Hello and welcome to Talking Tudors, a fortnightly podcast about the ever fascinating Tudor dynasty. My name is Natalie Gruniga and I'll be your host and guide on this journey through 16th century England. Are you ready to step through the veil of time into the dazzling and dangerous world of the Tudor court? Without further ado, it's time to talk Tudors. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Talking Tudors. I'm your host, Natalie Gruniga. Thank you so much for joining me today. Before we begin, I'd like to mention an online event that I'm hosting this weekend called A Bookish Weekend with the Tudors. Over the weekend, the 28th and 29th of September, we'll explore 16th century printing, books and manuscripts through a series of six lectures and one live Zoom discussion delivered by experts in this field. Joining me are Joe Saunders, Dr. Owen Emerson, Kate McCaffrey, Dr. Rebecca Quosemore, Professor Martin Van Elke and Dr. Vanessa Wilke. This is unmissable for lovers of books and Tudor history. For details and to reserve your place, click on the link in the show notes or just Google a bookish we can with the Tudors. Be quick though as ticket sales ends soon. I'd also like to acknowledge and thank the generous listeners who continue to support Talking Tudors on Patreon and extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who's taken the time to rate and review the show. As an independent podcaster, this means a lot to me. If you love the podcast, please consider joining the Talking Tudors Patreon community. Visit patreon.com/talkingtutors for more information. Once you sign up, you'll have access to exclusive posts, additional monthly live talks, a member only book club, patron-only monthly giveaways to name just a few of the rewards. You can also support the podcast and share your love of Tudor history with the world by buying Talking Tudors merchandise. Check out all the products at talkingtutors.threadless.com. Now on to today's episode. I'm thrilled to welcome Dr. Amy Jeffs to the podcast to chat about her new book, Saints, a new legendary of heroes, humans and magic. Dr. Jeffs is an author, artist and medievalist. During her PhD in art history at the University of Cambridge, she co-convened a project researching medieval pilgrim souvenirs at the British Museum. She then worked in the British Library's Department of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts. Now a Somerset-based author, she illustrates her books. Storyland, a new mythology of Britain, was published in 2021. It was a Sunday Times bestseller and a Waterstones Book of the Month, as well as being shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year. Wild Tales from Early Medieval Britain was published in 2022. Its audiobook, which included seven original songs co-written and performed by Amy, was named Audio Book of the Week by The Guardian and The Times. Let's dive straight into our conversation. Welcome to Talking Tutors, Amy. How are you? Really well. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Maybe if we could just start with an introduction, you just telling us a little bit about you and your background. Yes, so my name is Amy. I am a medievalist by trade, art historian, but I began my education, my higher education with Early Medieval and Wolf Western European Languages and Literature, and also the production of manuscripts. I was very interested in that. I did a very, very niche course, University of Cambridge, undergraduate course, called Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic, and voted Old English Language and Literature, Old Norse Language and Literature, and Medieval Latin, and hodecology and paleography, so the history of bookmaking, and for the whole manuscript period of handmade books from their kind of genesis up to the printing prints, really, and script histories. They're looking at medieval script systems and different hierarchies of script that are very formalized. And in my third year, I jumped across the history of art to pursue a study of medieval art, especially metalwork from the early medieval period and manuscripts of illumination, and that's then, you know, I was still very much in an early period at that point, but for my masters, I moved into the Romanesque period with making a meaning in medieval art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and I ended up doing my dissertation on about a 14th-century manuscript. When I say on a 14th-century manuscript, it often sounds like I vandalized something in a public collection, but I didn't write it on and on a manuscript. And then I continued studying that, researching that manuscript, along with other 14th-century English illuminated manuscripts of my PhD. And I was very interested in the contents of these manuscripts, obviously, but they happen to be sort of origin myths of Britain, origin stories being in translation for a Norman Plantagenet sort of elite or ruling classes often, and so presenting a view of the deep history of Britain that supported the imperial ambitions of the contemporary ruling classes. And this remains relevant well into the Tudor period as well. This was a mythic history, then perceived as history proper of giants and prophesying goddesses and Trojans that really connected Britain, this puny little island at the edge of the known world with no good stories to its name, but of course it did have something not ones written down by apostles or classical authors, connected this island to the center of the map, the world map, as it was perceived then to the biblical and classical heartlands. And so this story gave real kudos to the brute legend. So, anyway, this is what I got into when I was working on my PhD, and I was suddenly aware of that these stories were really actually good stories in their own right, exciting stories. So I started illustrating them with lino-cut illustrations, and that turned into series of articles for Country Life magazine, which then on Britain's mythic topography, which then turned into a book proposal, which became my first book, Storyland, a new mythology of Britain. Then I did a smaller book called Wild Tales from Early Medieval Britain, which went back to my early studies of the earlier period, and the kind of very mysterious Old English elegies and Welsh and Glenyan, and very curious, heavily narrative objects like the Walesbone Frank's Casket. And now I have just received, yesterday, my box of orthocopies of Saint, a new legendary of heroes, humans, and magic, which is really rooted. I didn't actually mention while I was doing my PhD, this is actually crucial to the current book. I was working in the British Museum on a research project about medieval pilgrim souvenirs and secular badges. Badges, ES, not badgers, which is one of the constant issue people, old school friends, would think I was digitizing their evil