Parergon

This is a handsome volume. Although using a font size smaller than is usual, this book is a pleasure to read: the paper quality is remarkable, and the manifold-coloured illustrations and photographs leap from the page. Happily, the book’s contents live up to its materiality, which is as well, for materiality is the hub around which this work revolves: religious practice sustained through material entanglement, materiality as ritualistic and devotional focus, and materiality as embodiment of both faith and authority.

The introductory chapter is a well-wrought overview of recent research into the Nordic reflexes of medieval Western European Christianity. The key aspects of this field are laid out, with prominence given to the diversity of practice across the medieval West, despite central attempts at harmonisation of liturgy. Notwithstanding this diversity, the point is made that medival religious culture can be consistently characterised as performed ritual piety, in which devotional acts imbued material objects with sacred significance, where the worldly and the divine become fused through codified ritual movements, bodily enactment, and the translation of matter between places and vessels. Key to such an understanding of material practice is the agency of the practitioner, the interconnectedness of people with things, and the notion of potency (rather than agency) embodied in the object.

There are nine chapters in addition to the introductory chapter and an epilogue. Chapters 1–4 examine the research context and aspects of liturgy and materiality in medieval Scandinavia. Chapters 5 and 6 look at corporeality in the context of cults of saints, and Chapter 7 examines material tokens of personal devotion. There then follow two chapters dealing with the religious relevance of the materiality of memory, and the epilogue emphasises the necessity of interdisciplinarity in this field, and reflects on the overall enterprise.

In the first chapter, Morten Larsen synthesises and critically assesses the array of currents and ‘turns’ in Danish medieval religious scholarship, and explores their impact on and relevance to the study of materiality. Importantly, Larsen emphasises the recent trend in considering religion as centrally integrated in a community, rather than being treated as an isolated subsystem within society. Next, Bertil Nilsson focuses on Lund Cathedral, exploring the role and importance of material objects in rites of consecration of both church and cemetery, and revealing important theological conceptions in medieval Christianity in relation to how objects and matter were understood, including the important belief that objects can be possessed by evil powers, for which consecrative exorcism was necessary. Chapters 3 and 4, by Nils Holger Petersen and Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen respectively, both consider different aspects of medieval Scandinavian liturgy. The former looks to the role that the gospel book plays in the Mass, as a venerated physical object, representative of and embodying Christ, while in the [End Page 248] latter of these two chapters, Jürgensen traces the use of material objects, such as friezes, figured sculpture, orders of procession, and church equipment like the chalice and censer, as performing and making manifest the liturgy, inter alia drawing on Hugh of Saint Victor’s statement regarding the three essential and equal elements of church rites: words, motions, and objects.

The role and liturgical importance of relics and mimetic anthropomorphic figures come into view with the next two chapters, which look at particular examples from medieval Denmark of relics and physical anthropomorphic statuary imbued with sacred agency. In Chapter 5, Lena Liepe explores the afterlife of Pope Lucius’s skull at Roskilde, emphasising the relic as pignus, a saint’s pledge of enduring interest and care. In Chapter 6, Mads Vedel Heilskov examines the incorporation of living matter in objects of veneration, such as in a crucifix, so as to create an interface between the divine and physical worlds, thereby facilitating an interaction where the ontological boundaries become permeable. Importantly, both Liepe and Heilskov consider such anthropomorphic interfaces...