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- [00:01]
Matt Lewis
Hello, I'm Matt Lewis.
- [00:03]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
And I'm Dr. Eleanor Jaenega and we're.
- [00:05]
Amy Jeffs
Just popping up here to tell you some insider info.
- [00:08]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
If you would like to listen to Gone Medieval ad free and get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to.
- [00:14]
Amy Jeffs
History Hit with the History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries such as my new.
- [00:21]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Series on everyone's favorite conquerors, the Normans.
- [00:25]
Amy Jeffs
Or my recent exploration of the castles that made Britain.
- [00:29]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
There's a new release to enjoy every week.
- [00:32]
Amy Jeffs
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe or find the link in the show notes for this episode.
- [00:49]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway this new year. Make sure you take some time to take care of yourself and your family. Stock up on your favorite personal care Items now through January 28th and earn four times the points to use towards discounts on groceries or fuel. Shop in store, online or in the app for items like Pantene Shampoo, Old Spice Body Wash, Campers, Swaddlers, diapers, Venus Razors and Crest Complete toothpaste and earn four times points on your purchase offer ends January 28th. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [01:20]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
When it comes to weight loss, no two people are the same. That's why NOOM builds personalized plans based on your unique psychology and biology. Take Brittany. After years of unsustainable diets, Noom helped her lose 20 pounds and keep it off.
- [01:33]
Brittany
I was definitely in a yo yo cycle for years of just losing weight, gaining weight and it was exhausting.
- [01:41]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
And Stephanie, she's a former D1 athlete who knew she couldn't out train her diet and she lost 38 pounds. My relationship to food before NOOM was never consistent. And Evan, he can't stand salads, but he still lost 50 pounds with Noom.
- [01:56]
Ryan Seacrest
I never really was a salad guy.
- [01:58]
Brittany
That's just not who I am. Even through the pickiness, NOOM taught me.
- [02:01]
Ryan Seacrest
That building better habits, a healthier lifestyle. I'm not doing this to get to a number. I'm doing this to feel better.
- [02:07]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Get your personalized plan today@noom.com Real Noom users compensated to provide their story. In four weeks, the typical Noom user can expect to lose 1 to 2 pounds per week. Individual results may vary. Hey there Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet resolutions. A way for us all to try and do a little bit better than we did last year. And my resolution, unlike Big Wireless, is to not be a raging and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first 3 month plan only. Taxes and fees. Extra speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.
- [02:56]
Amy Jeffs
Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval From History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gob smacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades, we cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here, find out who we really were with. Gone Medieval in this episode of Gone Medieval, you might have already gathered we're doing things a little bit differently. The veneration and worship of saints were an intrinsic part of the medieval world, and the celebration of their dedicated feast days formed the main threads around which the rhythms of medieval life revolved. So today we're bringing in the new year by focusing on one of January's most famous saints and one of England's most famous kings, Edward the Confessor. I'll be joined by the marvellous Amy Jeffs, author of the new book Saints A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic, in which she delves into the legends, myths and miracles that suffused the cults of several medieval saints. We'll be chatting about why saints captured the imagination of so many people in the Middle Ages, what they meant to the medieval mind, and which saintly lives and legends were important in the first few months of the new year. But first, we're delving into the legendarium of Edward the Confessor himself with a retelling of one of his most famous saintly adventures. It was recorded by the St. Albans monk Matthew Paris about 100 years after Edward's canonization in 1161, and comes from a history of Edward's life that attempts to justify and strengthen his status as a legendary saint. Whilst Paris's account is consciously rooted in real events, it's important to remember that its contents are more literary than historical. It's designed to make Edward seem saintly and supernatural. So take what you hear with a pinch of salt. But regardless of its veracity, such legend can still reveal a huge amount about what medieval people thought and how they understood their own lives. So let's return to 1065 to find out what this mysterious stranger wants from St. Edward.
- [06:00]
Evan
It is a bright summer Sunday in the heart of Saxon London as peasants and pilgrims go about their business. But soon the clinking of iron horseshoes and the creaking of rickety carts are drowned out by a surging, roaring crowd. It's as if every citizen of London has poured out into its streets. They jostle and heave, shove and swarm. Each one hopes to catch a glimpse of a king amongst his people. The one they have flocked to see is no ordinary king of England. He is Edward the Confessor, legendary saint king of this sceptered isle, blessed, they say, with the power to work the most extraordinary of miracles. Stories have spread like wildfire across the land that he has helped the blind see and the lame to walk, that his exacting piety and dedication to church building have bestowed the favor of St. Peter upon him. It is little wonder that his presence has drawn such a throng this particular Sunday. However, he does not intend to perform any miracles, rather a simple mass at The Church of St. John, his loving wife, Edith of Wessex. By his side is the order of the day. That is, until he is approached during the service by a mysterious and unknown stranger. The stranger is impoverished, a vagabond, haggard and bedraggled. And as he walks towards the King, he begs incessantly for the love of St. John. A part of your possessions for a lowly beggar. The King, gracious and paternal as all kings ought to be, hears the beggar's prayer and reaches for his arm's chest. But he can find neither gold nor silver. He asks for his treasurer to be summoned, but the man cannot be found in the melee of people. All the while, the poor man grows more and more desperate. He tears at his hair and rips at his ragged clothes, unsure how to ease the stranger's distress. The King reflects for a moment and then looks down at his hand and remembers. On his finger is a cherished ring, large and beautiful, an opulent symbol of his rank and stature. He slides the ring off his finger and presents it to the poor man who grasps it with joy, giving thanks to the King with a gentleness that would have been inconceivable just moments before. A gentleness that perhaps only a saint could possess. With commotion quelled, the King returns to mass, whilst the stranger vanishes as quickly as he appeared, slipping away into the swirling bustle of the city. Our story now turns to a far off desert, to the other end of Christendom, across the glittering Mediterranean Sea, in the holy land of Syria, Two pilgrims of English birth find themselves astray. They seek the holy places where Jesus lived and died, but can see neither man nor house. Lost among the dunes as the sun sets, they fear robbers and wild beasts, monsters and dreadful tempests. The encroaching dark of the night drapes over them like a shroud. Suddenly, a luminous old man appears