St. Christopher & Summertime Saints

Ever worn a St. Christopher medallion and wondered about the man carrying the Christ child across a river? Or heard of St. Uncumber, the bearded female saint invoked by women desperate to escape unwanted marriages? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis is once again joined by historian and storyteller Amy Jeffs, this time to uncover the fascinating stories of medieval saints connected to the summer months. From the legendary Seven Sleepers of Ephesus—precursors to fairy tales like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty—to England’s own warm-weather holy figures, these stories are as strange as they are sacred. More: Edward the Confessor & New Year Saints > https://open.spotify.com/episode/7i4V3LuC73ZezCgtBAlGQ4 St. George & Springtime Saints > https://open.spotify.com/episode/0jtOYqCQAq2AIK23n0gJy4 Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. The narrator was Sophie Gee. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yarnagger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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• 2:34Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 3:16Matt Lewis?

  There's hardly a single day in the year when one saint or another isn't being remembered or celebrated somewhere in the world. Back in January, Amy Jeffs, author of Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic, joined me here on Gone Medieval to tell us about St Edward the Confessor and a few other splendid saints associated with the first wintery months of the year. Then in April, to mark the coming of spring, Amy returned to talk with Eleanor about England's very own springtime patron saint, St George. So now summer is a-coming in and we thought, what better way to celebrate than invite Amy back to pick out for us a few of the more interesting summertime saints? We'll be talking about Uncumbe, the saint called upon by women seeking liberation

• 4:01Matt Lewis?

  from unwanted husbands, and also the legend of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, who were precursors to the stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. But first, if you've ever worn a medallion of St Christopher, carrying the infant Christ, and wondered about the story behind this iconic image, listen up.

• 4:36Speaker 05

  There once lived a giant of a man named Scoundrel, a notorious tower of strength. Scoundrel was driven by a thirst for power, seeking only to serve the greatest and most fearsome of kings.

• 4:54Speaker 05

  First, he sought to serve the King of Men, a mighty ruler whose name struck terror into all who heard it.

• 5:04Speaker 05

  "Serve me well, giant," said the king. "Serve me if you are to be true to your strength."

• 5:13Speaker 05

  Towering over him like a mountain, Scoundrel stood in the king's service. But he soon grew restless.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  Abandoning the king and seeking a higher ruler, he left the court and wandered into the wilderness in search of the devil, the Prince of Darkness, convinced that to serve the darkest of lords would grant him unmatched might.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  "You seek power?" said the devil. "Then join me, and the world shall cower at your feet."

• 5:55Speaker 05

  For a time, Scoundrel followed every command of the devil, obeyed his every whim. But soon, even the Prince of Darkness grew distant and withdrawn, and Scoundrel began to feel a strange unease growing within him. One day, Scoundrel heard the voice of a humble monk.

• 6:15Speaker 05

  "Why do you serve a master who flees from the light?" asked the monk.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  "The true strength is in serving the Almighty." The monk spoke of a king far above all earthly rulers, the King of Heaven. Scoundrel, now curious, approached him.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  "The King of Heaven does not demand power," said the monk.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  "He offers salvation. Will you leave behind your pride, your strength, and serve him?"

• 6:51Speaker 05

  And in that moment, Scoundrel was torn. To serve the Almighty required a different kind of strength, a strength of the heart, not of the body.

• 7:03Speaker 05

  And so, Scoundrel set forth in search of this true king. His journey led him through wild forests, across treacherous rivers and over craggy mountains. The land seemed to conspire against him, but his resolve was unshakable.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  At last, he arrived at a raging river. And there, by the edge, he saw a small child, standing seemingly without fear, gazing at the rushing waters.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  "Will you carry me across, mighty man?" asked the child.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  Scoundrel looked at the child, noting how small and fragile he seemed. But the giant's heart swelled with compassion. He knelt and said, "I will carry you, child, across this stormy river." And so, he lifted the child and stepped into the torrent. With each step, the waters grew fiercer. The river itself seemed to fight against him. The child's weight grew heavier, far heavier than any burden Scoundrel had ever borne. The waters surged, the storm raged. Yet still, the giant pressed forward. And as he reached the other side, breathless and trembling from the ordeal,

• 8:29Speaker 05

  the child spoke, his voice now rich with divine power.

