Mapping Saints

Om att praktisera i projektet

2024-02-16

Blogginlägget är skrivet av projektets praktikant Anton Andersson, student vid Göteborgs universitet.

Som studerande på Liberal arts-programmets femte termin ingår ett halvår av praktik. Min praktik blev i forskningsprojektet Mapping Lived Religion. Jag har nu under en hel termin spenderat min tid med att arbeta i projektet. Det har varit en spännande och väldigt lärorik period, där jag har fått använda mig av mina tidigare erfarenheter från mitt program Liberal arts och även fått lära mig nya saker inom projektet.

När jag började med databasen fick jag i framför allt i uppgift att mata in data från medeltida brev från Diplomatarium Fennicum. Detta är något som jag aldrig hade gjort tidigare, och jag hade definitivt inte jobbat med någon liknande databas. Jag hade ett möte med min handledare Terese Zachrisson och Johan Åhlfeldt som programmerar databasen. Jag fick en lärorik genomgång om hur den fungerade och hur allting hängde ihop när olika brev och texter läggs in. I början kändes det som väldigt komplicerat, med många saker att hålla koll på. Men efter att ha jobbat med det mycket i början så kom det ganska naturligt hur det gick till. Jag började lära mig och kunde ta mig an fler brev, och brev som blev mer komplicerade. Jag fick även utanför det försöka mig på att översätta vissa latinska texter till engelska eftersom jag läst flera kurser i latin under mitt program.

Arbetet som jag har fått ta störst del av är att lägga in dessa medeltida brev i databasen. Jag har fått gå in på Diplomatarium Fennicums hemsida för att sedan hitta ett brev som jag fått identifieringsnumret för av min handledare och sedan har jag läst igenom brevet för att lägga in det i databasen och kategorisera de kultmanifestationer brevet innehåller. Jag har också fått försöka hitta vilka personer som finns i breven, vem som har gjort vad, och om det är en t.ex. en donation. Jag har även fått försöka att ta reda på vilken plats brevet är skrivet ifrån osv. I vissa fall fanns det mesta redan inlagt i databasen, så jag bara kunde mata in dem. Men i andra fall kanske inte personen var inlagd och då har jag fått försöka söka mig fram för att hitta till exempel om det var en adlig person i någon känd släkt och vilka föräldrar och barn personen kan ha haft i det fall de förekommit i brevet. Detta gällde även för platser. De vanligaste platserna, som Åbo i Finland, där många brev utfärdats, har redan varit inlagda och jag kunde enkelt mata in dem. Men ibland kunde det gälla mindre sockenkyrkor och då har jag fått ta reda på information kring den här kyrkan, om den finns kvar eller om den har förstörts på något sätt, för att sedan lägga in den informationen i databasen så att kultmanifestationerna kan kopplas till den platsen i databasen.

Jag har även fått ge mig på lite latinska texter som jag fick översätta i början. Jag gjorde några stycken och blev ganska stolt över mina översättningar, men ju fler jag gjorde desto större och mer komplicerade blev de och jag kände att min kompetens från programmet inte riktigt sträckte mig så långt som att översätta källtexter på medeltida latin. Detta eftersom vi till stor del bara har studerat antikt latin från Rom, vilket skiljer sig en del i från det latin som jag skulle översätta från breven. Men det var en rolig utmaning och jag lyckades bra med de kortare texterna. Efter ett tag fann jag dock donationsbreven mer intressanta och jag började bygga upp en mycket större förståelse för de olika viktiga familjerna i framförallt Egentliga Finland och Åland, där jag kunde hitta spännande kopplingar och se deras inflytandet i dessa områden. Jag fick se en vardag inom medeltidens helgonkult som jag aldrig hade fått möjligheten att ta del av om jag inte hade börjat praktisera i detta projektet eller valt att jobba mer med just de här breven.

Mapping medieval sculptures: Part 4. Databases, objects and research

2024-02-06

Sofia Lahti, Tampere University

The sculptures of Ii and Lavansaari are so seldom mentioned in published literature that they might not have come to my attention if they weren’t included in the two regional museums’ collections databases. Although the sculptures have lost their original “homes”, the museums are committed to maintaining and protecting their existence. Even in the case of the Ii sculptures, where the museum was unable to protect them from the destructivity of war, they are still part of the collections, where the record of their former existence remains.

Archival card on oral folklore concerning Lavansaari church. Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki. Photo: Sofia Lahti, 2023.

Being registered in a collection data management system is not in itself a guarantee of any particular level or quality of description, analysis or documentation. The registered information concerning the object may be precise, up to date and multilayered, or minimal, patchy, outdated, or any mixture of those. Inevitably some objects will always have a richer, more detailed register than others. The registered content is a result of several factors, different generations of museum professionals and eras of different archival practices, circumstances and interests. Nevertheless, being registered is a guarantee of the object not being entirely lost, forgotten, or out of reach. If an object is in a museum collection but not on display, nor registered in a database or some other cataloguing system, it can be defined as dormant, but it is really as good as inexistent: nobody will know of its existence, and it cannot be found.

Unlike a research database like the Mapping Saints, a museum collections database is primarily a tool for managing the collections, where data concerning an object’s location and physical dimensions is crucial. In some museums, this kind of logistic data is kept in a different database from the information related to the content and context of the objects. Ideally, the same database could serve the interests of collections management, research, and educational or exhibition work by containing all essential information about each item in a concise form, with references to all available literature or sources.

Naturally, a serious analysis of a physical artefact cannot be completed within databases even with the fullest record of data. Artefacts need to be seen in order to be understood; even 3D scans do not substitute the actual object. With lost artefacts or images, however, the impossibility of seeing can only be compensated by other sources. Comparing data on lost images or objects to images of existing ones is a useful option that needs to be used cautiously.

Resources for research and cataloguing in museums are nearly never sufficient in relation to the size of the collections, which is why collections databases are often lagging behind on up-to-date information. Sometimes it also happens that new, research-based information on collection items does not reach the museum. In the worst case, this leads to a situation where the limited resources are wasted if the already existing information on a collection item is not found and the same research work ends up being repeated. In the best case, the situation is the opposite and resources are multiplied, when research and collections management benefit from each other. This is why it is so important that museum professionals and researchers – both ones employed in the museums and outside – remember to collaborate. As long as all the relevant information is meticulously kept, new research is possible and new understanding can be gained, even decades or centuries after the objects themselves may have disappeared.

Mapping medieval sculptures: Part 3. The Virgin Mary stranded on an island

2024-01-30

Sofia Lahti, Tampere University

In the collection of the regional museum of Kymenlaakso in South-Eastern Finland, a late-medieval wooden sculpture of Virgin Mary with her child is registered as “the Madonna of Lavansaari”. The sculpture is 94 cm high. The Virgin is crowned and holds the child on her left arm, and they both are facing forward. The child is holding an irregular semi-round object that may have represented a bunch of grapes or a pomegranate. The Virgin has lost her right hand, and the child’s feet are missing below the ankles. The sculpture’s back is flat, which indicates that it has originally been attached on a supporting structure such as a tabernacle shrine. The sculpture has lost its original polychromy and been re-painted at some point, probably in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Much of that later polychromy is lost as well, but the figures’ skin (including their eyes) is painted in dark pink, and the Virgin’s clothes have remnants of red, white and green in their folds.

The sculpture has not been discussed or investigated thoroughly, but is mentioned briefly by the art historian K.K. Meinander (1908), who estimates the sculpture to be a North German work from the late fifteenth century.[1] This is the only known medieval sculpture surviving from the evacuated Karelian region. In the museum, which is located in Kotka and represents the Finnish region of Kymenlaakso, it is also the only object related to the medieval cult of saints in Finland.

Wooden sculpture from Lavansaari church. Photo: Regional Museum of Kymenlaakso.

