Eilert Sundt. A founding father of the social sciences in Norway

The cult of St Nicholas spread in Scandinavia and northern Rus' in approximately the same period, namely in the last decades of the 11th and the first decades of the 12th centuries. In spite of such a correspondence, the dissemination of the cult in the two adjacent regions has been treated as two separate phenomena. Consequently, the growing popularity of the cult in Scandinavia has traditionally been dealt with as an immanent part of the transmission of the Catholic tradition, and a similar phenomenon in northern Rus' has been discussed with reference to the establishment of Orthodox Christianity. By contrast, the evidence analysed in this article shows that the establishment of the cult of St Nicholas in the two regions was an intertwined process, in which the difference between Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy played a minor role. The early spread of this particular cult thus suggests that, as far as some aspects of the cult of saints are concerned, the division between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity in Northern Europe was less abrupt in the 11th and 12th centuries than has been traditionally assumed. This was due to the fact that the medieval cult of saints was not limited to the liturgy of saints, but was a wider social phenomenon in which political and dynastic links and cultural and trading contacts across Northern Europe often mattered more than confessional differences. When we leave the liturgy aside and turn to kings, princes, traders and other folk interacting across the early Christian North, then the confessional borders are less useful for our understanding of how some aspects of Christian culture were communicated across Northern Europe in the first two centuries after conversion.     

The remains of the saints: the evidence of early medieval relic collections

This article explores the materiality of early medieval devotion to the saints. It argues that, even though most of the material objects themselves no longer survive, there is nevertheless much to be gleaned from surviving caches of relic labels about what churches believed they possessed. It exploits the same evidence to explore how types of relic‐objects changed over time, track evidence for the importance of oral tradition in their formation, and identify pathways of circulation. In demonstrating how churches curated the relics in their care, it pinpoints the active participation of scribes and relic custodians in interpreting and re‐interpreting them.     

Handmaids of God: Images of Service in the Lives of Merovingian Female Saints

Merovingian hagiographies make extensive use of the metaphor of service to demonstrate the sanctity of their subjects. These religious images emerged from a society in which slaves and servants were both ubiquitous and demeaned, and the metaphors were embedded in the social realities of service. This article examines the Lives of three elite female saints who were depicted as slaves, or engaged in acts of servitude: Radegund, Balthild, and Austreberta. It argues that although service as a religious motif was central to each of these texts, the authors engaged with the image in strikingly different ways and to quite different ends, depending on the social world of the text.     

Politics, diplomacy and the cult of relics in Venice and the northern Adriatic in the first half of the ninth century

In early medieval Europe the cult of the saints emerged as a prominent focus for the construction of political identity. Corporeal relics became objects of importance, conferring status on their possessor; and, like other precious commodities, they frequently served as prestigious diplomatic gifts, useful for the fostering of political affiliations between donor and recipient. This strategic use of saints' cults is here examined with special regard to the region of the northern Adriatic. In the first decade of the ninth century, Byzantine attempts to maintain the allegiance of Venice and urban centres along the Dalmatian coast may have prompted the translations to the region of the relics of saints such as Anastasia, Tryphon and Theodore, all of whom became important civic patrons. Later in the century, the Byzantine mission to Moravia was focused on the relics of St Clement, while archaeological and other evidence suggests that Frankish missions into the Balkans may have stressed the cult of St Martin, a native of Pannonia. Ultimately, Venetian independence from both powers was made possible by their adoption of a new patron saint, Mark, whose cult arrived from Alexandria unencumbered by implicit political debts.     

Apprehending the Archangel Michael: hagiographic methods

Abstract

This essay examines the means by which hagiographies attempt to describe the presence and appearances of the Archangel Michael. It deals with several hagiographies at some length in order to demonstrate the ways in which each text persuades its audience of the Archangel's benign proximity. It examines, in particular, the hagiographies of the miracle at Chonae since the ‘pre-history’ of this cult is relatively clear and the shrine's activities during the Byzantine period were widely acclaimed. This essay also discusses other hagiographies, namely of the sanctuary at Monte Gargano and of the shrine described by Michael Psellus (1018–1081 ?). In examining these texts, certain structural similarities become apparent: access to the Archangel is made difficult by his unique angelic nature and this difficulty led to textual strategies that make Michael more firmly entrenched in the texts' levels of narrative. The hagiographies reveal Michael's elusive, elemental force active in a landscape, and work to bind the Archangel-notionally at least-to places in order to strengthen expectation of devotional return.     