badges. But these amazing pilgrim souvenirs, especially often depicted, saints who were venerated at the time and moments from their legends, and many of them had been found in the foreshores of the Thames in the Victorian period and collected with the British Museum. And so I became really fascinated by the idea of these little, very lowly, lead alloy, cues for narrative that were just in the mud of London, in their hundreds, in their thousands. I mean, as a matter of this, over 730 in the British Museum, secular and sacred iconographies, and the similar numbers, if not more in the Museum of London. And then we find them also in Bristol Harbour, they've found a per fleet in King's Lynn, also in the old medieval sewers and solesbury, and they've gone into the collection at Solvea, then they've got hundreds too. And that these stories, I just suddenly was really excited about these stories. I mean, I was able to read these images. And so Gatsun got me planted the seed of this, I sewed the seed for this idea of writing a book about saints' legends, about this amazing storytelling culture, where the tales are not, they're far more unruly and unofficial than maybe we assume that many of their subjects are completely legendary, not at all historical, that their structures and form have a lot of, a lot in common with fairy tale and folklore, and that we don't know these stories, not because they aren't interesting, or intimately connected. Many of them have sort of spin-off stories that connect them intimately to the British landscape or the North Western European landscape, even though they, but that these stories were actively suppressed in the Protestant Reformation. And so we lost them as a result of authoritarian regime, not because they aren't super cool. And so I have chosen a number of stories, 30 or so stories, for this book, I've retold them as fiction, going through the year January to December, according to the same days in the St. Space Day, and then I've written a commentary that comes after each story, sort of placing that saint in context. Some of them are native to, and some of them are kind of imported, but it also tells the story of the rise and fall of the medieval cult of saints, all the way up to the Protestant Reformation and the destruction of the shrines, and it's just, for me, it's just a really exciting story about the push and pull of popular fervor versus the kind of orthodox theology, which is a changing thing throughout the history of the church, but how the cult of saints didn't really sit easy for the whole period for which the medieval cult of saints existed. So yeah, that's really, that's me, and that's my work, and saints are down on the 12th of September, and I'm really excited to have it, finally, and to take it around to bookshops and talk about it and meet people. Yeah, that sounds so exciting, and your work and your studies sound absolutely fascinating, so I wanted to ask you, Amy, a little bit more about saints. So in case our listeners haven't really studied this area very much, what role did they actually play in medieval Christian world? In this really early period where missionary work is still happening, where people like Boniface, who is living in the 8th century, I believe, he's going into places like Frisia, where people are, yeah, Christian, and those kinds of missionaries found relics to be very effective. I mean, the cult of saints was already in motion at this point, with, after the persecution of the Christians under the Romans, there wasn't a formal canonization process, but there were heroic death that were recognized by the Christian communities within the Roman Empire, and those communities would have had begun venerating the tombs of those who had been killed, and who had refused to renounce their faith under torture or whatever else that was precious placed on them. And so already, there was a kind of cult of martyrs, and this, then, this veneration of bones of their bones or bones of holy figures from the Bible enabled missionaries to kind of transport body parts into unconverted territories. And these were just a particularly effective way of, I guess, a kind of a focal point or a religious object that people, that inspired people's imaginations, and that the relic veneration seemed to be an effective missionary tool. And so there's an amazing letter from Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century, to Bishop Meletus, the first Bishop of London, he's an Italian man, probably. And Pope Gregory the Great says, "Don't destroy the old temples. Take out the furnishings and replace them with altars and relics of the saint, and don't stop the people from sacrificing from killing animals, but stop them from sacrificing them to the old gods. But you can keep killing animals on the dedication day of that saint or the stay of that saint, and you can eat the animal as part of the celebrations around that." And so you see how relic veneration is not only a tool for conversion, it also then becomes part of the way in which Christianity is assimilated into the lives of people who hadn't been practicing Christianity for most of their lives. And it sort of allows that integration to take place, and the idea of this person who died on a particular day, and it gives you particular days on which to celebrate and have festivities. But by the later period, they have become, I mean, there's an interesting, initially it's all about relics, the veneration of relics. We zoom forward quite a few hundred years, there's then a shift from needing to visit a saint's relic, relics in order to experience that sanctity, or to be touched by that sanctity, to the veneration of images of the saint, and actually the relics become less important. And this is a very crucial thing in the build-up to the reformation, this line between what is idolatry and the role of images in that. People would have experienced saints, therefore, in the form of relics, in the form of images, not only kind of panel paintings or conventional paintings as we think of them on a separate board, but also narrative imagery painted onto the walls of churches and into secular buildings as well. And many other kinds of media, sort of the outsides of the Clédéasal buildings, maybe also in manuscripts or on tiles, tiles, like in slippewear, was a very popular form of narrative imagery, or medium for narrative imagery. And then they would have also had the legends, you know, some of them are because they're on a saint's feast day, the churches would, and in abbe's and things, they would weed the saint's legend, and they might read it in some settings that might be read in Latin, but also households that, by the later Middle Ages, when the laity were much more literate than especially the higher echelons of society were able to read, they won't have collections of legends called