Christian Life in Twelfth-Century Scandinavia: a Comparative Approach

Christian Life in Twelfth-Century Scandinavia: A Comparative Approach

Erik Niblaeus

1. Introduction

In 1152 Pope Eugenius III sent his legate Nicholas Breakspear, cardinal bishop of Albano, on a two-and-a- half-year tour of Scandinavia. Nicholas, who was to become pope himself shortly after his return to Rome, as Adrian IV (1154–9), went, according to his biographer, to partes Noruegerie to «preach the word of life in that province and apply himself to the winning of souls for the Almighty God», and thus «diligently instructed that barbarous and rude people in the Christian law and en- lightened them with Church teachings»1. The missionary language recurs elsewhere in a reference to the next papal legate to visit Scandinavia, Stephen of Orvieto, a decade later: he was stranded in Britain, on his way to «convert or correct» Noruuagæ gentis barbaria. For the ﬁrst of these writers (writing in Rome), Norway was far away2. For

1 Boso, Vita Adriani IV: Processu vero modici temporis, cognita ipsius honestate ac prudentia, de latere suo eum ad partes Noruegerie legatum se- dis apostolice [Eugenius] destinavit, quatinus verbum vite in ipsa provincia predicaret et ad faciendum omnipotenti Deo animarum lucrum studeret. Ipse vero tamquam minister Christi et ﬁdelis ac prudens dispensator misteriorum Dei, gentem illam barbaram et rudem in lege christiana diligenter instruxit et ecclesiasticis eruditionibus informavit; the text is edited and translated into English in Adrian IV The English Pope (1154-1159): Studies and Texts, eds. by B. Bolton and A. Duggan, Ashgate, Aldershot 2003, pp. 214-33; this pas- sage is from pp. 214-5. See also the sensible overview by A. Bergquist in the same volume: The Papal Legate: Nicholas Breakspear’s Scandinavian Mission, pp. 41-8. 2 It is possible that Boso had followed the subject-to-be of his writings to Scandinavia in 1152-4; the oft-repeated tradition that he was Nicholas’s nephew has however been discounted: A. Duggan, Servus servorum Dei, in

«Storica», n. 40 Adrian IV The English Pope, p. 182. 34 Filo rosso the second (writing in Durham) it was closer3. They both, however, seem strangely off the mark: Norway, by this stage, had been ruled over by Christian kings for over a century and a half; scribes were already copying national histories in Latin and the vernacular; there were communities of nuns, monks, and canons; the cult of the royal saint, Olav Haraldsson, had been flourishing since soon after his death in 1030, and his shrine in Nidaros (modern-day Trondheim) was a popular site of pilgrimage; in rural areas, churches were being built in stone or delicate- ly carved wood, at great speed and in great numbers; as elsewhere in Europe, internal strife was couched in terms of a struggle between secularists and church-reformers. In fact, although both Cardinal Nicholas and Cardinal Stephen probably saw fit to catechise while they were at it, they were not primarily in Scandinavia to preach: they were there on a delicate diplomatic mission to reorganise the Scandinavian church. In 1153, Nicholas conferred the pallium on the first Norwegian archbishop; in 1164, in the wake of Stephen’s visit, the first archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden was consecrated in the cathedral of Sens, in the company of two illustrious exiles: Pope Alexander III and Eskil of Lund, the second Scandinavian archbishop – until 1103/4, metropolitan authority in Scandinavia had rested in Saxony, with the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen. The language used in the two texts cited must nevertheless not be discounted; for it reveals something of the attitude in the old lands of Latin Christianity to its new lands, to the lands that expansionist popes and Cistercians declared – not without a little pride to have established themselves there – to be in extremis finibus mundi. The process of Christianisation has concerned Scan- dinavian historians for as long as there have been Scan-

3 Reginald of Durham, writing in the 1160s and 70s: Reginaldi monachi Dunelmensis libellus de admirandis Beati Cuthberti virtutibus, ed. by J. Rain, J.B. Nichols and son, London 1835, pp. 108-9 (Publications of the Surtees Society, 1); Reginald in fact seems to have been rather well-acquainted with Norwegian conditions, as he revealed elsewhere in the work: ibid., pp. 248- 54 and A. Conti, S. Crumplin, H. Antonsson, A Norwegian in Durham: An Anatomy of a Miracle in Reginald of Durham’s Libellus de admirandis Beati Cuthberti, in West over Sea: Studies in Scandinavian Sea-Borne Expansion and Settlement Before 1300, eds. by B. Ballin Smith, S. Taylor and G. Wil- liams, Brill, Leiden 2007, pp. 196-226 (The Northern World, 31). Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 35 dinavian historians, and their interest shows no signs of abating4. The last couple of decades have seen significant development in the discipline, however. A symposium in Sweden in 1985, with proceedings published in English, set the tone for much of what was to follow: interdisci- plinary ideals, collaboration, skepticism towards written sources5. A culmination of sorts occurred in the 1990s, with two large-scale collaborative projects in Norway and Sweden6. These and similar investigations, although far from presenting a simple, unified picture, have often pointed in the same general direction. First, the chronology of the process has been expanded: from the first Frank- ish missions in the ninth century, well into the twelfth century, when the archiepiscopal organisation was com- pleted. Second, the links between Christianisation and the consolidation of royal power in the three Scandinavian kingdoms have been greatly emphasised; thus allowing political historians to, in a sense, universalise the traditional state-formation narratives of national historiographies by introducing a religious element. Third, scholars have pointed out the apparent disparity between written and material sources, often with a certain penchant for the latter. A prominent example: Adam of Bremen, a German chronicler writing in the 1070s, described in some detail a great pagan temple in Old Uppsala, north of present-day Stockholm7. By contrast, the same region saw vast numbers of rune stones, Christian commemorative monu-

4 Beginning in 1122×32 with A. Þorgilsson, in his Íslendingabók, ed. by J. Benediktsson, Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, Reykjavík 1968 (Íslenzk fornrit 1.1); The Book of the Icelanders (Íslendingabók) by Ari Thorgilsson, ed. and transl. by H. Hermansson, Cornell University Library, Ithaca (N.Y.) 1930 (Islandica, 20). 5 The Christianization of Scandinavia: Report of a Symposium Held at Kungälv, Sweden, 4–9 August 1985, eds. by B. Sawyer, P.H. Sawyer and I. Wood, Viktoria bokförlag, Alingsås 1987. 6 For a summary overview, see S. Brink, New Perspectives on the Chris- tianization of Scandinavia and the Organization of the Early Church, in Scandinavia and Europe 800–1350: Contact, Conflict and Coexistence, ed. by J. Adams and K. Holman, Brepols, Turnhout 2004, pp. 163-75 (Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 4). 7 Magistri Adam Bremensis Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, ed. by B. Schmeidler, MGH scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum, 3rd ed., Hahn, Hannover and Leipzig 1917, IV, pp. 26-8, pp. 257- 61; History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen (trans. F.J. Tschan), Co- lumbia U.P., New York 2002, pp. 207-9. 36 Filo rosso ments, raised at the very time when Adam claimed the Uppsala temple was still going strong. Recent scholarship has tended to respond to this perplexing situation by accusing Adam of being unreliable, even of fabrication, and by minimising the strength of late-eleventh-century paganism and stressing the overwhelmingly Christian na- ture of the landscape8. Similarly, there’s been an increased emphasis on English, or even Russian, missions and influence – elusive in written sources – and a tendency to downplay the German contribution – carefully chroni- cled by Adam of Bremen. In Sweden, this flourishing in Christianisation studies coincided with the accession to the European Union in 1995, and the scholarly rhetoric came to reflect this, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes no doubt deliberately. «Europeanisation» became the buzzword du jour, and publications were given titles such as When Sweden Became European9. The most successful exploration of the Europeanisation topos in the 1990s, taking it well beyond the clichés of contemporary politics, was however by a British historian, Robert Bartlett, in his The Making of Europe, subtitled Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350. English-language scholars have traditionally put great emphasis on the central Middle Ages, and the twelfth century in particular, as a period of in- tensified development of lasting institutions, ideologies, and mentalities (their titles sometimes seem to compete in bombast: the period saw the Creation of This, the Birth of That). Bartlett, however, expanded the usual focus on Western Europe, and France and England in particular, and described a process of transformation at its most intense at the frontiers of Latin Christendom, an often violent imposition (successfully likened to modern colo- nialism) of strong but modifiable «legal and institutional blueprints or models», which resulted in considerable

