Category: Medieval

Matthew Paris’ Book of St Albans digitized

Medieval, Multimedia

The Library of Trinity College Dublin has digitized one of the greatest medieval masterpieces in its collection: The Book of St. Albans, handwritten and illustrated by chronicler, scribe and illuminator Matthew Paris. The artwork and verse text was previously only available in a black-and-white facsimile edition made in 1924 that cannot begin to convey the bright colors of the original.

Born in England, Matthew Paris was still a teenager when he entered monastic life as a monk at the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans in Hertofordshire. He lived at St. Albans from 1217 until his death in 1259, where he wrote all of his known works including his seminal history of the world, the Chronica Majora (ca. 1240-53) and the Book of St. Albans (ca. 1230-1259).

Alban lived in the 4th century and is venerated as the first English Christian martyr. The monastery dedicated to him was founded by King Offa of Mercia at the end of the 8th century. It was an important site of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, attracting the nobility and aristocracy of England. They even offered accommodations for royal women, the only monastic house in England to do so.

The Book of St. Albans, which included also a Life of St Amphibalus (according to some sources the man who converted Alban) and other writings about the history of the abbey, is composed of 77 leaves with 54 illustrations. Matthew’s drawings are narrative scenes that take up a third of the top of the page. Some are in comic book-style double panels. He enhanced his line drawings by coloring them with washes of green, red, blue and silver and gold accents. The colors are brilliantly preserved in the manuscript.

Each scene is peopled with human figures in dynamic motion, and they are not just saints, kings and extras. Matthew Paris included people from all walks of life — sailors, soldiers, bell ringers and builders. His illustration of Offa directing the construction of the first St. Albans church is a unique graphic representation of medieval construction techniques, tools and materials. It also features some solid gore like Alban’s severed head and his executioner’s eyeballs falling out into his hand.

The text is in both Anglo-Norman French, the language of the secular ruling class, and in Latin, the language of the clergy. It is a small enough volume to be portable, and there is evidence the monastery did lend it to important patrons. A note on Folio 2r records that the volume was loaned on one occasion to Sanchia of Provence (d.1261), the Countess of Cornwall, who was the sister of Queen Eleanor of Provence (1223-1291).

The note says she kept the book until Whitsuntide and must have returned it because the manuscript remained at St. Albans Abbey until the monastery was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. Unlike the relics of saints Alban and Amphibalus, the manuscript survived the orgy of destruction. It was owned by astronomer John Dee (1527-1609) at some point, and then by Bishop James Ussher who bought it in 1626. (Ussher’s claim to fame is having counted up the generations in the Bible to determine conclusively that the world was created on October 22, 4004 B.C.) Ussher bequeathed his library to Trinity College and the Matthew Paris manuscript officially entered the library’s rare book collection in 1661.

Browse the digitized Book of St. Albans here.

“Second Sistine Chapel” restored at Europe’s oldest hospital

Medieval, Museums, Renaissance

The magnificent Renaissance ward of the oldest hospital in Europe, the complex of Santo Spirito in Saxia on the Vatican banks of the Tiber in Rome, has been restored. Two years of work have repaired the carved wooden ceiling, the masonry and the interior and exterior plaster, reviving the huge expanse of frescoes and polychrome painted wood architectural elements.

The hospital started out as more of a hostel. The Schola Saxonum was founded in 727 by King Ine of Wessex on the ancient site of the pleasure gardens of the villa of Agrippina the Elder, daughter of  Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and Julia, daughter of Augustus. Located on the Tiber under the shadow of Constantine’s ancient basilica of St. Peter’s, the schola provided accomodation and assistance to English travelers on pilgrimage ad limina apostolorum (“to the threshold of the apostles”). No fewer than 10 English kings, Alfred the Great among them, are known to have lived there for extended stays when they made their pilgrimages to Rome. In 794, one of those kings, Offa of Mercia, funded the addition of a xenodochio, a small building where strangers could get a little food and sleep, to the schola’s church.

Damaged by repeated fires and Saracen raids in the 9th century, the Schola Saxonum was repaired around 850 and again in the 11th century, but its use as accommodations for the crowned heads of Northern Europe was over by then. There were no Anglo-Saxon crowned heads after the Norman Conquest of England, for one thing, and Rome was no longer the only game in town when it came to major relics and martyrdom sites. Santiago de Compostela drew in huge numbers of pilgrims to venerate the relics of Saint James the Apostle. By the end of the 12th century, Canturbury was the premier destination for English pilgrims, drawn by the martyrdom site and miraculous relics of Saint Thomas Becket, and the schola in Rome languished from neglect.

Then Innocent III had a dream. Several, actually. In 1198, the Pope was plagued by a series of recurring dreams in which fishermen on the Tiber drew up the bodies of infants in their nets, illegitimate babies thrown into the river by adulterous women seeking to eliminate the living evidence of their sin. The fishermen presented the corpses of these drowned babies to the horrified pope. An angel then commanded Innocent to build a hospice for exposed babies.