According to the collections database of the museum, the sculpture had belonged to the parish church of Lavansaari, which was on the large island of Lavansaari on the coast of Karelia in South-Eastern Finland. The medieval population on the island was Swedish-speaking, but since the 1630s it was inhabited by Finnish-speakers until 1939, when Soviet Union forced the entire population to leave the island. After the war, the island has been Soviet and then Russian territory. The church was destroyed by Russians at some point after the evacuation.[2] In August 1940, the sculpture was deposited in the museum, while officially belonging to the national church administration.[3]

According to a history book by the local writer Vaalimo Hannula, the sculpture was in the church of Lavansaari until it was removed during a renovation or redecoration in 1787.[4] Where the sculpture was since then until it was evacuated and deposited in the Kymenlaakso museum in 1940 is unknown, but typically medieval sculptures were stowed away in bell towers, attics, or sacristies after having been removed from the actual church space.

A more difficult question is where the sculpture had been before the 1780s. The church of Lavansaari was built in 1783, and thus couldn’t be the original location for the medieval sculpture. Hannula claims that the sculpture had been donated to an earlier chapel on Lavansaari by another nearby parish, Koivisto.[5] However, Koivisto is not necessarily a more credible medieval location for the sculpture, considering that the first known church in Koivisto was supposedly built in the mid-sixteenth century, soon after the Protestant Reformation, and the sculpture clearly belongs to the Catholic Middle Ages.

In Lavansaari, local folklore in fact suggests that there had been an earlier, small wooden chapel built by either Spanish or English seafarers that ended up there by accident. For a long time, the wind wouldn’t turn for them to be able to continue their voyage, and while waiting, they built a chapel. As soon as it was ready, the sailors finally got a tailwind and sailed away. Their chapel was, as one version of the story goes, built from the parts of their shipwrecked boats, but placed on unreliable ground: the sand gave way, and the chapel gradually sank and fell.[6] In another version, the chapel fell as soon as a cross was placed on top of it.[7] Hannula has a more specific explanation: the church met its fate due to excessive cutting of forests around it. With no more trees keeping the quicksand in place, the sand rose and covered the church during a storm, and this caused the church to collapse. When other storms later lifted the sand around the old church place and revealed bones from old graves nearby, local people imagined a more dramatic story of villagers having died in the collapsing church.[8] There is no proof of the veracity of these stories, but they are clearly based on the local experience of the dry quicksand that is typical of large areas on Lavansaari. Archaeological excavations have been made in Lavansaari, but only some early iron-age structures or materials have been found.[9]

Stories of stranded seafarers were undoubtedly popular on the island, but they also bring to mind the stories of medieval sculptures or altarpieces miraculously carried by waves to churches. Local folklore has attributed this kind of provenance to the altarpiece of Kalanti/Nykyrko church in Finland,[10] but other similar stories are known from Sweden as well as Central Europe.[11] The story of the sinking chapel in Lavansaari does not include any sculptures, but one can always speculate. If there was some truth in the story of the seafarers, could they have brought the sculpture with them? In the Middle Ages, sculptures were routinely bought or commissioned to Finnish churches from Tallinn or Lübeck, for instance, and brought by boat across the Baltic Sea.[12] According to the story, Lavansaari was not the sailors’ intended destination, but they could have been on their way to Viborg, for instance, or Vehkalahti, which was the mother parish for Lavansaari earlier. In any case, if Lavansaari was populated in the Middle Ages, it probably did have a small chapel for religious gatherings. Another plausible explanation to the sculpture’s presence in Lavansaari is that it was moved from a nearby medieval church at some point after the Reformation, perhaps from relatively nearby Karelian churches in Kivennapa, Viipuri, or Vehkalahti. In any case, the presence of the medieval sculpture in the Karelian archipelago is unusual. In the Mapping Saints database, I first tagged it to an “Unknown place in Karelia”, but ended up creating an “uncertain” place on the map for the lost chapel in Lavansaari.

Archival sources:

SKS = The Finnish Literature Society: archives of oral tradition. Paikallistarinat: Uskonto (Local stories: Religion)

Regional museum of Kymenlaakso: collections database (thanks to chief curator Vesa Alén for help)

[1] Meinander 1908, 353. His estimate is repeated in e.g. Nordman, Carl Axel 1964, Medeltida skulptur i Finland. Helsingfors: Finska fornminnesföreningen, 641; Hyvönen, Heikki 1997, Karjalan luterilaisten kirkkojen esineistön kehitys ja erityispiirteitä. Rinno, Soile & Minna Laukkanen (toim.) 1997, Karjalan luterilaiset kirkot ja seurakuntien pyhät esineet. Etelä-Karjalan taidemuseon julkaisuja 18:1a, Jyväskylä, 312; Hiekkanen, Markus 2007, Suomen keskiajan kivikirkot. Helsinki: SKS, 612 (note 63).

[2] Koponen, Paavo 1999, Karjalan kirkkokummut. Helsinki: Tammi, 98–99.

[3] Snäll, Aila 1997, Siirtoseurakuntien esineistön sijoitus ja kirkkohallituksen toimenpiteet. Rinno, Soile & Minna Laukkanen (toim.) 1997, Karjalan luterilaiset kirkot ja seurakuntien pyhät esineet. Etelä-Karjalan taidemuseon julkaisuja 18:1a, Jyväskylä 1997, 501–540, 530.

[4] Hannula, Vaalimo 1947, Lavansaari: Historian pohjalle rakentuva kertomus “Suomenlahden selkäsaaresta”. Lavansaaren historiatoimikunta, 28.

[5] Hannula 1947, 26.

[6] Rinno, Soile 1997, Karjalan luterilaisten seurakuntien kirkot. Rinno, Soile & Minna Laukkanen (toim.) 1997, Karjalan luterilaiset kirkot ja seurakuntien pyhät esineet. Etelä-Karjalan taidemuseon julkaisuja 18:1a, Jyväskylä 1997, 132–133.

[7] SKS, Paikallistarinat: Uskonto.

[8] Hannula 1947, 26.

[9] Edgren, Torsten 1992, Lavansaaren Suursuonmäen röykkiöhaudat. Suomen Museo 1992: 5–20.

[10] Valkeapää, Leena 2016, Tietämisen tavat: Uskomustarinat ja tutkimus Kalannin alttarikaapin äärellä. Tahiti, 6(3). (https://tahiti.journal.fi/article/view/85629); see also Räsänen, Elina & Leena Valkeapää 2021, Sukupuolten tulkintoja ja “venäläisiä tyyppejä” – Kalannin alttarikaapin varhaisesta tutkimushistoriasta. Suomen Museo–Finskt Museum, 120, 5–31. (https://journal.fi/suomenmuseo/article/view/110143).

[11] Meinander, K.K. 1908, Medeltida altarskåp och träsniderier i Finlands kyrkor. Helsingfors, 341.

[12] On medieval art trade contacts between Finland and the countries south of the Baltic Sea, see e.g. Von Bonsdorff, Jan 1993, Kunstproduktion und Kunstverbreitung im Ostseeraum des Spätmittelalters. Helsinki: Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistys.; Leskelä, Ilkka 2016, Trade and the known world: Finnish priests’ and laymen’s networks in the late medieval Baltic Sea region. Tuomas M.S. Lehtonen and Linda Kaljundi (eds.),Re-forming texts, music, and church art in the early modern north. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 69–96.

Mapping medieval sculptures: Part 2. The burned Apostles at Ii

2024-01-23

Sofia Lahti, Tampere University

A little chapel existed in the village of Ii in North-western Finland already in the mid-14th century. In the 1470s Ii or “Ijo” was established as a parish, which grew to be one of the largest parishes in the region. According to local history, the parish church was built on an island in the Iijoki river, outside the current centre, and it was destroyed by raiders from the Eastern Karelian region at least three times during the 15th and 16th centuries, so it had to be repeatedly rebuilt.[1] However, still in the late nineteenth century, the Ii church reportedly had a group of six old wooden sculptures that had seemed to have survived there despite the series of attacks.

A group of members of the Finnish Antiquarian Society (Finska Fornminnesföreningen) visited and documented the Ii church in 1896 during their expedition of North Finland,[2] capturing “a group of wooden images” in what was perhaps the only photograph ever taken of those sculptures. In the same year, the Regional Museum of Northern Ostrobothnia was founded in Oulu (Uleåborg), and in 1899, the sculptures were donated to the museum. In 1929, the museum and the majority of its collections were damaged or destroyed by fire, but again, the sculptures miraculously survived. They were conservated and put on display. However, during the war in 1940, a new fire was caused by bombing, and this time the sculptures were finally destroyed.[3] Ironically, the Ii church was struck by lightning and burned down in 1942.