• 8:35Speaker 05

  You have carried the weight of the world upon your shoulders. And in doing so, you have carried me. Know this now. I am Christ, the King of Heaven. The realisation struck Scoundrel like a thunderbolt. The child he had born was none other than the Saviour Himself. And as the child vanished from his sight, a great light filled the sky and the waters of the river calmed. Forever changed Scoundrel, now known as Christbearer or Christopher, knelt upon the shore, his heart ablaze with faith. For he had carried the weight of the Saviour.

• 9:18Speaker 05

  And in doing so, he had found the strength of true service. A strength that was not of the body, but of the soul. Christopher had become the patron of travellers.

• 9:40Matt Lewis?

  Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Amy. Here to talk about summer saints, just as the temperature is ramping up here in the UK at least.

• 9:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's wonderful to be sitting with the windows open, talking about these characters who were so entangled with things like the harvest and Sirius in the night sky.

• 9:58Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, you mentioned Sirius there, which is the star that we particularly associate with summer and with heat. So how does the season of summer sort of particularly lend itself to metaphors and stories in the medieval mind?

• 10:13Speaker 06

  Summertime, if we take that to mean June, July, August, this covers harvest activities. You've got making hay in June, that's the conventional labour of the month. In July, you're cutting the wheat. And in August, you're threshing, you're separating the wheat from the chaff. And of course, all of these things had huge allegorical potential. Haymaker is also the kind of archetype of death with the scythe and the kind of felling of souls. The separating the wheat from the chaff is a biblical metaphor for the separating the souls of the blessed from the damned. These, in the medieval imagination, on the calendar page, you would have the labours

• 10:54Speaker 06

  of the months depicted alongside the zodiac symbol for that month. So here we've got Cancer for June, Leo for July, and Virgo for August. Leo, you've got this blazing lion, this real feeling of heat and power. This was also the month for what were known as the Días Caniculares, or the Puppy Days, which we translate as the Dog Days. So the star Sirius is above the horizon, following Orion. And that's that time of really punishing heat overseen by Sirius. And with Virgo, the basic, age-old symbol of fertility with her kind of sheaf of wheat. And she is both Astraea and the Virgin Mary, bringing in

• 11:38Speaker 06

  the grain, the means for making the year's bread and ale. So all of these stories operate within this context of the summertime heat and the harvest and the abundance, one hopes, from the fields overseen by the stars.

• 11:55Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. We're going to talk first about St Christopher. So listeners will have just heard a story of St Christopher to lead them into our discussion about him. But I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit first about how you sort of first came across St Christopher. There's an interesting story in the book about your first sort of encounter with St Christopher.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  Yes, this was years ago. I was visiting my then boyfriend's house in a little village called Presbury outside Cheltenham. We decided to walk to Hales, which is beyond a village called Winchcombe. I'd heard that it had a parish church with wall paintings. And it was a really hot day, a thunderstorm threateningly hot day. And I remember walking through these fields with our elderly Border Collie and the kind of pollen rising up. It was such an interesting way of getting to this church because we didn't see any roads and we dipped down into the valley. And there was Hales Church in front of us. I just had this overwhelming sense that we had entered a foreign country, that we'd crossed some kind of threshold.

• 12:56Speaker 06

  And the church has no tower. It doesn't look like the conventional English parish church. It's like a reliquary, a house-shaped reliquary with a little thing for a bell, not a tower, just like a little frame made of stone. And we walked up to the church and it was open and just grasshoppers, just birdsong. Went inside and...