He rebuilt the schola and xenodochio into a hospital dedicated to the care of abandoned infants, the sick and indigent. Built into one of the exterior walls was a “wheel of the exposed,” a wooden lazy susan behind a little door on which infants could be placed anonymously.

In 1471, the hospital was ravaged by a fire that left it in shambles. The newly-elected Pope Sixtus IV visited the hospital and decried its dark, airless, crumbling environment. He ordered a full reconstruction of the facilities in anticipation of the upcoming 1475 jubilee year. The resulting structure, dubbed the Corsie Sistine (“Sistine Wards”), was the first example of Renaissance civic architecture built in Rome.

The hall is 120 meters (394 feet) long and 12 meters (39 feet) wide. It is divided into two spaces by an octagonal tiburio (a tower or lantern over the crossing of the galleries). Under the tiburio in the center of the Corsie is a ciborium (a canopy built four columns over an altar) that is the only known work in Rome of Renaissance master architect Andrea Palladio. The long walls facing each other are frescoed with more than 60 scenes depicting the founding of the hospital by Innocent III on one side and the life of Sixtus IV on the other. That’s 13,000 square feet of frescoes. You can see why it’s compared to the other Sistine Chapel, also built by Sixtus IV (although that one was famously frescoed under the papacy of his nephew, Julius II).

Soon hospitals built on the model of Santo Spirito in Saxia sprang up all over Europe. Before Innocent III’s dream, there were no hospitals dedicated to the care of the indigent and abandoned babies. By the end of the 15th century, there were 1,000 of them. Today the Renaissance ward is part of the modern Santo Spirito hospital complex and care and maintenance of the historic building played second fiddle to the hospital’s primary focus on patient care and medical research.

Financed by the Lazio Region for the ASL Roma 1, the restoration work has also focused on the ciborium which over the centuries, says the restorer Maria Rosaria Di Napoli, was “marked by dirt and [water] percolation from above. The greatest difficulty is balancing the different materials , because this is a jewel: we have polychrome and gilded wood, stucco, canvas, marbles. The colors were hardly seen anymore. Even the lantern, all made of wood, due to the water, had lost a lot of pictorial surface.

The Corsie Sistine is now open to visitors. In future, more historic hospitals in Italy are slated for restoration in a new initiative by the culture ministry to promote their extraordinarily deep bench of architecture and art off the beaten path of museums, churches and grand palazzi.

13th c. shipwreck full of stones granted protection

Medieval

Maritime archaeologists have discovered the wreck of a 13th century ship off the coast of Dorset, England. Dubbed the Mortar Wreck, it is the only known wreck of seagoing ship from the 11th to the 14th centuries in English waters. The announcement of its discovery was delayed until the wreck was designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act of 1973. This designation requires careful monitoring of the site and that any divers who wish to explore it be licensed by Historic England.

The shipwreck was first discovered in 2020 by Bournemouth University divers who were exploring an obstruction on the western edge of the Swash Channel in Poole Bay. The central area of the wreck site is a large mound of unworked quarried Purbeck stone covering the remains of the port side of a wood frame clinker-built ship. Dendrochronological analysis of the hull planking found the boards were made from Irish oak trees cut down between 1242-1265, during the long reign of King Henry III (r. 1216-1272).

The cargo also included smaller use objects. The shipwreck got its nickname from a number of Purbeck stone mortars found in the wrecks. Other artifacts that went down with the vessel include a millstone, a cooking cauldron that would have been placed directly onto a fire and a large Fred Flintstone-like stone mug.

Just northeast of the mound are two gravestone markers, one decorated with an uncommon wheel headed cross design, one with the more common splayed arm cross. Neither of the slabs were polished or personalized.

The two carved grave slabs are similar to examples still seen in churches of the period, but unlike them are in pristine condition, with their chisel marks still clearly visible. Each is decorated with a different style of cross, which until now archaeologists thought dated from different periods, says Meara.

“But this goes to show that actually these designs were contemporary and in use at the same time. And so the question is: are these things that have been made to order? Or are they speculative and being sent out?

“This is evidence of industry – they’re quarrying the stones, carving them, dressing them. And it shows that these are really desirable products [being] exported far and wide, all around the coast of England, to Ireland, to the continent. And this gives us a really interesting indication that it’s not just the stone itself that was desirable. It’s the skills of the local craftspeople.”

The tree-ring dating and surviving finds indicate the wreck was a cargo vessel carrying quarried stone and gravestone slabs from the Purbeck region when it sank just off shore on its outbound journey.

The site is under threat from sediment erosion exposing the wood to boring sea organisms and boring organisms of the human variety (ie, looters). For its own protection, the wreck has been reburied. The new designation adds another layer of protection by making interference with the scatter field, ship or any artifacts related thereto illegal.