8 Uppsala och Adam av Bremen, ed. by A. Hultgård, Nya Doxa, Nora 1997 (Religionshistoriska forskningsrapporter från Uppsala, 11); H. Janson, Templum nobilissimum: Adam av Bremen, Uppsalatemplet och konﬂik- tlinjerna i Europa kring år 1075, Gothenburg University, Historiska Insti- tutionen, Gothenburg 1998 (Avhandlingar från Historiska institutionen i Göteborg, 21). 9 C.F. Hallencreutz, När Sverige blev europeiskt: Till frågan om Sver- iges kristnande, Natur och Kultur, Stockholm 1993. Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 37 cultural homogeneity: Europe as a concept rather than a geographical entity10. By introducing problems traditionally treated only in national historiographies into a large context and time period, he managed to convey the dyna- mism of subjects as infected the as German settlement of Prussia, productively, without causing offence. Bartlett’s book has been enthusiastically received, and a number of publications and collaborative projects have since, it seems fair to say, followed its lead. In East Central Eu- rope, where questions of European identity, of East and West, of German expansionism, are still highly problematic, but also more alive and more relevant than in Scandi- navia, comparative analyses of Bartlett’s kind have a spe- cial interest, and the idea of medieval Europeanisation has been debated with particular vigour in recent years11. In British and American scholarship, the Christiani- sation of Scandinavia has been a recurring concern, and it has been treated, sometimes well, sometimes glibly, in any number of books with the word «viking» in the title. This is also the problem: when there are no more vikings, that is, from around the second half of the eleventh century, Scandinavian history of any kind seems to lose much of its popular appeal – less romantic perhaps, less directly related to the British Isles. Much of the historiography of the later stages of Christianisation, of the introduction of monasticism and canon law, of the building of the ﬁrst stone churches and cathedrals – all of which occurred in the post-viking period – remains therefore inaccessible to those without a Scandinavian language. Recent years have however seen some inter- nationalisation of Scandinavian medievalism, and the Centre for Medieval Studies in Bergen in particular has become associated with comparative research on the re- lation of the eastern and northern European peripheries

10 R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cul- tural Change 950–1350, Allen Lan, London 1993. 11 See in particular P. Górecki, Medieval «East Colonization» in Post- War North American and British Historiography, in Historiographical Ap- proaches to Medieval Colonization of East Central Europe: A Comparative Analysis Against the Background of Other European Inter-Ethnic Coloni- zation Processes in the Middle Ages, ed. by J.M. Piskorski, Columbia U.P., New York 2002, pp. 53-61 (East European Monographs, 611), and other articles in the same volume. 38 Filo rosso to the western centre, responding to the challenges set by Bartlett both with enthusiasm and reservations12. A series of publications focussing on contact and change around the Baltic Sea should also be mentioned13. Bartlett has likened the «models and blueprints» that spread from Western Europe in the central Middle Ages to the alphabet: a strong and reproducible system, trans- parent in a sense, but capable of accommodating the most diverse languages and sonorities14. Here, to continue his extended metaphor, I wish to look at how a comparative approach can inform the study of some of the actual pho- nemes, the manifestations of Christianity as it was prac- tised in twelfth-century Scandinavia. My comparisons will be across space, rather than time: certainly one could look for comparisons with societies in the later stage of Christianisation in earlier periods, such as seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England or ninth-century Saxony15. There is, however, a risk of getting stuck in a restrictive teleological view here, one of «Christianity-formation», assuming a set of criteria immanent in the developing religion. Furthermore, I have a particular interest in ques-

12 See The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Chris- tendom (c. 1000–1300), ed. by L.B. Mortensen, Museum Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen 2006, in particular P. Geary’s concluding Reflections on Histo- riography and the Holy: Center and Periphery, pp. 323-9; Franks, North- men, and Slavs: Identities and State Formation in Early Medieval Europe, eds. by I.H. Garipzanov, P.J. Geary, and P. Urbanczyk, Brepols, Turnhout 2008 (Cursor mundi, 5); and highly relevant in this context Christianiza- tion and the Rise of the Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’ c. 900-1200, ed. by N. Berend, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 2007, where accounts of the Christianisations of the regions in question are conveniently juxtaposed. 13 For example Culture Clash or Compromise, ed. by N. Blomkvist, Gotland Centre for Baltic Studies, Visby 1998 (Acta Visbyensia, 9); Euro- peans or Not? Local Level Strategies on the Baltic Rim 1100–1400, eds. by N. Blomkvist and S.-O. Lindkvist, Gotland Centre for Baltic Studies, Visby 1999 (Culture Clash or Compromise, 1); Der Ostseeraum und Kontinenta- leuropa 1100–1600: Einflußnahme – Rezeption – Wandel, eds. by D. Kat- tinger, J.E. Olsen and H. Wernicke, Helms, Schwerin 2004 (Culture Clash or Compromise, 8); in the latter collection, N. Blomkvist, Is the Europeani- zation of the Baltic a Conjoncture or a Phenomenon of the Longue Durée? – Or Is There Something Missing in «Braudel’s History Rhythm Machine»? is pertinent, and as entertaining as the title implies. 14 Bartlett, The Making of Europe, pp. 310-1. 15 For example A. Sanmark, Power and Conversion: A Comparative Study of Christianization in Scandinavia, Uppsala University, Department of Archaeology and Ancient Studies, Uppsala 2004 (Occasional Papers in Archaeology, 34). Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 39 tions of «barbarity» and religious primitivism, attitudes introduced at the beginning of the article, and I believe that seeing Scandinavia as being «behind the times» in religious development is too simplistic. Some consideration of the differences and similarities between Scandinavian religious practice and the Western European mainstream is therefore necessary. I have used the formulation «Chris- tian life» in my title. This is to an extent deliberately vague: by «Christian life» I mean simply that I am writing from the perspective of the cultural historian, and will avoid references to Gregorianism, crusading ideology, or any other grand church-political concepts of that kind. Most of this article concerns those whose life was Christian by more than faith or baptism: nuns, monks and clerics; much could, and should, be said about the laity, but that is for elsewhere. I do by no means purport to be complete, as should be obvious within the present context, but will present aspects of the subject which I find interesting, and which could bring up relevant points of comparison. Part of the intention of the article is to bring out of a Scandina- vian context issues that have been prominent in local historiographies for decades, but are little known elsewhere, and thus alert the reader, by necessity, to works in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Where possible I have tried to include references in English or German, however, and most recent Scandinavian books will include English-language summaries.

2. The Land

What would a traveller from elsewhere in Western Eu- rope have thought of twelfth-century Scandinavia? There is little evidence, but one can speculate: certainly, the sheer geographical differences would have been striking. Even in the relatively mild twelfth century, the cold win- ters were prohibiting at best16. Southern Scandinavia has been described by a prominent medievalist as having «the

16 For the twelfth-century Baltic world, the best introductory account in English is in E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, Penguin, London 1997, pp. 7-49. 40 Filo rosso worst climate in Europe», but it was north of Denmark that the landscape would have become really alien17. Here ends the low-lying and easily cultivated land that dominates most of northern continental Europe, and begins the Fenno-Scandian pre-Cambrian bedrock18. The distances would have impressed: a small population in sparse areas of settlement, separated by great wilderness that was difficult and dangerous to traverse, and unsuitable for any effective cultivation. Appearances are often deceptive, however: instructively, one could compare what a well-read Dane, Saxo Grammaticus, had to say about the forested area that formed the medieval border between Denmark and Sweden, Värend, at the turn of the thirteenth century, with an insider source, the Life of St Sigfrid, an inven- tive saint’s life from around the same period. Saxo claimed this was a desert, deserta Werundiae19. Those who actually lived there, on the other hand, were certainly well aware of the «great and most dense forests» that surrounded the area, but described its interior as «abundant in all good things, with rivers full of fish, full of bees and honey, decorated with fertile fields and meadows, opulent with wild animals of various species»: another warning that attributions of barbarity are loaded and can be mislead- ing20. There will be an occasion to return to the contrast between cultivated Denmark and wild Värend below. It seems clear at least that by 1200, travelling to Scan- dinavia would have been a rather different experience from what it was at the beginning of the twelfth century. Adam of Bremen tried his hand at a travel guide of sorts for Scandinavia and the Baltic world in the 1070s, help- fully building on his own experience in parts of Den- mark. Further north, however, his information seems to

17 B.P. McGuire, Why Scandinavia? Bernard, Eskil and Cistercian Ex- pansion in the North 1140-80, in «Goad and Nail: Studies in Cistercian His- tory», 10, 1985, p. 251. 18 U. Sporrong, The Scandinavian Landscape and Its Resources, in The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, ed. by K. Helle, Cambridge U.P., Cam- bridge 2003, I, pp. 15-42, at pp. 18-9. 19 Saxo, Gesta Danorum, Praef. ch. 2, 5 (trans. P. Zeeberg), ed. by K. Friis-Jensen, Gad, Copenhagen 2005, pp. 78-9. 20 Vita Sigfridi, in Scriptores rerum Sueciarum medii aevi, eds. by E.M. Fant et al., 3 vols., Uppsala 1818-76, II, p. 350: omnibus bonis abundans, pis- cosis ﬂuminibus, apibus et melle repleta, agris fertilibus et pratis decorata, feris diversorum generum opulenta, silvis densissimis et magnis circumcincta. Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 41 become gradually less rooted in empirical reality, cul- minating in a classically-inspired menagerie of half-men half-beasts in the furthest regions21. True travel accounts from twelfth-century Scandinavia are few and sparse, but other literary sources, prosopographical investigations, and archaeological data can give a number of clues to how the preconditions for long-distance travel, and thus the preconditions for the movement of goods, culture, and ideas, were transformed22. Changing trade routes are of importance also for understanding the development of religious culture: from a situation where isolated instances of contact drove cultural transfer came one of regular interaction across the Baltic and North Seas. Entrepreneurial clergy could make use of the situation: the anonymous narrator of the Middle High Ger- man fragmentary poem known as Merigarto claimed to have met a wise and virtuous cleric called Reginbert in Utrecht, who had travelled to Iceland, da’r michiln rihtuom vant («where he gained great riches»), selling honey, wine, and alder-wood23. To turn for a moment to the non-Scandinavian Baltic, the herring ﬁsheries on the island of Rügen (which did come under Danish rule in 1169), reportedly presented a formidable attraction to as well-known a missionary as St Otto, bishop of Bam- berg (1102–39), and the monks of the abbey of Corvey

