{"id":501,"date":"2018-07-30T15:20:58","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T13:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/regionandnation\/?p=501"},"modified":"2018-08-03T16:42:49","modified_gmt":"2018-08-03T14:42:49","slug":"going-public-with-medieval-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.unil.ch\/regionandnation\/2018\/07\/going-public-with-medieval-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Going Public with Medieval History"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year, 2018, marks 800 years since the death of St Robert of Knaresborough. Hazel Blair blogs about her latest trip to the town the hermit made his home, where she delivered a public talk as part of a year-long programme of commemorative celebrations.<\/h3>\n

I delivered a talk about stories \u2013 medieval stories about saints, and about St Robert of Knaresborough, in particular. Hoping to draw in and engage a wide range of people, my combined presentation and workshop assumed no prior knowledge of the history of the medieval period.<\/p>\n

Most medievalists won’t have heard of him, but St Robert is a\u00a0local celebrity<\/a>. My aim was to get the Knaresborough-based audience to engage with the historical source materials relating to Robert’s life. I wanted them to see Robert not just as a hermit-saint and long-ago figure, but also as the central character in several interesting and entertaining medieval narratives. I titled my talk (part of St Robert in His Time<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>organised by Peter Lacey)\u00a0‘Celebrating Saints in the Middle Ages: St Robert of Knaresborough in Medieval Manuscripts’.<\/p>\n

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‘Celebrating Saints in the Middle Ages: St Robert of Knaresborough in Medieval Manuscripts’, 14 July 2018, Gracious Street Methodist Church, Knaresborough. Image: Hazel Blair<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Everyone introduced themselves briefly before things kicked off, and among the 30-or-so attendees were members of the local historical society, amateur historians, a dentist, a number of self-declared ‘Knaresborough residents’ \u2013\u00a0and even a couple of academics.\u00a0This made for a good mix of questions at the end of the day, but it also made for interesting discussions during the group-work phase of the session, with people coming from all walks of life to approach the source materials relating to St Robert in their own individual ways.<\/p>\n

Seeing that this was Knaresborough, and seeing that Robert is a well-known local historical figure, I began by asking the audience to shout out any facts they already knew about their local holy hermit, writing their answers up on a flip-chart. This was both to warm up the room and to get some of the main facts about Robert out there in the open, but it was also for me to gauge which aspects of Robert’s sanctity are considered most prominent in Knaresborough today.<\/p>\n

I think this opening tactic also quickly established that the voices of the non-historians in the room were just as important as those with more particular knowledge of Robert and his historical context, and I was glad to see some of the ‘Knaresborough residents’ getting involved immediately to help paint a working picture of St Robert for us to refer back to over the course of the afternoon.<\/p>\n

Flower of York<\/h3>\n

Together, we established that Robert Flower was as a holy man born in York who moved to Knaresborough to live in a cave and show devotion to God through prayer and by living chastely. His care for the poor and miraculous abilities over animals were mentioned, and I expanded on this to highlight that he also performed healing miracles and had the ability to vanquish demons.<\/p>\n

Working picture established, I then moved on to provide a lightning history of the Middle Ages, from the fall of Rome to the reign of Henry VIII, pointing out that Robert lived during ‘the High Middle Ages’, between\u00a0c<\/em>. 1160 and 1218. While for several attendees this would not necessarily have been new information, I thought it was important to historically orientate the room\u00a0\u2013 there’s no point in getting interested non-medievalists over the threshold only to alienate them early doors!<\/p>\n

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Timeline. Image: Hazel Blair<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Of course, it’s not easy for anyone to absorb lots of information on a new topic in a short space of time, and no-one can be expected to learn ‘the Middle Ages’ in less than a minute (!), but I hope the timeline on my handout and the historical groundwork I laid at the beginning of the talk did its job by bringing into the fold those non-historians whose interest we had piqued when marketing the event. I think visualising time in relation to your subject, either with an on-screen timeline, or\u00a0\u2013 preferably\u00a0\u2013 on a handout, is a sure-fire way to ensure everyone in your audience is on an even footing.<\/p>\n

