A Vision of Mammon on Black Friday

The most intransigent spam messages in today's inbox have told me that today is Black Friday. I normally don't proselytise on this blog, but I make an exception for some issues and I will make an exception this time. As a farm-boy from a small rural village of Western Norway it is hard to identify and to comprehend some of the workings and going-ons of higher capitalism, but now as a PhD candidate I find it more and more difficult not to get inundated by the sundry pernicious stratagems that businesses concoct to attract more buyers and to accelerate consumerism. To me there is something deeply disturbing and immoral about this type of extreme capitalist-induced consumerism, used as I am from childhood that things should last and if they broke they could be repaired.

As a medievalist familiar with the Bible and biblical language, it is difficult not to wax slightly gloomy and launch into Jeremiads on the subject. The Bible contains many poignant words on the subject, but in this instance I leave the words to the Caribbean poet Kendel Hippolyte, born in Saint Lucia, who wrote an evocative poem called Mammon in his poetry collection Birthright (Peepal Tree 1997).

The destruction of Baal's altar, and Gideon's sacrifice
BL MS Royal 2 B VII, psalter, England, between 1310 and 1320
Courtesy of British Library

Mammon
ghost, guardian-spirit of banks, trans-national Corporations,
daylight deals in air-conditioned sewers
ghoul, eating the flesh of our dead childhood
ghost, effluvium of the rotting innocence in the skull-vault
ghost, smoke-screen between my self and your self
whose language is a hissing yes to vice
who salivates hypocrisies and sleeks the tongue with moss
who slithers between Man and Woman
who multiplies us only to divide
who adds and then subtracts to zero
ghost, slick as night-wet city streets
vinyl-skinned and glittering with devices
whose rock-pit is a gold-mine near Johannesburg
mammon
watching our children growing
never-closing nickel eyes minting their images
watch him, this god
rattle like dice, like thirty pieces of silver
watch him
flick and rustle a green promising tongue
watch him
grin like a wallet opening
watch him
as he whispers to you now.

The Ash Plant, by Seamus Heaney

November is usually the month when all the projects planned or merely dreamed of throughout the autumn comes crashing into reality to eat the days and weeks with a rapacious hunger. At this point, I'm past the most hectic period but since there's not much energy left for blogging, I'll put up this beautiful poem by Seamus Heaney, published in Seeing Things (Faber & Faber 1991).

Dropwort and ash
BL MS Egerton 747, herbal miscellany, various authors, Salerno, between c.1280 and c.1310
Courtesy of British Library

The Ash Plant

He'll never rise again but he is ready. Entered like a mirror by the morning,
He stares out the big window, wondering,
Not caring if the day is bright or cloudy.

An upstairs outlook on the whole country.
First milk-lorries, first smoke, cattle, trees
In damp opulence above damp hedges -
He has it to himself, he is like a sentry

Forgotten and unable to remember
The whys and wherefores of his lofty station,
Wakening relieved yet in position,
Disencumbered as a breaking comber.

As his head goes light with light, his wasting hand
Gropes desperately and finds the phantom limb
Of an ash plant in his grasp, which steadies him.
Now he has found his touch he can stand his ground

Or wield the stick like a silver bough and come
Walking again among us: the quoted judge.
I could have cut a better man out of the hedge!
God might have said the same, remembering Adam.

The Emptiness of Royal Gain

 

In the histories of kings it is a commonplace to find stories about ambitious men who rose high, achieved a sought-for throne, only to fall miserably a short time afterwards. Many great stories, true as well as fictional, are woven around this basic premise, and those of us who study medieval history are bound to encounter a fair share of such accounts, either in the guise of cautionary tales or as chronicled incidents. In the histories concerning medieval Norway prior to the twelfth century, such tales abound with such frequency that they seem sometimes endless. I have chosen a brief excerpt from one of these histories as an example. The excerpt in question comes from the book called Historia Norwegie, the first Latin account of Norwegian history that we know of. It was written in the middle of the twelfth century, but we know neither where nor by whom. Historia Norwegie is a rich and entertaining exposition of the geography and the royal history of medieval Norway.

After an account of the geography of Norway and its tributary islands including Iceland and the Orkneys, the historiographer begins his chronicle of Norwegian kings from the earliest period. Up until the time of Harald Fairhair in the 9th century, this chronicle is essentially a list of deaths following each other in quick succession, as will be seen.