legendaries, like the South English legendary, which are written in Middle English and would have been and are in, you know, very readable verse, entertaining, very dramatic, really good kind of the original period drama for a Sunday night, for the family to consume. And so I think it's what this book made me realise, and of course, yeah, pilgrim souvenirs and badges and images like that, that saints were everywhere in medieval Christian Europe. This was just part of life, it was part of, I mean, you know, just the oaths that people's war and taking, you say, by Saint Martin, would have been, it would have just been everywhere, constantly, and daily references, and that sort of things. I will also say like the, and then the taking the mick out of it too, because medieval Christians had a really good sense of humour, and so that kind of inversion, and I talk about the difference between inversion and subversion in the book, is they take the mick out of it not to undermine the saints or the cult of saints, but to undermine gullible pilgrims or, you know, the, or the silliness of some aspects of the cult of saints, because it does verge on the ridiculous quite a lot, and I think there was a consciousness of that, so it's just everywhere. And in terms of how these cults of saints spread, wasn't mainly through these relics being transported or moved, or were there other ways that people found out about this? Well, I think the power of the stories is a big part of it, so you've got your, you know, relics of Saint Cuthbert at Durham Cathedral, but you've also, you know, within 50 years of his death, 50 or so years of his death, you've got the venerable bead writing the first life of Cuthbert, not the first surviving one where it describes his nightly immersions in the sea and his prayer in the, in the freezing cold water off from people away from his Hermitage on the Pharn Island, and then getting out of the sea and then standing there just to dry in the, in the wind, and the otters coming out of the sea and winding themselves around his ankles to dry his feet, and that these stories are the intangible dimension to the surviving built heritage that we have, or the artifacts like Cuthbert's coffin or like Durham Cathedral, Durham itself wouldn't be there in this form if it weren't for the cult of Saint Cuthbert, but it's really, it's all about, to my mind, the power of the story of the Hermit that is so desperate for his solitude that he, when he's at the end of his life offered the chance to become the Bishop of Hexum, the honor, he, he says, oh, I really, he really didn't want to go that far inland, he's living out on this island beyond Lindisfon on a little Hermitage surrounded by sea birds and marine animals, and he, he says, I'll, I suppose I should, you know, do my duty, but I'll become Bishop of Lindisfon, and the current Bishop of Lindisfon, he can go and beat the Bishop of Hexum, and so he does that for a couple of years, but it eventually just goes back to his Hermitage, can't, can't bear to be away, and within a year he's, he's died out in his Hermitage, that compounded with the otter, and it's just very moving, moving story of, of holiness and, and dedication to hard life to excuses, that kind of exercise and, and prayer and all of that, I think it's a, that's really what is powering the monks, their devotion to comfort, and they're taking his relics away from the Viking incursions to Chester the street where they rest for a while, and then on to Durham, and the, the foundation of the cult there, then the, the, he was, to his coffin was opened at least twice, and they find various objects in there, like a, a gospel book that's now in the British library, a gospel of Saint John, and from, from his, you know, made a very, an early medieval product with the earliest surviving intact Western binding, not that it was then, but it is now. Yeah, it's just, I, I think, I think it's their stories, I think it's the part of the story that, and that's also comes across in the Pilgrim's souvenirs, the, the way in which they just like trigger one, like if you, that's on what Thomas Beckett ones like often show, there are many, many different iconographies for Thomas Beckett, Pilgrim's souvenirs, and one shows him returning from exile on his horse just before it all kicks off again, and Henry's Knights come into attack him in the cathedral, and, and he could just imagine people saying, oh, that's that bit in the story, or that's, you know, I think these, these were familiar. And so, Amy, could you tell us a little bit about who the most popular saints were in the 15th and 16th centuries? I know lots of the, the Tudor Queens, for example, associated themselves with certain, certain saints, usually named saints, but yeah, that would be wonderful if you could tell us a bit about that. Mm, for sure. So one thing I find, actually, I'm going to find this in the book, which is right next to me, and then I'll definitely get it right, because there was a very popular group of saints, 11,000 saints, led by Ursula. Ursula was led to have been a British princess, who was Christian, but she was betrothed to a pagan prince, and she said, I'll marry him, if you let me, if I'm allowed to go on pilgrimage to Rome and take 11 noble women and each of them take, I'm going to get my maths really confused here. There you go, there's a thousand, you're going to just take a thousand or some things servants. Anyway, it ends up with 11,000 of them. That's the main, that's the answer to the complex psalm I'm trying to do. And she, they do this pilgrimage to Rome, and they accrue even more people, more followers, till there's 26,000 of them, according to the Golden Legend, which is a really popular compendium of saints, legends, that circulated in Europe from the 13th century, and North Africa, if I should say not just Europe. Then they come back from their pilgrimage, and they stop at Cologne and Cologne is invaded by the Huns, and they all receive martyrdom except for one, Cordula, who hides in one of their boats, but then comes out the next morning and is like, sorry, I hid, and then she gets martyred too. And so their feast days are the 20th of October for 10,999 of them, and then Cordula's feast days on the 21st of October, because he hid, but they, they were very popular, but then it was said, that obviously there was tons and tons of relics for the 11,000 virgins, but it was said that if an imposter relic got in, it would be miraculously ejected, and relicery busts of these very pious late medieval noble women were all over the courts of Europe and the monasteries. And I, one thing I found very interesting in relation to Tudor dynasty is to regarding Catherine of Aragon and her arrival, I'm just going to read paragraph or two. That's all right. Yes, please do. In the November of 1501, England welcomed a Spanish