21 Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, on Denmark: IV ch. 1-9; on monsters: IV, ch. 19 and IV.41, ed. by B. Schmei- dler, pp. 226-37, pp. 246-8, and p. 278; History of the Archbishops of Ham- burg-Bremen, pp. 186-93, pp. 200-1, and p. 221. 22 A guide for routes to the Holy Land by an Icelandic abbot in 1149×53 is a rare example of twelfth-century Scandinavian travelling literature: Alfræði Íslenzk: Islandsk encyklopædisk litteratur: I. Cod. mbr. AM. 194, ed. by K. Kålund, in Samfundet til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur, Møllers bogtrykkeri, Copenhagen 1908, 37, p. 13; The Pilgrim Diary of Nikulás of Munkathverá (trans. F.P. Magoun), in «Mediaeval Studies», 6, 1944, p. 347. For a fascinating prosopographical investigation of long- distance travel from Scandinavia in this period, see D. Waßenhoven, Skandi- navier unterwegs in Europa (1000-1250): Untersuchungen zu Mobilität und Kulturtransfer auf prosopographischer Grundlage, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2006 (Europa im Mittelalter, 8). 23 Die religiöse Dichtungen des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts, ed. by F. Maurer, Niemeyer Tübingen 1964-70, III, pp. 65-75; for a Modern Ger- man translation, see N.T.J. Voorwinden, Merigarto: Eine philologische-historische Monographie, Leiden U.P., Leiden 1973, which also includes a (not very convincing) discussion of the identity of Reginbert. 42 Filo rosso in Saxony wanted the island so much that, in 1147, they forged a charter claiming to have been granted it by Louis the Pious24. The references to herring are symp- tomatic of how Baltic trade was changing: the principal trade route in the eleventh century had been across an east-west axis, from Novgorod, the gateway to Russian fur, to Schleswig in southern Jutland, either along the south Baltic coast, or via the Baltic islands of Gotland and Bornholm. Along these routes, marked today by de- posits of (mostly German) coins, eastern fur went west, and in exchange for it luxury goods: silver, silk, spices. In the twelfth century, however, the Saxons established themselves on the Baltic coast, and, from Lübeck, could trade directly with both Scandinavians and Russians25. The trade expanded beyond fur and luxury products: excavations in Scania, then in eastern Denmark, have shown how what had been small, discrete temporary settlements for fishermen along the coast were growing in importance. By 1201, Arnold of Lübeck could report, the majority of the leading merchants in Lübeck attend- ed the Scanian herring fairs in the autumn26. As the herring went south into the European continent, salt for preserving it went north, and so did new cultural impulses, transforming also rural areas. The twelfth century saw the early flourishing of the most prominent example of the Europeanisation of the Scandinavian landscape: the profusion of Romanesque local churches and the creation of parishes. The survival of medieval rural churches varies between regions, and is particularly low in areas where wood was more common as a building

24 C. Jahnke, Wege und Absatzmärke im Handel mit Ostseehering 1100-1600: Kontinuität und Wandel, in Der Ostseeraum und Kontinenta- leuropa, pp. 131-6. 25 J. Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and Its Significance for Medieval Russia, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge 1986, pp. 43- 52; it should be noted that C. Jahnke has recently argued that Lübeck only really achieved prominence in the Baltic trade in the early thirteenth century, and that Schleswig remained central throughout the twelfth century: Handelsstrukturen im Ostseeraum im 12. und beginnenden 13. Jahrhun- dert: Ansätze einer Neubewertung, in «Hansische Geschichtsblätter», 126, 2008, pp. 145-85. 26 Id., Das Silber des Meeres: Fang und Vertrieb von Ostseehering zwischen Norwegen und Italien (12.-16. Jahrhundert), Böhlau, Cologne 2000, pp. 63-9 (Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte, 49). Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 43 material, but overall the Romanesque stone church is still dominant among Scandinavian parish churches – just as in so many other parts of Europe. It is worth noting that many of them were rebuilt in the later medieval period – side chapels, gate-houses, towers, and so on, were added, or the shape of the chancel modified27. The architectural historian therefore often has to work with reconstruc- tions. Overall, it seems fair to say, however, that the rural churches exhibit little variation in terms of their basic function as places of worship: the most common shape, by far, consists of an one-aisled rectangular nave, ending in a slightly narrower chancel (although sometimes of equal width), with or without an apse. Even within this basic shape, scholars have tried to see patterns of variation, across time and geographically, and reconstruct their significance, with more or less convincing results28. This said, if the Romanesque churches might appear alike if one looks at floor plans only, another perspective gives a very different impression, of much variation – that is, if one includes towers, storage rooms, upper chambers, crenellations, and so on: elements of the church building that could be said to represent secular rather than sacred functions. Such a strict dichotomy could, and has been, questioned, notably in reference to a group of churches on the Baltic isles of Öland and Bornholm, and along the Baltic coast, traditionally known as «defence churches» and thought to have functioned as places of refuge during warfare or pirate attacks29. As military historians have repeatedly pointed out the effective uselessness of these churches for purposes of defence, the term was

27 See J. Wienberg, Den gotiske labyrint: Middelalderen och kirkerne i Danmark, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm 1993, pp. 78-110 in particular (Lund Studies in Medieval Archaeology, 11). 28 See notably Id., Enten - Eller: Apsidekirker i Norden, in «Hikuin», 24, 1997, pp. 7-44; recently J. Runer, Från hav till land eller Kristus och odalen: en studie av Sverige under äldre medeltid med utgångspunkt från de romanska kyrkorna, Stockholm University: Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm 2006 (Stockholm Studies in Archaeology, 38). 29 J. Wienberg, Fortresses, Storehouses and Symbols - Ambiguous Churches of the Baltic Sea, in Der Ostseeraum und Kontinentaleuropa, pp. 35-50; M. Anglert, Kyrkorna i Möre, in Möres kristnande, ed. by H. Wil- liams, Lunne böcker, Uppsala 1993, pp. 145-70 (Projektet Sveriges kristnande: Publikationer, 2). 44 Filo rosso largely rejected in the 1980s in favour of «multifunctional churches’, which certainly seems a safer assumption. The relevance of this group in this context is however different: the group is an international one, its peculiarity typi- cal of the Baltic world and an axis between Denmark and Estonia rather than Scandinavia. Similarly interesting is a group of churches with round towers, spread between Orkney and Poland, most common in East Anglia and what in the twelfth century was southern Denmark and northern Saxony, around present-day Schleswig-Hol- stein30. Such groups are often difficult to identify, as many architectural historians have, understandably, had a fairly local focus and restricted comparative work to attempts to find individual instances of influence or contact. It is possible to say, however, that in general twelfth-century local churches in Scandinavia, at least those in stone, were similar in size, shape, and function to their contemporary counterparts in, say, England or Germany31. One instance where international parallels can easily be detected, even by the non-specialist, is the sheer numbers of Romanesque church buildings: in Denmark alone, scholarly estimates of known Romanesque churches have always gone above two thousand, sometimes consider- ably higher32. In contrast, an estimated two hundred and one Romanesque or pre-Romanesque stone churches are known from Poland (although the comparison may be unfair for reasons of survival; and of course deciding which geographical entity should constitute Poland in such an argument is always difficult)33. Indeed, the veri- table explosion of a new type of church in Scandinavia in this period can only be compared with the process which

30 S. Heywood, The Round Towers of East Anglia, in Minsters and Parish Churches: The Local Church in Transition 950–1200, ed. by J. Blair, Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, Oxford 1988, pp. 169-78; E. Fernie, The Church of St Magnus, Egilsay, in St. Magnus Cathedral and Orkney’s Twelfth-Century Renaissance, ed. by B.E. Crawford, Aberdeen U.P., Aberdeen 1988, pp. 140-62. 31 In fact, remarkably so, according to B. Sawyer and P.H. Sawyer, Scan- dinavia Enters Christian Europe, in The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, ed. by K. Helle, I, p. 155. 32 Jes Wienberg has counted 2391: Den gotiske labyrint, pp. 73-7. 33 P. Urbanczyk, S. Rosik, The Kingdom of Poland, with an Appendix on Polabia and Pomerania Between Paganism and Christianity, in Chris- tianization and the Rise of the Christian Monarchy, p. 295. Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 45

