New publication: 'Saints and Urban Medievalism: The Case of Saint Knud Rex in Modern-Day Odense'

 

Earlier this week, I was notified about the publication of the collection of articles Doing Memory: Medieval Saints and Heroes and Their Afterlives in the Baltic Sea Region (19th–20th centuries), edited by Cordelia Heß and Gustavs Strenga. The book is open access, and can be read and downloaded here. I was elated by these news, as the collection also features an article written by me, namely 'Saints and Urban Medievalism: The Case of Saint Knud Rex in Modern-Day Odense'. 

Cover of Doing Memory (ed. Heß and Strenga)

Courtesy of De Gruyter 

The article is an examination of how the figure of Saint Knud Rex - who was king of Denmark from 1080 to his murder in 1086 - has been used in the cityscape of Odense, the city where he was killed and later venerated as a saint. The article puts together a range of materials from artworks, signage and place names in Odense, and examines these sources through the concept of urban medievalism, a term I coined for a conference presentation in 2020. 

I am very proud of this article, because it allowed me to explore a new timeframe and types of historical sources with which I am not accustomed to working, such as temporary art works. It also provided a great opportunity to become more familiar with the concept of medievalism - the reception of the medieval past in a post-medieval era - and to think more carefully about how we, as modern humans, make use of the Middle Ages. 

The article was also a joy to write, in part because the writing and subsequent publication mark the culmination of a process that began in the autumn of 2014, and I can see how ideas and observations from back then have flourished into the text that now has been published. It was in 2014 that I moved to Denmark to begin my PhD, and as I was exploring my new home I was frequently bemused by the numerous details of the cityscape that showed some sort of engagement with the Middle Ages, or with ideas, concepts and aesthetics from the medieval period. For instance, that autumn I wrote a blogpost on artworks depicting dragonslayers in Odense. 

In the course of the five years I lived in Denmark, I accumulated a collection of pictures and notes that I intended to put together into some sort of overview. Eventually, that goal did not come to fruition, at least not as I had intended it to do, but the process of collecting and reflecting on these aspects of the cityscape of Odense did provide me with the groundwork for writing this article. I am very happy that the article has given me an opportunity to engage with these materials that I gathered during my Danish sojourn. Moreover, I am quite proud to note how the article provides glimpses of a process in the history of Odense, as many of the pictures and details used in the article were taken and noted down during the now-completed building of the Odense tramway, as well as apartment complexes. The tramway and the apartments have significantly changed the Odense city centre, and the archaeological excavations and subsequent construction work allowed for an engagement with the city's medieval past - both through the items encountered in the excavations and the artworks that served to beautify the temporary walls around the construction site. During my time in Odense, the city was changing, and I was living through a temporary state that was designed to end in the near future. This feeling of living in a moment with a looming endpoint - a transformation nearing completion, as it were - made me all the more alert to the importance of recording some of these changes. The article has allowed me to share some images of a cityscape that is no longer there, because even though the constituent parts of the city are still in place, new buildings have been erected and the vistas are no longer the same. The article, in short, provides some snapshots of a lost past, recorded in the process of losing that past. 

The early cult of saints – an attempted history

 

[The following is an attempt at a brief history of the development of the Christian cult of saints in the first 500 years. This period saw a rapid development of this phenomenon, yet the relative paucity of the sources means that it can sometimes be difficult to understand that despite the rapidity of the process, it was also piecemeal and slow, as well as both decentralised and not streamlined. What prompted me to write this text was a promise to help a colleague with providing an overview of the cult of saints, and I ended up putting together this text which is aimed at giving those unfamiliar with the topic some sense of the historical process, as well as some key terms and dates.] 

Terminology and the first hundred years    

 

The word ‘saint’ is the English translation of ‘sanctus’, which in turn is the Latin translation of the Greek ‘hagios’, which means ‘holy’. In the epistles of Paul, this term is used indiscriminately about all followers of Christ, but it later came to signify an especially holy kind of Christian. There was, in other words, shift from the more general use of ‘hagios’ to a kind of elite Christians. Here, the elite status is based on whether they died for the faith, not their social standing or their position in the early church hierarchy. The circumstances of this shift are nebulous to us, and it was likely a gradual development that grew out of the early persecutions of Christians. (Although it is likely that the persecutions under Nero were too early to have an impact on this shift, and it is more likely that the persecutions under Domitian and Trajan had the most immediate effect – especially those of Domitian.) It is not clear how this change in terminology began, whether it was initiated by the leaders of the early congregations, or whether it emerged from common usage that eventually became the standard way of referring to those who had shown their faith more clearly and publicly. These persecutions served to solidify the sense of a shared identity among Christians, and therefore also gave root to a stronger development of a Christian collective memory. This memory was perpetuated in part through the celebration of the anniversaries of those who had died for the faith. These celebrations were held at the graves of the dead, and from this practice grew the elaborate liturgical celebrations that came into place in the fourth and fifth centuries. The day of the saint’s death became known as ‘dies natalis’, birthday, as it was the beginning of the saint’s life in Heaven. Eventually, as Christianity became more widely common and eventually legalised, the remnants of the especially holy dead Christians could be moved into churches or other sacred spaces intended for the veneration of these remnants. These remnants were relics, which were held to be sacred, and to provide a tangible contact point through which the power of God could work miracles for the glory of the saint (cf. ‘translation’ below).     

