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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]
Matt Lewis
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]
Matt Lewis
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]
Matt Lewis
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]
Matt Lewis
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe or find the link in the show Notes for this episode.
- [00:49]
Jacob Goldstein
This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? Business software is expensive, and when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing. Slow to use, hard to integrate. Odoo solves that because all Odoo software is connected on a single affordable platform. Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odoo has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odoo has over 60 apps available for any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge. Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at o d o o.com that's o d o o.com this.
- [01:34]
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- [02:07]
Matt Lewis
How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer?
- [02:10]
Jacob Goldstein
Too many to say here.
- [02:11]
Amy Jeffs
Multi vehicle discount, Safe driver discount, New vehicle discount, Storage discount? How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com autodiscounts restrictions apply.
- [02:25]
Matt Lewis
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 gobsmacking 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 that to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval, there's hardly a single day in the year when one saint or another isn't being remembered or celebrated somewhere in the world. Back in January, Amy Jeffs, author and of Saints A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic. Join me here on Go Medieval to tell us about St. Edward the Confessor and a few other splendid saints associated with the first wintery months of the year. Then, in April, to mark the coming of spring, Amy returned to talk with Eleanor about England's very own springtime patron saint, Saint George. So now summer is a coming in, and we thought, what better way to celebrate than invite Amy back to pick out for us a few of the more interesting summertime saints we'll be talking about Uncumber, the saint called upon by women seeking liberation from unwanted husbands. And also the legend of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, who are precursors to the stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. But first, if you've ever worn a medallion of St Christopher carrying the infant Christ and wondered about the story behind this iconic image, listen up.
- [04:27]
Narrator
There once lived a giant of a man named Scoundrel, a notorious tower of strength. Scoundrels driven by a thirst for power, seeking only to serve the greatest and most fearsome of kings. First, he sought to serve the King of Men, a mighty ruler whose name struck terror into all who heard it. Serve me well, giant, said the king. Serve me if you are to be true to your strength. Towering over him like a mountain, Scoundrel stood in the king's service. But he soon grew restless. Abandoning the king and seeking a higher ruler, he left the court and wandered into the wilderness in search of the devil. The Prince of Darkness, convinced that to serve the darkest of lords would grant him unmatched might. You seek power, said the Devil. Then join me, and the world shall cower at your feet. For a time, Scoundrel followed every command of the devil, obeyed his every whim. But soon even the Prince of Darkness grew distant and withdrawn. And Scoundrel began to feel a strange unease growing within him. One day, Scoundrel heard the voice of a humble monk. Why do you serve a master who flees from the light? Asked the monk. The true strength is in serving the Almighty. The monk spoke of a king far above all earthly rulers. The King of Heaven. Scoundrel, now curious, approached him. The King of Heaven does not demand.
- [06:31]
Amy Jeffs
Power, said the monk.
- [06:33]
Narrator
He offers salvation. Will you leave behind your pride, your strength, and serve him? And in that moment, Scoundrel was torn. To serve the Almighty required a different Kind of strength. The strength of the heart, not of the body. And so Scoundrel set forth in search of this true king. His journey led him through wild forests, across treacherous rivers and over craggy mountains. The land seemed to conspire against him, but his resolve was unshakable. At last he arrived at a raging river. And there, by the edge, he saw a small child, standing seemingly without fear, gazing at the rushing waters. Will you carry me across, mighty man? Asked the child. Scoundrel looked at the child, noting how small and fragile he seemed. But the giant's heart swelled with compassion. He knelt and said, I will carry you, child, across this stormy river. And so he lifted the child and stepped into the torrent. With each step, the waters grew fiercer. The river itself seemed to fight against him. The child's weight grew heavier, far heavier than any burdens can Scoundrel had ever borne. The waters surged, the storm raged. Yet still the giant pressed forward. And as he reached the other side, breathless and trembling from the ordeal, the child spoke, his voice now rich with divine power. You have carried the weight of the world upon your shoulders, and in doing so, you have carried me. Know this now. I am Christ, the King of Heaven. The realization struck Scoundrel like a thunderbolt. The child he had borne was none other than the Saviour himself. And as the child vanished from his sight, a great light filled the sky and the waters of the river calmed. Forever changed Scoundrel, now known as Christ Bearer or Christopher, knelt upon the shore, his heart ablaze with faith. For he had carried the weight of the Saviour, and in doing so, he had found the strength of true service, a strength that was not of the body but of the soul. Christopher had become the patron of travellers.
- [09:32]
Matt Lewis
Welcome back to Gone Medieval Amy, here to talk about summer. A saint. Just as the temperature is ramping up here in the uk, at least.