Richard Gem, writing on English churches, has called a medieval «Great Rebuilding». For major churches, this usage of the term implies the almost complete rebuilding according to Romanesque ideals, which in England attained, in the decades following the Norman Conquest, «a momentum equalled scarcely anywhere in Europe»; similarly, France, across a more extended time period, saw the complete reconstruction of practically every major church34. Gem has also included minor churches in the model, albeit within a rather different chronology of sty- listic development; here, the process implies, in the words of John Blair, a transformation of local churches «from a category of ephemeral, “vernacular” buildings to one of permanent “polite” ones»35. The comparison between this and Scandinavia is, of course, not unproblematic. First, it is chronologically tricky: with such numbers of churches, most of which will be difﬁcult to date precisely, only the most general approximations can be made – traditionally, the great wave of Romanesque church building is thought to have been at its most intense in England between 1050 and 1150, in Scandinavia between 1150 and 1250 – but such generalisations are deceptive and unfair. For any comparison between England and Scandinavia – or, for that matter, the similarly peripheral, but long-since Chris- tian Scotland – the conclusions reached by Piotr Górecki on congruent developments in the Polish church apply: some of the processes [...] seem directly comparable to exactly contemporary processes elsewhere in Europe, others occur later, and others have no documented counterparts at all. Through the evidence for Poland, we glimpse processes comparable to those of other regions of Europe, but not in any rhythm that lends itself to convincing periodization36.

34 R. Gem, The English Parish Church in the 11th and 12th Centuries: A Great Rebuilding?, in Minsters and Parish Churches, pp. 21-30; the quota- tion is from p. 21. 35 J. Blair, Churches in the Early English Landscape: Social and Cultural Contexts, in Church Archaeology: Research Directions for the Future, eds. by J. Blair and C. Pyrah, Council for British Archaeology, York 1996, pp. 6-19, at p. 13 (Council for British Archaeology Research Reports, 104). 36 P. Górecki, Parishes, Tithes and Society in Earlier Medieval Poland, c. 1100–1250, American Philosophical Society, Philaldephia (PA) 1993 (Trans- actions of the American Philosophical Society, 83 ch. 2); for Scotland, see N. Cameron, The Church in Scotland in the Later 11th and 12th Centuries, in Church Archaeology, pp. 42-6. 46 Filo rosso

A second complication arises when one considers what came before the Romanesque churches, and what changes in ecclesiastical organisation accompanied their construc- tion, that is, the process of parish formation. These questions have loomed large in Scandinavian historiographies since the nineteenth century, and although the prolifera- tion of regional studies in recent decades – often a result of scholars turning from legal or documentary evidence towards the non-textual (archaeological evidence, topon- ymy) – has made a fair overview almost impossible, at least one clear general trend can be detected. In fact, what has occurred is an almost complete reversal of the traditional consensus. Scholars have gone from a view where parochial divisions arose directly out of the ancient Germanic social organisation of free, egalitarian peasants, who themselves took the initiative to build and maintain churches, to one where the earliest church building was predomi- nately initiated by the elite in a highly stratified society, and parochial structure was subsequently and gradually imposed throughout the twelfth century, as tithing became more efficient and lay ownership of churches increasingly frowned upon. As a paradigm shift, this applies only with some considerable modifications: notably, one has to allow some scope for regional variation, for example in remote areas of Sweden where central control was weak37. Still, the shift in scholarly opinion is remarkable38. It can be explained partly as the result of new attitudes to the Scandinavian law codes, which will be introduced below, and partly as the result of archaeological excavations revealing traces of pre-Romanesque wooden churches

37 S. Brink, Sockenbildning och sockennamn: Studier i äldre teritoriell indelning i Norden, Gustav Adolfs akademien, Uppsala 1990, pp. 116-22 (Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi, 52). 38 For an introduction to relatively recent research in English, see S. Brink, The Formation of the Scandinavian Parish, with Some Remarks Re- garding the English Impact on the Process, in The Community, the Family and the Saint, eds. by J. Hill and M. Swan, Brepols, Turnhout 1998 (Inter- national Medieval Research, 4); see also, importantly, D. Skre, Kirken før sognet: Den tidligste kirkeordningen i Norge, in Møtet mellom hendendom og kristendom i Norge, ed. by H.-E. Lidén, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo 1995, pp. 170-233, which surveys the earliest ecclesiastical organisation in Nor- way with the European background ﬁrmly in mind. Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 47 that often can be associated with centres of local power39. What is often missing in the vast literature on this issue, however, is an appreciation of similar developments going on at the same time elsewhere in Europe. The European parish was by no means a static administrative model that could be imported and imposed wholesale in Scandina- via, as will be quickly revealed by a comparison with the model for the development of smaller basic units of ecclesiastical authority in eleventh and twelfth-century Eu- rope proposed by Susan Reynolds40. Reynolds has argued that the basic point that «parishes (in the sense of the basic units of ecclesiastical authority) were a good deal larger before 1100 than they were afterwards» applies not only to recently Christianised places such as Scandinavia, or to areas where previous two-tier systems of ecclesiastical organisation are well-known, such as Italy or Anglo-Saxon England, but in general also to post-Carolingian Europe, where local churches have traditionally been thought to have had parochial status for centuries41. Seen against this background, the formation of Scandinavian parishes become more than the tail-end of the Christianisation, and part instead of something larger, of Europeanisation perhaps, where old-Carolingian blueprints and models were suddenly and widely being put into practice across the Latin West, «largely [as] the result of lay demands for local churches»42. Reynolds has also warned against a too simple dichotomy between elite and community initiatives in the creation of smaller units of ecclesiastical ad- ministration, and concluded that «evidence that a church was later regarded as the property of a lord is not evidence that his ancestors, tenants did not help to build it or re- gard it as also “theirs”»43. Similar doubts about the often

39 See for example, for Norway: H.-E. Lidén, De tidlige kirkene: Hvem bygget dem, hvem brukte dem og hvordan, in Møtet mellom hendendom og kristendom i Norge, pp. 129-41; see also, with some significant reservations, M. Anglert, Kyrkor och herravälde: Från kristnande till sockenbildning i Skåne, Almqvist & Wiksell, Lund 1995, pp. 65-9 (Lund Studies in Archae- ology, 16). 40 S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900– 1300, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1997, pp. 79-100. 41 Ibid., p. 87. 42 Ibid., p. 89. 43 Ibid., p. 88. 48 Filo rosso neat and tidy categorisation of church builders, patrons, and owners have recently been voiced by another British historian with large-scale comparative ambitions, Susan Wood, writing on the concept of the proprietary church44. Wood’s great and varied mass of examples of church ownership, and attitudes to church ownership, reveal «a fluid set of attitudes and practices», and she has shown just how deceptive the language of legalism, whether medieval or modern, can be for describing historical reality45. Her contextualisation of the Scandinavian so-called community churches shows clearly that they, first of all, were not a residue of primitive Germanic law, but also that there were plenty of precedents and parallels for similar collec- tive initiatives or responsibilities across Europe46.

3. The Law

In all of Scandinavia, and especially in Sweden, where literary evidence for twelfth and thirteenth-century history presents particular challenges, historians have found legal texts a valuable source for medieval life and society. The vernacular, provincial law codes, none surviving in manuscripts from before 1200, but variously and sometimes controversially dated to preceding centuries, have been used imaginatively and frequently by scholars from disciplines well beyond the specialised conﬁnes of legal history since the ﬁrst collected editions from the period of high National Romanticism47. The otherness of the

44 S. Wood, The Proprietary Church in the Medieval West, Oxford U.P., Oxford 2006; Wood’s book is heavy only in the literal sense, but a review article by J.L. Nelson (Church Properties and the Propertied Church: Donors, the Clergy and the Church in Medieval Western Europe from the Fourth Century to the Twelfth, in «English Historical Review», 124, 2009, pp. 355- 74) makes it easier to navigate. 45 Wood, The Proprietary Church, p. 356. 46 Ibid., pp. 651-8. 47 In Sweden: Corpus iuris Sueo-Gothorum antiqui, 13 vols., eds. by H.S. Collin and C.J. Schlyter, Z. Haeggström, Stockholm 1827-77; in Norway: Norges gamle love indtil 1387, eds. by R. Keyser et al., Gröndahl, Chris- tiania (Oslo), 1846-95; the standard Danish edition came later: Danmarks gamle landskabslove, eds. by J. Brøndum-Nielsen et al., Gyldendal, Copen- hagen 1933-61. For more recent editions, and a number of translations, until 1993, see the bibliographies in O. Fenger, H. Fix, M. Rindal and E. Sjöholm, Laws, in Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, eds. by P. Pulsiano and K. Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 49 provincial law codes has been especially suggestive to proponents of Scandinavian particularism: they can seem harsh, brutal, with a tone that ranges from the clumsily poetic to the crudely jocular – the cruel jester’s law in the oldest surviving Swedish law code is a famous example of rough humour48. The society of the law codes is that of the community of free peasants, bönder, and the church of the law codes is theirs to build and to maintain. Ec- clesiastical legislation seems rooted in rural, secular cus- tom, and could appear widely distant from the universal intellectualism of canon law, making full allowance for married clergy (bishops in one case), trial by ordeal, and so on, even in copies from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One might think that if anything provides good evidence for the unsophisticated and peculiar na- ture of Christian life in medieval Scandinavia, this is it. Scholarly debate in the past decades has however shown that the situation is rather more complicated, and there have been a number of revisionist attempts to answer the question recently posed in the title of a collection of conference proceedings: How Nordic Are the Nordic Medieval Laws? The most popular answer seems to be paradoxically twofold: more Nordic than traditionally thought, in that they are not representative of ancient Germanic tradition, but of Scandinavia only; less Nor- dic than traditionally thought, in that they are far from unaffected by other Western law49. The debate began in the 1980s, notably spurred on by the publication of Elsa Sjöholm’s radical reassessment of the Swedish provincial