Aun fathered Egill, nicknamed Vendilkráki, who was deprived of his kingdom by his own slave, named Tunni. The slave raised civil strife against his master in eight battles and won the Victory in all of them; he fell in the ninth, vanquished at last, but the kinghimself was soon afterwards gored to death by a ferocious bull. He was succeeded in the realm by his son Óttarr who was killed by a namesake
- Historia Norwegie, translated by Devra Kunin, printed in Phelpstead 2001


Sadly, there are no depictions of this brief footnote in the history of royal demise, so instead I have chosen to let this illumination of the death of Philippe le Bel of France serve as an illustration.

Paris - Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève - ms. 1128 , f.346,
Boccaccio's Noble Men and Women, 15th century, Paris
Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

Similar blogposts:


Submarine oxen of Northern Norway

An explanation of tidewater by Adam of Bremen

Beavers in Historia Norwegie

Harald Fairhair and his dead queen (from Ágrip)

Bearded women in Norway and the Far East

Sanctity in Milan, part 4 - The Flayed Bartholomew

This series of blogposts is inspired by a work-trip to Milan which the Centre for Medieval Literature arranged this September, and aims to present some of the many stories and cultural expressions connected to the cult of saints in and/or related to the city's history.

This post is a rather short one, presenting the famous sculpture of the flayed Saint Bartholomew, which is situated by the transept of the cathedral of Milan. The statue, finished in 1562, was made by Marco d'Agrate, a fact which he proudly displays in the legend on the stone underneath Bartholomew's feet. The text reads: Non me Praxiteles, sed Marc'finxit Agrat, "Not Praxiteles, but Marco d'Agrate made me". By this comparison to one of the greatest and most famous sculptors of the classical era Marco placed his own worth at the very summit of the artistic expression then in vogue in Late-Renaissance Italy. (Photographs taken by me.)

The gruesome and gruesomely realistic depiction of the flayed saint is not only intended to convey one of the most famous details from the story of Saint Bartholomew, it also serves to highlight Marco d'Agrate's intimate anatomical knowledge and his ability to render stone into the semblance of living flesh, where tendons and muscles are as well-crafted as the hairs of his dangling head-skin, worn in a manner not unlike the traditional depictions of Herakles draped in the skin of the Nemean lion.

The story of Bartholomew's martyrdom inspired a wide range of depictions of the saint throughout the medieval and early modern periods, and as a consequence his iconographic attribute is the knife by which he was flayed. It is also for this reason he is seen as the patron saint of tanners and all other trades related to the treatment of hide. According to the traditional, and rather apochryphal, legend, Bartholomew met his death in India where he was preaching the word of God. In Legenda Aurea the episode itself is briefly recounted as follows:

[T]he king tore the purple robe he was wearing, and ordered the apostle to be beaten with Clubs and flayed alive. Christians then took his body and gave it honorable burial. King Astyages and the temple priests were seized by demons and died.
- Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, translated by William Granger Ryan, Princeton University Press, 2012: 498



The manner of Bartholomew's death was given a similar, but less horrific rendition in Michelangelo's Last Judgement, in which the saint has been given the features of the playwright, poet and infamous pornographer Pietro Aretino.

Bartholomew Aretino
From Wikimedia

For similar blogposts, see:


Sanctity in Milan, part 1

Sanctity in Milan, part 2

Sanctity in Milan, part 3

On the late-medieval iconographic development of Saint Sebastian

Torquato the badger-poet

In a previous blogpost I had a closer look at some adaptations of William Shakespeare in Italian comic book stories from the Disney universe. Since the beginning of the Italian production of comics about Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse in the 1950s, a wide range of works from world literature have been adapted into stories from the world of Duckburg, in Italian Paperopoli. A range of these adaptations have been collected in a book series issued by Corriere della Sera which is called I classici della letteratura, the classics of literature, presenting these adaptations with information both about the stories themselves and their authors. I am very fond of these adaptations since I grew up with them in Norwegian translations, and they will feature in many blogposts to come. This time I will look briefly at one very charming aspect of an adaptation of Torquato Tasso's (1544-95) epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata, the deliverance of Jerusalem, which was completed in 1575.