            We do not know who were the first saints. Arguably, the apostles, John the Baptist and perhaps also the Virgin Mary are likely to have been held in very high regard from the earliest stages of the Christian religion. Because the early church was both scattered and very heterogenous, however, it is doubtful that we can surmise any coherent approach to the memorialisation of those who died for the faith. In both the Latin and Greek traditions, one of the earliest saints is said to have been Polycarp of Smyrna, whose death is conventionally dated to 155 CE. Early accounts of his death were written in both Latin and Greek, which shows that there was a lot of exchange between those Christians who were Greek-speaking inhabitants of the Roman Empire – not necessarily citizens, although some, like Paul, were – and those whose main written language was Latin. Stories travelled, and so did the terminology. In some cases, this exchange led to the translation of Greek terms into Latin – ‘hagios’ to ‘sanctus’, for instance – but in other cases the Greek terms became dominant also in the Latin language. The best example of this retaining of Greek is seen in the word ‘martyr’, which means witness, and came to mean someone who bore witness to their Christian faith by accepting death rather than recanting their faith. Another of these Greek terms is ‘apostolos’, which means envoy or messenger, and which became slightly Latinized as ‘apostolus’.   

 

The early literature: c.160-c.400     

 

The account of Polycarp of Smyrna’s death – commonly known as The Martyrdom of Polycarp – is believed to have been written relatively shortly after his death, and is often dated to 160 CE. This text is interesting because it shows that many of the typical features of later literature about saints were already in place by the mid-second century CE. For instance, there is an elaborate martyrdom, the remnants of Polycarp were gathered by Christians and held in greater value than jewels – this is perhaps the earliest reference to the veneration of the relics of saints – and the text also exhibits very strong anti-Semitism. Throughout the second and third centuries, several texts about the especially holy Christians appeared, perhaps most famously the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, written in Carthage around the year 200 CE. In this early period, however, there was no coherent genre for writing about saints. The term ‘hagiography’, writing about the holy, was first used by Greek-speaking Jews to refer to the Ketuvim, but at some later point became adopted by Christians to refer to the accounts of saints and their deaths and deeds. As far as I know, we cannot say for certain when this terminology came into this Christian usage.

            Following the legalisation of Christianity during the reign of Emperor Constantine, the churches became more stable centres of administration and memory-production. The various church leaders were able to communicate more frequently with one another, and this exchange led to a streamlining of both terms, practices and forms of memorialisation. By Constantine’s death in in 337, the veneration of relics had become standard practice among Christians, and rich Christians had begun collecting them and turning their house complexes into memorial spaces. The memories of the recent persecutions under Diocletian – particularly in the period c.300-305 – were transformed into a collective memory that further solidified a Christian, but also a Roman Christian, identity. One of the best examples of this memory-making is Pope Damasus I (r.366-84). He himself was born around the time of the Diocletian persecutions, and as bishop of Rome he began to collect the bones of those who had died in the persecutions. These bones were placed in churches and the places of their martyrdoms were memorialised through epigrams. This effort effectively converted Rome into a Christian space, and several popular saints – such as Agnes and Sebastian – became famous through the efforts of Damasus. These epigrams were also part of the early literature about saints.

            In the second half of the fourth century, some of the most impactful texts about saints were written, and these came to establish the form that hagiography would retain throughout the medieval period and into the modern era. The biographical accounts of Martin, bishop of Tours, written by Sulpicius Severus (d.397) while Martin was still alive, and the account of Anthony, the Egyptian hermit, by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (d.373) came to provide a template for later saint-biographers. The biography of a saint – often called ‘vita’, life, or ‘passio’, passion, or even ‘acta’, acts – typically described the saint’s childhood and background, their conversion or at least deeper commitment to Christianity, their suffering, their good deeds, their deaths, and eventually also the appearance of miracles. These two biographies also established more clearly that even those who had not died for their faith – which neither Martin not Anthony had done – could be considered holy, because their way of life had proved their commitment to Christ. They were ‘confessores’, confessors, of their faith, rather than martyrs. 

            The emergence of a more formally coherent Christian literature also led to the more coherent stylistic form of saint-biographies. Although a Christian was always supposed to imitate the life of Christ, this was paramount in the case of the saints. The early saints had imitated Christ by choosing death, and died like Christ, even though the manner of dying was not necessarily on a cross. This imitation of Christ, ‘imitatio Christi’, became more important to demonstrate with the cessation of persecutions, and the relative scarcity of new martyrdoms that followed the legalisation of Christianity. From the late fourth century onwards, therefore, saint-biographers modelled their accounts even more explicitly on episodes from the Gospels, and emphasised the parallels between the life of Christ and the saints more strongly. This practice continued throughout the medieval and modern periods.

            As part of the more formalised and streamlined cult of saints, collections of miracles became more common. I do not know exactly when such accounts of miraculous events first became committed to writing, but it is likely that an expectations of signs and miraculous cures led to orally transmitted accounts in the early period of the veneration of saints. Augustine’s City of God includes an account of the miracles said to have appeared in the wake of the finding of the body of Saint Stephen Protomartyr in 417, and the arrival of some of the relics of Stephen in Carthage in 424. The popularity of Augustine’s writings also had an impact on later miracle collections.    