before them, more dazzling than the sun at midday. In his hands, he carries two torches that banish the creeping darkness, and on one finger is a ring, shimmering in the flickering light. Drawing closer, he asks them from whence they have come. We are both from England, sire. Our king is named Edward, and we have come to seek the Holy Sepulchre. But we have befallen misfortune. The old man comforts them. Be not troubled or sad, dear friends, for I am John the Evangelist and your loyal and generous king is my friend. For when I came to him in lowly rags and begged for his riches, he did not turn me away as most vain rulers would. No, he gave me this cherished ring, which I will now return to him. Take it as proof of this encounter and as a testament of my anointing. The two pilgrims look at each other in astonishment, marveling at the gleaming garnet entrusted to them. Now. Go to your King, John implores. Salute him from me and let him know that before six months are over, he shall be in my company in heaven. And as swiftly as he had appeared, St. John vanishes into the night. Now entrusted with a holy mission and a greater purpose, the pilgrims depart and hasten back to England. Guided by the saint, they arrive at the king's court without ill or trouble and return to him the ring he long thought lost. Edward is overwhelmed by delight and wonders at the sheer impossibility of the ring's return. But his elation is soon tempered when the pilgrims relay the rest of John's portents. As he learns of his imminent death, Edward is gripped with the sorrow that only inspires acts of saintly generosity. He gives away all of his treasures and dedicates his final months entirely to prayer, almsgiving and acts of devotion. Courtier and commoner alike marvel at his transformation, witnessing a man wholly resigned to divine will. And when the time arrives for his earthly life to end, Edward passes away in quiet dignity. True to St. John's prophecy, he leaves behind a kingdom grieving not just the loss of a king, but a saint.
- [12:25]
Matt Lewis
Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Amy. It's your second visit here, but the first time I've had the chance to speak to you.
- [12:30]
Brittany
Yeah, It's a pleasure to be back. I had so much fun with Kat.
- [12:33]
Matt Lewis
And you're here today to talk to us about saints, and particularly about the saints that might feature in the first kind of few months of a new year. So we're in January, we're thinking about the new year. We've got a quarter's worth of saints that we're going to try and get our way through during this episode.
- [12:49]
Brittany
We could be here for weeks, couldn't we? I mean, there are just so many, but we've whittled it down.
- [12:54]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, we've done our best to whittle away and go for a few. I wondered if we could start off, though, by just thinking a little bit about what saints meant to the medieval mind. Were they there to be exemplars? Were they there to be warnings? Were they guides to how to live a better life? What did medieval people take from saints?
- [13:13]
Brittany
Yeah, okay. Well, it's obviously, it's a very big question, as you know, but when I had to define some parameters for myself with this book, and so I stuck to saints from the pre1200 period almost exclusively because it was around 1200 that the Papacy really took charge of the saint making process. And then you see a sort of shift in tone in terms of what their legends include. But you've also got these other. The mendicant saints, like St. Francis for Sisi and St. Dominic, and you've got the mystics. I think we'll steer for now, just steer clear of those categories of saints because there's so much we could say and there's so many kind of conflicting stories, I suppose. But basically, with the saints that I focus on in my book, they are mostly saints to be admired rather than imitated. They are saints who work wonders, who receive martyrdom. And this is, you know, one of the things that really struck me when I was working on stories like the story of Saint Catherine, Catherine of Alexandria. She was one of the most popular saints in medieval England. Her image, you would have gone into pretty much any parish church, you'd have seen St. Catherine somewhere, you know, maybe on a panel painting or on the walls in the plaster or carved somewhere. You'd have seen her with her little wheel, you know, the Catherine wheel, the original version, peeping out from behind her legs, or perhaps she's holding it. There's this torture instrument that explodes because the big angel comes down and smashes it. So she can't be tortured, but you'd have seen her everywhere. And her story is that she's a great scholar. Her father educates her in the liberal arts and she learns rhetoric and grammar and everything that she needs to argue really convincingly. And so then when there's this big sweep weep of anti Christian persecution happening under the Roman Emperor, she argues with the Governor of Alexandria about why his position is flawed and why she shouldn't worship the Roman gods. He's actually, he doesn't listen. It's quite a. It's quite a classic situation. He says, I'm so sorry, sweetie, I wasn't actually listening. Would you like to come around for dinner? And so she then has dinner with him that night and they argue again. And it becomes clear that he has. He can't argue with her. She's too good at it. She's. Her logic is too good. So he then summons all of the great philosophers in the Roman Empire from far and wide to come and publicly argue with Catherine. And they do this. And of course all of the philosophers are completely convinced by her arguments and convert to Christianity. And the governor has to have them killed. And you know, she. Then there's the. She's put into prison. She then has the big wheel, instruments of torture, four wheels with spikes and horrible things sticking up. She's going to be crushed by this mechanism of these four wheels that's sort of presented in the arena. But then an angel appears and smashes it to bits and then he chops her head off because that tends to work with martyrs. But then she bleeds milk out of her neck, which is super strange. I thought to myself, surely she's a young woman in the story. Did not medieval young women kneel in front of St. Catherine and think that they too should become great rhetoricians? Is surely she's an example to follow. Because, I mean, I was raised in the Catholic faith. That's often how I felt as a modern Catholic. Saints were presented to you as exemplar. But in reading, Eamon Duffy, the great scholar of English Reformation and upload of Christianity, he makes the point that saints are protectors, that their legends are like catalogs of. To prove their power, their immense power, their virtus is the word that comes up a lot. This idea of like strength that is physical and spiritual and sort of exists, remains in the saint's body long after their spirits left it, you know, and that if you are lighting candles to a saint every week as an act of devotion or you go on a great pilgrimage, you are kind of entering into a contract with the saint whereby when you die and you're standing at the heavenly tribunal, which is a really, you know, in the kind of secondary world universe of the medieval Christian imagination, that is a real place. There are saints legends or miracle stories where pilgrims actually die and they come back from the dead. Having been in that heavenly tribunal, your patron saint, the one that you're doing these devotions for, will appear at that tribunal and argue your case to God and to the Virgin Mary so that you can stay in heaven, basically. So if, you know, you've done some things, you know, you're probably going to need an advocate on Judgment Day. You want Catherine, like, she is going to argue the devil out of the room, like there's going to be no one that can naysay her. So, yeah, I thought that was a really fascinating discovery in the process of writing this book, that role of saints, not so much as examples to follow, perhaps, but as sources of immense power and as really powerful allies.