Wolf, Garland Publishing, New York and London 1993. Editions since then include Den eldre Gulatingslova, eds. by B. Eithun, M. Rindal and T. Ulset, Riksarkivet, Oslo 1994 (Norrøne tekster, 6); De eldste østlandske kristenret- tene: Tekst etter håndskriftene med oversettelser, eds. by E.F. Halvorsen and M. Rindal, Riksarkivet, Oslo 2008 (Norrøne tekster, 7). 48 In the Older Law of Västergötland: Corpus iuris Sueo-Gothorum, I, p. 67; it is worth noting that some of the rough impression can be a simple question of language: a comparison between the vernacular Law of Scania and Archbishop Anders Sunesen of Lund’s Latin translation is instructive here (both edited ibid. IX; see also Svenska landskapslagar tolkade och förk- larade för nutidens svenskar (trans. Å. Holmbäck and E. Wessén), 5 vols., Geber, Stockholm, 1933-46, IV, pp. XIX-XXXI. 49 D. Tamm, How Nordic are the Old Nordic Laws?, in How Nordic are the Nordic Medieval Laws?, eds. by D. Tamm and H. Vogt, University of Copenhagen Press, Copenhagen 2005, pp. 6-22 (Medieval Legal History, 1). 50 Filo rosso law codes in 198850. Sjöholm denounced practically all her predecessors in the field, and the reception of the book was unsurprisingly critical51. For all that her argument may have failed to convince in detail, however, the main thrust, with some modification, remains compel- ling: first, that scholars have (too often) failed to consider the law codes as instruments of the power of the elite, rather than descriptive documentation of rural society; second, that instead of being read as late manifestations of a centuries-old oral tradition, they should be taken as part of a European textual system, directly and indi- rectly influenced by other Western law codes, by Mosaic law, by Roman law, and by canon law. With the sections of the provincial law codes of relevance here – the church laws – there was of course never any question of over-enthusiastic antiquarians recon- structing residues of pagan Germanentum, and their debt to canon law has long been acknowledged52. And there is no doubt that there was Latin canon law around, and that it was carefully studied: one has only to look at a recent assessment by Peter Landau, who has pointed to an early twelfth-century copy of excerpts from Ivo of Chartres’ Decretum that belonged to the house of canons at Dalby near Lund, and to the sheer number of surviving papal decrees issued to the Norwegian church between 1160 and 1200 – thirteen of them, to be compared to his estimate of around thirty for Spain, around ten for Germany. In

50 E. Sjöholm, Sveriges medeltidslagar: Europeisk rättstradition i politisk omvandling, Institutet för rättshistorisk forskning, Lund 1988 (Rättshistor- iskt bibliotek, 41); and its predecessor Gesetze als Quelle mittelalterlicher Geschichte des Nordens, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1976 (Stockholm Studies in History 21); and Ead., Sweden’s Medieval Laws: European Legal Tradition – Political Change, in «Scandinavian Journal of History», 15, 1990, pp. 65-87. 51 See reviews by S. Bagge, «Historisk tidsskrift», (Oslo) 68, 1989, pp. 500-7, and O. Fenger, «Historisk tidsskrift», (Copenhagen) 15, 1989, pp. 443-6; also S. Brink, Law and Legal Customs in Viking Age Scandinavia, in The Scandinavians from the Vendel Period to the Tenth Century: An Eth- nographic Perspective, ed. by J. Jesch, Boydell Press, Woodbridge 2002, pp. 87-127 (Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology, 5). 52 See for example L.M. Bååth, Bidrag till den kanoniska rättens historia i Sverige, O.L. Svanbäck, Stockholm 1905; I. Nylander, Das kirch- liche Beneﬁzialwesen Schwedens während des Mittelalters: Die Periode der Landschaftsrechte, Nordiska bokhandeln, Stockholm 1953 (Rättshistoriskt bibliotek, 4). Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 51

Landau’s opinion, a series of decrees probably from provincial synod in Bergen in 1164 demonstrate «an intimate knowledge of recent developments in canon law», and there are several cases where the Norwegian grappling with canon law that, for reasons of geography, climate, or demographic patterns, was difficult to implement in Scan- dinavia, created precedents for decrees that the papacy was to universalise in the thirteenth century53. Still, hordes of question marks surround the interaction between the ju- risdictions of vernacular ecclesiastical law and Latin canon law, and actual legal practice often remains hopelessly obscure54. Clearly there was influence and borrowing, sometimes direct – examples include a decree from Alex- ander III about herring fishing on feast days which made its way into the law of Frostating in Norway – but saying that the church laws are simply «a codification of canon law within the framework of the provincial law codes» seems to be taking matters too far55. Rather than seeing them as a kind of compromise version of canon law, wa- tered-down and vernacularised to reflect rural practice, one can think of them as representing only part of the church, and specific interests within the church at that. A case in point comes from Iceland, and Orri Vésteinsson’s study of the development of the Icelandic church in the central medieval period, narrative sources (the abundance of literary evidence from codification-crazy Iceland is the envy of medievalists working on all other Scandinavian areas) provide enough information on clerical careers to offer an effective counterpoint to the legal material. Orri has argued, persuasively, that the legal sources reflect the interests of bishops and old-fashioned chieftain priests, who attempted to control the so-called district priests,

53 P. Landau, The Importance of Classical Canon Law in Scandinavia in the 12th and 13th Centuries, in How Nordic are the Nordic Medieval Laws?, pp. 24-39; see also V. Skånland, Det eldste norske provinsialstatutt, Univer- sitetsforlaget, Oslo 1969. 54 Cf. however M. Korpola, On Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction and the Re- ception of Canon Law in the Swedish Provincial Laws, in How Nordic are the Nordic Medieval Laws?, pp. 202-31. 55 Cf. C. Strandberg, Kyrkobalkar, in Kulturhistoriskt lexikon till nordisk medeltid, Rosenkilde of Bagger, Copenhagen 1981, IX, cols. 682-4. For the herring in the Frostating law: see Norges gamle love, I, p. 139; the Latin original is in E. Vandvik, Latinske dokument till norsk historie fram til år 1204, Norske samlaget, Oslo 1959, pp. 70-3. 52 Filo rosso

– regulated servants, but skilled and able to choose their own employers – by emphasising, and perhaps exaggerat- ing, the servile status of the non-aristocratic priest56. In this context, the value of the Christian law code can lie «to a large extent in what it does not contain»57. Granted, the Icelandic church – which falls outside the main scope of this article – presents a number of peculiarities of its own, but it was part of the archdiocese of Lund (and Nidaros from 1153), and the recognition that the ecclesiastical laws can be biased towards a particular subset of the clergy and can be seen as instruments of regulation and elite pres- sure begs a number of questions about the provincial law codes of the three Scandinavian kingdoms. Why is so little room given to the church building projects of the elite? To what extent are the various levels of authority granted to churches in the Norwegian law codes really reﬂections of a two-tier hierarchy before the parish, and not a desperate attempt to impose order on local church builders claiming parochial status?58 It appears that recent scholarship has effectively put paid to the notion of the vernacular ecclesiastical laws being «the most detailed and reliable evidence» for «a Germanic “national” church» in the twelfth century, but for those interested in comparison and international contextualisation, much work remains to be done59.