 

Saints in the Christian cosmology  

 

We know little about how the earliest venerators of Christian saints understood the place of the especially holy dead in the greater scheme of things. There was an expectation of an afterlife, and most likely the saints were believed to be in Heaven. It is unclear whether the veneration of the early saints was done with the hope that those who were venerated would provide help, but such an expectation came into place as the cult of saints became more Romanised. The collection of verse biographies by the poet Prudentius – Liber Peristephanon – shows that by the turn of the fourth century, Christians in the Roman Empire, at least those who belonged to the upper classes, understood the saints and ‘advocati’, intercessors or ambassadors, in the Heavenly Senate. In other words, the system of Roman society – where the rich were patrons who bestowed favours on the common people in return for services, and where the Senate was the house of ultimate authority – was transposed onto the greater cosmology. Saints were understood as patrons, and in return for their aid – ‘beneficium’ – the living Christians performed their duties or their labours, ‘officium’. This idea of saints as interceding before God on behalf of the living has remained a key point in Christian thinking. The ‘beneficium’ usually came in the form of cures or other miraculous events by which God was believed to demonstrate the holiness of his saints. The ‘officium’ usually signified the celebration of the anniversaries of the saints, mainly their day of death or the day of the moving of the relics, the so-called translation. The term ‘officium’ later came to denote the performance of liturgical songs and readings in the course of a daily round in a church or a monastery. Saints interceded on behalf of the living, but they could also punish the living for wrongdoing, neglect of their patrons, or heresy.     

 

Continuity and discontinuity

 

There has been a lot of discussion about the degree to which we can see a continuity from the pagan polytheism to the role of the saints within Christian monotheism. The traditional argument has been that the old gods were simply replaced with different figures, and that people attributed to these figures a lot of the same properties and powers that they did the old gods. Since Peter Brown’s monograph The Cult of Saints (1981), however, the main consensus is that the situation is more complicated than that. Naturally, there might well have been Christian converts who did not discern much of a difference between the saints and the old gods, but to the Christian theologians and, indeed, to the bishops and missionaries, there were many important differences. First of all, a saint does not make any decisions of their own, but with the approval of God. Miracles, moreover, are not brought about by the saint. Instead, God performs the miracle as a favour to the saint in return for the saint’s merit – ‘meritum’ – which is the quality of the saint’s life on earth. Furthermore, while the Christians venerated the saints as heroes, and although Paul’s epistles uses terms like soldier and athlete – there was nothing physically violent about the way the saints met their demise. They fight consisted of enduring violence – often described in gruesome detail by Christian authors – and from the point of view of the pagan Romans, there was little heroic about such passivity. In other words, and following the arguments of Peter Brown, the heroes and gods of the pagan pantheon had little in common with the heroes of the Christians.      

            The differences between the worship of pagan gods and the veneration of Christian hero, however, do not mean that there were not continuities. As the Christian religion became legalised and increasingly infused with Roman impulses – one of which was the transposition of the patron-client system onto the Christian cosmological system – there were several aspects of the various polytheistic religions that came to shape Christian religious practice. For instance, the practice of incubation ritual, where someone sleeps at a shrine in order to acquire a religious experience, was very common among various polytheistic religions. This practice was adopted by Christians, and from miracle collections from the Middle Ages we often read about cures and visions that happened to those who slept or kept a vigil by the saint’s shrine.

            Another form of continuity can be seen in the deliberate re-use of pagan cult places by Christians. Pagan shrines, temples or sacred trees were destroyed with the purpose of replacing the pagan holy place with a Christian one. Among the earliest surviving records of this idea is the Life of Saint Martin by Sulpicius Severus, where Martin cuts down a sacred tree. In Gregory the Great’s Dialogues – a collection of saint stories written during his papacy (590-604) – we read that Saint Benedict of Nursia destroyed a shrine of Apollo and replaced it with an altar of Saint Martin, which suggests a deliberate imitation of the holy bishop. This incident is also a reminder that saints could imitate other saints, not only Christ or biblical figures. In addition, however, it is important to be cautious about whether this hagiographical topos was indeed enacted in real life, or whether it was only a literary claim. It is likely that the hagiographical topos did indeed inspire real-world events, but it is also possible that in some cases we are dealing with a claim of imitation only, not an actual event.  

 

 

+++    

 

Key terms      

 

Apostolos: Greek for envoy or messenger; term used for those of Christ’s early followers who were missionaries, but also used about those saints credited with introducing Christianity to a new place or a new people

 

Beneficium: the favours given by a saint to the living

 

Confessor: those who testified to their faith by their Christian living, but who did not die a violent death (cf. martyr)

 

Dies natalis: the Heavenly birthday of the saint, meaning their day of death

 

Hagiography: writing about the holy; in the Christian sense, any text that provides an account of the saint’s life, characteristics, death, and/or associated miracles. What makes a text hagiographic is that it has its focus on the saint, and many different types of texts therefore qualify as hagiographic, not solely biographies of saints

 

Hagios: Greek for ‘holy’, Paul’s word for the early followers of Christ

 

Imitation of Christ: every saint was expected to imitate Christ to some degree; this imitation could be achieved in many different ways, either by simply sacrificing their life for the faith, or by imitating specific episodes from the Gospels. Saints could also imitate other saints

 

Martyr: Greek for witness; a term used for those who died for the faith and thereby testified to their conviction

 

Meritum: the quality of a saint’s life which makes the saint earn the goodwill of God; the better a saint’s meritum, the more efficient the saint is as an intercessor for the living

 

Miracle: in Christian terms, signs by which God shows His will on Earth, and through which humans are expected to recognise the holiness of a saint  

 

Officium: the veneration given by the living in order to deserve the favours given by the saint

 

Passio: Latin for ‘suffering’, a word commonly used to describe accounts of the saint’s tortures and subsequent death (cf. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas)

 

Relics: the remnants of the saints, usually their bodies or bones; some relics were so-called contact relics, meaning relics that had absorbed some of the holiness of the saints by contact with them – either while the saint was living or after the saint’s death. Through this contact, items such as clothes placed on the saint’s relics or the saint’s shrine could become a new tangible relay point through which God’s power worked miracles. The container in which these relics were placed is commonly referred to as a reliquary, but also sometimes a shrine (cf. ‘shrine’)

 

Sanctus: Latin for ‘holy’; the root of the English ‘saint’

 

Shrine: can be used to refer to the holy space in which a saint is placed and venerated, but it could also mean the casket or container in which the saint’s body or the saint’s bones, dust and ashes were placed

 

Translatio: the moving (translation) of a saint’s relics to a place of rest, sometimes to a new place of rest. The occasion could be celebrated by an anniversary feast.  