- [18:09]
Matt Lewis
It's like investing in a pension fund of a really good saint. Who can argue your case when you get to heaven.
- [18:15]
Brittany
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [18:17]
Matt Lewis
That's really interesting, Interesting way of looking at it, I think. I guess I was listening to that also, thinking lots of women must kneel and pray to St. Catherine, thinking, why don't men just ever listen? Nothing changes very much, does it? And I'm always struck in the medieval world as well by how often they will measure dates and times by saints days rather than. Actually, they won't be talking about the 15th of January, they'll be talking about the saints day when you're planning things. And I guess that's a really interesting way that people. We do it entirely by whatever the calendar date is. But that's a very different way to the way the medieval world thought about the passage of days and time.
- [18:56]
Brittany
Yeah, I think. I suppose we do it with, say, Christmas. We would say, oh, it's around Christmas. There are certain festivals that, if we're sort of raised in a Western Christian tradition, will loom so large in our imaginations they will supersede the calendar date itself. I think it's, you know, when you were saying about how saints and the kind of year and time work together, I think one of the clearest places you can see this, if you go to digital facsimile of, or are able to get out a manuscript of a book of hours or a psalter, a book of psalms. These were. A book of hours, was a collection of prayers to be said at set times through the day. And it's one of the most common forms of manuscript to be Commissioned by lay patrons, so probably lesser to upper nobility, people who aren't clerical but can read and maybe have basic Latin. So you see lots and lots of these books of ours produced for noble women and that sort of thing. And lots of these manuscripts start with a calendar and it will be a calendar of saints days and liturgical feasts. And how each page is often laid out is that you have the list of. So you have the say January at the top and it'll say calends, which is where we get the word calendar. So the first day of the month called calends. This is the Roman system for reckoning the months. You then about four days after that you have knowns. So it's given like a list down the left hand side of the page. Knowns is always eight days before ides. Ides is sort of fixed point in the month and then you count down from ides back to the calendars of the next month. It was partly maybe because it's just really confusing system. I mean you say it's around ides, but you know, ides might be at a different. It might be around the 15th of what we call the 15th of the month. But it depends where knowns is. And so probably people didn't have every single month memorized in relation to where these points were. But how it's laid out in this calendar pages is that you then have the major feast days or the relevant feast days to that patron. So you'll have the super saints nearly always. But if the patron's from Oxford, you're going to have fries wide in there. It's always like a smoking gun. So, ah, this is an Oxford manuscript and major liturgical feasts like Pentecost will be in there too. In this list. It's like, I think, kind of imagine it a bit like a ladder. It's quite helpful because beside the list of feasts you'll also have two often like decorative roundels, little illustrations within circular frames. And the first one or the lower one will show the labour of the month for that month. There's a kind of misleading name because not all of we would think of as labours. So the labour of the month for January is feasting.
- [21:41]
Matt Lewis
Oh, such hard work.
- [21:43]
Brittany
Yes.
- [21:43]
Matt Lewis
Someone's got to do it.
- [21:44]
Brittany
Yeah. If the labours of the previous 11 months have gone well, then you're going to have a really good January table. If nature's been on your side and the weather's been on your side and all that sort of thing. So you often get a depiction of Janus The Roman God with his two faces sitting at a banqueting table. He's looking forward to the year to come. Looking back at the year just gone and he's doing the labour of the month for January. February is often warming your feet or your bum in front of the fire. Very important. Or sometimes it's somebody who looks very poor sitting there warming their feet in front of the fire. You've got some great Dutch manuscripts where they're kind of lifting up their tunics and warming everything else. You might have a very wealthy sort of well nourished looking individual standing in front of a hearth while somebody is working for them out the window, carrying a big bundle of sticks on their shoulders or something. March is pruning often. April's picking flowers, May is carousing. June's the hay harvest, July's the wheat harvest, August is threshing, September's treading the grapes. October is putting the pigs out to pannage on the acorns and the beechnuts. November, you've got to sow the wheat for the next year. And December, you're going to kill the pig with the back of an axe pole, axing the doink. And then it all starts again. You'd have this image of the labour of the month, which is like connecting. You've got these saints down the side at the bottom of the ladder, you've got the soil, what's going on at ground level. But then in the round above that, you've got a symbol of the zodiac for that month, which in the medieval way of reckoning, it mapped exactly onto the month. It didn't kind of straddle two months as we have it now. And the symbol of the zodiac would affect, you know, this was because we're in an age that believed in humoral theory, that subscribed to humoral theory, the medical sciences inherited from Galen and the classics, and so actually via the Islamic world, I should say. But what the celestial bodies were doing and the stars were doing at any given moment would implicate the kind of medical treatment you might receive for different parts of your body, or even issues of kind of mental health. So January is seen as a time that implicates the ankles, but also melancholy. And so what you might avoid certain medical treatments, certain times of the month, depending on the zodiac. But again, it's then we're at the top of the ladder now it's, there's the spheres, what's going on in the sky. And so one of just one of these calendar pages, it connects the soil to the spheres, the saints and the turgical feasts being like a ladder in between structuring time and bringing everything from the falling leaves and the weather into a kind of whole cosmological drama about creation and about why humanity's here and where it's going and what its fate is going to be. And that there's something, for me, very. It sort of inspires a kind of nostalgia, but it's also deeply insufficient because, you know, it's anthropocentric. You know, it's not going to work as a. As a worldview, really. But the poetry of it and the completeness of it is very engaging, I think.