Saints,rulers and communities in Southern Italy: the Vitae of the Italo-Greek saints (tenth to eleventh centuries) and their audiences

Relations between saints and secular rulers as presented in the Vitae of the Italo-Greek saints in Southern Italy in the tenth and eleventh centuries have been treated in terms of identity and difference, namely to measure the degree to which the Italo-Greeks identified themselves with the Byzantine people, thus differentiating themselves from the Latins. In this way, however, the mediating function of the saint, the narrative strategies of the hagiographers and the interaction between the texts and their audiences are ignored. Taking its cue from the frontier character of Southern Italy and the local context of the cults, this paper examines the narrative representations of these relations in order to understand how local communities gathered around a cult to find support and how they perceived the political powers acting in their region. It is argued that in this frontier society multiple local frameworks of power relations rather than identities are represented in the saints' Lives.     

The martyr, the matrona and the bishop: the matron Lucina and the politics of martyr cult in fifth- and sixth-century Rome

The present study attempts to build on the achievement of Pietri and Llewellyn in assessing the peculiarities and limitations of the gesta martyrum as a source for late ancient and early medieval Rome, while shifting interpretative stress away from the lay—clerical binary which has dominated recent treatments of the cult of the saints, and toward an emphasis on factional conflict among lay—clerical coalitions. Central is an analysis of the literary motif, which recurs across the gesta of Lucina, the aristocratic matrona or widow who sees to the burial of the martyr on her own lands. Though the stereotypical figure of Lucina warns us of the limitations of the gesta as a source for the patronage activity of the lay aristocracy, it is argued, her appearance in crucial texts such as the Passio Sebastiani can nonetheless help us to trace the role which the memory of the martyrs played in texts such as the gesta martyrum, the Symmachan Forgeries, or the Liber Pontificalis, as well as the role which martyr shrines such as the Vatican basilica and the memoria apostolorum on the Via Appia played in the contestation and consolidation of Roman episcopal authority.     

Building urban Christian communities: sermons on local saints in the Eusebius Gallicanus collection

This article uses the sermons in the anonymous collection known as the Eusebius Gallicanus to explore the ways in which preachers in fifth-century Gaul tried to build urban Christian communities, focusing particularly on the subset of sermons which deal with local saints. In these sermons preachers adapt a tradition of Christian language and thought to the specific circumstances they faced. They seize the opportunity provided by their subject matter to evoke a vision which is urban, localized, and which stands in contrast to more 'universal' conceptions of Christian community.     

The Fate of Jewish Historiography after the Bible: A New Interpretation

What caused the eventual decline in later Jewish history of the vibrant historiographical tradition of the biblical period? In contrast to the plethora of historical writings composed during the biblical period, the rabbis of the early common era apparently were not interested in writing history, and when they did relate to historical events they often introduced mythical and unrealistic elements into their writings. Scholars have offered various explanations for this phenomenon; a central goal of this article is to locate these explanations within both the immediate historical setting of Roman Palestine and the overarching cultural atmosphere of the Greco‐Roman Near East. In particular, I suggest that the largely ahistorical approach of the rabbis functioned as a local Jewish counterpart to the widespread classicizing tendencies of a contemporary Greek intellectual movement, the Second Sophistic. In both cases, eastern communities, whose political aspirations were stifled under Roman rule, sought to express their cognitive and spiritual identities by focusing on a glorious and idealized past rather than on contemporary history. Interestingly, the apparent lack of rabbinic interest in historiography is not limited to the early rabbinic period. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, Jews essentially did not write their political, diplomatic, or military history. Instead, Jews composed “traditional historiography” which included various types of literary genres among which the rabbinic “chain of transmission” was the most important. The chain of transmission reconstructs (or fabricates) the links that connect later rabbinic sages with their predecessors. Robert Bonfil has noted the similarity between this rabbinic project and contemporary church histories. Adding a diachronic dimension to Bonfil's comparison, I suggest that rabbinic chains of transmission and church histories are not similar though entirely independent phenomena, but rather their shared project actually derives from a common origin, the Hellenistic succession list. The succession list literary genre, which sketches the history of an intellectual discipline, apparently thrived during the Second Sophistic and diffused then into both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. Thus, even though historiography was not terribly important to the early rabbis or to most Second Sophistic intellectuals, the succession list schematic, or the history of an intellectual discipline, was evaluated differently. Rabbis and early Christians absorbed the succession list from Second Sophistic culture and then continued to employ this historiographical genre for many centuries to come.     