 

Vita: Latin for ‘life’, a very common term to denote biographical account of a saint  (cf. Life of Saint Martin)

                  

+++    

 

Brief timeline (all years in CE)       

 

c. 30: commonly accepted date of Christ’s death

 

c.35-64: the missionary activity of Paul the apostle

 

54-68: reign of Nero; possibly the first, and if so very limited, Christian persecutions

 

81-96: reign of Domitian; first major persecutions of Christians

 

155: conventional date of Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna       

 

c.160: composition of The Martyrdom of Polycarp

 

203: conventional date for the death of Perpetua and Felicitas in Carthage, whose imprisonment was recorded in an account that partly might be dictated by Perpetua herself          

 

249-51: reign of Decius, which saw a major persecution of Christians  

 

257-58: the Valerian persecutions; Bishop Cyprian of Carthage died in 258  

 

c.300-305: the Diocletian persecutions

 

313: the Edict of Milan, which legalised Christianity

 

366-84: papacy of Damasus I, one of the major campaigns for Christianising the topography and urban space of Rome

 

373: death of Athanasius of Alexandria, author of The Life of Anthony of Egypt         

 

397: death of Sulpicius Severus, author of The Life of Martin       

 

415: death of Prudentius, author of Liber Peristephanon    

 

417: the finding of the body of Stephen Protomartyr

 

424: the arrival of some of the relics of Stephen Protomartyr in Carthage        

 

430: death of Augustine of Hippo

 

543: death of Benedict of Nursia

 

590-604: the papacy of Gregory the Great

Trondheim without worms - echoes of a lost legend of Saint Olaf?

In medieval art, Saint Olaf of Norway is commonly depicted standing on top of a figure. The nature of this figure appears to have changed over time, although I myself have not mapped the evolution of this iconography, and I should emphasise that there might be several parallel iconographical traditions. In any case, very often we see that in images from the thirteenth century, the figure in question is a human being, the interpretation of which is uncertain. Later on - I hesitate to be precise - the figure takes the shape of a serpent or a dragon, very often with a crowned human head. It is very common in medieval art to see saints standing on such figures, presumably because of Psalm 90:13 in the Vulgate, where God is verbally depicted as trampling lions and dragons underfoot. Consequently, the shift in Olaf's iconography might be part of a wider trend, or perhaps a more localised offshoot that came to take on a life of its own in Northern Europe. The interpretation of this human-headed serpent has been subject to much debate, and I will not enter into here. However, I was reminded of this iconography while I was reading passage from a text written in the seventeenth century, and which might represent some sort of echo of a lost legend of Saint Olaf, or perhaps rather a confusion that ultimately has its root in this late-medieval iconography.   

Saint Olaf stepping on the beast 

Image from the right-hand door of a winged altarpiece, Bygland Church (after 1470) 
Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, C6113

The text in question is the utopian novel La Terre Australe Connue (1676) by Gabriel de Foigny, which David Fausett has translated into English as The Southern Land, Known. Foigny, a Franciscan-turned-Protestant who published the book while living in exile in Switzerland. The novel records the life and travels of Nicholas Sadeur, a hermaphrodite who ends up in a utopian society called Australia in the Southern Land, which in this case refers to the hypothetical southern continent - Terra Australis - which came to give its name to modern-day Australia. As most of the novel's fascinating content is superfluous to the subject at hand here, I will refrain from most of the details. However, in the opening of one of its chapters, there is a claim which becomes very interesting in light of the debate about the iconography of Saint Olaf. When reflecting on the marvellous properties of various landscapes and regions, Foigny - through his narrator Sadeur, mentions that "in Norway's Trondheim worms are unknown". At the time of writing, I have not checked what kind of worm is meant here, whether the serpent-like animal, or the earthworm. It is likely that the worm in question is a more formidable beast than the earthworm, yet later in the novel a note about the positive consequences of the absence of insects might suggest that the more humble creature is meant here. 

Whichever animal Foigny had in mind when writing this passage, it is a claim that I have not encountered elsewhere. The claim is not to be found in Latin medieval chronicles from Norway, even though these books do mention various marvellous properties of various Norwegian locations. It is possible that the claim appears in Olaus Magnus' Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (History of the Northern peoples) from 1555, which was printed in Rome and - due to being in Latin - would have been accessible to a man like Foigny, but such a connection remains to be verified. At the present, I remain at a loss to explain the inclusion of Trondheim in this list of marvellous topographies. What is possible, however, is that there is a connection with the legends of Saint Olaf, and that the absence of worms in Trondheim is based on some now-lost miracle story.    