- [24:45]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, I'll never look at a page in a book of hours in the same way again. I'll be looking for all of those little things. It's really useful guide to how to read those pages. It's great.
- [24:54]
Brittany
Thank you.
- [24:54]
Matt Lewis
If we move on to think about some specific saints. So if we think about January. Thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, by the way. Brilliant. I recommend people go and dig through all of the stories of the various saints that are in there for each month. But for January, I kind of wanted to pick out Edward the Confessor because he's a medieval king, Medieval king of England, too. And so he's one of January saints. What are the saintly stories that surround Edward the Confessor? How does he become a saint?
- [25:19]
Brittany
Oh, my gosh. I could talk about Edward the Confessor for days and it's going to be so hard to work out what to choose and where to start.
- [25:28]
Matt Lewis
Right, everyone, get your packed lunch. Amy is going to talk Edward the Confessor.
- [25:31]
Brittany
I feel like some people are like this about steam trains and I'm like, about Edward the Confessor, but so I'm going to start with the manuscripts because I feel like manuscripts are, you know, it's nice to have an object to focus on. And there is. In. In the university library at Cambridge University, there is a. A history of Edward the Confessor, and it was written by Matthew Paris, who was the incumbent historian at St Albans abbey in the 13th century, in the second half of the 13th century. He is a polymath. He's a great friend of Henry iii. He is in touch with lots of noble women. He lends them books that he's written and illustrated, and he produces a load of saints lives, which are verse lives. Really engaging. Keep saying engaging, but they're really sort of dynamic Old French, and most of them, in the vernacular poetry, telling the story of A different saint with these prolific illustrations that he's done himself. And they've got, you know, I'm trying to think of an illustrator we'd all know that's got this kind of dynamic pen and washi. It's almost like Quentin Blake, but less kind of playful. But they got. They kind of roll into each other, these continuous narrative scenes with all these characters and doing things and really mapping onto what's happening in the story underneath. And he produced a text that he called l'estoire de Saint Edouard le Rais, the History of Saint Edward the King. And it tells the story. It's kind of like a saint's legend, is closely based on his official hagiography, but it's also a story of English political history and the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest and the circumstances that led to that. It's absolutely fascinating. It's got an amazing. Where's Wally? Battle of Hastings scene at the end, where it takes quite a while to find Harrold, but when you do, you know, he's got his little crown on his head. He's right down in the melee at the bottom, he's fallen over and the arrow is poking out of his eye and he's looking you with the other eye, looking right at you. And it's this moment of reckoning, sort of. Yeah. Oh. Oh, I've been found out, you know, the divine dart has fallen out of the sky and got me. So, anyway, Edward the Confessor was very. He's obviously a historical figure. Lots of saints are. But what happened in his reign and what happened to England after his reign means that his story's really loaded, symbolically loaded, and ripe for kind of adaptation and embellishment in ways that serve the ruling elite, the Plantagenet ruling elite. So you've got this story of. Okay, the main miracles led with the Confessor are that he gives a ring to a poor man that he meets outside his palace in London. The poor man then appears to some pilgrims way off in the Holy Land and gives them back the ring and says, can you tell your King, Edward the Confessor, these are English pilgrims? He said, can you tell them that I'm actually John the Evangelist? And when he gave me this ring, he was thinking that I was a poor man. He did not know. But I actually also know the date he's going to die. So if you could return this ring to your king, tell him it's from John the Evangelist. Thanks for that. And also, you're going to die soon. And this is when.
- [28:40]
Matt Lewis
Oh, wow, thanks. That's like good news and bad news kind of thing. You've got your ring back, but yeah.