princess called Catherine of Aragon. When her ship had docked at Southampton, she had been accompanied by 11 English women of the upper nobility, all dressed alike, along with a larger company of knights wives. They were intended to make Catherine look like Ursula with her 11,000 virgins. On London Bridge, they met another Saint Ursula tableau. Catherine then processed through the streets of London to her betrothed Prince Arthur Tudor, the brother of the future King Henry VIII. Thus embodied by Catherine and Arthur, the legendary British princess would marry the legendary British warlord. Pageantry elevated both figures and made one into an honorary Britain. The pageantry surrounding Catherine's arrival in England shows yet again how Saint's legends could help convey politically important ideas. But Arthur would die young and she would marry his brother, the future King Henry VIII. It starts to change his mind about how politically useful Saint's legends are. I thought that was amazing how there's also a thing that we can easily forget as these live performances inspired by Saint's legends and the political function of them. And it took a long time after the main events of the Reformation for the mystery plays to be suppressed because this was such a popular civic event, Pross, England and Britain at large, where guilds would come together and stage different parts of liturgical dramas and Saint's legends. There's a really amazing reclamation poem by a reformer. It gives an insight as well into what a late medieval town bento might have looked like on a piece like the Corpus Christi when it was very popular to put on the plays. So this is Thomas Nargurg, the Popeish Kingdom, Britain in 1570. Christ's passion here derided is with sundry masks and plays that Ursula with maidens awed off past amid the waves and Valiant George, with spear thou killist the dreadful dragon here. The devil's house is drawn about where in their doth appear, a wondrous sort of damned sprites with foul and fearful look, great Christopher doth wade and pass with Christ amid the brook, Sebastian full of feathered shafts, the dint of dart doth feel, their walketh Catherine with her sword in hand and cruel wheel, the chalice and the singing cake with Barbara is led, and sundry other pageants played in worship of this bread. So I think we've got Catherine there, we've got Saint Christopher, he's a super popular one, and there's over 130 surviving wall paintings of Saint Christopher in parish churches in England and Wales that show gigantic, I mean I think he's in a really like slightly corny way, the original BFG, that appeal of giants who are everywhere else giants are mean and scary and threatening, but Christopher, he begins the story as his name is Reprobatus, Reprobates or Scoundrel, but he ends up carrying the Christ child across the river and despite the increasing weight of the Christ child to the point that it's as heavy as the whole world, he manages to get across and put the child safely down on the other side, at which point the child reveals himself as Christ and says you did carry the weight of the world because that's what I bore when I died for humankind and this is often depicted, this is this moment with the child on his shoulders and the rising water and he's always huge, it is the moment he's becoming the official friendly giant and you go into church and it's really amazing, he's often right in front of the south door as you come in sort of on the opposite wall, so it's the first thing you see, there's enormous giant just becoming the goody that he's going to be, but there was sometimes in a company with an inscription that translates very roughly as if you look on Christopher today you will not die and so there was this belief in his like talismanic power, Saint Catherine I think is such an intriguing saint, she was very very popular, the ones with the really dramatic and distinctive martyrdoms seem to become especially popular in the late Middle Ages, she is a philosopher and she vanquishes all the philosophers in the Roman Empire with her rhetoric and her her ability to to argue and her wisdom, I think one thing that I was quite interested in in the writing of this book was whether she was a kind of feminist icon because that's where our minds go I think straight away is all you know how intriguing one of the most popular saints were the young girl who is really really well educated and really brilliant and you think then okay so you know she was a very popular saint, the women is that because they are saying her as a role model and I think the answer is probably not, you know this is is a time in which I think one of the things we assume about saints especially if you're if anyone listening is a practicing Catholic and I was raised Catholic you saints are presented as role models but this isn't the case in the Middle Ages, the particular brand of virtus or strength or power is a tool with which they're going to protect you and it raises them closer to the holy ear, the ear of God, so that they can plead on your behalf to God and so I don't think that young women were kneeling in front of me somewhere probably but leaning in front of Catherine in general and thinking I should I too should be a great philosopher what they were probably thinking was she's really good at arguing and like I've done some stuff and like I really want to go to heaven and so I'm going to get Catherine on side because with her amazing skills of argumentation she's going to advocate for me at the divine court and it's actually a story in saints in which a very very unfortunate program to the shrine of St James has I'm not going to say what he's done but it's absolutely awful he's done a terrible thing to himself and he ends up actually dying of his injuries and he gets taken by devils to they get taken to hell but he gets redirected by St James to a kind of heavenly version of the saint of the basilica of St Peter's in Rome and St James because this guy's a faithful pilgrim St James then does this like full-on argues in the tribunal that's at the tribunal of of heaven argues for Gerald this poor pilgrim to be released from the devils and he argues to the virgin Mary and she's sitting there and I've enthroned listening and so it's just a really I think really excellent and interesting insight into this like the secondary world building of the afterlife in the medieval Catholic imagination or Christian imagination and so yeah I can I can imagine people kneeling in front of a rude screen with an image of St Catherine or St Barbara or St Agnes but especially St Catherine she's really good at arguing and imagining her pleading on their behalf oh I did want to talk about Mary I think she's a really important one because I mean she is like the most probably the most popular thing devotion to marrying late medieval England and