So, since 1940, the sculptures only exist as a catalogue entry in the regional museum. From the remaining information in the museum’s register, written in the 1910s by curator, ethnographer Samuli Paulaharju, they have been tentatively identified as Christ and four Apostles – Peter, Andreas, John the Baptist, and one unidentified apostle. The identifications are based on what is known of their attributes: a key, a diagonal cross, and a chalice. The unidentified apostle carries a book. The fifth sculpture had a cross and a globe in his hand, and this led some researchers to suggest he may have represented a king, perhaps St Olaf or St Erik.[4]

Until recently, it was assumed that the sculptures were medieval. This implied that they had survived the repeated attacks and fires better than the church itself, which seemed puzzling; the archaeologist Mika Sarkkinen suggested that they might have been successfully hidden by locals before each attack. [5] This seemed like a plausible explanation, knowing that devotional images and objects held a great emotional and social value in medieval communities and that there were efforts to protect them during the Reformation, for instance. Unfortunately, it turned out not to have been the case. In fact, whatever devotional art existed in the medieval chapel or parish church was most likely destroyed during the attacks.

The photograph taken of the “group of wooden images” in 1896 is mentioned in a list of all images produced during the expedition. Advised by art historian Leena Valkeapää, a specialist on the travels of the Antiquarian Society, I inquired at the Finnish Heritage Agency if any photograph of the “wooden images” had survived in their archives. The archivist’s answer was: yes and no – the old nitrate negative had deteriorated, but a print of it existed!

Viktor Sucksdorff, 1896: Wooden images from the Ii church. Archival print from damaged nitrate negative. The Finnish Heritage Agency. The print is not currently available for proper digitizing as the archives are being relocated.

The photograph immediately clarified what had puzzled both me and the museum professionals in Oulu: on a first glance, it was obvious that these were not medieval sculptures, but from the eighteenth or late seventeenth century. The attributes correspond to the written description in the museum register. The man previously registered as a king has no crown, but he is holding a globe with a cross on top, a globus cruciger, which identifies him as Christ. As described in the register, there is another Christ figure in the group as well, also holding a globus cruciger. He is surprisingly smaller than the Apostles and the other Christ, but clearly made by the same master or workshop. In other words, Christ appeared twice in this group of sculptures, but we do not know how the group was arranged; similar apostle figures are often attached on the pulpit, which might have been the case with these as well. Their height, 48 cm according to the old museum register, supports this hypothesis. In that case, the smaller Christ (35 cm) could have been placed on top of the pulpit. In any case, in 1896 the figures had already been removed from whichever structure they had earlier been attached to. In the photograph, they are accompanied by a gilt, winged putto angel head and an angel holding a horn or a trumpet; according to the old museum register, there were several more of each. The black and white photograph can be complemented with Paulaharju’s detailed hand-written notes in the collection catalogue: each of the figures had a tunic of a different color – green for St Peter, brown for St Andrew, light brown for St John, light blue for the anonymous apostle, and dark blue for the man now recognized as a second Christ. The written description also confirms that the sculptures are flat in the back, which would have been difficult to read from the photograph. This indicates that they were attached to an altarpiece or, plausibly, to the pulpit.

The earliest known written document that may refer to the wooden apostles is an inventory list of the Ii church from 1780, very vaguely mentioning a group of “church images”.[6] At that point, the apostle images were still relatively new, and the maker of the inventory did not think it was necessary to describe them. However, this also means that there is no clear evidence that the six sculptures were originally part of the Ii church interior. Despite the uncertainties, the approximate age of the Ii apostles is now defined – and thereby also their Lutheran context, which means that in the end, they were not inserted in the Mapping Saints database.

It is fortunately rare for objects to be destroyed in museums. Indeed, being registered in a catalogue can be considered a manner of existing, as art historian J.S. Ackley has observed.[7] For lost objects, that is even the only manner of existing at present.

Archival sources

MV, SMY = Finnish Heritage Agency: Photograph and archival catalogues from the Finnish Antiquarian Society’s expedition (thanks to archivist Natalia Riipinen and researcher Leena Valkeapää for help)

Regional Museum of Northern Ostrobothnia, Oulu: archives and collections database (thanks to researchers Mika Sarkkinen and Eija Konttijärvi for help)

[1] Kallio-Seppä, Titta 2011, Tietoja Iin kirkoista ja kirkkomaista kirjallisten ja arkeologisten lähteiden perusteella. Kallio-Seppä, Ikäheimo & Paavola (toim.), Iin vanhan haminan kirkko ja hautausmaa: Arkeologisia tutkimuksia, 34–43.

[2] On these expeditions, see Valkeapää, Leena 2018, Suomen muinaismuistoyhdistyksen taidehistorialliset tutkimusretket Suomessa 1871–1902. Tahiti, 8(1), 5–27. https://doi.org/10.23995/tht.69289

[3] Sarkkinen, Mika 2011, Illinsaari, Iin kirkko ja Pohjois-Pohjanmaan museon kokoelmat. Kallio-Seppä, Ikäheimo & Paavola (toim.), Iin vanhan haminan kirkko ja hautausmaa: Arkeologisia tutkimuksia, 46–47.

[4] Sarkkinen 2011, 46.

[5] Sarkkinen 2011, 46.

[6] Sarkkinen 2011, 46.

[7] Ackley, Joseph Salvatore 2014, Re-approaching the Western medieval church treasury inventory, c. 800–1250. The Journal of Art Historiography, Nr. 11, December 2014: 1–37.

Mapping medieval sculptures: Part 1. Tracking wooden saints from Finnish museum databases

2024-01-17

Sofia Lahti, Tampere University

In 2021, I set out to complement the Mapping Saints database with medieval sculptures and other objects related to saints from Finnish churches and museums. As the principle of this database requires, the objects have to be pinned to a physical place – either a specific church, even a specific altar, or a more general area in a diocese. The location data can be registered as certain or uncertain, and with movable objects such as sculptures, altarpieces or reliquaries, this uncertainty is extremely relevant.

Some of these objects are currently in churches – they may have stayed in the same church since the Middle Ages, or have been sold or donated from one church to another, or they may have been sold or donated to a museum and later on deposited again in the church. In many cases, the itinerary of these objects can be tracked from the nineteenth century onwards, but it is often impossible to verify their medieval location. Even if extant medieval written sources indicate the presence of a sculpture of the same saint in the church, it is not water-tight proof that the sculpture currently in that church is the same one. As art historian Katri Vuola has recently remarked, another challenge in trying to track the post-medieval itineraries of medieval sculptures in Finland is that the relevant sources exist in various different archives of parishes, museums and other actors, and are often not systematically organised.[1]

More than a third of the circa 800[2] surviving medieval sculptures in Finland are currently in museums, either on display or in storage. In most cases, the museums have documentation of their acquisitions from churches, but even among these, there are a few sculptures whose acquisition documents and other provenance data has gotten lost at some point. An excellent article was published last year by researcher Ninna Pulli about the acquisition history of the medieval sculptures in the Museum Centre of Turku. By combining and combing through various archival sources, she was able to track the acquisition processes of 43 sculptures out of the 54 in their collection.[3]

The National Museum of Finland and the Museum Centre of Turku have published good-quality photographs of their medieval sculptures or altarpieces online in the Finna portal for Finnish archives, libraries and museums. Several other museums are in the process of bringing their collections into Finna as well. Meanwhile, some museums have made accessible online versions of their collections databases, but there are also museums whose collections are not viewable online at all. I contacted the Finnish regional museums to ask for an access to their collections databases in order to see what kind of information they had registered about the medieval sculptures or other saint-related objects.

Screenshot from the Finna portal: a sculpture in the collection of Kymenlaakso museum, Finland.