- [28:46]
Brittany
Real double edged sword. So they return to London and do this and Edward's really pleased because he can't wait to go to heaven. So that becomes the kind of motif like the signature story of Edward the Confessor's cult. So the ring was one of his primary relics at his shrine in Westminster Abbey. The pilgrim souvenir that's sold to pilgrims at the shrine shows Edward the Confessor and John the Evangelist disguised as a beggar, standing together in a kind of circle border. And they're exchanging, they're being handing over this ring to John the Evangelist. It's an amazing sort of idea because obviously it's not just about Edward the Confessor, it's also about John the Evangelist. It's kind of elevating the saint by the royal English saint by association with a biblical saint. His cult is being actively encouraged by Henry iii. He names his son Edward, you know, Edward I. That's it's not a coincidence. He's refurbishing Westminster Abbey. This is a top down cult that they want Westminster Abbey to feel like the St. Denis of London. It's the necropolis of the Plantagenets. This is the same with the other big famous legend of Edward the Confessor. It's about how he was responsible for refurbishing Westminster Abbey the first time. So Henry III gives it a going over and he says, this is because I'm imitating Edward the Confessor who did the same thing and Edward the Confessor that in the manuscript, all about his, you know, his history is talking about, there's a sort of digression and it says way back when, long before Edward the Confessor was on the throne, the first bishop of London was called Meletus. And he was on his way to consecrate a new church that they'd been building on the Isle of Thorney, which is the future Westminster. It used to be an island, not anymore. Meanwhile, there's a fisherman out on The Thames and St Peter appears to him, asks to be carried across to the island where the church stands as yet unconsecrated church stands. And he performs this miraculous consecration and angels appear and the walls kind of, he's just flinging holy water around, there are kind of candles burning. He then goes outside St. Peter and writes a Greek message in the sand by the entrance to the church. And then he says to the fisherman, have you got any fish? I'm hungry. And the fisherman says, oh, no, I've been so distracted by you doing all this magicy stuff and kind of all the angels that I haven't done any fishing. And he says, well, throw your nets over the side of the boats in a classic St. Peter move. And so the fisherman does the nets fill with salmon and he pulls the catch onto his boat. And St. Peter says, can you take this salmon to Meletus, the first bishop of London, who is on his way to consecrate this church and tell him that by this salmon and by other signs that I've left, like the wet walls from all of the holy wars and the Greek message that St. Peter's already been here and I've dedicated it to myself. And, you know, it's all done. Yeah. And so you don't need to. You don't need to worry. And so again, this is it. The church then falls into disrepair. It's refurbished in the reign of Edward the Confessor and again in the reign of Henry iii. But it's got this miracle story links the cult of Edward to St. Peter as well. And so now he's got these kind of really powerful sidekicks of John the evangelist and St. Peter, who holds the keys to heaven. There's so much more I could say about him. But in terms of what you actually asked me about the famous stories, those are probably the two, the two big miracle stories that people would have thought of if they were into the cult of Edward in the 13th century.
- [32:43]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [33:14]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
When it comes to weight loss, no two people are the same. That's why NOOM builds personalized plans based on your unique psychology and biology. Take Brittany. After years of unsustainable diets, Noom helped her lose 20 pounds and keep it all.
- [33:28]
Brittany
I was definitely in a yo yo cycle for years of just losing weight, gaining weight, and it was exhausting.
- [33:35]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
And Stephanie, she's a former D1 athlete who knew she couldn't out train her diet and she lost 38 pounds. My relationship to food before Noom was never consistent. And Evan, he can't stand salads, but he still lost £50 with Noom.
- [33:50]
Ryan Seacrest
I never really was a salad guy.
- [33:52]
Brittany
That's just not who I am. Even through the pickiness, Noom taught me.
- [33:56]
Ryan Seacrest
That building better habits builds a healthier lifestyle. I'm not doing this to get to a number. I'm doing this to feel better.
- [34:01]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
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- [35:27]
Matt Lewis
And I guess if I was being slightly cynical, which maybe I am, I guess there's an attraction for particularly Henry iii, but any medieval king to want a previous saint King of England. There was something to be gained from having the fact that kings of England can be saints. And I'm thinking Henry III in particular because I think he'd have loved to have been a saint, would have been his dream come true. So he's kind of almost setting the precedent that kings of England can be saints because there's Edward. What about me, guys? What about me?
- [35:58]
Amy Jeffs
What about me?
- [35:58]
Brittany
Yes. Yeah. And there was of course the so one of St Edward's parting as he's on his deathbed, he has a vision of a tree that gets chopped down and then reroutes. He says it's like three furlongs later or something. Basically it's a kind of allegory. I Mean, this is being written down in the. So I think that miracle story with the vision of the tree is composed in the reign of Henry I, because the tree, it's interpreted as an allegory for how the English royal line will be severed by the Norman Conquest, but by blood will reign emerge with the reign of Henry I. This is also is useful to Henry III later because you're basically saying we are descended from Edward the Confessor. There's been this kind of blip. And this is useful to them politically because their cousins in France are becoming more and more like enemies. And so I don't know if you'd agree, but it's quite useful to be defining themselves by a history that roots them more securely on English soil and not as kind of migrants, essentially.
- [37:06]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, we do see kind of early on in Henry III's reign, probably while he's still a child, you know, before he's really in charge of things. But when you've had that French invasion, 1215, 1216, with Louis coming over, you do see an emergence of a much more English identity in driving the French away. You know, no longer do we consider ourselves Anglo, Norman, basically French elite over here. Yeah, we're now separating ourselves. So you get that real sense of an English divide from the French. And this is part of the English building that identity for themselves that, you know, we can have saints over here as well that are separate from anything that's going on in France.
- [37:44]
Brittany
Yes. And that are royal and that are blood related to us. So. Yeah, that's such an interesting point. And I think this is the same period. It's this latter part of Edward. Edward I's reign that he. And not even the latter part sort of in it. So Henry III's son is then really promoting the story of Brutus the Trojan and claiming. And it's in his reign that the amazing bodily roll genealogical diagram is produced that goes all the way from Brutus the Trojan to Edward I and was probably kept at St. Mary's Abbey in York while he was kind of leading the campaigns in Scotland. And so, yeah, there's this. There are various ways through myth and through sacred legend that they are really establishing this fixed English identity and that sense of place and heritage.
- [38:35]
Matt Lewis
Fascinating. Then if we move into February, maybe a little bit of a step change, a change of direction, we've got Saint Brigid. What can you tell us about when Saint Brigid was around and again, how she becomes a saint.