early modern England is through the roof and she something I was really interested in is the her is that the story of her and right it was it's from the apocryphal gospel of pseudo Matthew and it says that she's riding to Bethlehem and she see the dates palm covered in dates and she asks Joseph to pick some for her and he says he's a bit recalcitrant and says like that the one that got you pregnant pick the dates something on those lines and and the tree recognizing that she's got the child of God in her womb bows down so that she can pick her full of dates and this was reframed for a English audience with a cherry tree instead of a date palm and it appears in the end town plays and and Joseph is particularly kind of led the one that got you pregnant pick the cherries this is wild work like I don't want to do that I don't want to go off a cherry tree and the other thing that is that is because it's seasonal that it's the idea that the cherries have set in midwinter and so it is like a miraculous on seasonal fruit they then and then Mary's able to gather her fill and I've got a whole chapter on cherries I was really obsessed with the symbolism of cherries in late medieval England but there's an amazing panel late medieval panel painting in battle hall now it was from a Dominican priory convent I think and the underpaint it shows that several saints all in a row these big iconic super saints in the middle is the virgin and in the it was recently conserved very thoroughly and in the under drawing they found that the virgin was going to be holding a lily but in the painting it was changed to a sprig of wild cherry with little cherries on it so yeah I won't go into the whole cherry thing because I'm really really into the 15th century cherry thing and if the reformation hadn't happened maybe we'd all still be obsessed with cherries of the symbol of abundance and life's riches like life's free riches I think that's what they come to symbolize and the virgin I think there's a fantastic story that kind of an insight into maybe ordinary people's devotion it's in the the chapbook or the commonplace book I mean of what's he called Robert Raines I think his name is and he it's full of sort of everyday like accounts and things he but he's also putting like stories that he thinks are interesting or valuable and he tells a story of a man who was completely persisted with the virgin like he'd gone to he'd gone to school he'd had an education but all he could remember was the the Hail Mary the prayer and he would just say it all the time he was so devoted to her that when he died a lily brew on his grave and every leaf was inscribed of a maria and and the villagers are like a bit freaked out by this and so they decide to dig down to find where this lily's going from and they did deeper and deeper and deeper until they actually reach his corpse and it's growing the root is in his mouth it's so weird and amazing there's this story of this like this corpse of the lily root in his mouth because he said that our memory of prayer so much in his life I don't think that's obviously a real true story but the bit about it I feel like it comes from oh it could be a true story you know I won't go so far as to make that claim but the bit that I think you can see glimmers of social history and is this idea of of people just latching on to a prayer or latching on to a saint and that bit surely there's there's it's meant to be believable that there's people like that who are just always talking about the virgin or there's another story that I read telling in the book about St Martin about a farmer who's always praying by St Martin and then St Martin appears to him and grants him four wishes like a kind of saint eugeney and it all goes horribly downhill I'll leave that as a cliffhanger oh I love them they're such amazing stories aren't they they really do tell us a lot about the time and the people so on that note what do these saints offer us in terms of insight into the the medieval mind did you did you come up with any kind of can you make any generalizations about that yeah well I think sometimes when you study political history or you study history from I don't know you sometimes you sometimes come across this kind of like oh well they lost so many children they were used to it or or weren't they hilarious like not like holy grail kind of Monty Python representations of absurd people and it's like they are like there is hilarity because there's hilarity whichever in all humans and it you know it carries on whatever periods you're looking at but I think one thing I found really touching was like reading I don't end up in I didn't include Henry the sixth in the end but I read various miracles to do with Henry the sick he was a popular cult never canonized but there were many many reports of him saving children and so people would this was by the later period people generally made pilgrimage in thanks for a miracle that had already happened rather than going to receive a miracle and so lots of the miracles reported at the shrine of Henry the sixth were to do with accidents that happened and and how he had then appeared or intervened or rescued and many of them are amazing catalogue of childhood accidents every day accidents things like a little girl getting tangled up in a leather strap that was hanging from a door and sort of being aphyxiated by it but then coming round when her mother prayed to Henry the sixth or a child falling into a mill race and drowning but then appearing to come back to life once they had been pulled out and on the bank and the various saints have been invoked but then they invoked Henry the sixth and then the child sort of recursusitates and but what you get portrayed in these stories is the grief of the parents and the terror and that moment of panic that you can't even look at too closely actually over but it's real and it's not oh well we've got 14 more yeah exactly yeah so that's the genuine the desire to to find protection to find talismans to find safety to have some agency and and not and there's also I think something I was interested in was the was a line between magic and magical incantation or sort of religious magic and prayer in a more straightforward sense I think prayer theologically speaking and I might be corrected on this but it's it's an offering up it's a a relinquishment of control the saying you know please don't let this happen but I I can't impact on this I just have to offer it up to something bigger than me or please could this happen you know but whereas the idea that you say certain words you perform certain actions and if you do it right it will affect a change a supernatural hinge that's something that anthropologically as I understand it it's perceived more as a religious as a magical practice and so it's that perception of of what kind of agency you have in