While some of the objects are well documented and may have been studied by several researchers during the last couple of centuries, many medieval objects are registered without much information. Even some of the objects in Finna are published without some relevant information such as size or known provenience. During my postdoctoral period in the Mapping Saints project, I did not have the time to dig much deeper into individual objects, but new information is constantly produced by ongoing research, particularly by art historians like Elina Räsänen and Katri Vuola, who are specialists in medieval wooden sculptures in Finland.

In this series of four blog posts, I will introduce and discuss two examples of the challenges met when studying medieval images of saints in the collections databases of Finnish regional museums. It is important to underline here that the museums are not to be blamed for the challenges related to these cases; the challenges are simply results of uncontrollable past circumstances. Also, these cases are not representative of the Finnish material in general – on the contrary, both are unusual – but nevertheless demonstrative of some of the obstacles in the process. One essential thing they have in common is that there is hardly any provenience data. One of the cases concerns an extant image, while the other is a group of images that no longer exist; both examples are registered as belonging to a post-medieval church, but both of those churches have since been destroyed.  

[1] Vuola, Katri 2023, Esinefragmentteja hartaudellisesta menneisyydestä. Puiset polykromiveistokset Turun hiippakunnassa pitkällä 1300-luvulla. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto, p. 15.

[2] Nordman, Carl Axel 1964, Medeltida skulptur i Finland. Helsingfors: Finska fornminnesföreningen, p. 619.

[3] Pulli, Ninna 2023, Lahjoitettuja, ostettuja, toimitettuja Keskiaikaisten pyhimysveistosten hankinnat Turun kaupungin historialliseen museoon. Suomen museo / Finskt museum vol. 129/2022, p. 130–152.

An update from the Mapping Lived Religion project: Work on the public interface and a project retreat

2023-11-29

Our latest project retreat was held at Korrö – once the property of the Växjö diocese – in the deepest woods of Småland, Sweden, in October. There, we discussed the updates to the upcoming public interface’s Explore function, as well as made decisions regarding the Advanced Search function. We also discussed quality control connected to our research question of lived religion. This post briefly highlights our work during that workshop as well as over the past year. All of our core project members were there, as well as our postdoc and current research assistant.

In terms of the Explore interface, we considered aspects related to its visual appearance, and the terms to be used in the headings and other fields. We also tested the implementation of the “functional period” on the timeline. It was deemed necessary to enable searching in our quotes and transcriptions, as well as see more options to search in “type of place”. Many questions for the advisory board were noted, for when they test the interface, and this aspect of the database is nearing completion.

Seven people standing on the deck of a red building beside a river and with a stone and red wooden building on the other shore

The project members taking a well-deserved break from their intense workshopping in lovely Korrö (Sweden).

Regarding the development and implementation of the Advanced Search function, a suggested placement was proposed that we decided works fine: a user gains access to this via the Explore interface. In this respect, we had to decide what properties should be searchable and how many different fields that we wanted to search in. For instance, we discussed that we needed to be able to search for whether or not an object is extant and more clearly search for the names of different people (other than saints). Of course, it will be possible to search for multiple saints via this function too, as well as in the transcriptions and quotes that have been input into the database.

When updates have been made to both of these functions, the public interface will be sent to our advisory board for feedback.

In addition to questions regarding the Swedish mirror site, and the possibility of a Finnish page, our discussions, as is usual, centred around quality control and how to make sure our data is reliable. As envisioned at the start of the project, it would be impossible to be as comprehensive as we would like given the relatively short period of time allotted to the project. Our focus on lived religion has necessitated excluding some data, such as church floor plans, that we do find interesting and potentially useful in other respects. In other cases, the short articles that we have written and included in the “Comment” field for cult manifestations and quotes/transcriptions might be more to the point than we had first envisioned. However, we have accomplished a great deal in the past (nearly) five years, and the resource will give access to diverse data about the cults of saints in medieval Sweden and Finland – mapped and visualized in a new way – providing new insights into lived religion via the lens of the cults of saints in the former church province.

Our aim is to be able to launch the resource Mapping Saints for public use in June 2024, while the autumn of 2024 will be spent on adding comments or short passages illuminating and explaining the data further. Next year will also be spent writing articles about the development of the digital resource, and finishing our forthcoming anthology, written together with our sister project.

Wall-paintings in Finnish Churches in the ‘Mapping Saints’ Database, part 2

2023-04-21

Vilma Mättö, Linnaeus University and University of Turku

In my previous blog-post, I introduced the major painting series that are preserved in Finnish medieval churches and listed some of their key features, namely the overlays and fragmentation caused by various factors. In this blog-post, I will discuss a few specific cases to exemplify how these features should be taken into account when analyzing the depictions of saints.

The fragmented nature of the material poses challenges. Each wall painting exists in relation to other images, formulating chronological or thematic entities, and associations with one another. The interpretation of the whole iconographical program gets more complicated when the material has been somehow altered or damaged (Aho 2023, 20). This can also hinder us from identifying individual motifs. For instance, in many cases it is hard to determine what saint a figure represents or even to recognize if a depicted person is a saint in the first place.

Sometimes, even though the actual image is mainly intact, but the identity of the portrayed person is still uncertain. The identification of a saint is made firstly with the help of related attributes. However, the attributes connected to each saint have varied depending on the area where the saint was venerated (Nygren 1945, 15–18). It is also evident that painters visualized saints in their own creative way and sometimes they might have confused saints with each other or simply made a mistake and connected a saint with the wrong symbols.

 

Painting of St Christina in the church of Hattula. Photo by Janika Aho.

Fig 4. Painting of St Christina in the church of Hattula. Photo by Janika Aho.

 

Because we lack contemporary written sources that describe and explain the content of the church murals – let alone the intentions of their makers – other pictorial reference material is a crucial aid in identifying the saints featured. For example, in Hattula church, St Christina of Bolsena is depicted with a knife, which is not her usual attribute (Fig. 4). Even so, the identity of this female saint is easily unraveled, since the closest comparable example in Lohja church shows Christina with another edged weapon, a small sword, and a more common attribute of hers, the millstone.

 

A pelican feeding its young with blood, symbolizing the sacrifice of Jesus, and depiction of St Christina of Bolsena at the lower right corner. Photo by Janika Aho.

Fig 5. A pelican feeding its young with blood, symbolizing the sacrifice of Jesus, and depiction of St Christina of Bolsena at the lower right corner. Photo by Janika Aho.

 

Some other good examples of the importance of comparative material are the paintings representing St Botolph of Thorney in the churches of Lohja (Fig. 6) and Hattula (Fig. 7). In Lohja, the east wall of the chancel shows a depiction of a bishop with a crozier and a mitre in his right hand. In earlier research, this saint has been interpreted as St Dionysius based on the assumption that the painting had later been restored incorrectly, and that the mitre in his hand was in fact an erroneous version of the Dionysius’ decapitated head (Nygren 1945, 102–105). In Hattula, the depiction of this saint is quite similar to the painting in Lohja, showing the saint in a bishop’s cope and with a mitre and crozier in his hands.

 

An unknown bishop, possibly St Botolph, depicted in the church of Lohja. Photo by Janika Aho.

Fig 6. An unknown bishop, possibly St Botolph, depicted in the church of Lohja. Photo by Janika Aho.

 

Later, art historian Anna Nilsén compared the paintings in Lohja and Hattula with the pictorial program of the Täby church in Sweden and noticed a resemblance between some of the motifs. In Täby church, St Botolph is correctly depicted wearing an abbot’s attire, but like in Lohja and Hattula, the mitre is with him next to his left shoulder. St Botolph of Thorney was indeed a well-known English abbot and a missionary in the seventh century (https://saints.dh.gu.se/person/45). But because the saint was occasionally informally referred to as a missionary bishop, he was sometimes depicted with a mitre and a crozier. As Nilsén has proposed, it is feasible that the painter was unfamiliar with the legend of St Botolph and therefore concluded that a saint portrayed with a mitre must have worn the cope as well (Nilsén 1986, 196, 203).

 

A painting in the church of Hattula that might be of St Botolph. Photo by Janika Aho.

Fig 7. St Botolph? A painting in the church of Hattula. Photo by Janika Aho.