Viking jewelry of mysterious origins donated to museum

Medieval, Museums

A previously unrecorded set of jewelry once worn by an elite Viking woman was donated to the University of Stavanger’s Museum of Archaeology in Norway. The set consists of two oval openwork bronze brooches with traces of the original silver plating, a string of more than 50 variegated beads and a bronze bracelet. A mosaic bead dates the group to around 850 A.D., the early Viking Age.

Museum archaeologists have been scouring the archives since the appearance of the jewelry to investigate the set’s possible origin. All the donors knew is that they were found in the tiny farming village of Frafjord on the southwest coast of Norway, an area with very little archaeological material from the Viking Age. They had no idea exactly where or when. One notable Viking find was made there in 1955: the remains of a funerary boat 23 feet long that was the grave of a woman buried with an axe, a shield, scissors, a heckle (a board used to split fibers for spinning) and an iron weaving sword.

There was no jewelry in the grave, however, which most certainly would have been part of her funerary attire. The two oval brooches pinned up an apron dress at the shoulders while the strand of beads connected the pins. A third brooch would keep a cloak closed was the de rigeur attire for elite Viking women. Archaeologists now believe that the recently-emerged set is the jewelry buried with the Frafjord woman, lost before the ship burial was excavated.

“The Frafjord woman belonged to the upper strata of society, because not everyone was fortunate enough to wear such jewellery. The jewellery showed not only what status she had in this life, but also what social position she should take in life after death, and were thus important social markers, not only on earth, but also in the hereafter”, Kristine Orestad Sørgaard explains.

The Frafjord woman’s equipment testifies to flourishing international contacts and trade. Oval brooches were mass-produced in towns such as Kaupang and Ribe, while several of the beads may have originated in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Several of the beads come from a great temporal distance as well. Three blue glass beads date to the Early Iron Age, so they were hundreds of years old when the Frafjord woman was buried.

“It is regrettable that we have lost this knowledge and that professionals did not have the opportunity to investigate the site when the discovery was made, since we have thus lost a lot of important information.  […]

“Either this is heirloom, or the find is mixed with another find from another, much older grave. We will never know”, says Kristine Orestad Sørgaard, who emphasizes that this is the reason why it is so important that private finds are reported as soon as possible.

Norse settlers in Greenland traded walrus ivory with Kyiv

Medieval

A group of nine mysterious bones unearthed in Kyiv years ago have been identified as walrus remains that originated in Greenland. The nine pieces of bone were excavated in 2007, 2008 and 2011 and were stratigraphically dated to the mid-12th century. It wasn’t immediately clear what animal they came from and researchers have only just determined that they were indeed walrus tusks.

Samples were successfully extracted from seven of the nine bones and subjected to staple isotope and DNA analysis. Results found the ivory all came from the Atlantic walrus whose habitat ranged from Greenland to the Canadian Arctic. The evidence of human processing on the bones confirmed the western origin.

When the walrus tusks were exported, they were still attached to a piece of the snout bone. Remains of this bone are what the archaeologists found. Walruses have extremely strong muzzles, since they like to support their entire body weight on their tusks when they relax. In order to make it easy to break off the tusks, the muzzle was therefore “thinned” before export. This was done in a particular way in Greenland.

Walrus ivory was a prized raw material in the Middle Ages, particularly in northern Europe. Elephant ivory was a luxury import and the disruption of ancient trade networks made locally-sourced walrus teeth even more valuable. Master carvers transformed walrus ivory into luxury game pieces like the Lewis Chessmen or masterpieces of religious art like the gilded and painted Crucified Christ.

Walrus hunting was immensely profitable. (A 14th century tax document records a single tusk was worth the equivalent of a year’s average income in Norway.) Indeed, it was such a cash cow that it was one of the main drivers for the Norse settlement of Iceland in the 9th century and, once they rapidly obliterated that population of walruses, the settlement of Greenland in the 10th century. Walrus remains are so widespread in the medieval archaeological layers of Greenland that the Norse settlers were all involved in the walrus ivory trade, either as hunting crews who spent three months of the year trawling the Arctic Sea for their quarry or in the extraction and processing of the tusks and teeth.

The ivory harvested in Iceland and Greenland was believed to have been sold in Western European markets whereas the medieval walrus ivory found in Eastern Europe was believed to have originated in Arctic Russia. The Kyiv ivories have proven that the eastern market for walrus products relied on Greenland’s hunting grounds as well.

Kyiv was a very important trading city in the Middle Ages, centrally located on the banks of Europe’s fourth longest river, the Dnipro, where traders from the north and south met.

“In the 12th century, Kyiv was a mediaeval metropolis and the capital of a state with an economy built on trade. Archaeological research shows that the largest amount of imported finds stem from the end of the 11th century and the 12th century,” says Khamaiko.

“What we’ve now discovered about the walrus bones shows that Kyiv was an unusually large trading centre, with goods flowing through from distant parts of the world.”

The research team’s report of the findings, the excellently named Walruses on the Dnieper, has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B and can be read in its entirety here.