- [09:38]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah, it's wonderful to be sitting with the windows open, talking about these characters who were so entangled with things like the harvest and Sirius in the night sky.
- [09:49]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, you mentioned Sirius there, which is the star that we particularly associate with summer and with heat. So how does the season of summer sort of particularly lend itself to metaphors and stories in the medieval mind?
- [10:04]
Amy Jeffs
Summertime, if we take that to mean June, July, August, this covers harvest activities. You've got making hay in June, that's the conventional labour of the month. In July you're cutting the wheat and in August you're threshing, you're separating the wheat from the chaff and of course, all of these things had huge allegorical potential. Haymaker is also the kind of archetype of death with the scythe and the kind of felling of souls. The separating the wheat from the chaff is a biblical metaphor for the separating the souls of the blessed from the damned. These in the medieval imagination, on the calendar page you would have the labours of the months depicted alongside the zodiac symbol for that month. So here we've got Cancer for June, Leo for July and Virgo for August. Leo got this blazing lion, this real feeling of heat and power. This was also the month for what were known as the dies caniculares or the puppy days, which we translate as the dog days. So the star Sirius is above the horizon following Orion, and that's that time of really punishing heat, overseen by Sirius. And with Virgo, the basic age old symbol of fertility with her kind of sheaf of wheat, and she is both Astraea and the Virgin Mary, bringing in the grain, the means for making the year's bread and ale. So all of these stories operate within this context of the summertime heat and the harvest and the abundance, one hopes, from the fields overseen by the stars.
- [11:46]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, we're going to talk first about St. Christopher. So listeners will have just heard a story of St Christopher to lead them into our discussion about him. But I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit first about how you sort of first came across St. Christopher. There's an interesting story in the book about your first sort of encounter with St. Christopher.
- [12:05]
Amy Jeffs
Yes, this is years ago. I was visiting my then boyfriend's house in a little village called Prestbury outside Cheltenham. We decided to walk to Hales, which is beyond a village called Winchcombe. I'd heard that it had a parish church with wall paintings. And it was a really hot day, a thunderstorm, threateningly hot day. And I remember walking through these fields with our elderly border collie and the kind of pollen rising up. It was such an interesting way of getting to this church because we didn't see any roads and we dipped down into the valley and there was Hale's church in front of us. I just had this overwhelming sense that we had entered a foreign country, that we'd crossed some kind of threshold and the church has no tower. It doesn't look like the conventional English parish church. It's like a reliquary, a house shaped reliquary with a little thing for a bell. Not a tower, just a little frame made of stone. And we walked up to the church and it was open and just grasshoppers, just birdsong. Went inside and went in through the south doors. The first view I had was of the north wall. And your eyes are adjusting to the light and there was this colossal wall painting of a man. And his feet were at shoulder height, my shoulder height. And he towered ten foot above us and he was holding a child on his shoulder and he's wading through water and it felt like theater. Walking in and seeing this image of St. Christopher on the wall. And then we walked around and looked at the other wall paintings. I'd been studying medieval history and culture and things for a few years by then. Nowhere had made me feel as though landing in medieval England would be like going to a completely foreign country. That this was a world apart from what I knew. And seeing these funny little almost like manuscript marginalia on the walls, like strange little elephantine creatures and mermaid like creatures and then narrative scenes from saints lives and this colossal Christopher. I just felt like I could have stayed there for hours and hours. We didn't. We walked back and the rain clouds broke and the elderly border collie was really resentful. So it sowed the seed for this. This idea that there was something very enchanting about the stories and the characters in the medieval cult of saints.
- [14:29]
Matt Lewis
Interesting that even someone who studies medieval history can be kind of caught a little bit unawares by the environment of a church that feels slightly more genuinely medieval. Like you say, it almost feels like a different country. It's not the bare, cold, grey walls that we're used to seeing today.
- [14:45]
Amy Jeffs
There's something wonderful about going into a church that is more in touch with its post Reformation side, let's say. But the feeling was that it was like going in and thinking, this is a vis language I don't speak. There are hilarious examples of medieval people struggling to speak this language. Like, Anyway, there's a 15th century sequel to the Canterbury Tales. It is by an author called Beren. And the pilgrims go into Canterbury Cathedral to say their devotions. And the miller and the pardoner end up standing underneath a stained glass window, looking up at a stained glass window which survives. They describe it as being a man digging. So it's probably the 12th century window that shows Adam and digging the soil after the fall aligning with that bit from the Book of Genesis that says, by the sweat of your brow, you will till the earth. But the miller and the pardoner can't work out what the iconography is. And they're saying, I don't know what he's holding, maybe it's a kind of stick. I think we can go into these churches and see these amazing narrative scenes and these stained glass or these paintings and think, wow, everyone in medieval England would have understood this, perhaps. And Maybe stories like St. Catherine, St. Christopher, people did understand that there was a kind of folk interest that you didn't need to have a Latin education or be a monk or a nun to comprehend. Yeah, there's that feeling of not only this is a language I don't understand, but what kind of people understood this at the time? Who were they and what did it mean to them?