 

Images of saints whose identity is uncertain or unknown are included in the Mapping Saints database along with all possible alternatives that the saint in question could represent. As noted above, the identity of a saint is sometimes possible to trace by finding parallel images, such as plausible models that the painter might have used. In fact, a common method is to examine the depicted figure’s posture, gestures, accessories, and other objects connected to the person, as well as observe the style and colour of the garment that the person is wearing. In addition, a pivotal step is to contextualize the image to determine how it relates to contemporary events and actions connected to the painting’s place of origin (Vuola et al. 2018, 59–64).

The Mapping Saints database facilitates this contextualization (about the context of the artwork see, for example, Räsänen 2009, 23–24). The user can quickly form an overall picture of how the chosen images could be connected to other objects, places, people, oral traditions, texts, feast days, etc. and for example, limit the search results to a selected time-period or region. Images like wall-paintings can be treated as objects that echo the phenomena of the past. But they can also be considered as subjects in themselves, in which case the context is rather built up around the image. Nonetheless, church paintings are not only products of their own time, but they also have their own autonomous rhetoric that is continually constructing our current culture (Liepe 2003, 415–417, 424–425).

 

Painting of St Botolph in the church of Täby. Photo from the Iconographic Index card.

Fig 8. Painting of St Botolph in the church of Täby, Sweden. Photo from the Iconographic Index card, courtesy of the Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet).

 

By linking the digitized cards of the Swedish Iconographic Index (Sw. Ikonografiska registret) and re-digitized photographs of the World of Medieval Images project (Sw. Medeltidens bildvärld), the database provides a vast collection of visual data, and together with other material content and textual sources they constitute a good base for elaborating on medieval church art (see more Liepe & Ellis Nilsson 2021, 55–60). The Iconographic Index of Finland housed by the Finnish Heritage Agency has also been newly digitized and after its publication in the Finna portal will soon be complementing the database. Additionally, more photographs of the Finnish medieval wall-paintings will be published on another platform and, in time, also be made accessible via the Mapping Saints interface. The existing church murals being a fractured material overall brings its own challenges, yet they have a lot of research potential. Indeed, the Mapping Saints research resource compiles several kinds of scattered information that can bolster iconographical surveys and give support in interpretative problems, offering new possibilities and perspectives for the further study of church murals.

 

References

Aho, Janika. “Fragmentaarisuus Suomen keskiaikaisissa kirkkomaalauksissa: kolme esimerkkitapausta”, Suomen Museo – Finskt Museum, (2023), 19–40. https://journal.fi/suomenmuseo/issue/view/9079

Liepe, Lena, & Ellis Nilsson, Sara. “Medieval Iconography in the Digital Age: Creating a Database of the Cult of Saints in Medieval Sweden and Finland”. ICO Iconographisk Post. Nordisk tidskrift för bildtolkning – Nordic Review of Iconography, (2021), 45–63. http://ojs.abo.fi/ojs/index.php/ico/article/view/1745

Liepe, Lena. ”On the Epistemology of Images” ‒ in History and Images. Towards a New Iconology, Axel Bolvig & Phillip Lindley (eds.). Turnhout: Brepols, 2003.

Nilsén, Anna. Program och funktion i senmedeltida kalkmåleri. Kyrkmålningar i Mälarlandskapen och Finland 1400‒1534. [Stockholm]: Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, 1986.

Nygren, Olga Alice. Helgonen i Finlands medeltidskonst. En ikonografisk studie. Diss. SMYA, FFT XLVI:1. Helsingfors: SMY, FF, 1945.

Räsänen, Elina. Ruumiillinen esine, materiaalinen suku : tutkimus Pyhä Anna itse kolmantena -aiheisista keskiajan puuveistoksista Suomessa. Helsinki: Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistys, 2009.

Vuola, K., Reijonen, H., Kaasalainen, T., & Saat, R. “Medieval Wood Sculpture of an Unknown Saint from Nousiainen: from Materials to Meaning”, Mirator, 19 (2018), 43–66.

Wall-paintings in Finnish Churches in the ‘Mapping Saints’ Database, part 1

2023-04-13

Vilma Mättö, Linnaeus University and University of Turku

Medieval church paintings combine a wide range of material that can broaden our perception of how different saints were venerated – which saints were chosen to be immortalized on the church walls and how their legends were visually retold. In the former medieval diocese of Turku situated in present-day Finland, the pictorial compositions featuring saints exist in approximately 30 medieval churches. Throughout 2022, the Mapping Saints database was supplemented with saints’ cult manifestations that occur within this material. In this first blog-post, I will outline some major characteristics that the Finnish medieval church paintings have and continue in the next post by mentioning a couple of examples that demonstrate how these special features should be considered especially when studying the images of saints.

Out of over 80 preserved stone churches in Finland there are around 47 in total that have murals from the medieval period. Extant paintings range from single fragments or consecration crosses to extensive and detailed schemes recounting episodes from the Bible and other religious texts. The Finnish medieval paintings can roughly be divided into two main categories: the paintings made by painting workshops or individual painters who apparently have had some level of professional education, and the paintings that are plainer in their execution and have presumably been created by the construction workers of the church (Fält 2012, 11). The oldest wall painting series located in Finland are found in the churches of Jomala and Lemland, Åland, both dated to around 1300 (Hiekkanen 2020, 48–49). The majority of the Finnish medieval church painting series were executed in the latter part of the 15th century and in the early 16th century though and are situated mostly in Southwest Finland and Uusimaa.

Three major groups of professional workshops can be identified within the best-preserved painting compositions. The earliest works of these are attributed to the so-called Taivassalo Group, which was active in Southwest Finland from 1467-1490 and has painting series in, for example, the churches of Taivassalo/Tövsala, Kalanti/Kaland (Fig. 2), Laitila/Letala, and Parainen/Pargas (Aaltonen 1999, 14, 16). Characteristic of the Taivassalo Group’s paintings is the emphases on the Passion history and martyrdom legends, as well as a notable influence from mystery plays and theological literature like Speculum Humanae Salvationis. In addition, series showing the Apostles creed and various depictions of saints with adjoining coats of arms or portrayals of the donors are common in their work.

 

Image of St Erasmus wall-painting in Kalanti church. Photo by Janika Aho

Figure 1. The martyrdom of St Erasmus in the church of Kalanti. Photo by Janika Aho.

 

Another group of painting programs that show strong similarity with each other are found in the churches of Inkoo/Ingå, Espoo/Esbo and Siuntio/Sjundeå, all located in Uusimaa. The date of the murals in these churches is estimated to somewhere between the years 1510 and 1520. One distinctive feature of the paintings in the abovementioned churches is that the figures are depicted with their eyes closed, although otherwise the subjects differ among these three compositions. Typological scenes from the Old Testament are noticeable in Espoo and Siuntio, whereas the focus in Inkoo is on the New Testament with the addition of exceptional memento mori themed motifs. (Aho 2020, 37; Riska 1987, 161–167).

The painting series in the churches of Hattula and Lohja/Lojo were most likely produced by the same group of professionals in the 1510s. The church of Hattula is not only famous for its unique brick structure and having the status as a pilgrimage destination in the Middle Ages, but also for its eye-catching painting program that covers almost all surfaces of the interior and having survived time relatively well (Fig. 1). The pictorial compilation is rich with representations of over 50 different saints, including, for example, majestic sequences showing the miracles of the Virgin (Edgren 1993, 66–67). In Lohja church the painting series is also extensive with large-scale depictions of biblical themes and legends.

 

Image of Hattula wall paintings. Photo by Janika Aho

Figure 2. Murals from the first decade of the 16th century in the church of Hattula. Photo by Janika Aho.

 

Other painting series worth mentioning are those in the church of Kumlinge in Åland, made by an unknown painter, and in the church of Rymättylä/Rimito in Southwest Finland, attributed to the Swedish master Lars Snickare. Both of these mural series were most probably completed in the 1510s (Hiekkanen 2020, 182, Nilsén 1982, 20–41).