4. The Liturgy

Despite its centrality to Christian life, medieval liturgy often remains mysterious. Text and practice are difﬁcult to square. Manuscript survival is a constant problem: what remains is often representative of the grand, mag- niloquent end of the liturgical spectrum or the luxuri- ous private worship of the contemplative elite, whereas

56 Orri Vésteinsson, The Christianization of Iceland: Priests, Power, and Social Change 1000–1300, Oxford U.P., Oxford 2000, pp. 179-237. 57 Ibid., p. 108. 58 See K. Helle, Gulatinget og Gulatingslova, Skald, Leikanger 2001, pp. 201-5. 59 Cf. Id., The Organisation of the Twelfth-Century Norwegian Church, in St Magnus Cathedral and Orkney’s Twelfth-Century Renaissance, pp. 46-55, at pp. 47-8. Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 53 everyday books were discarded as rites changed. Liturgi- cal commentaries are plentiful, but focus more on theol- ogy than actual practice. Twelfth-century Scandinavia is in most ways no exception: liturgical practice is elusive, but of great interest. The introduction of baptism and Christian funeral rites was of course essential during the Christianisation process, but so was the regular, sustained celebration of the mass and the office. If the building of churches heralded the evangelisation of the landscape, the introduction of a daily round of offices, marked by ring- ing church bells, heralded the evangelisation of time. The liturgy was inviting – indeed, a thirteenth-century Icelan- dic saga attributes the conversion of a viking-age peasant to his wonderment at the splendour of the celebration of the Hours – but also a means of establishing hierarchies and control: the Latinate over the non-Latinate, the cathedrals over the lower churches60. Liturgical evidence can be used to investigate international contacts and influence, and is essential to understanding the beginnings and peculiarities of Latin, textual, and scribal culture in Christianisation-period Scandinavia61. There is only one centre from which enough complete manuscripts survive to give at least a glimpse of a twelfth- century Scandinavian book collection. This is the library of the metropolitan cathedral chapter of Lund, now in southern Sweden, but in Denmark until 1658. Ten books from before 1200 survive, doubtless only a small part of what was once there, but still of considerable interest62. There are no chant or prayer books, but taken as a whole, and properly contextualised, the group provides significant evidence of life in the cathedral chapter, of its interaction with other centres, and of some of its status and devel-

60 Þórvalds þáttr víðförla, in Fjörutíu Íslendinga-þættir, ed. by Þ. Jóns- son, S. Kristjansson, Reykjavík 1904, at p. 483; The complete sagas of the Icelanders (trans. J. Porter), ed. by V. Hreinsson et al., Leifur Eiríksson Publishing, Reykjavík 1997, V, p. 361. 61 For an introduction, see S. Helander, Liturgin som källa till Sveriges kristnande, in Kristnandet i Sverige: Gamla källor och nya perspektiv, ed. by B. Nilsson, Lunne böcker, Uppsala 1996 (Projektet Sveriges kristnande, 5). 62 Those of the manuscripts now in Lund University Library have recently been re-catalogued, and are conveniently available in full electronic facsimiles online: http://laurentius.ub.lu.se/. See also P. Ekström, Lunds domkyrkas äldsta liturgiska böcker, Universitetsbiblioteket, Lund 1985. 54 Filo rosso opment compared to the rest of Western Europe. Among the survivors are three gospel books from the episcopate of Asser (1089–1137), two imported from Germany: one is of uncertain origin, but became liturgically normative for Lund; another is from the great scriptorium of the abbey of Helmarshausen on the Weser, although without doubt produced specifically for Lund. The third, a local product, is a sort of combination of the two, liturgically in accordance with the cathedral chapter’s rite, but with illu- minations and rubrics in Helmarshausen style. The three gospel book show how Lund was not simply influenced by, but actively collaborated with one of the most significant artistic centres of its time63. Most well-known is the chapter-book of the cathedral, a compilation manuscript most probably assembled, and largely written, in 112364. It contains, among other things, the chapter’s necrology – rich evidence of the cathedral’s members, benefactors, and contacts – and a most interesting customary. This includes a reworked version of the consuetudines of Marbach, a highly influential centre of reformed communal life on the Rhine65. The changes made to the text are small but important: references to Augustine and the word regularis have been avoided, showing that the chapter was never entirely regularised. Still, it is clear evidence that Danish canons actively and profoundly engaged with the reform movement, and remarkably early at that: the Marbach customary only really began to be widely diffused from 1139, propagated by the cathedral of Salzburg, and the consuetudines of Lund are in fact the earliest surviving witness to the text66. Certainly, this experiment in reformed canoni-

63 The manuscripts are Uppsala, Universitetsbiblioteket, C. 83; Co- penhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Thott 22 4°; and Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Thott 21 4°: see notably H. Hoffmann, Bücher und Urkunden aus Helmarshausen und Corvey, Hahn, Hannover 1992, pp. 41-2 and p. 74 (MGH Studien und Texte, 4). 64 Lund, Universitetsbilioteket, Mh 6: see Necrologium Lundense: Lunds domkyrkas nekrologium, ed. by L. Weibull, Lund 1923 (Monumenta Scaniae historica). 65 Consuetudines Lundenses: Statutter for kannikesamfundet i Lund c. 1123, ed. by E. Buus, Det danske sprog- och litteraturselskab, Copen- hagen 1978. 66 S. Weinfurter, Die Kanonikerreform des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts, in 900 Jahre Stift Reichersberg: Augustiner Chorherren zwischen Passau und Salzburg, Amt der oberösterreichischer Landesregierung, Abteilung Kultur Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 55 cal life needs being contextualised within the interesting, but still unclear, history of the earliest Danish cathedral chapters. It could however also easily be seen as a mani- festation of a general European trend. By 1123, the Lund canons had entered confraternity with a number of houses and other cathedral chapters. These included the canons regular of Ravengiersburg near Trier, one of the most radical of reformed houses of canons founded as an eremiti- cal foundation in 107467. Another prominent member of the Lund cathedral chapter was a certain Herimann, son of the founder of another strict community, Kloosterrade or Rolduc near Aachen, founded 1108, from which he had been thrown out in 1129, after a long struggle to become its provost68. When St Otto of Bamberg had sent an am- bassador to Archbishop Asser, he had found Lund and the Danes shabby and unreﬁned in appearance, but the archbishop to be clever and educated69. The description, in Herbord of Michelsberg’s biography of St Otto, seems to encapsulate the mixture of barbarous appearance and up- to-date culture that characterised Christian life in twelfth- century Scandinavia. When Archbishop Eskil ended the experimentation with semi-regular life in Lund in 1145, this was also part of a wider movement away from radical reform canonry on the European continent. The Lund manuscripts help to understand the highest end of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in twelfth-century Scandinavia. Interestingly, a very different body of liturgical evidence exists which can throw light also on the workings of the local or rural church. This is the corpus of tens of thousands of manuscript fragments spread across Scandinavian archives and libraries, often neglected by

Linz 1984, pp. 27-32, at p. 27. For the date of the Lund customary, see A. M. Ciardi, När tog lundakanikernas Consuetudines egentligen i bruk? Reﬂe- ktioner kring texttradering och traditionsförmedling i 1120-talets Lund, in Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift 2004, pp. 11-21; H. Deutz, Geistliches und geistiges Leben im Regularkanonikerstift Klosterrath, Schmitt, Siegburg 1990, pp. 32n and 35n. (Bonner historische Forschungen, 54). 67 Necrologium Lundense, pp. 126-32. 68 Deutz, Geistliches und geistiges Leben im Regularkanonikerstift Klosterrath, pp. 142-53. 69 Heiligenleben zur deutsch-slawischen Geschichte, ed. by L. Weinrich, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2005, pp. 470-2 (Augewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters, 23). 56 Filo rosso scholars, but attracting increasing attention70. They have been preserved, oddly enough, through bureaucratic re- forms in the early modern period: as Reformation-period kings and their Protestant successors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries centralised administrative functions of the state, they needed tax accounts from around the kingdoms. To bind these often large volumes, the bailiffs responsible used parchment, and what better source of parchment than the masses of Latin, Catholic manuscripts that were lying around churches and religious founda- tions? Thus thousands of manuscripts were systemati- cally dismembered and either cut into small strips and pieces to strengthen paper bindings at sewing stations, or kept as whole leaves or bifolia and wrapped as covers around the account books (the latter practice dominated in Sweden, the former in Denmark and Norway). Liturgi- cal books, both the most numerous, and the least useful to the post-Reformation church, were the main victims: they make up around 76% of the around 22,500 fragments in the Swedish collection in the National Archives (Riksarkivet) in Stockholm. Cruel as it might seem, this practice ensured the survival of at least samples of a book culture that in other circumstances might have been lost completely: like other collections of medieval manuscript