Commentary Individuation in Country Music: A Modern Pilgrimage

Cattle festivals and cattle rites are much neglected elements of the Indian cattle complex. This study examines Gopashtami and Govardhan Puja, two cattle festivals identified with the cult of Krishna. Although Krishna assumes several aspects in Hinduism, the pastoral Krishna is one of the most popular forms of the deity. Gopashtami and Govardhan Puja are important festivals in Braj, the traditional homeland of the cowherd god. Their origins can be traced to medieval Hindu texts, but Govardhan Puja contains ritual elements that suggest ancient rites have been absorbed into a later Hindu festival. Gopashtami and Govardhan Puja, like any religious festival, can be interpreted at several different levels. They have symbolic meaning, raising questions of conflicting religious traditions or economic systems in the past. They mirror regional patterns of culture and historical tradition in India. They assume a range of social functions, and in addition, form part of the process by which people are exposed to their cultural heritage. Above all, however, they are festivals dedicated to cattle and to the cowherd god Krishna. The myths and rituals of Gopashtami and Govardhan Puja reflect the strong historical ties between Krishna and the cow, as well as reinforce traditional Hindu concepts concerning the sanctity of the cow.     

罗马时代的信仰危机

异教时期的罗马国教具有公共性、反个人崇拜及相对宽容等特点。自从元首政治建立之后,随着东方思想的大量涌入,有关个人灵魂拯救的秘传崇拜开始打破公共崇拜对于信仰领域的垄断;皇帝崇拜日益冲击着城邦宗教中的共和与民主传统;与此同时,帝国政府对于异己思想表现得越来越不宽容。这种信仰危机随着3世纪社会总危机的爆发而日益加剧,其最直接的后果就是造成了普遍的道德危机。基督教的崛起有效地缓解了公共崇拜与私人信仰之间的张力,彻底瓦解了个人崇拜赖以存在的基础,并用一套全新的伦理原则重塑了社会的道德模式,因而最终结束了这场长达四百年之久的信仰危机。     

‘Almost Every Miracle is Open to Carping’: Doubts,Relics, Reliquaries and Images of Saints in the Long 12th Century

Many of the great surviving monuments from the middle ages, the cathedrals, churches and objects made for them or for private devotion, testify to the importance of Christian faith in medieval culture. Devotion to the saints was a facet of that belief, vividly recorded in the surviving relics, reliquaries and images of saints as well as in hagiographic literature. Yet medieval sources also contain references to doubts about the nature and power of saints and their relics. The overcoming of doubt or incredulity was a widely used trope in hagiography. However, if we take medieval doubts seriously, they should prompt us to consider whether the images and objects created to celebrate particular saints might sometimes have been designed to bolster dubious claims or help to authenticate disputed material within a rich discourse about both individual saints and relics and about the nature of holy bodies more generally.     

Orality and the reception of late Byzantine vernacular literature

Abstract

The starting point for this paper is the belief that orality has to be understood in a wider sense than is given to the term by the oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. This is the more important when the field of study is medieval or modern Greece, societies far removed from what Walter Ong (1982: 31–75) has termed the ‘primary orality’ of a culture from which writing is absent. The oral formulaic theory, although excellent as a tool for the analysis of materials actually transcribed from oral performance, has come to be seen in the last fifteen years or so as an unwieldy and often unreliable yardstick for assessing the interaction of oral and written types of discourse. The insistence of the theory that for a text to be considered oral, the three processes of composition, performance and transmission should be simultaneous, imposes a definition of orality which is unjustifiably restrictive, and despite the well-intentioned efforts of Albert Lord and others to address the problem of the ‘transitional’ text, the method of analysis developed through close study of one particular oral tradition in Yugoslavia has proved disappointingly inflexible in its attempt to account for texts which are neither, according to its own definitions, truly oral nor fully literary (cf. Beaton 1987).     