In one way or another, medieval art is always fragmentary. Wall paintings have been subject to many changes throughout the centuries. For instance, they have faced damage caused by the weather, being covered with plaster, white-wash, or new layers of paintings, being re-covered, or disturbed by enlargements of windows and other architectural constructions. The way medieval church paintings were treated after the Reformation has varied among countries. In Finland, the majority of wall paintings were left untouched in the early modern period but were eventually covered over at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries (Valkeapää 2000, 34–46).

Starting in the 1880s, all paintings were documented and restored. In those churches where paintings had been covered the century previously, they were first revealed under the whitewash, naturally exposing the fragile coat of paint to sunlight and interior heating. The restoration work in most churches followed conventions of the period, which included heavily overpainting and sometimes even changing the location of individual images by using copies of the original ones (Fig. 3). In many churches, it was decided to completely or partially re-whitewash some of the paintings after they had been documented, and it is difficult to estimate how many paintings still remain under plaster (Valkeapää 2015, 105–106; Fält 2012, 12).

 

Image of heavily restored wall-paintings in Taivassalo church. Photo by Janika Aho

Figure 3. Paintings on the east wall in the church of Taivassalo exemplify how heavy-handedly medieval church art was sometimes restored in the 19th century. This wall-painting composition shows representations of St Catherine and St Matthias at the upper section, both restored by densely overpainting, and at the lower part a scene depicting the martyrdom of St Barbara. This scene from St Barbara’s legend is a full copy made after the original painting which was initially located on the south wall but had to be demolished due to new window openings. Photo by Janika Aho.

 

Another important aspect in analyzing the paintings is that many churches have had more than one pictorial scheme overlaying each other. Even during the Middle Ages one church might have been decorated with two or more temporally separated image series executed by different makers, either by the new layer covering the earlier paintings or by placing the new ones beside the older paintings.

 

References

Aaltonen, Susanna. “Kalannin ryhmän kuusi maalaria”, SKAS 1 (1999), 14 –21.

Aho, Janika. ”Memento Mori Inkoon Keskiaikaisessa Kirkossa”. Tahiti 10 (2020), 32–55. https://doi.org/10.23995/tht.100180

Edgren, Helena. Mercy and Justice. Miracles of the Virgin Mary in Finnish Medieval Wall-Paintings. Diss. SMYA, FFT 100. Helsinki: SMY, FF, 1993.

Fält, Katja. Wall Paintings, Workshops, and Visual Production in the Medieval Diocese of Turku from 1430 to 1540. Helsinki: Finnish Antiquarian Society, 2012.

Hiekkanen, Markus. Finlands medeltida stenkyrkor, transl. Camilla Ahlström-Taavitsainen. Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, 2020.

Nilsén, Anna. “Kalkmålningarna i Rimito kyrka och deras upphovsman”. Finskt Museum (1982), 5–43.

Riska, Tove, “Keskiajan maalaustaide”, in Salme Sarajas-Korte (ed.), Ars: Suomen taide. 1. Espoo: Weilin + Göös, 1987.

Valkeapää, Leena. Pitäjänkirkosta kansallismonumentiksi: Suomen keskiaikaisten kivikirkkojen restaurointi ja sen tausta vuosina 1870-1920. Helsinki: Suomen muinaismuistoyhdistys, 2000.

Valkeapää, Leena. Vapaa kuin lintu: Emil Nervanderin elämä. Taidehistoriallisia tutkimuksia 47. Helsinki: Taidehistorian seura, 2015.

Wayside Shrines, Crosses, and Saints’ Images in the Nordic Landscape

2023-02-13

Terese Zachrisson, University of Gothenburg

Figure 1. A wayside shrine points out ’the narrow path’ towards Heaven to a fool stuck in a swamp in Sebastian Brant’s 1494 Ship of Fools. Image by Project Gutenberg (CC0 1.0 Universal).

A phenomenon that usually catches the eye of modern Scandinavians travelling through the Alps or the Southern European countryside, is the multitude of small wayside shrines scattered throughout the landscape. To secularised Scandinavians, this is often a rather exotic view. Few are aware that this aspect of sacred topography was once as common a sight in the North.

Christian wayside shrines come in a variety of shapes and sizes. A type of shrine evident from late medieval illustrations — that is still common today — is that of a crucifix or a saints’ image with a gabled ‘roof’ or enclosed in a small open ‘house’ (see figures 1 and 2). Shrines can also consist of a larger free-standing cross or crucifix, made of either stone or wood (see figure 3), or a large saints’ sculpture, for instance placed in a grotto or small oratory. Another variant is a painted image on a board or tablet, that according to some 17th-century descriptions seems to have been relatively common in Sweden. 

Wayside shrines were the focal points of ‘devotion on the go’. People working the fields, herding livestock in the woods, travelling along roads or visiting markets would kneel, make the sign of the cross and offer a prayer at such sites. Visiting shrines and crosses could also be a substitute for church attendance, when circumstances made it difficult to travel far. Shrines could also fill other functions. They could function as boundary markers and they could indicate sites where something remarkable had taken place, like a battle, or where someone had met a tragic and untimely end. People dying in riding accidents are especially common in the folklore surrounding many memorial crosses, and this tradition has much in common with offerkast* and the modern-day tradition of marking the sites of fatal car accidents with candles and flowers (Petersson 2009, 87). Even when a shrine mainly had a memorial function, it still called out for interaction with passers-by. Some of the surviving inscriptions on stone crosses request prayers for the victim’s soul, like the 13th-century runic inscription on a cross in Guldrupe parish on Gotland that says: Pray for Jakob in Annuganänge’s [?] soul, whom Nikulas slaughtered. 

Wayside shrines could also mark processional routes, as evidenced from medieval Central Europe, where religious processions ended in the open-air celebration of mass (Timmermann 2012, 393). According to Bishop Jöran Wallin the Younger (1668–1760), the stone cross in Kräklingbo had once had an altar at its base, for this very reason (Säve 1873, 18–19). Other shrines functioned as stations along pilgrimage routes, showing the way to pilgrims both physically and spiritually. 

Figure 2. Pilgrims at a wayside shrine. Colourised woodcut from a prayer book by Johann Geiler von Kaisersberg (Augsburg 1510). Image by the British Museum (CC BY-NC- SA 4.0).

As with so many other aspects of medieval Christianity in the Swedish realm, the contemporary sources rarely contain references to wayside shrines and we often have to rely on early modern narratives in order to identify sites that had these types of shrines. While shrines were likely an important part of the lived religion of the laity, as long as they weren’t part of saints’ legends or renowned enough to be objects of substantial donations, there was probably little motivation to mention them in writing. Many small shrines were likely also initiated and maintained by the laity, and as such not part of the formal ecclesiastical framework of buildings and other official structures. 

But there is little reason to doubt that wayside shrines were indeed a part of the religious repertoire of the Nordic region in the Middle Ages. From Norway and Iceland there are some early examples of wayside crosses in the sagas. St Olaf himself is said to have erected a cross in Sunnmøre in 1029 and Bishop Gudðmundr the Good (1161–1237) is said to have had several crosses consecrated along the Icelandic coast (Gardell 1930, 2–3).

In the last will and testament of Queen Margaret, the architect of the Kalmar Union, five different crosses in her vast realm were mentioned (DD 1405. Sorø 12. April.). For the sake of the queen’s soul, pilgrims were to be dispatched to the holy crosses in Solna in Sweden, in Borre in Norway, in Hattula in Finland and Randers and Kliplev in Denmark. Margaret’s will doesn’t clarify whether these crosses were free-standing shrines or part of the churches’ furnishings.  In the case of Hattula, the cross in question has been identified with the 14th-Century crucifix still in place in the parish church (Hagen 2021, 113–114), but no crucifix has been preserved from Solna, and it is possible that it was indeed a free-standing object.

The terminology used in the sources presents a challenge to its categorisation and analysis. For example, the Swedish word for cross — kors — had a much wider application in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period than it has today. It could refer to both  the ‘naked’ cross and the crucifix, and it was used for both smaller objects and large, free standing ones. Sometimes it seems to have been used to refer to a shrine or holy object in general — that in itself could have had any iconographic content.