• 13:16Speaker 06

  Went in through the south doors. The first view I had was of the north wall. And your eyes adjusting to the light. And there was this colossal wall painting of a man. And his feet were at shoulder height, my shoulder height. And he towered ten foot above us and he was holding a child on his shoulder and he's wading through water. And it felt like theatre, walking in and seeing this image of Saint Christopher on the wall. And then we walked around and looked at the other wall paintings. I'd been studying medieval history and culture and things for a few years by then. Nowhere had made me feel as though

• 13:57Speaker 06

  landing in medieval England would be like going to a completely foreign country, that this was a world apart from what I knew. And just seeing these funny little almost like manuscript marginalia on the walls, like strange little elephantine creatures and mermaid-like creatures. And then narrative scenes from saints' lives and this colossal Christopher. I just felt like I could have stayed there for hours and hours. We didn't. We walked back and the rain clouds broke and the Alderley Border Colli was really resentful. So it sowed the seed for this, this idea that there was something very enchanting about the stories and the characters in the medieval cult of saints.

• 14:38Matt Lewis?

  Interesting that even someone who studies medieval history can be kind of caught a little bit unawares by the environment of a church that feels slightly more genuinely medieval. Like you say, it almost feels like a different country. It's not the bare, cold, grey walls that we're used to seeing today.

• 14:54Speaker 06

  There's something wonderful about going into a church that is more in touch with this post-Reformation side, let's say. But the feeling was that it was like going in and thinking, this is a visual language I don't speak. There are hilarious examples of medieval people struggling to speak this language. Like, anyway, there's a fifteenth century sequel to the Canterbury Tales. It's by an author called Beren. And the pilgrims go into Canterbury Cathedral to say their devotions. And the miller and the pardner end up standing underneath a stained glass window, looking up at a stained glass window, which survives. They describe it as being a man digging. So it's probably the twelfth century window that shows Adam digging the soil after the fall. Aligning with that bit from the Book of Genesis that says, by the sweat of your brow, you will till the earth.

• 15:38Speaker 06

  But the miller and the pardner can't work out what the iconography is and they're saying, I don't know what he's holding. Maybe it's a kind of stick. I think we can go into these churches and see these amazing narrative scenes and these stained glass or these paintings and think, wow, everyone in medieval England would have understood this. Perhaps, and maybe stories like Saint Catherine, Saint Christopher, people did understand that there was a kind of folk interest, that you didn't need to have a Latin education or be a monk or a nun to comprehend. Yeah, there's that feeling of not only this is a language I don't understand, but what kind of people understood this at the time? Who were they? And what did it mean to them?

• 16:17Matt Lewis?

  And you're also talking in the book a bit about with Saint Christopher, there's even some meaning in the etymology of his name. How do we arrive at the name Christopher?

• 16:24Speaker 06

  I think his is one of the stories that first alerted me to the artificiality of some of these early legends, especially ones where now they are no longer in the official register of Catholic saints. They are legendary figures and Christopher certainly falls into that camp. And his story was popularized in Jacobus de Veragene's Golden Legend in the 13th century. And it tells about how he was a giant called Scoundrel and it ends up with a martyrdom. So it falls into the category of saints killed as part of the Roman persecution of Christians. But what I wanted to focus on was the kind of bit before that. It describes how he's a giant

• 17:05Speaker 06

  and his name is Reprobatus, like reprobate. I translate it as Scoundrel. So he's this giant called Scoundrel, which kind of alerts you straight away, it's a bit of a run. This is substantiated by the fact that he is a mercenary soldier. Maybe a bit like Goliath figure, you get wheeled out at the end of the battle to fight the hero and you're a bit of a spectacle. And so he has decided that he wants to fight for the highest prince in the land. He fights for the prince of Canaan, he fights for the devil, and then he wants to fight for Christ. And it's once he has spawned the Christ child on his shoulder, collapsed on the other side of the river and said, gosh, that felt like the weight of the world, that the Christ child says it was the weight of the world. It was the weight I bore when I died for humanity's sins.