relation to your actions and so I think I was I we were one of things I found really interesting exploring in this book is that is at an anthropological level a lot of what medieval pilgrims and christians at various levels within medieval society is practicing is probably more like religious magic and charms and I found the holoforness and the imagination and the symbolism and the objects and words that's associated with this kind of practice really just brilliant and and I think it gets seized by reformers and and and turned into and slurred with the word paganism which I think lives on in our a perception of medieval Christianity but now I think most people think paganism is quite cool or that idea is quite cool so we no longer got that reformer like oh pagan you know but I think we still overstate it to give an example there's those Saint Christopher you know look at my face and you won't die today that's a good example another one is well maybe this doesn't this is a bit more of a blurry one but there's a really one of my favorite favorite pilgrim souvenirs is is was from the shrine of Thomas Beckett and it's one at the British Museum and it's in the form of a little hollow cast peacock it's all crumpled now and it's got a cylindrical hollow cylindrical base which probably was designed for it to be stuck onto the top of a pilgrim star and the peacock is kind of in the round three-dimensional and its tail is is held up and is open and it's got a little hook on its chest probably for suspending a Canterbury bell because there's another very popular kind of pilgrim souvenir from Canterbury was a little tiny bell made of tin and the peacock has also got Thomas Beckett standing on its back with his hand raised in blessing you know I think it's a really cool little collection of allesmen so you've got the the bell bells ringing has in many cultures and not just medieval christian cultures is a way of warding off evil spirits or thunderstorms bells and church towers rung during thunderstorms and that kind of thing and the eyes of the peacock looking out at the road is kind of the idea of the many watching eyes the peacock itself is a herald of danger along with cockles and other birds like that that cry out at danger and then the saint with his hand raised in blessing also looking forward when you had this on your staff with its little jingly bell and you had the staff ahead of you on the road all of those eyes and the saint's hand and the bell and the crying bird are all ahead of you as you walk home from Canterbury I think it's the most camp and wonderful object and it's got it's got some similar some there are some other ones that maybe don't have the saints they're just a cockrel or you know similar kind of meanings I think so I think there's you get from that the way in which there's an earnestness to the quest for protection and for having some kind of control over the vicissitudes of life but also a joy and a kind of creative humor and an aesthetic delight in creating those forms of protection that I think is also very human and very relatable yeah it really is and given how integral saints were and everything that you've spoken about and the fact that they were everywhere as you say you know I'm thinking of jewels that have the Catherine wheel and things that people warn all that kind of thing what impact then does the Reformation have on saints the cults of saints and on the people as well yes I mean so one of the things that's a big deal in the Reformation is whether images are being worshipped as images whether it's idolatrous or not and there's these stories of iconoclasts sticking pins in images to see if they bleed and it's not just an idea that that there's something theoretically wrong with worshiping an image but that the act of idolatry creates a space for a devil to move in I think that is an interesting revelation from writing this book is that idolatry creates a diabolical vacuum it's not just about the holiness no longer being there and this is something that that crops up throughout the book is the presence of demons the threat of demons you know so like people like Thomas Moore and Erasmus there's a Darius who are not yeah I mean Thomas Moore's obviously he's out now Catholic doesn't want reform doesn't various Erasmus is a bit more he's he's not a reformer but he's a bit more kind of middle of the road but they they're kind of they're saying all come on what's the harm you know there's a shrine in pickety where Valerie she said to cure people of genital illnesses and so there's just loads of wax willies hanging all around the shrine you know sorry to use a really silly word because it's kind of it's a literative so had to and own vulvas hanging all around the same shrine and Thomas Moore like he kind of writes about it quite satirically but he's also like eh you know there's also a ring at the shrine that men can put them their gear through as it's called in the text to uh and then it gets prayed over if they've got issues so and this is this is laughed at in by the text but it's also then how the said like I'll come on what's what's wrong with that whereas reformers are saying it's dangerous it makes for space for the devil and I think what's quite interesting what I find like an interesting question and a sort of cliffhanger at the end of the book is and there's lots more I'm not this isn't a big spoiler or anything but just what what taking away all of that color and all of that protection and all of those symbols and ideas and stories but not taking the devil away what this is is something it's like other you know many other scholars have asked is it what you know what does that leave people with to protect themselves and it's interesting my my other half is a carpenter and a conservation carpenter and a lot of the buildings that he works in have those daisy wheels and you know the the apotropaic symbols scratched above fireplaces but they only really appear from the post-reformation period in the post-reformation period and and so this is kind of like I won you know this interesting scrabbling for new permissible means to protect yourself and maybe there aren't any and so that's that's I think an impact of this suppression another one is this the loss of all of these stories that that I think we tend now to associate saints legends because there's still because the catholic faith lives on and because saint the cause of saints lives on in countries that or within catholic communities in catholic countries maybe we think that that in the secular worst or in the Anglican worst or whatever form of wherever you live or whatever you believe that these there isn't we have no claim to these stories but actually many of the saints that I I discussed in in my book are no longer perceived as as legitimate saints by the catholic church that you can celebrate their these