In the Mapping Saints database we have currently collected around thirty such sites. Crosses and sculptures placed by holy wells aren’t included among these, since we view them as part of the wells rather than their own separate sites. Neither are the crosses mentioned in the will of Queen Margaret categorised as wayside shrines. Due to the uncertainty mentioned above, we haven chosen to categorise them as connected to the parish churches of Solna and Hattula.

Several wayside crosses were associated with the saints. At St Olaf’s Harbour in Medelpad, the staring point of the northern pilgrims’ way to Nidaros, a large copper-clad cross was in place up to the middle of the 17th century. In Ålem in Småland, St Birgitta’s Cross marked the site where the ship carrying St Birgitta’s relics back to Sweden from Rome is said to have docked in 1374. In Nousiainen, Finland, a cross in remembrance of St Henrik was still standing in a field by 1674. 

Figure 3. 13th-Century stone cross on Kapelludden, Öland, later associated with St. Birgitta. Photograph by the author (CC0 1.0 Universal).

The saints could also be present at wayside shrines through their images. For example, a highly unusual object has been preserved in Liden Church in Medelpad: a simple wooden cross with a painting of St Martin on one side, and St Margaret on the other, dated to the first quarter of the 16th century (Figure 4). According to local tradition, as mediated by the parish’s pastor in 1776, the cross had been placed at a site in the woods “during the papacy” (HLA Härnösands domkapitel EIII:69). This shrine was visited by those who were unable to travel to the church, and who left offerings at the site. The cross itself is covered in grafitti, initials, and house-marks, which lends additional credence to the story. 

One aspect that likely contributed to the popularity of wayside shrines was their accessibility. As indicated above, such sites were accessible to people who due to age, ill health or remote living conditions had a difficult time attending church on a regular basis. Not only could these sites be found close at hand, they were also always open. Even when crosses and saints’ images were enclosed in some kind of small structure, there were no ‘opening hours’ to take into account. A clear example of the importance of availability is seen in the instructions by Bishop Eystein of Oslo (c. 1337–1407) regarding a wayside cross raised in honour of St Olaf in Eidskog:

Thus, we let it be so, that this cross is maintained and that there be made a small prayer-house in honour of St Olaf, with an altar and a door without a lock, so that it is always open and ready for the pilgrims to have mass there, as we have promised, when they cannot enter the church (DN I:545, Vinger, February 18, 1394).

He further specifies that half the income from offerings left at the site is to belong to the church, and the other half to the shrine itself, which is probably one of the reasons that his stipulations for the small shrine were put into writing. 

The 17th-century antiquarian reports, written by local clergy and magistrates and sent to the Swedish College of Antiquities, speak of several wayside shrines which still existed in living memory, and some that were still in use. One example is from Funäsdalen, located in the mountainous border region between present-day Sweden and Norway, where remnants of an “offering cross” [sv. offerkors] were still visible, as well as the evidence of an offering practice in the form of scattered coins on the ground (Ranns. I, 245). Another cross is mentioned from Södra Åsarp in Västergötland. It stood in a field, and according to two different reports from 1668, people would visit the cross to pray with their rosaries (Ranns. I, 195 & 202). Crosses from the Finnish part of the realm are also mentioned in the early modern sources. When Dutch diplomat Andries van Wouw visited Finland in 1616 he commented on the tall crosses with an altar-like foundation he encountered in Savonia (Wikman 1947, 114) and the same tradition was reported from Karelia (Arffman 2016, 259). 

Figure 4. A cross with saints’ images and grafitti from Indals-Liden, 1500–1525. Photograph by the Swedish National Heritage Board (CC0 1.0 Universal).

A particularly interesting case is found in a rather unlikely source — a scientific treatise from 1698 on the midnight sun by Mathematician Johan Bilberg. When travelling through Västerbotten in 1694, he visited Bygdeå Parish Church, where he was shown a saint’s sculpture that had functioned as a woodland shrine where parishioners living far from the church had met together for worship. After “the most happy Times of Religion being purged from the Heresies of Papists”, the image had been brought back to the church and laid aside “in detestation of the Memory of that Matter” (Bilberg 1698, 86). A very similar case is found in Lövånger, about 45 kilometres to the north of Bygdeå, where parishioners born in the late 19th century still remembered a sculpture (CM #73) by the name of ’God in Vebomark‘ (figure 6), that had previously been placed in the Vebomark forest (SND LUKA 1, 1 *113302). 

Tablets with painted images of Christ, the saints, or the Cross are also hinted at in several early modern sources that describe shrines as “votive boards” or “offering tablets” [sv. offertavla]. According to Fale A. Burman, who travelled through Jämtland in the late 18th century, many place-names containing the word tavel, such as Tavellokan and Tavelbacken, reflect the memory of such shrines (Burman 1898, 104). Another indication of the past importance of wayside shrines, and how they were preserved in memory, are the sayings that were common in Sweden in the Early Modern period. When describing someone lacking in piety, it was said that that he or she “went to neither cross nor church” [sv. gick varken till kors eller kyrka], and someone admitting their wrongdoings were often said to “crawl to the cross” [sv. krypa till korset]. While the former expression is extinct, the latter is still widely used in Swedish. 

* An offerkast [“offering throw”] is a heap of pebbles, twigs and branches marking the site of an untimely death. Passers-by would throw a pebble or twig onto the heap while passing.

References

Arffman, Kaarlo, ”Resistance to the Reformation in 16th-Century Finland”, in Sari Katajala-Peltomaa & Raisa Maria Toivo (eds.), Lived Religion and the Long Reformation in Northern Europe c. 1300-1700, Boston 2016. 

Burman, Fale A., Fale A. Burmans koncept-dagböcker förda under resor i Jämtland åren 1793–1802. I utdrag utgifna af Johan Nordlander, Stockholm 1894.

Diplomatarium Danicum (DD), Sorø 12. April, 1405.

Diplomatarium Norvegicum (DN) I:545, Vinger 18 February, 1394.

Gardell, Sölve, ”Om kors och korshus i medeltidens Bohuslän”, i Göteborgs och Bohusläns fornminnesförenings tidskrift, Göteborg 1930.

Hagen, Kaja M. H., “O holy cross, you are all our help and comfort”: Wonderworking Crosses and Crucifixes in Late Medieval and Early Modern Norway, Oslo 2021.

Lund University, Lund University Church History Archive (2014). Questions concerning religious conceptions and church customs, *113302. Swedish National Data Service. Version 1.0. https://doi.org/10.5878/001677.

National Archives of Sweden in Härnösand (HLA), Domkapitlets i Härnösand arkiv, EIII:69. 

Petersson, Anna, ”Swedish Offerkast and Recent Roadside Memorials”, in Folklore, vol. 120:1, 2009.

Rannsakningar efter antikviteter, Vol. 1. Stockholm 1969. 

Säve, Per-Arvid, ”Kors på Gotland”, in Svenska fornminnesföreningens tidskrift, Vol. 2:1, Stockholm 1873. 

Timmermann, Achim, ”Highways to Heaven (and Hell): Wayside Crosses and the Making of Late Medieval Landscape”, in Celeste Brusati, Karl A. E. Enenkel & Walter Melion (eds), The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Leiden 2012.

Wikman, K. Rob. V., ”Gårdskors och bönkors”, in Fataburen: Nordiska museet och Skansens årsbok, Stockholm 1947. 

Ex-voto images: lived religion in visual form

2022-10-05

Lena Liepe, Linnaeus University

“In the year 1454 it so happened that Ingrid, servant of master Anders, priest in Värend, had a swollen hand, covered with wounds, that caused her a lot of pain. She was unable to use the hand for any sort of household work. She tried several remedies, but nothing worked. One day she came to the abbey [i.e. the Vadstena abbey]. In the morning mass, she said her usual prayers, and while she was praying, she remembered Lady Catherine, the daughter of Saint Birgitta, and she decided to go to her grave in the hope of being cured. She did this and promised to make an offer of a hand made from wax if she was healed. And when the promise had been made the swelling disappeared before noon and the hand was completely healed. In memory of this she hung a wax hand in honour of God and the blessed Catherine, on account of whose merits she believed herself having been cured (Lundén (ed.) 1981, [48], 67).”