• 17:48Speaker 06

  And at that point, the Christ child confers on him the name Christopher, which is from- The Greek Christophoro, so like Christ bearer. In Latin, it could become Christophoro, and it's where we get obviously the name Christopher. And it's in the same mould as words like conifer, so bearer of cones, or Lucifer, bearer of light, which whenever those words come up now, you get thrown into the legend of Saint Christopher, once you know it. But there's this kind of name shift and character shift. And I think the really lame way of putting it is that he becomes the big friendly giant. He goes from being the stereotypical giant, which is the scary monster giant,

• 18:29Speaker 06

  and flips into being an inversion of the stereotype, and he's a force for good. And I think this is really interesting insight into just the whole medieval interest in giants and where they sit on the kind of sliding scale from human to monster.

• 18:44Matt Lewis?

  And also, I guess, where they sit on the sliding scale of good to evil. Because we tend to think of giants being, you know, these monsters who are generally evil. And here we have a case of one who is sort of reformed and becomes a more positive figure to the point where he's able to carry Christ across the river. So all of a sudden, he's using his power for benevolent reasons.

• 19:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's really heartwarming. And I think there's a kind of basic aesthetic response we have to that, like we have with the BFG, where we just love the idea of a friendly giant. We think that's great. And you walk into a church and you see him on the wall. It's uplifting. It's a joyful image. I think there are over a hundred and thirty surviving wall paintings of Christopher in medieval churches in England and Wales. And some of them are accompanied with an inscription that says, "If you look on my face, you will not today die an evil death." And you think that sounds like, oh, my goodness, you look at a picture of Christopher, you're not going to die that day. Actually, you think about it a bit more deeply, it's he's saying you're not going to die an evil death,

• 19:45Speaker 06

  which means you won't die that day without having first said confession, which was the next best thing for a medieval Christian.

• 19:53Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, if you've got to go, at least he's promising you you'll go the right way.

• 19:57Speaker 06

  Yes, exactly. It touches on that part that saints play in sacraments like baptism. This world of pre-Reformation Christianity, where the theological arguments that were happening around the cult of saints are also concerning things like baptism and whether or not you will go to hell if you haven't been baptised. What happens to infants who die before they are able to have received baptism? So, yeah, you can see the way it's all mixed up together, all those ideas. And how, when, if one of those branches of theological thought starts being challenged by reformers, it's going to bring in the cult of saints or the question of baptism as well. They're all enmeshed.

• 20:39Matt Lewis?

  How then does Christopher sort of cement himself in the medieval church as a protector of travellers? You know, I've still got a St Christopher's medal that my godmother got me for my christening. It's still today, you know, there are those elements of, you know, this is someone who will protect you on your journey through life, but travellers more widely as well. How does he become so closely associated with travellers and journeys?

• 21:01Speaker 06

  I guess there is very strong, tied to the fact his story is about that. And at a kind of nuts and bolts level, having a giant walking beside you when you're off on a dangerous journey, which any kind of journey's got its dangers, especially if you're going out of cities and off across open country, or even travelling abroad for pilgrimage, having Christopher walking beside you. And I think a lot of these, how saints, what they become patrons or how they are venerated, is to do with what their specific power would help you with. So I think Catherine, as a kind of arguer and a rhetorician, you want her there at the heavenly tribunal arguing for your soul's deliverance. When I was digitising the pilgrim souvenirs and medieval badges at the British Museum.

• 21:47Speaker 06

  There was one badge that was sold at the Shrine of Thomas Becket that showed Thomas Becket riding on the back of a peacock. The whole thing is about the size of a Kinder Surprise plastic toy. And it's got a little cylinder at the base to enable you to twist it on to the top of your pilgrimage staff, as crucial aspect of your pilgrimage costume. And the peacock has a hook on its chest, probably to suspend a Canterbury bell, one of the little miniature tin bells that was sold at the Shrine of Thomas, it says Thomas around the edge. And you would walk home from your pilgrimage with the bell ringing on your staff, jingling happily, with Thomas standing on the back of the peacock, he's got a hand raised in blessings, he's blessing the road ahead of you, the peacock looking at the road with its great big squawking face.