Front page of vol.14 in the second edition of I Classici della Letteratura

In 1565 Torquato Tasso settled in Ferrara and became attached to the house of d'Este, and during his time there he wrote a number of plays and poems in addition to his magnum opus. Gerusalemme Liberata is an epic chivalric poem, and in composition Tasso borrowed from that blend of classical epic and chivalric romance which had been made famous by Ludovico Ariosto in the early part of the century. The narrative of the poem is set during the First Crusade and recounts the capture of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre led by Godfrey de Bouillon in 1099, but also heavily interspersed with digressions, love stories and fantastical episodes.

Gerusalemme Liberata has had a great impact on Western culture. For instance, Edmund Spenser was very much inspired by Tasso's poem in the writing his own epic, The Faerie Queene, which he began composing in 1590.  Also John Milton relied on Tasso's imagery for parts of Paradise Lost, and a wide range of operas, songs and paintings have sought to elaborate or focus on elements from Tasso's epic, and in the twentieth century the poem was adapted into a Disney comic.

Opening page of Paperopoli Liberata

The comic book adaptation, Paperopoli Liberata or Duckburg Delivered, was written by Guido Martina and drawn by Giovan Battista Carpi. It was first published in the Italian Topolino magazine (Mickey Mouse) in vols. 598 and 599, respectively issued on 14th and 21st of May, 1967. The epic, medievalesque tone of the adaptation is set already on the opening page where we see a painting of Donald and Scrooge fighting Beagle Boys in stereotypical Saracen armour (note the pointed helmets) and armed with revolvers and machine guns, highlighting the blend of old and new, and perhaps preparing the reader for the fact that the adaptation is set in modern-time Duckburg.

The first lines of the comic book story are adaptations from the opening of Gerusalemme Liberata. In the new rendition the text begins like this (translations from Italian are my own):

Canto l'armi Furiose e il capitano / Chamato Paperino

"I sing of furious arms and the captain / who is called Donald Duck"


While Tasso's poem opens in this way:

Canto l'arme pietose e 'l capitano
che 'l gran sepolcro liberò di Cristo

"I sing of pious arms and the captain
who liberated the great Sepulchre of Christ"


Guido Martina has retained the tone of the epic and necessarily secularised the content, but although the Paperino story is set in a fictional part of America rather than in late-eleventh-century Jerusalem, some elements are still retained and employed in a game of intertextuality. One example of this can be seen below, as a sign tells us that this is the camp of Donald Duck and his nephew, bringing to mind - as is pointed out in the introduction to this volume - the camp of the crusaders in Tasso's epic.

(Note, for instance, that Martina applies "Furiose" with a capital f instead of Tasso's "pietose". This is of course to remove the religious dimension of the poem, but it might also be a nod to Tasso's debt to Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and perhaps also to Martina's own possible debt to Luciano Bottaro who had composed his adaptation of Ariosto's poem, Paperin Furioso, the year before.)

The story begins with the breaking of the camp and the departure for Paperopoli, and this sequence contains one of the most charming tools of intertextuality I can think of. As the nephews are taking down the tent, they notice that their new friend, a little badger, is saddened by their imminent leaving. The nephews then suggest that he come with them back to Paperopoli, and this makes the badger happy. But how is this intertextuality? Well, simply because this badger is a representation of Torquato Tasso himself, as his surname means "badger" in Italian. This is made crystal clear on the following page, where the little badger turns to the reader and says:

"It is not that I lack speech, it is that I, Torquato the badger, speak in the language of the badgers!"

Torquato the badger is then put in the car and as he departs he looks forward to whatever will transpire next, saying "what a wonderful adventure! I will tell this to my children, and to my children's children". Torquato Tasso is thus in a way reincarnated as Torquato the badger, and he will become the badger-poet who renders in proper verse the story which is about to unfold in Paperopoli.

The Ducks behold Paperopoli, as the crusaders beheld Jerusalem

For similar blogposts, see:


On adaptations of Shakespeare

On an episode from Orlando Furioso

On a painting on a knight errant

Elegy for Edmund Spenser

Saint Boniface and the Miracle of the Fox

I recently finished reading the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, a collection of stories about saints and miraculous events from Italy and sometimes the nearby world in the sixth century. This opus, divided into four books written in dialogue form between Gregory and the monk Peter - is a huge treasure trove for a medievalist, both for its interesting insights to daily life in Gregory's time, but particularly for a saint scholar such as myself since this book was written at a time when hagiographical typology still was in its first formative period. Many of the stories recounted by Gregory contain similarities with other stories, both earlier and later, and these make for interesting comparisons. The most famous dialogue is undoubtedly the second book, which is a comprehensive hagiographical vita of Benedict of Nursia.