The above episode appears in the collection of miracles, attributed to Catherine of Vadstena and chronicled by the clergymen of the abbey, compiled as part of the process to have her canonized (see Fröjmark 1992, 50–66). The wax hand donated by Ingrid of Värend was not the only such gift Catherine received. A total of 33 offerings, shaped in the likeness of humans, beasts, or objects, are recorded in the miracle collection: twenty whole figures made from silver or wax, including a wax nun; four wax children and one silver child; two wax heads and one silver head; one wax eye; one wax jaw; one wax hand; one wax arm; one wax leg; one wax breast and one silver breast; two wax horses; and one wax spoon.

The 33 wax and silver items are all examples of ex-votos: material artefacts made for offering to a saint or deity as an act of faith, to make a pledge, or fulfill a vow (Weinryb 2018, xi). Ex-votos (from the Latin phrase ex voto suscepto,‘from the vow made’), or votive offerings, could take all kinds of shapes, and also consist of mere lumps of matter; unspecified pieces of wax are frequently mentioned as offerings in the miracle collections (cf. below). A figurative ex-voto image is made in the likeness of the object for which a remedy is being sought: e.g. an aching limb, a sick child, an afflicted horse, or a silver spoon that has gone missing. It is a universal phenomenon: the catalogue of the exhibition Agents of Faith. Votive Objects in Time and Place, held at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York from 2018–2019, documents ex-voto images coming from five continents and dating from prehistory to the present day (Weinryb (ed.) 2018).

Seen from a lived religion perspective, the miracle collections’ mentions of ex-voto images provide rare evidence for a lay visual culture in the Middle Ages of which otherwise practically no evidence has survived. A world of images made by and for common people may have existed, but if so, no physical traces thereof remain today. Admittedly, we cannot be certain that the ex-voto images as a rule were made by the devotees themselves; in particular the silver objects can be assumed to have been made by professional goldsmiths. Thus, the widow of a once blind man recounted how she, upon her husband having been instructed in a dream to make an offer of two silver eyes to St. Brynolf of Skara, went to a goldsmith to have the eyes made. As soon as they were offered at the shrine, the husband’s eyesight was restored (SRS 1871–1876, 171). Wax images, on the other hand, might have been within the capability of the devotees themselves to produce. A Gunnar from Mellby suffered from insanity, but was cured by St. Brynolf after the parish priest had made a vow in his name. According to the testimony given by Gunnar to the commission that investigated the miracle, after he had recovered he made an image in wax (“fecit sibi ymaginem de cera”) as an offer to St. Brynolf (SRS 1871–1876, 168). Whether the ex-voto images were manufactured by the individuals who had experienced the miracles or not, their status as expressions in visual form of lay agency in a devotional context is unquestionable, and unique.

St. Catherine leads the field among Nordic saints whose miracle stories include mention of offerings and votive images made from wax or silver. Next comes Nicolaus of Linköping with 23 recorded ex-votos, whereas the “Helga lösen” group – a gilded-silver sculpture of the Deposition from the Cross, in the Dominican convent church in Stockholm – comes third with eight documented ex-voto offerings. The miracle collection of St. Eric of Sweden mentions four offerings; the collections of St. Birgitta and of Niels of Århus three each; the collection of Brynolf of Skara two offerings; and the miracle collection of St. Henry of Finland one. These numbers do not include the more or less unformed lumps of wax that were frequently presented to the shrines, nor the wax candles that are mentioned in the miracle collections of St. Eric (two), Nicolaus of Linköping (one) and Helga lösen (three) (Lundén 1950, 54–54). A special category of votive offerings are fish and cereal ears made from silver, offered, it may be presumed, in the hope of or as thanksgiving for plentiful hauls and harvests. In his survey of Reformation confiscation protocols Olle Källström records the impounding of eight silver fish and 27 silver cereal ears from churches in Sweden and Finland (Källström 1936; Källström 1943, 136–137; see also Lundén 1950, 55–56).

It should be borne in mind that the records in the miracle collections need not reflect the actual number of ex-votos offered to the shrines. They are the result of the documentation carried out by clerics who had gotten hold of and interviewed pilgrims visiting the shrines. Hence, the ex-votos mentioned were connected to an experienced miraculous healing recounted by the pilgrim, and/or by witnesses able to confirm the authenticity of the account, as recorded by the commission that investigated the application for canonization. Many more ex-votos may have been presented by pilgrims seeking healing or help. If their appeals were unsuccessful, or they simply escaped the clergy’s notice, their offerings were not registered in the miracle collections.

The votives are long gone, but a few visual sources remain that give an idea of what it looked like in those churches where ex-voto¬s accumulated. A painted scene on the exterior of one of the wings of an altarpiece in Västerås Cathedral shows a priest holding up a reliquary before an audience of beggars and cripples (cult manifestation # 3535; Bedoire 2019, 143, 147). In the upper right corner of the panel, crutches and was limbs hang suspended from a rope right above what appears to be a saint’s shrine, standing on or behind the altar. It should be kept in mind, though, that the altarpiece was made in Antwerp and that the painting is generic in character, i.e. it is not an historically accurate rendering of the interior of Västerås Cathedral (cf. Liepe 2020, 56, on the apparent lack of a saint’s shrine in Västerås). Somewhat more reliable as a historical source is an engraving from around 1700 of the late medieval so-called Erik altarpiece in Uppsala Cathedral (cult manifestation # 3505; Bengtsson 2010, 57–58). The altarpiece disappeared in the great fire that ravaged the cathedral in 1702, but engravings made of it not long before on the initiative of Johan Peringskiöld, inform us of its appearance. One of the altarpiece’s painted panels depicted two pilgrims kneeling in front of the shrine of St. Erik. Included in the composition were votive offerings: to the right in the picture, a leg and a hand made from wax (or perhaps silver), and the upper part of a suit of armour, can be seen suspended from the vaults or piers in the chancel where the shrine had its place in the late fifteenth century, when the panel that the engraving reproduces was painted.

Votive gifts in wax or silver had monetary value, and were likely often given with the intention that the receiving institution could convert them into material or pecuniary assets Thus, one of the reasons for the complete loss of medieval ex-voto images is probably that the waxen ones were used for candles, whereas the silver ones were perhaps melted down and reused for making other objects, or were simply turned into an economic resource. The material value also attracted thieves. The miracle collection of the local Danish saint Niels of Aarhus tells of how thieves twice tried to steal silver – in one case a pair of silver eyes – from the shrine, but how the relics emitted a fragrance that alerted the clerics so that the thieves could be caught. The Stockholm legal protocols for 1482 recount how a woman confessed to stealing wax from the altar of “Helga Lösen” in the Dominican church. For this, she was first placed on the pillory and then banished from the city (Krötzl 2014, 215).

Another cause for their disappearance is that they were purged as part of the Reformation’s crackdown on the Catholic cult of saints. The saints were not banned in the strict sense; they were, and still are, accepted as pious models to be venerated and remembered as worthy examples of faith, piety, patience and obedience. They may not, however, be worshipped or invoked. The Danish reformer Peter Palladius writes in his Visitatsbog (Visitation book) from just after the mid-16th century, that “billeder som mand haffuer giort søgning til, och hengde voxbørn och krycker for, de schule borttagis och brendis op” (“images that people seek out, and hang wax children and crutches before, should be taken away and burned.”) (Jacobsen (ed.) 1926, 36). In Fana parish in Norway after the Reformation, the priest burned several wagonloads of crutches and staffs that pilgrims had donated to the church’s reputedly miracle-working cross or crucifix that had a reputation for miracle working (Hagen 2021, 386).

At the time of writing (September, 2022), 35 votive offerings in total are registered in the database, the majority of which are silver cereal ears and silver fish. As more miracle collections and other sources are harvested for cult manifestations, the number of entries belonging to this category will grow, and yet another dimension of the material forms that the cult of saints could take will be made visible and accessible for further study. By mean of these objects, another piece is added to the jigsaw puzzle of lived religion as it unfolded in medieval Sweden and Finland.


References

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