days but they're all legend they've got no historical basis St Christopher being one of them and many of them are so or others that there's sort of local dimension to their legend is irrelevant or something so also what I'm hoping to achieve with this book is is to invite people to see saints legends wherever they come from as part of their own heritage and the heritage of of storytelling or human storytelling and and you know related to and part of the same world as folklore and fairy tale in there well thank you I think you've given us so much food for thought and you've suddenly inspired me to become more familiar with these with these legends and stories so I appreciate there's one more thing that we do on talking tutors at the end and that is what I call tend to go so these are just 10 little questions to get to know you a little bit better that's all right so the first one is do you have a favorite historic site that you like to visit when I grew up I grew up in Bostonshire I was raised catholic when I was either family I'm looking on my dad's side of the family and we'd also make churches and the Anglican church that we went to was Saint Mary's and Great Wickham little Wickham even and it's a 12th century church with later editions you know big valley because that's Wickham means wider valley and and it's got a little stream running past it and it's a gorgeous little English country church and on the side of the hill people's hill that overlooks that part of the valley there's the remains of a Roman villa called Wickham Roman villa and I mean I just have like I just have fun memories of it anyway because it was where I grew up and so I remember cycling up towards the Roman villa on a really lovely summit of the day and I was wearing it for summer's dress on the day that the there was a Roman reenactment happening and all of these local men were um were marching up the hill behind me and they were heckling in the like the sweetest way like come on boys like I was like and it was really fun so I had just happy associations with that they were there in their flannels and an armor and the villa itself just the the way it looks out of I just imagine it had baths it had it has a mosaic and it looks it was abandoned I think in the fourth this century as many were and I imagine that Saint Mary's is built on a site of an earlier probably it early medieval church early in the 12th century and then probably before that you know if we take mellitus a lesser murder Scott from Gregory the Great so it'd been maybe a reflection of what was happening across the country then maybe there was a Roman temple place of worship down by that little stream you know it kind of makes sense that the you can see the church from the villa and maybe they when the Roman people were there the Romano British occupants of that villa were there they were looking down at some kind of structure for their their worship I like I really like getting an insight into networks and connections and a sense of a continuum of the past and I think the historical sites that inspire the most inspire me the most are the ones where you can you can join the dots in that way there's also the cool thing about that villa and I don't know if this is completely ahistorical and somebody an expert in snails can let me know but there's a about three miles further around that the escarpment of hills that there's a colony of roman snails of the scale of snails like the really big ones and they're protected there and I don't know whether because it's the Romans ate snails right so I don't know whether the Romans brought those snails and in typical snail fashion they've only managed to go about two miles from the villa in 2000 years and now they're like oh this will do so anyway I it's those those links there's also around the villa walnut trees growing and I believe that walnuts were a favorite food of the Romans I don't think the trees are 2000 years old but water you know what if they are the great great great great great grandchildren of walnuts brought by the that roman community so anyway I just I like those that's such an amazing place little wickham and the roman villa and the church of st marys and the snails and the walnut tree oh I love it I love all of that all those layers of history so I can see so many wonderful books behind you so what is the last book or maybe one that you're currently reading so last book that you read or one that you're currently reading I just read the gospel of mary magdalene I was just really a friend said oh we should read that and I was like yeah I never even thought about that so I kind of I think I associate the kind of stuff around mary magdalene a bit too much with much more recent holy grail speculation type thing and so I was like all right you know how historical that is but then I actually realize you know it is a papyrus you know it's preserved on papyrus ancient papyrus scrolls and there's a translation by somebody whose name I've gotten Karen I'll have to it we'll have to put it up at the end of the podcast but she's a harvard professor and she writes about he gives a sort of early christian setting for this time when when the gospels hadn't yet been chosen for the official bible when it's all still in discussion when how much of Judaic scripture ended up in the bible was still a subject of debate and the politics around that at the time and how christianity inherited a lot of greek koroman thought and philosophy especially neoplatonism and the gospel of mary magdalene take its amazing you know she's standing there after the death after the resurrection and the gospels are all in confusion and I think it's andrew says to her like you were close you were closest to cyclical to christ could you tell us and does he tell you anything to explain what's going on and so she then stands there so it gives you have to speak about this in this private conversation she had with christ and she explains it and it uses very different kind of language from what we use to in the gospels and it's much more platonic much more gnostic it's much more about a kind of genderless god and so fascinating so fascinating she and she kind of says and it's also quite just comforting to read now she's don't listen to people who say look that way or look this way she says you've got it within you and it's you know it's a really inspiring and quite a surprising read yeah I love that actually he's a little tidbit so jane cmore associated herself with mary magdalene because she didn't have a name saint port j she went for mary magdalene so there you go she was a mary magdalene yeah and the golden legend story for mary magdalene is absolutely fantastic i don't include her in saints but i would really urge readers to get a copy of yacobus de veragene's golden legend and read the mary magdalene chapter because it's super kind