I hope to return to Gregory's Dialogues frequently, and in this blogpost I wish to present you with a miracle that happened to Saint Boniface when he was a young boy:

Boniface used to tend his mother's hens in a yard near the house. Frequently a fox would come from his den nearby and carry off some of the flock. One day when the boy Boniface was standing in the yard, the fox came as usual and took one of them. The boy quickly ran into the church and fell on his knees: 'O God,' he prayed in a loud voice, 'can you be satisfied to see me go hungry at my mother's table? Look! A fox is eating up all our hens!'  The moment he finished the prayer he ran out again. Almost immediately the fox came back, opened his jaws to free the hen, and fell dead at Boniface's feet.
- Gregory the Great, The Dialogues, translated by Odo Zimmerman, 2002: 40-41

The monk Peter finds this story to be a charming account and deems it to be a childish favour (but in a positive way). Gregory then responds that God sometimes fulfill small requests to keep our faith going for greater ones.

In addition to the typological details of this brief account - an animal returning with its prey, the culprit falling dead at the saint's feet - we also see echoes of the age-old iconography of the fox as the trickster and symbol of slyness and theft. This was an iconography which held great currency in the medieval imagination, and it was this which gave us the many stories of Renard the Fox, stories which became so popular that the name "renard" supplanted the word "goupil" as meaning "fox" in the French language.

Fox with duck
MS Royal 2 B VII, English psalter, between 1310 and 1320
Courtesy of British Library

Ai vist lo lop - I saw the wolf
Medieval traditional about a wolf, a fox and a hare
Performed by Arany Zoltán

Narrative and Saints' Lives, part I - Abdon and Sennen, and the semblance of historicity

At the Centre for Medieval Literature in Odense where I work, we have recently started up a Latin reading group in which we translate selected stories from Legenda Aurea together. Since we are a centre of literary scholars – in various ways – we always talk about the stories as stories and narrative in addition to what grammatical discussions might arise. This has proved to be a very nice forum for talking about various forms of narrative, partly because we have a wide range of expertise among us and partly because the stories themselves – abbreviated renditions of existing tradition – lend themselves very well to narrative analysis. In this series of blogposts, therefore, I aim to present parts of our discussions and talk about points to be made from the stories. I will attempt to talk about elements and points that I raised in the course of our talk, but when I rely on the ideas of others I will do my best to attribute them as precisely as possible.

 

Abdon and Sennen holding their palms of martyrdom
Avignon - BM - ms. 0136, f.257v, Roman missal, c.1370
Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

First up is the story of SS Abdon and Sennen, and since their legend is so very short I will here quote it in full length as translated by William Granger Ryan in the 2012 edition of The Golden Legend (Princeton University Press).


Abdon and Sennen suffered martyrdom under the emperor Decius. When Decius had conquered Babylonia and other provinces, he found some Christians in these regions, brought them back to the town of Cordoba, and put them to death with various tortures. Two officials of that area, whose names were Abdon and Sennen, took the martyrs’ bodies and buried them. When the two were denounced and brought before Decius, he had them bound with chains and brought to Rome with him. There in the presence of the emperor and the Senate, they were ordered either to sacrifice and receive their freedom and goods, or to be devoured by wild beasts. They scoffed at the idea of sacrificing and spat upon the idols, so they were dragged to the circus, and two lions and four bears were loosed upon them. The beasts, however, would not touch the saints but rather stood guard around them, so they were put to death by the sword. Then their feet were tied together and their bodies dragged into a temple and thrown in front of an idol representing the sun god. When the bodies had lain there for three days, a subdeacon named Quirinus took them away and buried them in his house. They suffered about A.D. 253.