From David Fausett's translation of Gabriel de Foigny's La Terre Australe Connue (The Southern Land, Known)

During the Middle Ages, several miracle stories were told about Saint Olaf. The earliest of them are likely to have emerged among the Norse mercenaries who had followed the living king into battle, and became some of the most effective disseminators of his cult. Sometime around 1180, a number of these stories were collected and recorded in Latin in a text now known as Miracula Olavi, the miracles of Olaf. This work contains a broad range of miracles that God is said to have brought about in order to prove Olaf's holiness, and the selection includes both old and contemporary stories. However, it is important to note that this collection was never complete, and that several stories are likely to have emerged after this particular text was compiled. Miracula Olavi does not mention any worms or serpents, so even in the unlikely event that Foigny would have had access to this text, it would not have provided the basis for this idea. Other stories might have circulated, however, and it is possible that there once existed a story about how Olaf had liberated Trondheim - which was the centre of his cult and the place of his shrine until the Danish-Norwegian Reformation of 1536/37 - from worms. Such a claim might be based on the beast frequently seen under Olaf's feet in late-medieval art. There might have been some inspiration from the story of Saint Patrick in Ireland, who was believed to have chased the serpents out of the island - a story available to Norwegians in the thirteenth-century book Konungs Skuggsjá (The King's Mirror), which contains a description of the marvellous properties of Ireland. Similarly, a story of how Saint Hild of Whitby chased away the snakes - a legend believed to have been confirmed by the ammonite fossils often found in that region - is also likely to have been available to late-medieval Norwegians. These various elements, as well as others that I have not thought about, might have mixed in the Norwegian mind and produced a story about how Trondheim had been liberated from worms by Saint Olaf. 

Now, Gabriel de Foigny does not mention Saint Olaf, just as he does not mention Saint Patrick when he mentions the absence of spiders and worms in the forests of Ireland. Consequently, if there is a lost story in the distant background of this claim, it was also lost to Foigny. It is very likely that he had never heard about Saint Olaf, a saint whose cult never gained any strong following outside of the Nordic Sphere, eleventh-century England, and the late-medieval Baltic theatre. Some echoes might have arrived, however, possibly in the form of Catholic exiles from Norway, historical figures about whom we know practically nothing, yet of whose existence we can be certain. Such a surmise is hypothetical, however, and I must emphasise that I do not suggest that such a tenuous transmission of stories actually did appear. Yet the possibility remains - the possibility that some warped version of such a legend did reach Foigny, albeit a version evacuated of its explanatory content, a version where the cause - divine intervention on behalf of Saint Olaf - was divorced from the effect, namely the absence of worms in Trondheim.   

Other explanations also exist. The absence of worms - if these are earthworms - might be based on the perceived coldness of the land, the cultural trope of a frozen North willingly believed by someone who had not ventured into that North themselves. Ultimately, however, we do not know, and most likely we will never know. Such a lack of certainty does not give licence to completely free and unbridled speculation. On the other hand, the lack of certainty does force us to reflect on the intangible yet forceful nature of stories - their ability to subsist on very little and to be transported far and wide, even if not always in their original form. 

Mechanisms of patriarchy - medieval and modern iterations

And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair. 
- John Donne, 'Song: Go and catch a falling star' 

You clearly were not listening to my topic sentence: Get your women in line 
- Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory S05E08
 


Last September, the Spanish tech journalist Marta Peirano wrote a brilliant column about the phenomenon of pornographic deepfakes. This abomination of modern technology consists of making artificial pornographic images through so-called Artificial Intelligence. What makes this phenomenon particularly damaging is that this technology allows people to create such images of whomever they wish, and whomever they whish to publicly shame. In an age of social media and the virtual lack of any real and effective control of content dissemination, such artificially made images can be used to damage the life of any woman, and any girl. Marta Peirano noted that this technology is a form of patriarchal propaganda, one that serves to keep women and girl in a state of fear and uncertainty, and one that can be used to destroy reputations and lives through public shaming. In practice, it matters little that these images are fake, because the images will appear to provide evidence for all kinds of charges laid at the feet of these women and these girls. The column has stayed with me ever since, and with the growing sophistication of Artificial Intelligence, this particular mechanism of patriarchy has become increasingly relevant. It is a tragic and repulsive reminder that so many men - as well as some women - will happily use the historically entrenched misogyny of our own times to ruin the lives and reputations of women and girls. An important part of this tragedy is that these pornographic deepfakes are built on a long-standing asymmetry in the gender roles of contemporary societies, where women are more easily hurt and damaged by charges of promiscuity than are men. Deepfakes also exploit the very public nature of such charges, in that they make public spaces - in this case mainly online spaces - unpleasant or even downright dangerous for women. It is about the control of women and girls, and about reminding them that they are second-rate human beings in the eyes of those that shame them.   

The issue of such mechanisms of patriarchy came resurfaced in my mind the other day as I read a modern Norwegian translation of the saga called Möttuls saga, which means The saga of the cloak, which in the Nynorsk form of modern Norwegian is called Soga om kappa. The story is an Old Norse translation of an Old French fablieau known both as Le lai du cort mantel and Le mantel mautaillié. The translation was commissioned by the Norwegian king Håkon IV (r.1217-63), during whose reign a lot of chivalric stories and other aspects of French courtly culture were transmitted and adapted to the Norwegian context. The eponymous cloak is said to have been woven by four elven women and fashioned in such an exquisite way that the seams can not be detected, and it is impossible to say how it has been made.

The cloak has one main property. It will fit perfectly to a chaste woman, but if any woman has been unfaithful or unchaste, it will either become too short or too large. The cloak is brought to the court of King Arthur by an envoy, and the envoy makes the king promise to have all the women at court try on the magical cloak. When the king learns of the cloak's magical property, he regrets his promise but feels obliged to stick to his word. As a consequence, all the women at court - except one young maiden - are shown in a public display to be either unchaste or unfaithful. The episode brings great shame on both the women and their paramours, but, of course, mainly on the women. Moreover, and just as unsurprising, the men are not asked to do a similar test. 