of horrifying and interesting that sounds amazing and what about an ideal sunday morning for you what does that look like oh well i currently have a three-year-old and a one-year-old i would really like to sleep till six if that's all right so at least they are would be really nice and then probably walk or walk out on someone where there are absolutely no words quite enough words in my life no writing okay great and do you do you have a new skill that you would like to learn oh dear i'd really like to learn gymnastics but you know people have a teacher to seven-year-olds you could do it you could do some lessons gymnastics yeah i don't need for private gymnastics tutor but my daughter to a place that you know that does like is a gymnastics center near here and i went up to these like these young girls that were running the door not yet like teenage girls clearly gymnasts at the place and i was like tutored lessons for adult thoughts and they were like no sorry never mind and in terms of inspiration what inspires you or how do you find inspiration if you're feeling a little bit uninspired start writing something because quite often it gets interesting i i find i don't know i sort of hit a steam of inspiration with medieval up like primary sources and chronicles and and later stuff you know as well and and i right now i can rely on that like if i've got my head into like i find and i i hope that listen as well identify with this and i just don't sound like a psychopath but i i find um looking after children challenging you know i i love it and i feel blessed but there's also a lot of stew time like stewing time in your own head and if you tell them what's going on in your head they really don't care and as you don't bother with that and little things can grow and you can also just you know when one of them's watching something other ones are sleepy just sort of i'll watch like do for two minutes i'll go on social media and and i think you can sort of sort of going back to the gospel of mary magdalene you can sort of find yourself looking this way looking that way getting swept up in in in superficial things and nothing like sorts that out for me more than being alone for an hour and writing something just writing a version of something that's why i quite like the retelling thing because a lot of these old stories don't explain their characters motivations and so just it's like it's like doing a crossword now so you can kind of take take the the map of the plot that the text gives you and kind of try and make sense of it try and make it beautiful as well or to kind of like how would you pen that you know if it's the poem how would you turn it into prose and retain its kind of aura of mystery that's something i just it takes me out of my own hand and i find propane inspiring yeah that's the key isn't it get out of our minds for a little while our thoughts so as a child what did you want to be when you grew up a butcher i just had this idea that i would be a complete found for tall i thought i was going to be i thought i was going to be six foot tall and i was going to wear i can remember imagining myself in fishnets and red stilettos wow because that's what i thought sexy women war and i can remember imagining sitting at a bar having like a cocktail and somebody coming over and being like so what do you do and moving like butcher and i just thought that would be really really alluring i love that i've never had that response before there's never been butcher so that's the first time for everything and what about a country that maybe you haven't seen that you would like to travel to i would love oh does it have to be real no no let's go with the not real one i like that i quite like to go to like the earthly paradise that st brandon finds on this voyage although on that there's a really funny okay so there's um i think actually it's even on the harreford map of mundi there is it an island off the coast of west africa called st brandon's isle and it's put that it's kind of the place of the canary islands so maybe i've actually already been did it went on a cruise ship there once but you know it's like somewhere where the rain never falls but only bubbles up from the ground and the trees are always fruiting and there's like iridescent panthers and but the cool thing is like the there's a depiction of st brandon's isle on the first ever globe i talk about it in this book and what i find really funny so i'm quarter austrian and in austria we don't call potatoes kartofen as germans people from germany who speak germany called erd appel so earth apples but this this map this first ever globe depiction of the earth was made in i think the early 14th century i want to say and it's it was known as the erd appel globe but there's before potatoes had come to europe so they didn't realize that they had given it and it just means earth apple they called it the earth apple globe because it looked like an apple but they unwittingly made it really funny for the rest of human history because then quite soon the potato arrived and it really took the yeah took the rug out from under the seriousness of their of their that yeah st brandon's isle and since isle wonderful love it and very last thing i ask all my guests for a takeaway normally it's a two to take away but i'm more than happy for this to be a saint takeaway or a story takeaway and it's something for our listeners to go off and explore after the episode so sometimes people give websites or books to read or songs to listen to so do you have a takeaway for us go and visit your nearest st christopher look on his face i bet no one's ever more than a few miles away from a st christopher especially close in england and miles absolutely i'm going to be on the lookout now for um st christopher everywhere amy thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today your book sounds absolutely fascinating and i cannot wait to read all those amazing stories so thank you so much thank you so much it was utter joy thank you loved it well that brings us to the end of this episode of talking tutors thank you so much for joining us i absolutely love to hear from listeners so if you have any comments or suggestions or just want to say hi please get in touch with me via my website www.onthetutotrail.com where you'll also find show notes for today's episode if you've enjoyed the show please share the podcast with friends and family and don't forget to subscribe rate and review i also invite you to join our talking tutors podcast group on facebook where you can interact with other tutor history lovers and hear all the behind the scenes news you'll also find me on twitter my handle is on the tutor trail and on instagram as the most happy 78 it's time now for us to re-end to the modern world as always i look forward to talking tutors with you again very soon bye