Later, in the reign of Constantine, the martyrs themselves revealed the whereabouts of their bodies, and Christians transferred them to the cemetery of Pontianus, where the Lord granted many benefits to the people through them.
- Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, translated by William Granger Ryan, 2012: 412

Abdon and Sennen bury the remains of Christians martyrs
Guillaume Courtois, 1656-57
Courtesy of Wikimedia

As can be seen, this is a very compact story and it contains a lot of information and also a wide number of hagiographical topoi. To what extent this story has some truth to its foundation is difficult to assess. This difficulty arises not only from the fact that we lack sources contemporary to the two martyrs, but also because the narrative contains several details which are grounded in historical facts. For instance, Decius was known for his persecutions of Christians, and he did live around the date given, and although he died in 251 and could not have done anything against any Christians in 253, the text saves itself from historical inaccuracy by adding the “about”. Furthermore, that people were taken from Babylonia (which was not the name of the region at the time) all the way to Spain might be based on the Roman practice of transferring auxiliary troops from one end of the empire to the next for the purpose of detaching them from their native power base. These details lend a certain sheen of trustworthiness to the story, and we might speculate whether those are conscious additions made for that particular purpose, or whether we see here a jumbling of vague and confuse memories of a past – but not too distant – century. The reason for thinking so is that although we do not know much about the historicity of Abdon and Sennen, we know that they are included in the Depositio Martyrum which was composed in 354 and accordingly some memory seems to have remained of them (see Farmer’s Oxford Dictionary of Saints for details of their cult).

Abdon and Sennen
Retabula painted by Jaume Huguet, 1459-60
Courtesy of Wikimedia

However, notwithstanding the semblances of historical truth, we also find that several of the details in the narrative can be labelled as hagiographical topoi. The Decian persecutions is a typical historical framework for saints of dubious historicity, and this period is one of three in which such saint stories are usually set, the other two being the persecutions under Nero and the persecutions under Diocletian. These are not the only periods of Roman history to be used as historical backgrounds for early saints’ lives, but they are the most common. Accordingly, what appears to be a reasonable date for these two martyrs might merely be a commonplace, a suggestion strengthened by the strange approximation of their death, because although it is not meant to be accurate it takes its starting point two years after Decius’ death.

This leads us to another important point which was presented by my colleagues Lars Boje Mortensen and Alastair Matthews, namely that the occasional presentation of minute details might be a way for the writer to give the impression of an account which comes from eyewitnesses, that the details provide a certain verisimilitude akin to that provided by the echoes of historical facts mentioned above. (It is important to note that “the writer” in this question is not Jacobus de Voragine as he was compiling from older sources.) Accordingly, the precise number of animals (with their mnemonically powerful symmetry), the name and rank of the man who buried them, and the approximate precision of their dating (as pointed out by Boje Mortensen) are all there to provide the narrative with more intensity and to bridge the gap between the times of the reader and the times described.

Abdon and Sennen
Châteauroux - BM - ms. 0002, f.256v, breviary, Use of Paris, c.1414
Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr

In addition to this verisimilitude we also see a number of topoi aside from that of its temporal setting. Many details can be found which reminds one of other stories, and either this is done deliberately to invoke that kind of association – a typical feature of hagiography which was intended to lend credence and gravity to the story – or it could be a result of the writer having this array of topoi readily available in his memory.

The most obvious topos is that of the saint being forced to sacrifice to pagan idols and then refuse with holy derision. This is found in a wide range of saint stories, among them St. Catherine and St. Eustace. Another topos is the intended death by wild beasts – also found in St. Eustace – and the ultimate death by sword following the failures of the initial tortures (St. Catherine). Furthermore, that the saints are dragged through the streets can be found for instance in the story of Saint Fermín, while the detail that their remnants are honorably buried by other Christians can be seen for instance in St. Polycarp. That the saints posthumously alerted the faithful of their resting place is a topos perhaps most famously found in the story of Ambrose’s find of the relics of SS Gervasius and Protasius in Milano.

One final point should be mentioned here regarding the narrative progression of the story. The narrative begins in Babylonia and provides the historical setting and an initial geographical setting. Then the story moves to Cordoba and the first batch of martyrs – an unnumbered array of Babylonian Christians – are killed off. This is the preface of the story and in three lines we move from a grand scene with a big cast of characters which traverses a wide space to the deeds of two officials in Cordoba. At this point the narrative makes one more geographical move before it gains complete focus and it is amplified by a number of minute details. It is interesting, and perhaps also significant, that the narrative moves to Rome in order to reach its climax. From the inclusion of Abdon and Sennen in the Depositio Martyrum this might attest to a Roman memory of their martyrdom, and this is further suggested in the quiet epilogue which effectively begins with the abrupt introduction of Quirinius to the stage and the summary of their re-interment.

Abdon and Sennen
Nuremberg chronicles, f.128r, 1493
Courtesy of Wikimedia