The saga of the cloak shows a mechanism that is essentially similar to the modern pornographic deepfakes, in that its sole purpose is to publicly shame women who do not conform to a particular ideal, or - in other words - refuse to submit to the rules of patriarchy. Such mechanisms exist in all patriarchies - and I do believe it is more accurate to use the plural form than the singular - and their functions are all the same, only the forms change. To compare such mechanisms across times and across culture serves as a reminder that misogyny and the control of women are two aspects of modern society that both have deep roots and also continue to sprout new buds. Modern popular culture is full of these mechanisms, and, perhaps more importantly, full of characters or ideas that serve to normalise and perpetuate them. 

Modern misogyny and patriarchy often hide behind notions of the past being much worse, which in turn cultivates a sense that the modern atrocities are somehow less problematic. This is a very stupid idea, but it is very common and therefore the strategy works. When we start to recognising these mechanisms and their various forms, however, it might serve as an awakening to some of us, and serve as a first step towards refusing to perpetuate such mechanisms and realise the absolute horror of the life-destroying potential of Artificial Intelligence wielded in the name of patriarchy.    

Utopia, technology, and the nebulous borderlands of truth

 

In the past few months, I have tried to keep up with the ongoing discourse concerning the phenomenon inaccurately labelled ‘Artificial Intelligence’, and its potential for warping our sense of reality and further obscuring the already-nebulous boundaries between reality and fantasy. Whenever I have come across an article or news report related to this issue, I have bookmarked it in a folder in my browser, hoping against historically attested practice that I will some day return to these texts and have some intelligent thoughts about them. The folder in which I put these bookmarks is labelled ‘Utopia’, and the folder was created as a way to collect materials related to my current teaching. I thought it fitting at the time, but did not take the time to articulate why I thought so, and so I continued to use this folder while the justification for using this particular folder continued to grow in the back of my mind. In this blogpost, I will try to formulate some of the ideas that have crystallized in the course of this week.            

The connection between Artificial Intelligence and utopian thinking seemed at first intuitive, obvious, and so I did not bother to formulate it properly. However, as I am now reading David Fausett’s 1993 monograph on utopian literature in the seventeenth century – Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopians of the Great Southern Land – a few aspects have become much clearer to me. Fausett makes a compelling point about how utopian literature of the 1600s came to employ textual elements belonging to news reports, pamphlets and broadsides, causing readers to often confuse texts of prose fiction with texts claiming to present factual content. Naturally, the motif of authenticating elements has a long history in fiction, perhaps best illustrated by the topos of the found manuscript (as in Don Quijote), or the now-lost written report translated from another language (as in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain). What was new about this obfuscation of the boundaries between true reports and novels in the seventeenth century, was the changing media landscape. As knowledge of the wider world expanded through journeys of exploration and the growing networks of trade that brought European powers into contact with cultures across the globe, increased literacy and a broadening market for literature gave rise to a greater circulation of information about the distant regions of the world. Since there was an expectation of new encounters and new discoveries, audiences were better disposed to accept fantastical tales as either true or at least based on true events. The knowledge that there was new information to be had, conditioned readers and listeners to blunt their scepticism and become more receptive to the claims of authenticity utilized by authors of utopian fiction.  

 

The confusion about truth and fiction in seventeenth-century Europe is not unique to that time or that place, and it is not an indication of people being stupid or less critical in their thinking. The more I research historical matters, the more convinced I am that humanity has neither become more intelligent nor more stupid as time as passed, only that intelligence and stupidity have played out in different ways and through different means. What is crucial about the confusion described by David Fausett is that the confusion came about through developments in mass media. The confusion, I believe, was a consequence of rapid technological development that did not fit with the slow maturation and the incremental adaptation to novelty that humanity as a species requires in order to understand things. It is this contrast between humanity’s need for slowness and the rapidity of technological innovation that highlights the utopian aspect of the contemporary discourse on Artificial Intelligence.  

 

Those who champion the virtues of Artificial Intelligence and the use of AI in writing, journalism, research and so on, are themselves proponents of a utopian vision, one in which humanity has released themselves of the drudgery of knowing and thinking to the machines. Not all these champions view the future in this framework, but even the more restrained and reasonable among the AI enthusiasts still tend to demonstrate attitudes towards art, critical thinking and factual knowledge that lean very strongly in this direction.  This utopian attitude towards technology is nothing new. One of the hallmarks of utopian thinking is exactly the high levels of technology that are available in utopian societies. Perhaps the most famous example of this idea is Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), which lists a long range of technological advances, including artificial meat and laboratories for all kinds of different research. The motif goes further back in the history of utopian thinking, however. In the Middle Ages – a period not widely accepted as one of utopian thinking, yet nonetheless rife with examples of it – the idea of technologically advanced societies in faraway places appear in several texts. In the Letter of Prester John, a hoax from the 1160s that purported to describe the realms of a Christian ruler in distant India, the technological marvels of this imaginary kingdom are expounded in great detail. Similarly, the Alexander tradition – a collection of texts claiming to narrate the life and deeds of Alexander the Great – contains several descriptions of technological marvels, such as Alexander’s submersible for exploring the depths of the ocean. Other medieval texts that were less fantastical and which had a stronger claim to truth, similarly spent much detail in recording the technological marvels of distant, exotic places. Liutprand of Cremona (d.972), in his chronicle Antapodosis, describes a mechanical throne in the court of the Byzantine emperor. William of Rubruck, who travelled to the court of the Mongol khan in Karakorum in the 1250s and wrote an account of his experiences, tells about a fountain of marvellous ingenuity, built by a French smith who had lived among the Mongols for some time. Similarly, Marco Polo’s famous account of Kubilai Khan’s empire contains a number of examples of advanced technology. There is, in other words, a long-standing expectation that utopian societies – whether they are ideal or just simply better than the point of comparison – are technologically advanced. The presumption is perhaps strengthened by changes in the media landscape, and the idea that technological improvement is the same as social improvement is easily accepted when one is condition to connect technology and utopian thinking, and also when one is living through a changing media landscape that one does not have the time to properly adjust to.    