- [16:08]
Matt Lewis
And you also talk in the book a bit about with St Christopher, there is even some meaning in the etymology of his name. How do we arrive at the name Christopher?
- [16:16]
Amy Jeffs
I think his was one of the stories that first alerted me to the artificiality of some of these early legends, especially ones where now they are no longer in the official register of Catholic saints. They are legendary figures. And Christopher certainly falls into that camp. And his story was popularized in Jacobus de Varagene's golden legend in the 13th century. And it tells about how he was a giant called scoundrel, and it ends up with a martyrdom. So it falls into the category of saints killed as part of the Roman persecution of Christians. But what I wanted to focus on was the kind of bit before that it describes how he's a giant and his name is Reprobatus, like reprobate. I translate it as scoundrel. So he's this giant called scoundrel, which kind of alerts you straight away that he's a bit of a wrong. And this is substantiated by the fact that he is a mercenary soldier, maybe a bit like Goliath figure. You get wheeled out at the end of the battle to fight the hero, and you're a bit of a spectacle. And so he has decided that he wants to fight for the highest prince in the land. He fights for the Prince of Canaan, he fights for the devil, and then he wants to fight for Christ. And it's once he has borne the Christ child on his shoulder, collapsed on the other side of the river and said, gosh, that felt like the weight of the world that the Christ child says. It was the weight of the world. It was the weight I bore when I died for humanity's sins. And at that point, the Christ child confers on him the name Christopher, which is from the Greek Christophorus. So like Christ bearer in Latin, it could become Christo Ferro. And it's where we get, obviously, the name Christopher, and it's in the same mould as words like conifer, so bearer of cones, or Lucifer, bearer of light, which, whenever those words come up now you get thrown into the legend of St. Christopher, once you know it. But there's this kind of name shift and character shift. And I think the really lame way of putting it is that he becomes the Big Friendly Giant. He goes from being the stereotypical giant, which is the scary monster giant, and flips into being an inversion of the stereotype, and he's a force for good. And I think this is really interesting insight into just the whole medieval interest in giants and where they sit on the kind of sliding scale from human to monster, and also, I guess, where.
- [18:36]
Matt Lewis
They sit on the sliding scale of good to evil. Because we tend to think of giants being these monsters who are generally evil. And here we have a case of one who is sort of reformed and becomes a more positive figure to the point where he's able to carry Christ across the river. So all of a sudden, he's using his power for benevolent reasons.
- [18:54]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah, it's really heartwarming. And I think there's a kind of basic aesthetic response we have to that, like we have with the bfg, where we just love the idea of a friendly giant. We think that's great. And you walk into a church and you see him on the wall. It's uplifting, it's a joyful image, I think. There are over 130 surviving wall paintings of Christopher in medieval churches in England and Wales. And some of them are accompanied with an inscription that says, if you look on my face, you will not today die an evil death. And you think, that sounds like, oh, my goodness. You look at a picture of Christopher, you're not going to die that day. Actually, you think about it a bit more deeply. He's saying, you're not going to die an evil death, which means you won't die that day without having first said confession, which was the next best thing for a medieval Christian.
- [19:44]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, if you've got to go, at least he's promising you you'll go the right way.
- [19:48]
Amy Jeffs
Yes, exactly. It touches on that part that saints play in sacraments like baptism. This world of pre Reformation Christianity, where the theological arguments that were happening around the cult of saints are also concerning things like baptism and whether or not you will go to hell if you haven't been baptized. What happens to infants who die before they are able to have received baptism? So, yeah, you can see the way it's all mixed up together, all those ideas. And how when, if one of those branches of theological thought starts being challenged by reformers, it's going to bring in the cult of saints or the question of baptism as well. They're all enmeshed.
- [20:30]
Matt Lewis
How then does Christopher sort of cement himself in the medieval church as a protector of travelers? You know, I've still got a St. Christopher's medal that my godmother got me for my christening. It's still today. You know, there are those elements of, you know, this is someone who'll protect you on your journey through life, but travellers more widely as well. How does he become so closely associated with travellers and journeys?