70 For the fragments in Copenhagen no catalogue exists, but see the two published inventories: E. Albrectsen, Middelalderlige håndskriftfragment- er: Aftagne fragmenter: omslag om lensregnskaber, Rigsarkivet, Copen- hagen 1976 and M.G. Andersen, J. Raasted, Inventar over Det Kongelige Biblioteks Fragmentsamling, Det kongelige bibliotek, Copenhagen 1983; the latter collection, at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, also contains fragments from other book bindings. A database of the Oslo fragments has been begun: E. Karlsen, G. Pettersen, Katalogisering av latinske membranfragmenter som forskningsprosjekt, in Arkivverkets forskningsseminar, Gardermoen 2003, Riksarkivaren, Oslo 2003 (Rapporter och retningslinjer, 16); for the fragments now in Helsinki, see T. Haapanen, Verzeichnis der mittelalterlichen Handschriftenfragmente in der Universitätsbibliothek zu Helsingfors, Helsinki University, Helsinki 1922, 1935 and 1932 (Helsingin yliopiston kirjaston julkaisuja 4, 7 and 14). For the Stockholm collection, which I know best and from which I will draw most of my examples, see J. Brunius, Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Sweden: A Catalogue Project, in Interpreting and Collecting Fragments of Medieval Books, Proceedings of The Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford 1998, eds. by L.L. Brownrigg and M.M. Smith, Anderson-Lovelace, Los Altos Hills (CA) and London 2000), pp. 157-65 and Id., Medieval Manuscript Fragments in the National Archives - A Survey, in Medieval Book Fragments in Sweden, ed. by J. Brunius, Kungl. Vitterhets, Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, Stockholm 2005, pp. 9-17 (Konferenser, 58). Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 57 fragments across Europe, they may be cumbersome and problematic to work with, but often give a very different picture from the corpus of surviving complete manuscripts. Here is evidence of low-grade, everyday books of the kind that were unlikely to survive changing rites and customs. Like in other areas of Europe where Christianity came late, the numbers of complete surviving Latin manuscripts, particularly from during and just after the Chris- tianisation period, are low in Scandinavia, and fragments are of particular importance71. Furthermore: as voices in the wilderness go, they may be faint, but they are many, and allow some quantitative analysis, if doubtless imper- fect. The fragments first came under scholarly scrutiny in the early twentieth century, and a series of publications by Toni Schmid in Sweden and by Lilli Gjerløw in Norway were particularly important in subsequent decades72. After some years of relative neglect, interest was renewed in the 1990s, and has not flagged since. In Norway, liturgical fragments have formed the basis of a recent doctoral thesis73. Obviously, with so many fragments, it will be impossible within the confines of most research projects to study all examples even within a particular genre or period. In Stockholm, a cataloguing project of all the fragments in the Swedish National Archives was recently brought to completion, and the result, a database, is immensely useful for identifying groups of fragments of a certain type of

71 This certainly holds true for Hungary: see the convenient overview by E. Madas, Trente ans de recherche en Hongrie sur les fragments des manuscrits médiévaux, available online at http://www.fragmenta.oszk.hu/docs/ fragmfrancia.rtf, where – again – liturgical material dominates. 72 For Schmid, see the bibliography by J. Brunius in Schmid, Antonie (Toni), in «Svenskt biografiskt lexikon», 31, 2001, pp. 577-82. Notable examples of Gjerløw’s work that draw on fragments include Adoratio Crucis: The Regularis Concordia and the Decreta Lanfranci: Manuscript Studies in the Early Medieval Church of Norway, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo 1961; Missaler brukt i Bjørgvin bispedømme fra misjonstiden til Nidarosordina- riet, in Bjørgvin bispestol: Byen og bispedømmet, ed. by P. Juvkam, Univer- sitetsforlaget, Oslo 1970, pp. 73-128; Missaler brukt i Oslo bispedømme fra misjonstiden til Nidarosordinariet, in Oslo bispedømme 900 år, eds. by F. Birkeli, A.O. Johnsen and E. Molland, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo 1974, pp. 73-142; and Antiphonarium Nidrosiensis ecclesiae, Norsk historisk kjeld- eskrift-institutt, Den Rettshistoriske kommisjon, Oslo 1979 (Libri Liturgici Provinciae Nidrosiensis Medii Aevi, 2). 73 Å. Ommundsen, Books, Scribes and Sequences in Medieval Norway, PhD thesis, University of Bergen 2007. 58 Filo rosso text, from a particular period, or of a particular origin74. Among the around 3600 fragments in Stockholm dated to the twelfth century, one such group is immediately apparent: a series of breviary fragments with musical notation of probable German origin that can be associated with the province of Småland in southern Sweden, literally the «small lands», which include the region of Värend mentioned above75. The database contains around eighty fragments from thirty-four different breviaries, catalogued as of twelfth-century German origin, and associated with the Småland archives. The numbers are in fact likely to be higher, as many fragments have yet to be assigned an origin in the catalogue, but are nonetheless striking. The breviary, the amalgamate of all the elements of the daily office, arranged according to the calendar and liturgical year, that would become so popular in the later Middle Ages, was by this stage a new type of book: it seems to appear in the eleventh century, and – according to most liturgists – only really rises to prominence after 1200. The twelfth-century breviary, or so the common argument goes, was «a book of convenience», used not as a standard liturgical tool, but often tailored to unusual liturgical circumstances – a traveller’s book, or a book for the infir- mary in the monastery76. A classic account of the devel-

74 An example of the benefits of the database is a recent publication by one of its creators, Jan Brunius, which tracks the text for mass of thirteen Scandinavian saints across the whole collection, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century: Atque Olavi: Nordiska helgon i medeltida mässböcker, Runica et Mediævalia, Centrum för medeltidsstudier vid Stockholms uni- versitet, Stockholm 2009 (Scripta minora 17). 75 Assigning a medieval provenance to the fragments is by no means a straightforward process, nor an exact science, yet, general trends can be detected, and in Sweden, the comprehensive survey of the early modern bailiff system by J.A. Almquist, Den civila lokalförvaltningen i Sverige 1523–1630 med särskild hänsyn till den kamerala indelningen, 4 vols., Norsted, Stockholm 1917-23 (Meddelanden från Svenska Riksarkivet: Ny följd, 6), can be helpful. For methodology, see J. Brunius, Kammaren, fogdarna och de medeltida böckerna: Studier kring pergamentsomslagen i Riksarkivet, in ...och fram träder landsbygdens människor...: Studier i nordisk och småländsk historia tillägnade Lars-Olof Larsson på 60-årsdagen den 15 november 1994, eds. by P. Aronsson, B. Björkman and L. Johansson, Högskolan i Växjö, Institutionen för humaniora, Växjö 1994, pp. 109-22, and Id., De medeltida bokfragmenten och deras proveniens, in Ny väg till medeltidsbreven, eds. by C. Gejrot et al., Riksarkivet, Stockholm 2002, pp. 390-403. 76 S. Bäumer, Histoire du bréviaire (trans. R. Biron), 2 vols., Letouzey et Ané, Paris 1905, II, p. 64; V. Leroquais, Les bréviaires manuscrits des bib- Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 59 opment of the office liturgy in this period could list only thirty-nine surviving complete secular breviaries from before 120077. Although this list could probably now be expanded, the Småland fragments still seem to belie the general picture: more numerous, certainly, and clearly a «standard» book even of the rural church in what was generally thought of as one of the wilder areas even in Sweden78. This may partly, of course, be simply a matter of survival patterns: these books are precisely of the kind that would have been unlikely to survive intact elsewhere. That said, once one puts paid to the assumption of ecclesiastical underdevelopment in the area, their presence does not seem that surprising: books of this kind permitted regular, if possible sung, celebration of the Daily Office, by one or a small number of participants. As such, they show that the peripheries of Europe were by no means immune to developments elsewhere, striving for the regularisation of local or «parish» clergy79. Research on the fragment collections has added, and will continue to add, a number of new facets to the understanding of Scandinavian medieval Christian culture. It has also significantly predated the earliest scribal activ- ity in the area: indeed, it has been convincingly argued that a number of fragments from as early as the eleventh century are from books produced locally, even if most are from imported books80. How the importation of service books functioned is not quite clear. Certainly, they would liothèques publiques de France, 5 vols., Paris 1934; P. Salmon, L’office divin au Moyen Age: Histoire de la formation du bréviaire du IXe au XVIe siècle, Cerf, Paris 1967; S.J.P. van Dijk, J. Hazelden Walker, The Origins of the Modern Roman Liturgy: The Liturgy of the Papal Court and the Franciscan Order in the Thirteenth Century, Darton, Longmann & Todd, Westminis- ter (MD) and London 1960. 77 Ibid., pp. 528-42. 78 The fragments in this group are all, as far as it is possible to tell, from secular rather than monastic books. 79 Notably studied in the archdiocese of Salzburg, where Gerhoh of Reichersberg was the most extreme proponent of the regularisation of all clergy: Dialogus de clericis saecularibus et regularibus, PL CXCIV, cols. 1373-1426. See also P. Classen, Gerhoch von Reichersberg und die Regular- kanoniker in Bayern und Österreich, in La vita comune del clero nei secoli XI e XII: Atti della Settimana di studio: Mendola, settembre 1959 [no ed.], Miscellanea del Centro di Studi Medioevali, 3, 2 vols., Editrice Vita e Pensi- ero, Milano 1962, I, pp. 304-48. 80 For example Katalogisering av latinske membranfragmenter, pp. 65-70. 60 Filo rosso have been important throughout the Christianisation process, and already in the ninth century St Ansgar reportedly lost as many as forty books to pirates outside the Swedish coast81. Foreign clergy continued to bring books with them: a useful example for the twelfth century is a certain Siward, who at some point in the 1120s or «30s – uncertain when – was bishop of Uppsala in Sweden, and at some point – uncertain why (he was reportedly «thrown out through the insolence of the pagans») – came to Saxony and was appointed abbot of the monastery of Rastede near Bremen82. On taking monastic vows, Siward donated his property to the abbey, among it an interesting book collection, including a missale et matutinale in uno volumine – a combined missal and office book (literally a nocturnal, a book for only the night offices; the word is however often used to mean simply breviary)83. The first local book production is equally unclear: because of the fragmentary form, it is often difficult to assign a date and origin to a fragment on textual grounds, and one is forced instead to rely on the handwriting, musical notation, and decoration84. The British palaeographer Michael Gullick has made important contributions to the identification of Scandinavian hands, notably in reference to a series of fragments associated with Cistercians in Sweden85. Swedish twelfth-century monasticism appears to have