• 22:30Speaker 06

  So that's important, like cockerels and peacocks are squawking animals, they are often on the church towers or on protectors, and the eyes of the peacock facing the road. And so this kind of alerted me to these birds like cockerels and peacocks being protective creatures that you might have on your staff, because there are other cockerel staff mounts that survive, as something to protect you on the road. But then I came across another badge in the British Museum's collection that showed Saint Christopher, unmistakably Saint Christopher. It was a little open work badge, smaller than a credit card, a shield shape with Saint Christopher standing inside the shield with the Christ child on his shoulder, and Saint Christopher is holding a staff. And on top of the staff, instead of the sprouting leaves and flowers that you'd expect from

• 23:14Speaker 06

  his legend, there's a little shape of a cockerel or a peacock. And so it's as though he is wearing on his own staff this symbol of protection that medieval travellers might have worn on their staffs. It's a kind of like a bird and a bird roast, it's a real iconographic mashup. So there was this arsenal of imagery and sounds, which included the jingling bells, squawking birds, the blessing hand of a saint and the eyes of a saint, the eyes on the peacock's tail, and characters like Saint Christopher, who would arm you for a journey. I just love it, and it's a kind of like a mix and match. They're not necessarily practically helpful, so I can imagine they would have been so uplifting,

• 23:58Speaker 06

  they would have so put you in the right mindset for a potentially dangerous journey, and why you were doing it, and the joys behind it.

• 24:06Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, it's almost interesting that people are feeling the need to kind of double up and triple up protection, you know, Thomas isn't enough, I need a peacock as well. And if we're gonna have St Christopher, let's get him a peacock on his staff. So there's layers of protection built into those things. Does that speak to the way medieval people thought about travelling, that they feel they need all of this protection to make their journeys safely?

• 24:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I guess it's hard to speak to what individuals felt, but I think when you read 14th century, 13th century documents and texts and stories, you get this idea of the kind of allegorical mindset of medieval people. And I think this is something that we can infer also resided in the minds of people who weren't writing texts and didn't own books, the kinds of people whose lives aren't recorded, that any journey was also an allegory for life, and especially a pilgrimage. And so the symbolisms that you invoke for

• 25:10Speaker 06

  a journey like a pilgrimage are like a microcosm, or a kind of expression of your intention for life overall. It goes beyond worrying about meeting bandits on the road.

• 25:23Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. How did the church kind of rationalise, maybe even tolerate, the use of these kind of protective amulets? It doesn't feel very medieval Christian church to have talismans relating to legendary saints protecting people on the road.

• 25:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, by the later period, there is a real scepticism. It's in Erasmus, Desiderius, he talks about a pilgrim arriving, so just like clanking, because he's so covered in lead tokens. And in Low Countries art from the period, you might see an altarpiece or a panel painting about a particular saint, you might have an image of a pilgrim appearing at their shrine, who's receiving healing at the shrine, who's got 20 pilgrims' souvenirs on their hat. And it's a kind of expression by the patrons of the artwork.

• 26:15Speaker 06

  That you may have gone to all of these shrines, you may have collected all these badges, but our saint is the one that's actually going to heal you. There's an emptiness in the just going around collecting your souvenirs and going around saying devotions everywhere. Not every saint is created equal, not every legend is worth the investment of your devotion.

• 26:32Matt Lewis?

  And I guess for the church, there is an element of if people are carrying these badges, you know, they're carrying their faith with them. So there is a connection to the church. Does that contribute to the church tolerating these things, that they're almost an expression of faith, even if they're a little bit frowned on?