- [20:52]
Amy Jeffs
I guess there is very strong tied to the fact his story is about that. And at a kind of nuts and bolts level, having a giant walking beside you when you're off on a dangerous journey, which any kind of journey's got its dangers, especially if you're going out of cities and off across open country or even traveling abroad for pilgrimage, having Christopher walking beside you. And I think a lot of these house saints, what they become patrons of or how they are venerated is to do with what their specific power would help you with. So I think Catherine, as a kind of arguer and a rhetorician, you want her there at the heavenly tribunal, arguing for your soul's deliverance. When I was digitizing the pilgrim souvenirs and medieval badges at the British Museum, there was one badge that was sold at the shrine of Thomas Becket that showed Thomas Becket riding on the back of a peacock. The whole thing is about the size of a Kinder Surprise plastic toy. And it's got a little cylinder at the base to enable you to twist it onto the top of your pilgrimage staff. It's a crucial aspect of your pilgrimage costume. And the peacock has a hook on its chest, probably to suspend a Canterbury bell, one of the little miniature tin bells that was sold at the shrine of Thomas. It says Thomas around the edge. And you would walk home from your pilgrimage with the bell ringing on your staff, jingling happily. With Thomas standing on the back of the peacock. He's got his hand raised in blessing, so he's blessing the road ahead of you. The peacock looking at the road with its great big squawking face. So that's important. Like cockerels and peacocks are squawking animals. They often on the church towers or on protectors and the eyes of the peacock facing the road. And so this kind of alerted me to these birds, like cockerels and peacocks being protective creatures that you might have on your staff, because there are other cockerel staff mounts that survive as something to protect you on the road. But then I came across another badge in the British Museum's collection that showed St. Christopher, unmistakably St. Christopher. It was a little open work badge, smaller than a credit card, a shield shape with St Christopher standing inside the shield with the Christ child on his shoulder. And St. Christopher is holding a staff. And on top of the staff, instead of the sprouting leaves and flowers that you'd expect from his legend, there's a little shape of a cockerel or a peacock. And so it's as though he is wearing on his own staff, this symbol of protection that medieval travelers might have worn on their staffs. It's a kind of like a bird and a bird roast. It's a real iconographic mashup. So there was this arsenal of imagery and sounds which included the jingling bells, squawking birds, the blessing hand of a saint and the eyes of a saint, the eyes on the peacock's tail, and characters like St Christopher who would arm you for a journey. I just love it. And it's a kind of like a mix and match. They're not necessarily practically helpful. So I can imagine they would have been so uplifting. They would have so put you in the right mindset for a potentially dangerous journey and why you were doing it and the joys behind it.
- [23:57]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. I was going to say it's almost interesting that people are feeling the need to kind of double up and triple up Protection, you know, Thomas isn't enough. I need a peacock as well.
- [24:04]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah.
- [24:05]
Matt Lewis
And if we're going to have St. Christopher, let's get him a peacock on his staff. So there's layers of protection built into those things. Does that speak to the way medieval people thought about traveling, that they feel they need all of this protection to make their journeys safely?
- [24:21]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah. And I guess it's hard to speak to what individuals felt, but I think when you read 14th century, 13th century documents and texts and stories, you get this idea of the kind of allegorical mindset of medieval people. And I think this is something that we can infer also resided in the minds of people who weren't writing texts and didn't own books, the kinds of people whose lives aren't recorded, that any journey was also an allegory for life and especially a pilgrimage. And so the symbolisms that you invoke for a journey like a pilgrimage are like a microcosm or a kind of expression of your intention for life. Overall, it goes beyond worrying about meeting bandits on the road.
- [25:14]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. How did the church kind of rationalize, maybe even tolerate the use of these kind of protective amulets? It doesn't feel very medieval Christian church to have talismans relating to legendary saints protecting people on the road.
- [25:31]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah. By the later period, there is a real skepticism. It's in Erasmus Desiderius, he talks about a pilgrim arriving. So just like clanking because he's so covered in lead tokens. And in Low Countries art from the period, you might see an altarpiece or a panel painting about a particular saint. You might have an image of a pilgrim appearing at their shrine, who's receiving healing at the shrine, who's got 20 pilgrim souvenirs on their hat. And it's a kind of expression by the patrons of the artwork that you may have gone to all of these shrines, you may have collected all these badges, but our saint is the one that's actually going to heal you. There's an emptiness in the just going around collecting your souvenirs and going around saying devotions everywhere. Not every saint is created equal. Not every legend is worth the investment of your devotion.
- [26:23]
Matt Lewis
And I guess for the church, there is an element of if people are carrying these badges, you know, they're carrying their faith with them, so there is a connection to the church. Does that contribute to the church tolerating these things, that they're almost an expression of faith, even if they're a little bit frowned on?