81 Vita Anskarii auctore Rimberto, ed. by G. Waitz, Hahn, Hannover 1884, pp. 31-2 (MGH SS rer. Germ., 55). 82 Historia monasterii Rastedensis, ed. by G. Waitz, Hahn, Hannover 1880 (MGH SS, 25); T. Kleberg, Medeltida Uppsalabibliotek: I. Biskop Si- ward av Uppsala och hans bibliotek, Almqvist & Wiksell, Uppsala 1968 (Acta universitatis Upsaliensis, 15); there is some uncertainty as to when Siward actually was at Uppsala (1123–33 is the traditionally suggested date): ibid., p. 19, cf. W. Seegrün, Das Papsttum und Skandinavien bis zur Vollend- ung der nordischen Kirchenorganisation (1164), Wachholtz, Neumünster 1967, p. 54, p. 137 and pp. 208-10 (Quellen und Forschunger zur Geschichte Schleswig-Holsteins, 51). 83 S. Seelberg, Die Illustrationen im Admonter Nonnenbrevier von 1180: Marienkrönung und Nonnenfrömmigkeit – Die Rolle der Brevieril- lustration in der Entwicklung von Bildthemen im 12. Jahrhundert, Reichert, Wiesbaden 2002, p. 31 (Imagines medii aevi, 8). 84 For a more extended argument on this, see E. Niblaeus, Learning to Write in Southern Sweden: Liturgical Fragments and the Creation of a Culture of the Book, forthcoming. 85 M. Gullick, Preliminary Observations on Romanesque Manuscript Fragments of English, Norman and Swedish Origin in the Riksarkivet (Stockholm), in Medieval Book Fragments in Sweden, pp. 31-82. Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 61 been almost entirely dominated by the Cistercian order, and their importance for the implementation of Latinate culture in the area, while certainly already appreciated, should be possible to clarify with the help of the fragment database. A literary source to the Cistercians in twelfth century Sweden gives some indication of how signiﬁcant the copying of liturgical books was, as soon as possible after the monks had established themselves: at least if one is to believe the so-called Narratiuncula de fundatione monasterii Vitæscholæ in Cimbria, the ﬁrst abbot of Var- nhem in south-western Sweden was, after having settled in around 1150, quick to set up a domus magna to write missals in86.

5. Concluding remarks

I return to Nicholas Breakspear and his legation of 1152-4. The episode is, by medieval Scandinavian stand- ards, remarkably well documented. Clearly, Nicholas made an impression: according to the Heimskringla collection of kings’ sagas, probably of the 1230s, «no for- eigner has ever come to Norway whom men rated as highly and who had such influence on the community as he»; once Pope Adrian IV, he never had «so important business with other men that he did not first speak with Norwegians, whenever they decided to consult him»87. Saxo Grammaticus gave further details: after having consecrated the first Norwegian archbishop, Nicholas travelled to Sweden with the intention of doing the same thing there. He failed however, «because [the Swedes] were unable to provide a city or a candidate worthy of so great an office» and thus «their hitherto rough and out- landish faith remained unadorned by the highest rank of the priesthood». Instead, Saxo continued, the cardinal left the pallium for Sweden in Lund in Denmark, and prom-

86 Scriptores minores historiæ Danicæ medii ævi, ed. by M.C. Gertz, Gad, Copenhagen 1920, II, pp. 134-42. 87 S. Sturluson, Haraldssona saga 23: Heimskringla, ed. by B. Aðalbjar- narson, Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, Reykjavík 1941-51, III, pp. 332-3 (Íslen- zk fornrit, 26–8); Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway (trans. L.M. Hollander), University of Texas Press, Austin (TX) 1964, pp. 757-8. 62 Filo rosso ised the Danish archbishops eternal primacy over the Swedish church, even after a suitable candidate had been found88. A great guide to ethnic prejudice among Scan- dinavians in around 1200 (on Norwegians: «schooled in deceit and derision [...] ingrates»), it is no surprise that Saxo should have found the Swedes rough and outdated in their religion89. The outlines of his narrative are however corroborated by a series of letters from Anastasius V, giving the view from Rome90. Two of them are for Swe- den, one for the bishops, one for the king and nobles, and essentially take the form of rejection letters, even if the failure to establish an archbishopric is not explicit: after praising the Swedes for being Christian at all, Anastasius goes on to advise them on matters such as the liberty of the church, clerical marriage, when not to carry arms, and the importance of paying the Peter’s pence. One modern commentator found this good evidence that the legate had encountered a people «far behind with respect to Christi- anity, and in general ecclesiastical culture»91. But was this really the case? It was, after all, only a decade until the Swedes were actually granted an archbishop, and much of Anastasius’s instruction is no more than clichés of papal reform, applicable to pretty much anywhere in Europe. In a sense, the papacy’s memory was longer than in the European periphery, and the Scandinavian conversion probably seemed more recent in Rome than it did in the North; in another sense, there were structural and geographical reasons for why twelfth-century Christian life in both Sweden and Norway would have seemed highly different, and by consequence somehow inappropriate, primitive, to the observer from further south.

88 Saxo, Gesta Danorum, XIV ch. 11, II, pp. 190-3; Saxo Grammaticus, Danorum regum heroumque: Books X–XVI (trans. E. Christiansen), 3 vols, BAR, Oxford 1981, II, pp. 382-3 (BAR International Series, 84 and 118). 89 Dolis ac derisione instruct(i) ... ingrat(es): Saxo, Gesta Danorum, X ch. 12, 2, I, pp. 650-1; Saxo Grammaticus, II, p. 23. 90 Anastasii VII papæ epistola et privilegia, PL 188, cols. 1081-8; the grant of primacy over Sweden to Lund is not evident here, but only in a series of privileges issued by Adrian IV, Alexander III, and Lucius III, re- discovered in the 1950s: W.J. Koudelka, Neu aufgefundene Papsturkunden des 12. Jahrhunderts, in «Römische historische Mitteilungen», 3, 1960, pp. 114-28. 91 A.O. Johnsen, Studier vedrørende kardinal Nikolaus Brekespears legasjon til Norden, Fabritius, Oslo 1945, p. 348. Niblaeus, Christian Life in Scandinavia 63

If, as above, reduced to a few principal points (doubtless unfairly), Bartlett’s Europeanisation model may seem rather less relevant for Scandinavia than for East Central Europe (and the absence of Scandinavian examples in the concluding chapter of The Making of Europe is notice- able): the northern European periphery saw no real large- scale settlement from Germany; if a «frontier zone» it was different in the sense that beyond it lay no rival political or religious power – no Muslims, Asiatic Steppe Nomads, no Russo-Byzantine world – but only the Arctic zone and its scattered nomadic inhabitants. But if the conquest and colonisation elements are lacking, the similarities in cultural change in the twelfth century are striking92. This applies to the historiography as well: even if East Central European scholars have often tended more towards bla- tant nationalism in treating the process of integration into Europe in the central medieval period than their Scandi- navian colleagues, both traditions used to give the process a nostalgic tinge. It was the loss of innocence, a transformation from an idyllic, agrarian society of peaceful Slavs or freethinking Nordic peasants to the hierarchical, Cath- olic, bureaucratic Middle Ages. These traditions have probably left more residual exceptionalism in modern- day scholarship than historians or archaeologists would be willing to admit, but are thankfully largely superseded. Furthermore, when comparing peripheral societies to their central counterparts, it becomes clear that however one explains the distinctiveness of twelfth-century Chris- tianity, be it in Norway or in Poland, one has to go well beyond «semi-articulated models of arrested or delayed development»93. The idea of a «long Christianisation» still has its points, and the late introduction of monasticism to Scandinavia, particularly in Sweden, is remarkable. None- theless, even from the limited selection of examples given above, the legal systematisation, the diffusion of parochial rights, the attempts to regularise ofﬁce liturgy in the rural church, seem surprisingly congruent with developments

92 Conquest and colonisation from outside Scandinavia, that is: Den- mark was very much involved in the earliest stages of the so-called Baltic crusades: Christiansen, The Nordic Crusades, pp. 50-72. 93 Górecki, Parishes, Tithes and Society, p. 127. 64 Filo rosso in the long-established church of the Latin West. Further- more the transformation, particularly around the middle decades of the century, seems not slow or gradual, but remarkably swift and vigorous. As Scandinavian medievalism is becoming an increasingly international concern, all scholars of medieval Europe will beneﬁt from seeing all that was weird and wonderful about Christian life at the northern limits of the world as part of a general Western picture, rather than exceptional and barbaric.