- [38:46]
Brittany
Okay, so Saint Bridget is one of those really intriguing saints that, you know, I think it's quite a common assumption today to say that so many of the more weird and wonderful saints legends in medieval Christianity must have come from pre Christian cults. And I think there are two kind of comments that's worth making about that. Firstly, that the evidence is really slim. Mostly there's no evidence for that. The evidence that does exist exists in relation to the cult of St. Bridget. She appears in a very, an early medieval glossary as having come from a pre Christian Celtic cult to three goddesses, all called Brigid. But that's rare. And there's also a letter from Pope Gregory the Great, who led a great deal of missions into northwestern Europe, to the first Bishop of London, Meletus, who we met earlier. And he actually says, don't destroy what he calls pagan temples in your efforts to convert the people, but clear them of their furniture and put in altars to the saints, dedicate them to the saints and modify the animal sacrifices they were making to feasts on the dedication days of those new churches. And so that's a kind of active instruction to appropriate pre Christian places of worship for Christian worship. But so, you know, there is some evidence it's happening. On the other hand, the Reformation, the Reformers in the Protestant Reformation are very, very keen on accusing medieval Catholicism of heathenism, pagan practice, superstition, magic at every possible turn. And at that point, that is the gravest slur. To worship an image in a manner that was held to be idolatrous was not just doing the wrong thing, it was not just imagining something was there that that wasn't. Or in believing it had life, it actually created a vacuum into which the devil could move. You know, pagan idols are not, are not just a misunderstanding. They have the devil in them. They're deeply dangerous. And so, you know, to accuse a medieval Christian of worshiping images of being pagan was a massive accusation. Nowadays we hear the word paganism and I think by and large we go, ooh, cool. There's a reason. Yes. It doesn't mean we haven't inherited the Reformation smear campaign, it just means that we perceive it differently. So flatting into Bridget, basically, chances are she is an example of a pre Christian cult being transformed into a Christian cult. However, we shouldn't overstate it. She is held to have lived in the mid 5th, 1st 2nd quarter of the 6th century, or died then. Her first hagiography is written down in the mid 7th century by a monk called Cogitosis. She was believed to have lived in Kildare in Ireland. She is one of the most wonder Working saints. There's a wonder worker extraordinaire, as she's described. She performs all kinds of amazing miracles, such as the famous one is that when she was a girl and she was churning butter for her mother, she gave away all the butterfly to some travellers who were hungry. And then the churn just fills back up. So she's associated with kind of milk, the new season of sort of the sheep in the fields, then the lambs and that kind of the beginning of spring and the first milk coming in. Then she also this story of how she came in from the outside into the buildings that she shared with her community. And it's been raining outside and so she just takes off her cloak and without thinking drapes it over a sunbeam. Another is that to repel unwanted suitors, she just burst her eyeball with her finger. Or another lovely one where she is said to have found a beehive under the floor of their communal buildings. And it's just this enormous beehive all these bees have been living. It's. This is like immense productivity. The honey, like you know how the chosen, you know, the promised land is in the Old Testament is described as somewhere flowing with milk and honey. You know, that is Bridget. And that's kind of how I mean. The story that I chose to recreate in the fiction section of her chapter in my book is the one of how she said to have performed an abortion, quote, unquote, abortion on one of her followers. And this is just a really interesting and challenging miracle.
- [43:30]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [44:02]
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- [44:43]
Matt Lewis
So I think it's interesting because you talk around that in the book, then a little bit about this kind of the restoration of virginity as a miracle. And I did want to talk a little bit about kind of what that is meant to mean. The idea that you could be restored to innocence, I guess, is a core Christian message, really, isn't it?
- [45:00]
Brittany
Yes. So this abortion miracle, she's not alone. There are some other early Irish saints that end pregnancies. They're kind of glibly called abortion miracles, but it's possibly an inappropriate term. And this is something discussed in an article by a scholar called Maeve Callan. She describes how in early Irish penitentials from the period, you can go back to being a virgin after seven years of penance. And that becoming a holy virgin isn't. It's. It's a kind of constructed thing. It's not necessarily how we would perceive it now. And so she also describes how sort of the sin of fornication, let's say, didn't remove your virginity until the sin was manifest in the form of a child. And so if your pregnancy ended before the child arrived, and if the child vanished in the process, you were still kind of. You still hadn't lost your status within the community, necessarily. And so the way that the miracle occurs with Bridget is that the follower comes to her and confesses that she's pregnant. And then Bridget, her hands on the woman's belly and the flesh recedes and the child vanishes, and the woman experiences no pain, and she thanks God. And there's this kind of sense that it's a returning of the fetus to where it came from and for a sort of a chance for the female follower to stay in the community and not forfeit her choice to be a follower of Bridget. And this idea of purity is so interesting, especially in relation to Bridget, who's got these kind of motifs of fertility, of the milk and the honey and that kind of thing. The virgin body or the chaste body, it's sometimes described as a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden. And that you. This is sort of in a medieval way of imagining things that by the sort of the womb that has the potential to make life but doesn't, is a kind of sacrifice for God. It's a reservation of power. And that really tallies up with her association with the very first glimmerings of spring and all of the life force in the first shoots in the fields and in the animals that are getting ready to have their young.
- [47:09]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I think that was what I was taking away from Bridget's story was it kind of fits with that idea of spring and the arrival of lots of new life and the coming of plenty and all of that kind of thing is all tied in in the.
- [47:22]
Brittany
Glossary that her name appears in relation to those three goddesses. It says how you know, her feast is celebrated at the very start of February around the time of the feast of Imbolc, which the writer of the glossary says is when he gives this kind of etymology, says it's to do with yew's milk and when the first ewe's milk comes in. So it seems that maybe the timing of her feast has something to do with that pre Christian cult, if it did indeed exist.
- [47:47]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. Interesting though. The next one I wanted to talk about is Patrick. I mean, I think probably lots of people will be aware of St. Patrick. The idea that we have of Patrick, of going to Ireland, converting all of the Irish and driving out the snakes is possibly the limit, probably the limit of my knowledge before I read the book, to be perfectly honest. How accurate is that view of Patrick? What did he mean to medieval people?