- [26:40]
Amy Jeffs
I think there was a kind of threshold line. And so overall, the cult of saints was perceived as a good thing overall for most of the Middle Ages, and at the same time for the whole Middle Ages from the get go. It goes right back to the famous letter from Gregory the Great to the Bishop of Marseille saying, don't destroy all the images in the churches showing the lives of saints, because this is how the illiterate read. And there was a sense that through images and souvenirs, when you open the drawers of the British Museum or look at the database of all of those pictures that were on these amazing souvenirs or in the Museum of London on the Musee du Cluny, these things dredged up from the Thames or from the Seine, you see the visual language of the people that owned them, and you get a sense this was a way that stories were communicated. It must have been a valuable tool for disseminating Christian ideas, for keeping kind of devotion alive. And so you can imagine why, yes, the church would want that, but then they wouldn't necessarily want want them to be using the badges for superstitious purposes. It's like there was an emphasis in the cult of Thomas Becket. This is Thomas Becket's death in 1170 sort of precipitated the market for Pilgrim souvenirs. The first thing they have is these ampullae little flasks of Becket's liquid, as it was called. The kind of diluted.
- [28:03]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. Sounds gross.
- [28:04]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah. And these flasks came to bear images of his martyrdom and they were intrinsically holy because they contained that water which was supposedly contained traces of his blood and brains, I should add. But then it's like the flask gets taken away, just the images remain. So you might have an image of Thomas Beckett's martyrdom on an ampulla later. You just have a badge showing his martyrdom.
- [28:24]
Matt Lewis
And I guess if we're being slightly cynical, they're good money making ruse as.
- [28:42]
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- [29:28]
Amy Jeffs
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Amy Jeffs
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- [30:25]
Matt Lewis
I guess we should move on. We've got other saints we need to talk about. There's just one fascinating talking about Christopher and his connection to all sorts of things in the medieval world. But the next one we wanted to cover was Saint Ncumba, who is not a saint that I knew at all. Probably not many people will be familiar with Saint Ncumba. At least it's not as familiar as Saint Christopher. Could you tell us a little bit about Saint Ncumba and why Saint Ncumba is important in the summer?
- [30:49]
Amy Jeffs
Yes. So I should have said that Christopher's feast day falls on 25th July. St Uncumber is on 20th July. There's nothing in her legend that specifically ties her to the summer, but I think it's a case of imagining celebrating her feast with that kind of weather around you. That's something I found interesting about writing this book. But her legend post dates 1200 in my book. I don't take any other story from the post 1200 period because of the papacy really getting its teeth into the canonization process from that point on and the whole thing becoming a lot more legal, more like a legal process, but Uncombass emerges as a story set way back in the mists of time. There's not a clear kind of start date or date for her life. And she's the daughter of the King of Portugal and he wants her to get married. And he's lined up all these suitors for her, but she won't accept any of them. And all she wants to do is live a life of chastity and be a Christian. And he gets so frustrated that he throws her into a dungeon and she prays to be made hideous so that none of her suitors will want to marry her. And the next morning she wakes up and she's grown a long flowing beard. And her father is enraged that he has her crucified. Which is where we come to the iconography, the common iconography of Saint Oncumba, which is of a bearded figure wearing a crown, but with a female costume. So dress often by the later period of a tightly laced bodice. She was known by various names. One of her names was Wilga Fortis. That was her Latin name. It's thought that might come from Virgo fortis, like strong woman or strong virgin. She was in English, Middle English, known as Uncumber. This is possibly to do with the fact she was believed to unencumber women of unwanted husbands. And Thomas More writes about how women would leave a peck of oats at her image or at Least one of the characters in his dialogues talks about this to get rid of unwanted husbands. And the interlocutor in the dialogue says, well, why a peck of oats? Is that for the horses of the unwanted husband so that they can ride away? In French, she was called debara, like get rid of. In German, kummenis a caring, like sich kummen is to care for this idea of somebody who looked after women, which is a really fascinating insight. And the theory is that her cult emerged from depictions of the holy face of Lucca, which was another shrine in Italy, northern Italy. And it was a crucifix with Jesus on it. Unequivocally, he's wearing robes of victory. And this was unusual iconography for Northwest Europe. Northwestern Europeans would have been more familiar with Christ in a loincloth, suffering. And so it's thought that maybe depictions of the crucifix from this Italian site made their way into northwestern Europe and were misinterpreted as a depiction of a woman. So maybe it was a woman being crucified and that she had a big beard. One of the things I was trying to argue or explore in my book was that if we get excited about folklore and fairy tale and myth, then we should also get excited about saints legends, because so many of them are not some kind of dry, authoritarian narrative, but actually pull on the same threads as those other genres. And there's another name for uncumble was solicitor. And it's in that form that she makes her way into the first edition of the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. And it's about this amazing story of how a musician went to her shrine, and he was on the brink of destitution, and he plays the fiddle for her, and she kicks off one of her golden shoes into his hand, and he runs out of the church, and he's so excited, everyone thinks he's stolen it. So he's dragged back into the church and made to do the same thing again. And as he's playing, she kicks off the other golden shoe into his hand. This image of St. Anconberg kicks the other golden shoe into his hand in front of all the crowds, and they realize that he has indeed been blessed by the saint. She's magic.