• 26:49Speaker 06

  I think there was a kind of threshold, a line. And so overall, the cult of saints was perceived as a good thing overall for most of the Middle Ages and at the same time for the whole Middle Ages from the get go. And it goes right back to the famous letter from Gregory the Great to the Bishop of Marseille, saying, "Don't destroy all the images in the churches showing the lives of saints, because this is how the illiterate read." And there was a sense that through images and souvenirs, when you open the drawers of the British Museum or look at the database of all of those pictures that were on these amazing souvenirs, or in the Museum of London or the Musee de Pluny, these things dredged

• 27:30Speaker 06

  up from the Thames or from the Seine, you see the visual language of the people that owned them. And you get a sense, this was a way that stories were communicated. It must have been a valuable tool for disseminating Christian ideas, for keeping kind of devotion alive. And so you can imagine why, yes, the church would want that, but then they wouldn't necessarily want them to be using the badges for superstitious purposes. It's like, there was an emphasis in the cult of Thomas Becket. This is, Thomas Becket's death in 1170 sort of precipitated the market for pilgrim souvenirs. The first thing they have is these ampulli, little flasks of Becket's liquid, as it was called, that kind of diluted.

• 28:12Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, sounds gross.

• 28:13Speaker 06

  Yeah. And these flasks came to bear images of his martyrdom. And they were intrinsically holy because they contained that water, which was supposedly contained traces of his blood and brains, I should add. But then it's like, the flask gets taken away, just the images remain. So you might have an image of Thomas Becket's martyrdom on an ampulla. Later, you just have a badge showing his martyrdom.

• 28:33Matt Lewis?

  And I guess if we're being slightly cynical, they're good money-making ruse as well.

• 28:50Speaker 03

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• 30:38Matt Lewis?

  I guess we should move on. We've got other saints we need to talk about. It's just fascinating talking about Christopher and his connection to all sorts of things in the medieval world. But the next one we wanted to cover was Saint Uncumber, who is not a saint that I knew at all. Probably not many people will be familiar with Saint Uncumber, at least it's not as familiar as Saint Christopher. Could you tell us a little bit about Saint Uncumber and why Saint Uncumber is important in the summer?

• 31:02Speaker 06

  Yes, so I should have said that Christopher's Feast Day falls on the 25th of July. Saint Uncumber is on the 20th of July. There's nothing in her legend that specifically ties her to the summer, but I think it's a case of imagining celebrating her feast with that kind of weather around you. That's something I found interesting about writing this book. But her legend postdates 1200. In my book, I don't take any other story from the post 1200 period because of the papacy really getting its teeth into the canonization process from that point on, and the whole thing becoming a lot more legal, more like a legal process. But Uncumber emerges as a story set way back in the mists of time, there's not a clear kind of start date or date for her life.

• 31:47Speaker 06

  And she's the daughter of the King of Portugal and he wants her to get married. And he's lined up all these suitors for her, but she won't accept any of them. And all she wants to do is live a life of chastity and be a Christian. And he gets so frustrated that he throws her into a dungeon and she prays to be made hideous so that none of her suitors will want to marry her. And the next morning she wakes up and she's grown a long flowing beard. And her father is enraged that he has her crucified. Which is where we come to the iconography, the common iconography of Saint Uncumber, which is

• 32:24Speaker 06

  of a bearded figure, wearing a crown, but with a sort of female costume, so a dress, often by the later period, like with a tightly laced bodice. She was known by various names. One of her names was Wilga Fortis, that was her Latin name. It's thought that might come from Virgo Fortis, like strong woman or strong virgin. She was in English, Middle English, known as Uncumber. This is possibly to do with the fact she was believed to unencumber women of unwanted husbands. And Thomas More writes about how women would leave a peck of oats at her image. Or at least one of the characters in his dialogues talks about this. To get rid of unwanted husbands. And the interlocutor in the dialogue says,

• 33:07Speaker 06

  well, why a peck of oats? Is that for the horses of the unwanted husbands so that they can ride away? In French, she was called débarrer, like get rid of. In German, kummen ist, a caring, like sie kummen ist, to care for. This idea of somebody who looked after women, which is a really fascinating insight. And the theory is that her cult emerged from depictions of the Holy Face of Luca, which was another shrine in Italy, northern Italy, and it was a crucifix. With Jesus on it, unequivocally, he's wearing robes of victory. And this was unusual iconography for North West Europe.