Saints and saints’ stories<\/h3>\n

Doing my best to avoid the word ‘hagiography’, I then went on to talk more specifically about medieval saints. To anchor the topic, I read (a slight abridgement of) this paragraph from Robert Bartlett’s\u00a0Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? <\/em> (Princeton, 2013) \u2013 an inexpensive and authoritative book that’s packed full of information yet very accessible:<\/p>\n

Of all religions, Christianity is the one most concerned with dead bodies. Many religions have the idea of a holy man or woman \u2013 a living human being with extraordinary powers derived from special contact with the divine. Medieval Christianity developed to an extreme degree a distinctive form of this concept: the idea that the dead bodies of these holy people should be cherished as enduring sources of supernatural power. There were thousands of shrines in medieval Europe, containing the dust, bones, and undecayed bodies of the holy dead. Men and women came to these places, revered those whose mortal remains lay there, asked them for favours, and, were cured of their ills. The ecclesiastics who guarded these shrines wrote of the lives of those whose bodies they tended, recorded the wonders they performed after death, and gave the solemn liturgical commemoration in the churches that often bore their names. These were the saints.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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St Polycarp’s persecution<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I introduced St Polycarp, an early martyr, using dramatic re-imagined images of his persecution at the hands of Roman soldiers in the second century AD. I then moved on to introduce St Anthony, an early ascetic whose way of life mirrored the tortures that Polycarp, and Christ, felt in death. And I discussed the circulation of these early saints’ stories, as well as that of Northumbrian saint St Cuthbert, noting the similarities between the lifestyles of these early figures and Robert’s own way of living in holy discomfort and away from society.<\/p>\n

I then gave a short introduction to the manuscripts in which these saints’ stories have come down to us, using this as an opportunity to showcase some of the most impressive manuscripts from the Middle Ages. At every stage, though, I tried to link back to St Robert and to Knaresborough. So after showing some flashy bestiaries and medical texts, I inserted an image from an illustrated life of St Thomas Becket. Picking the scene in which he is martyred, I rounded things back to Knaresborough again, noting that the four murdering knights pictured on screen were said to have fled to the Knaresborough Castle after killing the archbishop.<\/p>\n

The many lives of St Robert<\/h3>\n

Keeping focused on saints’ stories, the hagiographies rather than the individuals on whom they were based, I then introduced three hagiographic texts about St Robert from the middle ages that survive in medieval manuscripts. I emphasised that these were reports, and that while they were well-researched, they were written after the saint’s death by individuals who had not met Robert personally.<\/p>\n

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One of the manuscripts containing medieval texts about St Robert. This manuscript, BL Egerton 3143, is at the heart of my PhD. Image: Hazel Blair<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Each of the three medieval narratives I introduced told the story of Robert\u2019s life. My aim was to have the audience appreciate that, despite key similarities between the different versions of Robert’s life story as it has survived in medieval manuscripts, each text was authored by a different hagiographer writing in his own historical context with his own preoccupations and priorities.<\/p>\n

I wanted the audience to notice the differences for themselves, and to acknowledge that while hagiographies may provide us with a degree of historical access to Robert, they also act as filters and obscure him to some extent, showing us Robert only as the hagiographers chose to depict him. The silver lining, of course, from a historical perspective, is that these same texts can function as windows on to the medieval periods in which they were produced, offering up information about those who remained devoted to Robert long after his death in 1218.<\/p>\n

I also wanted the audience to come to see these texts not as obscure medieval texts in dusty old books, but as the beautiful, creative literary responses to Robert’s sanctity that they are \u2013 testament not only to his holiness, but also to his ability to inspire Christian devotion and literary expression in those less perfect than himself. So we spent the middle part of the session reading (roughly) translated excerpts from three versions of Robert’s life. I split the room into three groups, A, B, and C, and assigned each group a bundle of individually cut-out excerpts from one of the following texts:<\/p>\n