- [34:53]
Matt Lewis
It's really interesting iconography that you don't kind of see anywhere else in medieval Christianity to have, you know, a woman with a beard. Women are often presented as virgins, as women who are protecting women in childbearing and things like that. It's quite unusual to have a bearded lady being crucified, who is all about ridding people of their husbands. What does it say about the position of female saints in Christianity?
- [35:19]
Amy Jeffs
I think it's tempting when you come to a subject like this, to hold on to those instant ways in which they resonate with themes we discuss a lot today, gender and sexuality, for instance. And that isn't necessarily that wrong. As you read into these sources, sometimes you find that actually there was a completely different viewpoint. And then it's really fascinating. There are quite a few female saints who take on masculine characteristics, so they might enter a monastery and in the legends their pronouns will change. You've got this kind of transition to manhood taking place. It doesn't happen with stories of men like male holy figures dressing up as women and becoming more holy. There's sort of a joke version of it. It's in the actual life of St. Jerome. There's a fantastic illustration of it in the Belle Heure commissioned by Jean Duc de Berry, who did the famous Tres Richard that we know. Like its aesthetic was used for Sleeping Beauty. Like you just recognize it straight away in the Belle Oeuur. It shows Jerome, he's sleeping in his cell and a naughty monk in his community that doesn't like him sneaks in and swaps his habit, which is lying at the end of his bed, for the blue dress of a noble lady, and then sneaks out again. And Jerome wakes up for matins all bleary eyed and just gets into this really lovely tight fitting, slash sleeved blue dress with the low cut sort of neckline. And Jean Duc de Berry was a real hedonist. And I think there's a great deal of pleasure must have been derived from seeing St. Jerome with his sort of patriarchal little beard and looking very Abrahamic in this blue dress. And he goes wandering into matins and you see all the monks in the choir stalls, kind of jaws dropping, looking at the singing out. Can't believe what Jerome's wearing. And it says in the story that he's so ashamed that he flees and never returns. So this is a moment of immense shame in the life of St. Jerome because he's a man that's ended up dressing in women's clothes. But when female saints take on masculine attributes, that is a transition to greater holiness. It's a kind of a supermanly moment. And the very word that people would use in the Middle Ages to describe the strength and power of saints was virtus, a physical and psychological force that has the word vir in it, man in Latin. And where we get the word virtue. And so I think that you could almost imagine that Uncumber has undergone this transition, and she's therefore a masculine protector for women from other men who are not virtuous.
- [37:55]
Matt Lewis
Is there an element there of the Church? Kind of. Because the Church is developing, particularly around 1200, is developing this idea that all women are the cause of all sin, you know, all daughters of Eve. Is there an element of female saints kind of shedding their womanhood in a way that they're shedding that original sin and coming back to being more holy as men are? Which is not what I think at all. Before anyone shouts at me, it's a.
- [38:20]
Amy Jeffs
Shedding of the stereotypically feminine responsibilities of household and childbearing. And it's been argued that it was perceived as almost more impressive for a woman to dress as a man and go and live in the desert in a Hermitage for 35 years and become people's spiritual guide because she was a woman. They're almost like more impressive than male hermits that begin the story as men by doing this. I think it's similar to what we were talking about with the giant St. Christopher, the kind of erasmitaz of having inverted a stereotype. And there's just a basic narrative aesthetic appeal about that, and it's memorable and it's surprising.
- [38:59]
Matt Lewis
And you mentioned there's the leaving a pile of oats to venerate Saint Encumba. Do we get to the bottom of what that is about? Why do you leave oats for St and Cumber?
- [39:09]
Amy Jeffs
We don't get to the bottom of it, but just chucking out of the air a possibility. Maybe it's to do with what women might have been able to access, especially if they were poor and suffering in abusive relationships. It's that, what can I give you, poor as I am? Maybe it's something to do with that and women being associated with things like brewing and making bread and basic kind of food production.
