Abstract
Eagerly venerated and able to perform miracles, medieval relics and religious artefacts in the Latin West would occasionally also be subject to sensorial and tactile devotional practices. Evidenced by various reports, artefacts were grasped and stroked, kissed and tasted, carried and pulled. For medieval Norway, however, there is very little documentary and/or physical evidence of such sensorial engagements with religious artefacts. Nevertheless, two church inventories for the parish churches in Hålandsdalen (1306) and Ylmheim (1321/1323) offer a small glimpse of what may have been a semi-domestic devotional practice related to sculpture, namely the embellishing of wooden sculptures in parish churches with silver bracelets and silver brooches. According to wills from England and the continent, jewellery was a common material gift donated to parishes by women. Such a practice is likely to have been taking place in Norway, too, yet the lack of coherent source material complicate the matter. Nonetheless, using a few preserved objects and archaeological finds as well as medieval sermons, homiletic texts and events recorded in Old Norse sagas, this article teases out more of the significances of the silver items mentioned in the two inventories by exploring the interfaces between devotional acts, decorative needs, and possibly gendered experiences, as well as object itineraries between the domestic and the religious space.
Highlights
In the Middle Ages, people’s engagement with sculptures took many forms
One of the antependia is even characterized as useless. Both inventories disclose a detail—and possibly a related devotional act—namely the embellishing of crucifixes and sculptures with silver bracelets and silver brooches. These descriptions are brief, it is intriguing that the only fourteenth-century church inventories which have been conserved for posterity both mention crucifixes with silver arm rings
The anonymous compilers who penned down the inventories of Hålandsdalen and Ylmheim both took their time to comment on the silver arm rings adorning the arms of the crucifixes in either church, and to note that it was a brooch attached to the Virgin in Hålandsdalen
Summary
In the Middle Ages, people’s engagement with sculptures took many forms. Sculptures, as well as manuscript pages, relics and reliquaries, could be grasped, stroked, kissed and tasted; at times they were felt as becoming living flesh under the hands of the devout (Freedberg 1989; Bynum 2011; Rosler et al 2013) and they could be dressed and undressed (Trexler 1991; Genovese 2011). Source material for people’s engagements with sculptures in medieval Norway is very scant, such bequests are possibly what are referenced in two unique documents from the fourteenth-century, namely the inventories from the parish churches of Hålandsdalen (1306) and Ylmheim (1321, additions from 1323). Both inventories disclose a detail—and possibly a related devotional act—namely the embellishing of crucifixes and sculptures with silver bracelets and silver brooches These descriptions are brief, it is intriguing that the only fourteenth-century church inventories which have been conserved for posterity both mention crucifixes with silver arm rings (silfr spongum). These are the only instances of such wording in the entire corpus of preserved medieval documents from Norway, and Scandinavia. Pellz/pell probably refers to silk fabrics; camelot refers to a woven fabric that might have originally been made of camel or goat’s hair, and fustane is a fabric made of cotton
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