The Christianisation of Scandinavia, generally viewed as having been conducted from England and Germany, has formed the context in which evidence of saints’ cults has been interpreted in Denmark and Norway, not only during the early days of organised Christendom, but also during the High Middle Ages. Consequently, saints associated with the Low Countries and appearing in Danish and Norwegian manuscripts has been partly overlooked in the scholarship, partly assigned to other categories such as ‘French’ and ‘German’. This article examines the inclusion of such saints in twelfth-century manuscripts with a provenance from the archsees of Lund and Nidaros, bringing nuance to the standard narrative and shedding new light on connections that have so far been little studied.

Found in the municipal archives of Breda (present-day North Brabant, Netherlands) is a conspicuous but ill-studied late fifteenth or early sixteenth-century codex, whose contents are deemed to have been composed within the late medieval town. Although characterised as a local cross legend, the Middle Dutch work is customarily referred to by its modern moniker of Denensage (i.e. Dane saga) due to the presence and pursuits of ‘viking’ mariners over the course of its verse narrative. By imparting how a group of Danes found their way to Breda and established a stronghold there – refashioning a prominent local tree into a cross in the process – the work occupies a distinct confluence of historiographical, devotional, and literary authorship. Situating the Dane saga in its sociocultural context, this article explores the wide-ranging narrative influences underpinning it, whilst determining its potential authorship and intended audience(s). Lastly, as well as furnishing a new edition of the manuscript, it offers the first English translation of this important, idiosyncratic text.

Only one wing (figs 1-2) survives of the triptych that Geertgen tot Sint Jans painted for the convent of St John in Haarlem (c. 1484-1492/95). It showed the Passion of Christ and St John as his Precursor. Interdisciplinary research resulted in new discoveries regarding the iconography and its functions. The altarpiece was intended to visualize the objectives of the Order of St John to which the convent belonged: the battle for Christendom, through the depiction of relics being rescued, and the care for the poor and sick, through the old man holding the shroud in the Lamentation of Christ. He represents a brother from the hospital from which the Order originated. This hospital already existed in Christ’s lifetime. The triptych was created because of a conflict between the conventuals and the churchwardens of the church of St Bavo. The latter was issuing indulgences to fund the rebuilding of the parish church whereas the convent started granting indulgences soon afterwards for the reconstruction of the island of Rhodes, the location of their headquarters, which had been ravaged by the Ottomans. Both sides aimed to attract as many faithful as possible. Therefore, the convent created an impressive altarpiece with memorable ancient stories.

This essay offers a new perspective on the cult of Scheut with the identification of several pilgrims’ badges. The badges from Scheut form a welcome addition to the written documents in which the p...

Frits van Oostrom, Nobel Streven. Het onwaarschijnlijke maar waargebeurde verhaal van ridder Jan van Brederode. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2017 (David F. Johnson)Wilma Keesman, De eindeloze stad. Troje en Trojaanse oorsprongsmythen in de (laat)middeleeuwse en vroegmoderne Nederlanden. Hilversum: Verloren, 2017 (Jeanne Verbij-Schillings)Willem Erven (ed., transl.), Nico Pijls, Nico Arts and Lauran Toorians (eds), Nicolaas Clopper, Florarium temporum (Bloemhof der tijden). Een laatmiddeleeuwse wereldkroniek door Nicolaas Clopper, geschreven in het Klooster Mariënhage bij Eindhoven. Hilversum: Verloren / Tilburg: Zuidelijk Historisch Contact / Duisburg: Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen-Abteilung Rheinland, 2018 (Bram Caers)Lisanne Vroomen, ‘Ik heb mijn lief in eeuwigheid’. Functies en thema’s van Middelnederlandse devote liederen, collaties en viten. Hilversum: Verloren, 2017 (Karl Kügle)J. A. Mol, De Friese volkslegers tussen 1480 en 1560, met een editie van de monsterlijsten van Friesland 1552 en Ameland 1558 door P.L.G. van der Meer en J. A. Mol. Hilversum: Verloren, 2017 (Michael Depreter)Elizabeth den Hartog, Een spoor van vernieling. Het Noord-Nederlandse katholieke kerkinterieur voor, tijdens en na de Beeldenstorm. Hilversum: Verloren, 2019 (Gerrit Verhoeven)

The liturgical evidence for bishops remains underexplored. What work there is tends to focus on those rites reserved to the bishop collected in pontificals and therefore ignores the potential of more mundane books in daily use. This case study of a sacramentary used by the bishop of Noyon in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries reveals, through a comparison with similar materials produced for contemporary communities within northern France, the ways in which the bishop’s roles in the secular world were reflected in minor changes made to the liturgy in use in one of his churches. It thus casts fresh light on the less well-known see of Noyon, and at the same time demonstrates the importance of incorporating such mundane materials into modern studies of episcopacy in this period.

Les deux Vies de Thierry de Metz et d’Adalbéron II présentent l’image de l’évêque défenseur de sa cité, constructeur, réformateur, impliqué dans les affaires politico-militaires pour la gloire de Dieu et de l’Empire. Mais cela doit être confronté avec des réalités plus nuancées. Enfin la mémoire de Thierry II - qui n’a pas fait l’objet d’une Vie - est glorifiée par les Gesta du xiie siècle, et matérialisée par sa tombe au chœur de la cathédrale qu’il a rebâtie et dont la monumentalité éclipse le souvenir de ses difficultés avec son beau-frère, Henri II. Si l’on en croit les Gesta du xiie siècle, ces évêques d’Empire, grands aristocrates proches du souverain, ont laissé une image positive car c’est de l’heureuse collaboration avec l’empereur que dépendaient le bien-être de la cité et la prospérité des monastères.

The two sermons on Saint Lawrence by the profilic Carthusian author Petrus Dorlandus survive in a manuscript from the charterhouse in Louvain, which was used for reading at table. Dorlandus’s development of the well-known tale about this martyr is geared to this practice. Inviting his fellow Carthusians to both corporeal and spiritual mastication, Dorlandus focuses on the body of the saint as being inviolate and virginal, and, in a very literal sense, food. These sermons challenge hagiographical gender studies by showing how the male body could be as consistently intact as a female virgin’s and how framing the saint as food and thus as similar to Christ was as relevant to a male Carthusian audience as to any female one. Therefore it invites a re-evaluation of gender in hagiography. How male or female is a saint? Or should saints be seen as being beyond gender?

A painting now kept in the Frick Collection, the so-called Madonna of Jan Vos, has been considered as one of the last works which were commissioned from Jan van Eyck in the final stages of his career. Most researchers agree that the painting was started by Van Eyck in the last year of his life and completed by one of his workshop members after Van Eyck’s death. The donor of the painting was Jan Vos, the Prior of the Carthusian monastery of Genadedal between 1441 and 1450. Evidence from the Order shows that the depicted image was to be venerated by ‘all truly penitent’, and that forty days of indulgence was granted for reciting the Ave Maria and the Pater Noster to the image. The aim of this article is to determine the original function, location, and audience of the Madonna of Jan Vos. In order to contextualize the painting in late-medieval devotional practice, emphasis is laid on the indulgence related to the Madonna of Jan Vos, as the indulgence is a decisive element to consider the raison d’être of the image.