- [39:32]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, fantastic. And I guess if your wife comes home with a pilgrim's badge or something like that of a crucified woman with a beard, she's trying to tell you something. And the final sort of. I say saint, but group that we wanted to talk about a little bit is the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. Can you tell us a little bit about their story and how it becomes entwined with Christianity?
- [39:54]
Amy Jeffs
This is an example, I think, of a story that everyone knew that vanished with the Reformation, and they didn't just know it on its own terms, but it had got in to idiom and other ideas. So the basic story is that they are among the sort of early martyrs persecuted by the Romans. In this case, the Emperor Decius is the kind of baddie in their story. And they are seven young men who live in Ephesus in Greece, and they are attendants in the court of the Emperor Decius, servants. And he announces that everyone has to renounce Christianity and worship the Roman gods or else. And they defy him. And he says, look, I'm going to go away for a few days. When I come back, I expect you to have changed your minds. And they, while he's away, decide among themselves that they're going to sell all their worldly goods, they're going to go to the mountains, they're going to find a cave, and they're just going to hide, but they're not going to renounce their faith. So off they go. And the Emperor Decius comes back and they're gone. And he knows that they've defied him, and so he wants to find them. And they are living in the caves. And every now and again, one of them will dress in rags and go into the sea, pretending to be a beggar, and he buys some bread. But then the Emperor Decius has a dream, and he finds out through this dream where the young men are. And he sends his men up to the cave, and he has the cave door blocked up in the night, and the young men who are sleeping inside, blocked in. They're none the wiser and covert. Christians have witnessed this. They've followed the officials, they've watched the cave door being blocked up. And so they write it down on a little scrap of parchment and fold it up and put it between the stones. Next thing we know in the story, one of the seven young men wakes up. He's really hungry, and so he thinks, I'm going to go into Ephesus and get some bread. And the others say, can you get a better bread than you did last time? Else it was rubbish, because I got waking up to. And so he goes down into the city, and he just notices a couple of odd things. As he leaves the cave, he notices a big pile of stones. And he notices that a thorn tree that was growing there has been chopped down. But there's a really big stump where this little thorn tree was. And he's, oh, that's odd. And he gets to the city gates and he starts wondering if there's been some kind of trick, because everywhere over the gates and around the city, he can see a symbol of a Cross, which is, of course, the Christian symbol. And he's thinking, this doesn't make sense. Decius is dedicating this stuff. And he goes into the city, he goes to buy some bread, and he uses his coins. And the baker is immediately suspicious because these are solid gold coins. And he says, where is the treasure hoard that you've got this from? Come on, show me. Come on. I won't tell anyone. He's no, I don't know what you're talking about. This is just my money. He gets dragged by the baker and his apprentice to the officials of the town of Ephesus, who bring a huge crowd of people. He can't see anyone he knows in the crowd. His family's not there. Anyway. It comes out that they say these coins haven't been in production for many decades, maybe centuries. And he says, but I just got them just from home. And he says, look, they've got the Emperor Decius face on them. Why don't we talk to him? He's been dead for ages. He takes them back to the cave. I have to just show you my six friends that are up in the cave in the mountain. And they go there and they find the parchment and they read the story that the Christians left. And basically, these young men have been in a kind of enchanted sleep for more than a century inside the cave. And a shepherd has come along and decided to use the stones that the cave had been blocked up with to build himself a body. And so that he's opened up the cave, not realizing what he was doing. And that is why the young man woke up and he was so hungry to go in and get the bread. And there's then a lovely kind of denouement where I think the Byzantine Emperor comes and sees the miracle. He wants to see the young men in the cave and witness this miracle. At that moment, all the young men start to shine like angels and vaporize and die. And then everyone goes, oh, wow. And then they die. But that is the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus.
- [44:09]
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- [45:18]
Matt Lewis
While you're talking, it's striking how almost fairy tale that is. You can see bits of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White kind of wrapped up in this story. Are there any kind of connections to this kind of love of fairy tales in the human psyche that we're connecting those to saints as well?
- [45:33]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah, I think it's just fascinating and unknowable, but it is, I think, testament to the interconnectedness of stories. And I think that there was a kind of a smear campaign in the Protestant Reformation that equated any superstition, anything that the medieval church had been doing called it paganism and papacy became like synonyms. And I think that has lived on to an extent. But now we consider paganism to be quite interesting. We don't have that Reformation horror of pre Christian religions and so therefore anything interesting that medieval Christianity does, we automatically think, oh, it must be a relic or a fossil from an earlier pre Christian culture. We find ourselves maybe rejecting the history of Christianity because we think, oh, that's just boring. And anything interesting it's doing. I think there is this tendency sometimes, what somebody describes like a queasy post Christian culture, that to find the interesting stuff you have to get the Christianity out of the way. These stories emerge in the first few centuries of Christianity and presumably they merge in dialogue with non Christian narratives, folk narratives, folklore, that kind of thing, and that they can be read together and with that kind of critical distance. Some saints lives like there's Saint Hippolytus is killed by being dragged along by wild horses. That seems to be clearly linked to the Greek myth as Hippolytus. But it's a fascinating melting pot is all I can say.