 

That technological change requires adjustment on the part of the humans affected by that change is perhaps a fairly straightforward claim. Often, this adjustment has been a core aspect of the enthusiasm and the justification surrounding technological change. There is talk about transhumanism, of technology allowing humans to transcend their humanity, of technology ushering in a new era in the evolution of the human species. Technology is often seen as the key to unlock Utopia, and in our contemporary discourse that technology is Artificial Intelligence. Yet the utopian aspect of technological change is two-sided. On the one hand, it is absolutely indisputable that technological change has allowed a vast number of people opportunities for a better life than they would otherwise have. The best argument for our current level of technology is that it allows those who are handicapped in one way or the other to reduce that handicap, to open up new opportunities for living that would have been impossible without the technology in question. On the other hand, technology can be used to either oppress or numb the critical faculties of people, and when that technology is controlled by someone with authoritarian tendencies, the technology in question can easily be used to obscure the distinction between reality and fantasy, between truth and fiction, between veracity and lies. The potential for abusing technology is strengthened when technology means changing how we receive information. Changes in the media landscape means that we, humans, need to reflect on how we can use our faculties to convert the information given to us through this changing landscape into knowledge. We need to learn how to distinguish between claims and facts, between lies and truth. If we do not reflect on this challenge, if we forfeit this process of critical reflection, or if we outsource it to those who control the changing technology, we become less able to understand the basis of truth and the signs of duplicity.            

 

With the current proliferation of AI programmes that can create images and texts by stealing from existing works of art and existing texts, we are becoming less well-equipped to ascertain what is true and what is false. This blurring and warping of the already nebulous borderlands between truth and falsehood can be, and is already, weaponized by various individuals and groups with authoritarian motives. The utopian scenarios presented by these would-be dictators and hobby-authoritarians might seem appealing, but we do well to remember that several works of utopian fiction have already highlighted the inherent risk of abuse in utopian societies. One example is Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Austral Connue (The Southern Land, Known, translated by David Fausett), where the novel’s narrator lives thirty-five years among the Australians, a people of highly advanced technology. However, these technologically advanced people, who consider themselves and their society perfect, tolerate no other form of human life than that of their own. Since Foigny’s Australians are giant hermaphrodites, this intolerance means that they commit genocide on their non-giant, non-hermaphrodite neighbours, and use their advanced technology to obliterate the very ground on which their neighbours sought to establish a living. In the novel, the Australians have also employed their combination of technology and force in numbers to establish an ecosystem that is devoid of insects. Such a manoeuvre stems from an idea of gardens as locus of perfection, where insects are seen as noisy intruders, and fits perfectly well within a branch of utopian thinking that equates perfection with homogeneity. While the realistic consequences of this insect-less world are not touched upon by Foigny, our twenty-first century perspective – an era of mass-disappearance of bees and other insects, and where the consequences of extensive and often unbridled use of pesticide have made themselves clear – notifies us of the impending ramifications of technologically crafted homogeneity in Foigny’s Australia.  

 

Utopian thinking and utopian literature often rely on a blurring of the border between truth and fiction, between the possible and the impossible, in order to make rhetorical points, or in order to push an agenda or proffer suggestions for how to improve society. On other occasions, utopian thinking and utopian literature showcase how illusory the perfection of utopian society actually is. Thomas More’s Utopia is a slave society, relying on prisoners of war to do the most basic tasks of a functioning commonwealth. Tommaso Campanella’s city of the sun in distant Taprobane is a eugenicist society where the individuals are governed to such an extreme degree that the leaders decide which individuals should have children together. And Foigny’s narrator, the hermaphrodite Sadeur, returns from Australia completely disillusioned with a society that believes itself to be perfect, and allows that perfection to justify horrible acts.         

 

In our contemporary discourse, the utopian implications of Artificial Intelligence tends to dominate. Yet utopian societies can often be illusory, and more often than not they are deeply authoritarian. One way of perpetuating authoritarian government is to confuse people’s perception of reality, whether it is through mass delusion or through a blurring of fact and fiction. Nowadays, the media landscape is changing too rapidly for us to easily adjust to the new ways of ascertaining truth and discovering lies. In such a confusion, utopian solutions might appear more realistic than they actually are. Indeed, these utopian solutions are based on the perpetuation of a tool – Artificial Intelligence – that is programmed to create an alternate reality from stolen fragments from the real world. The question we need to ask at every juncture when AI is lauded as the key to the future is as follows: Whose utopia is being heralded by AI’s warping of reality? The answer is most likely going to be very unpleasant.  

        

Podcast appearance: Bishop Grimkell, and Anno 1024

Earlier this year, I was invited to participate in an episode of the podcast Anno 1024, a podcast dedicated to topics pertaining to the millennium anniversary of the so-called Moster thing, or Moster assembly, in Western Norway. The episode is available here (in Norwegian only).

The anniversary is based on the texts of two law collections which were written down sometime in the second half of the twelfth century. These collections are known as the Gulathing law code and the Frostathing law code. They are named after the two major law provinces of eleventh and twelfth century Norway. Gulathing - or the Gula assembly - covered most of the western seaboard of Southern Norway, from Sunnmøre to Agder, as well as various parts of the central valleys of the interior. Frostathing - or the Frosta assembly - covered the western seaboard from Romsdal and northwards, eventually also including Hålogaland, as well as parts of the hinterland of the Trondheim fjord. 