Iranian Zoroastrians in Canada: Balancing Religious and Cultural Identities

Canada, now the number-one destination for Iranian migrants, is home to one of the world's most dynamic Zoroastrian communities, in which Iranians are increasingly represented and are playing ever more visible roles in maintaining and transforming the tradition. While exile has in some ways reunited Iranian and Parsi (South Asian) Zoroastrians after more than 1,000 years of separation, cultural and in some cases religious differences mean that they continue largely to live in separate spheres even while sharing their places of worship. Iranian Zoroastrians in Canada participate in some social settings as Iranians, in others as Zoroastrians, and in still others as Canadians, but to a large extent they remain a community unto themselves separate from these other three. Even so, their generally progressive interpretations of Zoroastrianism are having an influence on Parsi communities worldwide as well as on Zoroastrians in Iran, and being often recognized as “original Iranians” they are playing important roles in promoting awareness of Iranian culture within the broader community.     

Women’s public lives and sovereign arrangements in Karachi’s inner city

Women’s public lives in Pakistan are often presented through tropes of oppression and restricted mobility. While women do struggle with all kinds of limitations that curtail their movement in the public sphere, they also negotiate their way and find their place in the public realm through various means that remain understudied in this context. In this article I track women’s movements in public space in the historic quarters of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest and most populous city. What emerges in the study is that a key aspect of women’s movement through their neighbourhood is their membership in or attachment to various sovereign arrangements – political and religious, formal and informal – that seek to rule and govern the space of the quarter. These arrangements include political parties and groups, religious organizations and the shrines of Sufi saints. Ultimately I argue that women’s public lives are driven not so much by the assertion of an individualized citizenship as by an attachment to and association with collective arrangements that allow a participation in the making of political and religious imaginaries.     

Bites, nibbles, sips and puffs: new exotic goods in Norway in the 18th and the first half of the 19th century

The slow but significant changes in the material culture of European households that took place in the pre-industrial period are visible in several ways, such as in the changing patterns of housing, furnishing and clothing which have been illustrated in several studies. However, most of these studies focus on the pre-industrial economic leaders, often ignoring the changes taking place on the margins of the economic growth centres. This article seeks to rectify this by looking at changes in the material culture in one such 'marginal' country, namely Norway. The goods focused upon in this case are sugar, tobacco and coffee, which are often termed as exotic goods. These were new commodities in the 18th century and precisely because of their novelty and foreign origin, it is in many cases possible to trace how they spread in rural society, as well as how they impacted it. The emphasis has been put on rural areas for the simple reason that this was where the overall majority of Norwegians lived at the time.     

Women in Praise of Women: Female Poets and Female Patrons in Qajar Iran

This study examines the poetry of two women of nineteenth-century Iran—one royal, one non-royal—and the women patrons for whom they composed praise poetry. Through the reconstruction of female-centered patronage networks and associated female-only performance venues, and via an examination of the active roles played by female patrons both in affairs of state and in the management of the immense royal harem, this study highlights the various ways in which members of several generations of women in Qajar Iran were involved in the production, dissemination and appreciation of poetry. It is argued here that these patronage and poetry production networks should be read as evidence of a female-centered literary tradition, one that was in dialogue with (and often intersected) the dominant male tradition; one that empowered the women actors within it to create a sisterhood of poets through which their art could be passed on from mother to daughter, and from daughter to granddaughter (and occasionally from mother to son).     

Ad sanctitatem mortuorum: tomb raiders,body snatchers and relic hunters in late antiquity

In late antiquity there emerged new laws that sought to protect the dead through the prevention and punishment of crimes that contravened the sanctity of the body and its resting place, including the profanation of cadavers, tomb violation, and grave‐robbery. On a more personal level, individuals used epitaphs to convey their wishes to be left undisturbed after burial, and family and kin members began searching for new ways to commemorate the memory of loved ones that did not put their mortal remains at risk. At the same time, the increasing popularity of the cult of saints and martyrs put greater emphasis on the importance of relics as objects of veneration, which in turn led to elaborate strategies of acquisition, including the exhumation, transporting and dismembering of the dead. All of these developments were inspired in some degree by a growing awareness of the body as a symbol of God's eternal love for mankind. Yet paradoxically, literary and archaeological evidence confirms that grave‐robbing was a relatively widespread phenomenon during this time. The question for historians, therefore, is one of legitimacy: in what instances was the violation of tombs considered acceptable or legitimate, and by whom? In answering this, we can learn a great deal about the cultural and religious factors that underpinned the development of new laws and customs concerning the treatment of the dead.