- [47:05]
Matt Lewis
How is that kind of early, really early Christian story then preserved and kind of spread throughout medieval Europe over the centuries that follow?
- [47:15]
Amy Jeffs
It's in the early martyrologies and it's in Jacobus de Barodeney's golden legend, which I've mentioned before. That was a Latin text, but translated into many different vernaculars and into very engaging verse lives and these kinds of things. That might have been the word legend is from the Latin legenda. We get it from the cult of saints because it means to be read out on the saints feast day. And so you might celebrate seven sleepers by almost sitting down with your family. If you had any kind of means, maybe having it read out to you or going to a performance or seeing it in a play in your town, you might have encountered the story in that way. We still have weather saints. We talk about St. Swithin's Day. And if it rains on St. Swithin's Day, there'll be rain every day for four weeks afterwards, or 40 days. The seven sleepers were also weather saints. So Siebenschlieffertage in Germany is a day on which if you see rain, you will see rain thereafter for four weeks. I had a really exciting moment when I was reading to. I've got some family in Austria. And so they had sent some children's books in German, including a sort of little catalogue of animals. And it was while I was writing this book, I was reading this picture book full of different kinds of animals. And the names of the animals are given in German. And I was reading them out, and there was a picture of a family of dormice snuggled up. And underneath it said, siebenschleife, seven sleepers for dormice. And I was like, what? This is fascinating. And did some reading and discovered that actually in lots of dialects of English, dormice were called seven sleepers. And in the English context, where I've read about this often, the reasons given that they sleep for seven months of the year. But I thought actually in German context, the theory's put forward that it was good luck to find a family of dormice sleeping under your eaves, that they were like house guides to spirits, like friendly spirits of your house, that they represented like a blessing. From the seven sleepers of Ephesus, we find this idea of seven sleepers to do with good or bad luck or even prognostication, like weather saints in the verse Life of Edward the Confessor. And there's a moment when Edward the Confessor is at a feast and he has a vision that tells him something's bad's gonna happen. And you see the illustration. He's looking over his shoulder imagining. And this is kind of almost a thought bubble with his vision taking place. And he sees the seven sleepers rolling, I think, from their right sides to their left in his vision. And he knows, therefore, that bad luck is coming, bad things are coming for his kingdom.
- [49:48]
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- [49:48]
Matt Lewis
It's fascinating that all three of these saints kind of talk to the connection between old folklore, old folk stories, old folk memories, and how they become sort of wrapped up with Christianity. You know, you've got giants who can turn out to be good guys. You've got bearded women. You leave them oats, they'll get rid of your husband. We've got the seven sleepers. There is something in the way that Christianity is tolerating those connections to folk stories that we might not associate with the medieval Catholic Church being quite strict and trying to drive those almost pagan things away.
- [50:21]
Amy Jeffs
Yeah. And I think it's just so exciting to think we can think about the Middle Ages and the broader populations of medieval Christendom as being people whose lives were often brutally short, who would have. Although they spent half their time at church because of the saintly calendar, we imagine them having to work long hours. I'm not sure how true that always is, but this kind of backbreaking labor, and yet you can be three years old and enjoy a story. You can be 90 years old. There was still a delight and appetite for good story this whole time and that the same things crop up over and over again. Like you said, the giants, the enchanted sleep, the woman turned powerful kind of protector of other women. That appetite has never faded.
- [51:06]
Matt Lewis
I mean, that's a great way to sell the book, isn't it? There are endless brilliant stories to be found in there. Well, thank you so much for joining us again. Hopefully we can tempt you to come back when the leaves begin to turn and the mist begins to rise and we can talk a little bit about autumn Saints.
- [51:19]
Amy Jeffs
Yes, I'd love that. Thank you, Matt.
- [51:21]
Matt Lewis
Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us, Amy. It's been brilliant. I hope you'll look forward to Amy coming back in the autumn for some more saints associated with that season of mist and mellowness. And if you haven't heard them already, please do go back and listen to our previous episodes with Amy on Edward the Confessor and New year saints and St. George springtime saints. There are new installments of God Medieval every Tuesday and Friday. So please come back and join Elena and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free. Head to historyhit.com subscribe go on, you can do it now. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.
- [52:36]
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Matt Lewis
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