In the law codes, we read that the Christian law was introduced by King Olaf Haraldsson - the later Saint Olaf - and Bishop Grimkell at the Moster assembly, which has traditionally been dated to 1024. There is an ongoing debate about whether this claim is actually true, and whether there was an assembly at Moster, and also whether this was the starting point for introducing Christian legislation in Norway. It is clear that King Olaf did collaborate with ecclesiastics to strengthen royal control over the Norwegian juridical infrastructure of the time, and also to strengthen his legitimacy among the people. However, whether the introduction of Christian rules can be dated as precisely to one assembly, and whether there was an effort to reform the laws in the way described by the twelfth-century texts of the law codes, is highly uncertain. 

These are some of the questions that are discussed in the episode. While the host, Torgeir Landro, and I agree on the main issues, there are also other scholars who interpret the material differently.      

The vanity of exploration - or, The discovery of Bouvet Island prefigured?

This spring, I am teaching a course on utopian thinking in the Middle Ages. The course is designed for MA students, and to prepare a good foundation for delving into details and focusing on specific themes within the vast umbrella of the course's main topic, my co-teacher and I have dedicated the first seminars to a chronological walkthrough of utopian material, ending with the Early Modern Period and stopping around 1750 for purely practical reasons. One important reason for bringing the early modern material into discussion with the medieval texts, was to highlight how increasing geographical knowledge affects the way utopian places are imagined, and where they are placed on the map.  

Thinking about the development of cartography and geographical knowledge, I was reminded of a detail I noticed in a painting I had the pleasure of seeing up close in January, namely Antonio de Pereda's allegory of vanity, exhibited in Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The painting is an exquisite example of the vanitas genre, one of my favourite types of paintings, as it combines the exuberant display of skill typical of the still life with the sombre and melancholic note of the memento mori artwork of the Late Middle Ages. The genre takes its name from the Book of Ecclesiastes, which is an immensely beautiful and human reflection on the pointlessness of human endeavour: All is vanity, all is in vain. Since part of the point of a vanitas painting is the juxtaposition of numerous and often contrasting pursuits, the genre also offered artists an opportunity to show how skilled they were at drawing complicated things, while also adhering to the iconographical standards of the genre (such as a skull, an extinguished candle, and an hourglass with all the sand in the bottom).       

Antonio de Pereda (1611-78), Alegoria de la vanidad (1632-36)

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Inventory no. GG 771

One detail that particularly fascinates, and pleases, me about Antonio de Pereda's rendition of the vanitas motif, is the way that he has rendered the globe, a detail I only properly realised when I was standing right in front of the painting. As seen below, the globe is placed on its side - its imagined side, rather - with north facing east and the west facing north. The hand of the genius representing the passing of time and the eventual pulverisation of all things mortal and temporal, is pointing towards the tip of the African continent, to a point between Africa and Antarctica. 

The detail is particularly interesting to me in light of the time when the painting was made, namely the 1630s. At this time, the Portuguese had spent generations mapping the coastlines of Africa and the Indian Ocean World, and there had been great strides in cartography. Madagascar - which was merely  a a rumour to medieval Europeans, if even that - is slowly receiving its actual shape, and the interior of Africa is mapped in the minds of European traders through stories encountered in the great Swahili trading cities such as Sofala and Mombasa. Indeed, if we look very closely on the globe in Pereda's painting, we see that the map of Africa represents two cartographic stages, with an earlier phase rendered in a strong green colour - reminiscent of the way Africa is depicted in early sixteenth-century maps - and a more modern, broader outline in weaker grey-green colour, which seems to represent the extent of Africa as known by modern cartography. Further south, moreover, is the great southern continent that was hypothesised by numerous cartographers throughout the medieval and early modern periods. This was a continent expected to exist to the south of Africa, based on the knowledge that the earth was round, and that the lower hemisphere should resemble the upper in climate, and perhaps also in having a large continent that would correspond with Eurasia. It is important to note, however, that by the time Antonio de Pereda painted this allegory, no European had been far enough south to ascertain the existence of this continent.   

In light of Antonio de Pereda's own times, and the increasing cartographic knowledge of the era, how are we to understand the way that the globe is included and rendered in the painting? While I do not know for certain, I suspect that in an age when voyages for trade, domination and conquest were still an important part of the geopolitical and even everyday life of Europe, the mapping of distant shores would be a natural part of the register of motifs that could emphasise the pointlessness of human endeavour. That the outline of Africa is rendered in two versions might be understood as a shorthand of the recent cartographic development of Pereda's times, which, ultimately, is as pointless as the game of cards or the possession of jewelry, since it does not ensure humans that eternal peace and afterlife which can only be attained through spiritual pursuits. Essentially, the painting seems to say: Yes, we know more about the world, but so what? 

 

One detail in the rendition of the globe is particularly amusing to me, as it is a pure coincidence. The finger of the genius is pointing to a location between the southern tip of Africa and the great southern land, the Terra Australis, that corresponds roughly to what we know now to be Antarctica. If we look at a modern map of this area, the finger is placed on, or at least very near, Bouvet Island, known as one of the most isolated places in the world. The first known sighting of Bouvet Island, currently under the jurisdiction of Norway, happened in 1739 during a voyage under Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier (1705-86), and the first known landfall happened in 1822 by American whalers. Consequently, Antonio de Pereda did not know about Bouvet Island, and the placing of the genius' finger is purely coincidental. But it pleases me to think about how human speculation and imagination very often does manage to envision the real world despite lack of certain knowledge.