- [48:09]
Brittany
Yeah, I think saints like Patrick are so tricky because they've got, like Bridget, you know, they've got ongoing cults. It's not enough just to learn about what writings actually survive from Patrick's life lifetime, which he. There are two texts that he wrote that survive. You can learn that you still don't know anything about Patrick, the legend. You could learn his later medieval hagiographies and you'd have another layer. But then of course there's everything that Patrick has meant since then as well. I started with these texts that survive. There's his confession, his Confessio, in which he lays out biographical information. So that's where we know that you know, where the evidence comes from that he was a British born man who in his teens was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Ireland. He worked in the region of what's now County Mayo and was enslaved there. He had been raised Christian, but Ireland at that point wasn't Christian. So he was in a Romano British household that was Christian. And so when he manages to escape enslavement and return to Britain, he quickly resolves to go out to Ireland and become a missionary and to convert the Irish people. And then he becomes Bishop of Ireland. He has a major role in that conversion process. It's probably been exaggerated with time, but you can imagine these scenes of kind of mass baptism and there's this for. He does come back to Britain once to be tried for a crime, and he doesn't say what it was.
- [49:45]
Matt Lewis
It must have been really bad if he doesn't bother to say what it was.
- [49:47]
Brittany
That's a kind of true crime novel waiting to be written. The other surviving text from Patrick is his letter to Coroticus, who is a British slave dealer. And Patrick is furious. In this letter, he has just recently baptized a group of people in Ireland, a large group of people. Coroticus has been through with his men and has slaughtered all the men in that community and taken away the women and children, and he's. He's kidnapped them into slavery, which is, of course, what Patrick experienced as a young man. And this letter urges Coroticus to see the crime, understand the crime that he's committed. You know, and I think Patrick even says in the letter, you know, they were still in their baptismal robes. Maybe that's an exaggeration, or maybe it's a kind of. They symbolically were. They were like fresh out of. Of having converted. And. And you struck them down like lambs, you know, and. And it's. He's so enraged and embittered, and he says, if you don't change your ways and return the women and children and protect them, you, they are. You're going to burn in hell. And who knows if it worked. You think if Crosscase was prepared to do all of that, probably a you're going to burn in hell letter isn't going to cut it. So these are the two things that actually survived from Patrick's life. You then get these later medieval, much more conventional hagiographies. And that's where he's kind of driving out snakes and doing all kinds of things with his staff, like standing at the top of a mountain and kind of hitting his staff against the air. And way down in the valley in Idle Falls, you know, really fantastic stories. But then sometime after that, you get the story of St. Patrick's Purgatory. This is what really intrigued me. So in my fictional kind of story of St. Patrick, it's about his. It starts with him being shown the entrance to purgatory by Christ. So there's a Middle English story called Sir Owain, and it's about how a knight travels to this place called St. Patrick's Purgatory. It opens with St. Patrick dreaming that he is in this beautiful meadow and he encounters Christ. And Christ gives him a huge book with all the knowledge that ever was and ever will be in it. And he gives him a Staff that will be his powerful miracle working staff. And then he leads him through the meadow into a desert and across the desert to a huge pit, a hole in the ground that's so deep you can't see the bottom. And he explains that this is purgatory. This is where souls will go to be cleansed of their sin, however long it takes before entering heaven. And then in the story of Sir Owain, this is about a knight living around the time of King Arthur who decides he's going to go to this place, this hole that St. Patrick was shown. And it was actually by then associated with an actual kind of cave network or system of caves on an island in Lough Derg in Ireland. And so Owain goes there, he sort of defies the abbot and goes into the pit. And then he goes on this kind of Dante's Inferno journey through Purgatory and sees all kinds of awful, terrifying things and a lot of sort of naked, writhing bodies and farting demons and that kind of thing, and then sort of ascends via this terrifying road into the kind of holding zone before heaven. But basically, with Patrick, there's this place, this St. Patrick's Purgatory on Loch Dug, which was a genuine pilgrimage destination. It's thought that this is no longer open. But you get this story of Sir Owain's purgatory, you get another story in the Chronicles of Hoissart, which you're probably familiar with as a medievalist. He's a French historian. He talks about riding with some knights and ask some. I think they're English knights. And one of them is called William de Lisle, I believe. And he asks, he says, you've been St Patrick's Purgatory, haven't you? And he says, oh, yeah, I have. He was like, what was it like? Well, yeah, we went across to the island of Loch d'erg. We got permission to go and spend the night in the cave system and see what it's like, because people say they see all kinds of amazing things. And he said, what happened? He said, we went down into the cave, we went down all these steps, we sat down and we fell asleep. We think we had all kinds of really weird. We say, impossible desire to sleep. We couldn't resist it. And we fell asleep at the bottom of this cave network and had all these kind of crazy dreams. But in the morning when we came out again, we couldn't articulate what they were. We'd kind of forgotten what these dreams were. And there's this theory that possibly this genuine sort of cave system known as St. Patrick's Purgatory is a sort of prehistoric sweat house somewhere that sort of herbs were burned, maybe hallucinogenic herbs. And that Froissart's companion on this journey, Sir William de Lisle, actually kind of went and had like kind of wild trip in this cave in the 14th century and couldn't remember anything. He kind of couldn't resist falling asleep and had all these crazy dreams. There's this completely baffling and fascinating interweaving of myth and history and evidence and fiction. And you know, it's just with Patrick that's, you know, that's ramped up to the extreme. So he's such a complex character.
- [54:47]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And I was struck, I think, by what you described a little bit earlier. The way that Patrick's is a good example of where the stories are layered up to mean different things at different times. You know, we kind of have what Patrick tells us about himself, but then people will start adding onto that and creating this driving out the snakes thing. Then he becomes a representative of the idea of purgatory, when that's something the church is beginning to evolve and drive home for people. And Patrick just gets attached to that. So it's sort of the living nature of the cult of saints that they can be grafted onto whatever they're needed for in any given moment.
