers of 15-20 minutes should be sent to steffenabhope@gmail.com or eleanor.parker@ell.ox.ac.uk by August 25.

Dunstan pinching the devil's nose

MS Harley 315

Courtesy of British Library