- [55:23]
Brittany
Yes. And sometimes you really feel that kind of top down pressure of the church to use the cult of saints to their, to serve the theological purposes. But at the same time, this cult of saints is unruly and challenges orthodox theology throughout its history. You know, it's the, in the earliest period, the martyrs are. There is no relic veneration in the Bible. This is something that seems to appear with the early martyrs, other Christian communities, early Christian communities going to their tombs because these are people that have died heroically and who become sort of saints by popular vote. But then you get the missionary period, post legalization of Christianity and being becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire missions going into northwestern Europe. They take with them the bones of apostles and that kind of things. And these become very effective tools for evangelization. They're kind of focal points for storytelling and, and for kind of performance of miracles. Whether or not that's literally happening is kind of up to listeners to decide. But you sense this in the story. There's A Story of St. Andrew the Apostle's bones going to Scotland and how they're taken by Saint Rule or Saint Regulus and how a Pictish king sees A kind of great host of angels in the sky above the box of Andrew's bones that Saint Regulus is holding. You can kind of imagine how these sort of dramatic or theatrical potential of these, of these folky for devotion. And so, you know, by the time the Christian church is really established across Europe and theologians are saying, how do we feel about this kind of mass pilgrimage and venerating human remains and the reports of miracles, you know, how does that actually tally up with the teachings of say, the Church Fathers or the Gospels? It's too late. It's already in there in the popular imagination. It's massive part of Christian belief, of folk belief. You know, there's a shrine to a dog in 13th century France just outside Lyon, and a contemporary Dominican preacher says, this is really not what we think is appropriate. And yet the cult persisted into the 20th century. It's one of those bad Gelert stories where the dog had saved a baby from a viper, but is found with the cops tipped over. And the dog's got blood around its mouth and so the father kills it and throws it down a well and then he realizes he discovers the body of a snake covered in dog bites under the crib when he lifts the baby back up and realizes he's wrongfully killed the dog. And it was like this martyr story throughout this history. We're also seeing a kind of push and pull between orthodox theology and popular belief and the force of mass devotion.
- [58:13]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. And we're hoping to twist your arm to bring you back to talk about more saints throughout the year. So I just wondered whether there are patterns to the saints that match the periods of the year. So we've dealt with kind of January, February, March, springtime. Do the saints kind of reflect the season or is it much more random than that?
- [58:36]
Brittany
I think it depends on the stories associated with saints come from such a variety of sources. In my book, I've tried not to only talk about the official lives of saints, but also the spin off stories. And one of the stories that I found particularly wonderful, which I hope we come to in the summer, but it is actually highly appropriate for a winter episode because it's the story of how the Virgin Mary, while traveling to Bethlehem with Joseph and she's heavily pregnant, they encounters a cherry tree growing beside the road and it miraculously bursts into fruit, which is an astonishing thing in the middle of winter. And you've got to imagine that this is a kind of medieval English imagined landscape. This isn't actual Middle East. We're imagining Here. So it's probably snow everywhere. And you know, this cherry tree is suddenly covered in this glistening red fruit. And I'm quoting the Endtown plays, which is a traveling mystery play set from 14th century. She says, oh Joseph, could you please pick me some of these cherries? I'm so hungry. Look at this amazing miracle. And he says it is wild work. Let the one that got you pregnant pick the cherries. And the cherry tree realizes that there's a deity in the womb of the virgin. And so the whole cherry tree bows down for her to pick her fill of cherries. This is taken from the Gospel of the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo Matthew in which the virgin encounters not a cherry tree but a date palm and it bows down to her. But in the 15th century England, for some reason the version in which it's a cherry tree and so kind of matches on to what people from England would have been able to see out their windows, becomes an incredibly popular story, gives rise to all sorts of spin off stories often featuring unexpected gluts of fresh cherries in the middle of winter and at Christmas feasts. And so you know, in the same way with stories where like of Cuthbert, where there are otters, where in a Middle Eastern pretty predecessor there might have been a helpful camel or a helpful lion, you can see how these stories are being shaped for a British landscape or Northwestern European landscape and taking those tropes that they've seen elsewhere and playing with them. So I don't know if it's exactly seasonal, but it is certainly local.
- [60:49]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. Thank you very much. One question I really need to ask you before you go and I'm sure anyone else who reads the book will want to know this as well. What does the manuscript reading room at Cambridge University Library smell like?
- [61:01]
Brittany
Absolutely lovely.
- [61:03]
Matt Lewis
You describe it in the book and you talk about the smell in there and I was just. I wonder what it actually smells like. I've never been there.
- [61:08]
Brittany
It just smells of. You know, there was a part of the stores of the British Library manuscript. I mean it's still, it's still there. Obviously this manuscript stores in the British Library. Just if you go through some particular area of the stacks, smells of smoke because some of the manuscripts in that section were rescued from a fire a long time ago. This isn't the case in the Cambridge University Library manuscripts reading room. But when you go in there it smells of leather and old paper and parchment. And when you, you know, I am, I'm sure I'm definitely not alone in being a furtive manuscript sniffer. You think it's so, you know, you've got this permission to come in and look at this amazing artifact and you open it and it's on the, you know, it's on its cushion and you've got the snakes there weighing the pages down. And then when one's looking, you just even thought you. Because it's just, you know, it's. You wish that you were a dog and you could kind of read it, read the smells and. Yeah, that's just there's something so organic about it and such a lack of plastics and plasticizes which I think we just inured to. I don't know. It's my happy place.
- [62:10]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, it wasn't a very saintly question. I just wondered.
- [62:13]
Brittany
Well, there is something so sacred about the smell of manuscripts.
- [62:17]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. Lovely. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Amy. It's been fantastic to explore the first quarter of the year and we'll return to this for the spring months very soon.
- [62:44]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
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- [63:15]
Amy Jeffs
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