• 33:47Speaker 06

  Northwestern Europeans would have been more familiar with Christ in a loincloth suffering. And so it's thought that maybe depictions of the crucifix from this Italian site made their way into North Western Europe and were misinterpreted as a depiction of a woman. So maybe it was a woman being crucified and that she had a big beard. One of the things I was trying to argue or explore in my book was that if we get excited about folklore and fairy tale and myth, then we should also get excited about saints' legends, because so many of them are not some kind of dry authoritarian narrative, but actually pull on the same threads as those other genres. And there's another name for Uncombe was Solicitor. And it's in that form that she makes her way into the first edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

• 34:32Speaker 06

  And it's about this amazing story of how a musician went to her shrine and he was on the brink of destitution. And he plays the fiddle for her and she kicks off one of her golden shoes into his hand. And he runs out of the church and he's so excited. Everyone thinks he's stolen it. So he's dragged back into the church and made to do the same thing again. And as he's playing, she kicks off the other golden shoe into his hand, this sort of image of Saint Uncombe, kicks the other golden shoe into his hand in front of all the crowds. And they realise that he has indeed been blessed by the saint. She's magic.

• 35:05Matt Lewis?

  It's really interesting iconography that you don't kind of see anywhere else in medieval Christianity to have, you know, a woman with a beard. Women are often presented as virgins, as women who are protecting women in childbearing and things like that. It's quite unusual to have a bearded lady being crucified, who is all about ridding people of their husbands. What does this say about the position of female saints in Christianity?

• 35:31Speaker 06

  I think it's tempting when you come to a subject like this to hold on to those instant ways in which they resonate with themes we discuss a lot today. Gender and sexuality, for instance, and that isn't necessarily that wrong. As you read into these sources, sometimes you find that actually there was a completely different viewpoint. And then it's really fascinating. There are quite a few female saints who take on masculine characteristics. So they might enter a monastery and in the legends their pronouns will change. You've got this kind of transition to manhood taking place. It doesn't happen with stories of men, like male holy figures dressing up as women and

• 36:13Speaker 06

  becoming more holy. There's a sort of a joke version of it. It's in the actual life of Saint Jerome. There's a fantastic illustration of it in the Belle-Eure, commissioned by Jean-Duc de Berry, who did the famous Trébuché that we know, like its aesthetic was used for Sleeping Beauty, like you just recognise it straight away. In the Belle-Eure, it shows Jerome, he's sleeping in his cell and a naughty monk in his community that doesn't like him sneaks in and swaps his habit, which is lying at the end of his bed, for the blue dress of a noble lady and then sneaks out again. And Jerome wakes up for matins all bleary eyed and just gets into this really lovely tight fitting slash sleeve blue dress with the low cut sort of neckline.

• 36:56Speaker 06

  And Jean-Duc de Berry was a real hedonist and I think there's a great deal of pleasure must soon derive from seeing Saint Jerome with his sort of patriarchal little beard and looking very Abrahamic in this blue dress. And he goes wandering into matins and you see all the monks in the choir stalls kind of jaws dropping, looking at the sort of singing out, can't believe what Jerome's wearing. And it says in the story that he's so ashamed that he flees and never returns. So this is a moment of immense shame in the life of Saint Jerome because he's a man that's ended up dressing in women's clothes.

• 37:31Speaker 06

  But when female saints take on masculine attributes, that is a transition to greater holiness. It's a kind of a super manly moment. And the very word that people would use in the Middle Ages to describe the strength and power of saints was virtus, a physical and psychological force that has the word via in it, man in Latin, and where we get the word virtue. And so I think that you could almost imagine that Um Kumba has undergone this transition. And she's therefore a masculine protector for women from other men who are not virtuous.

• 38:07Matt Lewis?

  Is there an element there of the church kind of, because the church is developing, particularly around, you know, 1200, is developing this idea that all women are the cause of all sin, you know, all daughters of Eve. Is there an element of female saints kind of shedding their womanhood in a way that they're shedding that original sin and coming back to being more holy as men are, which is not what I think at all before anyone shouts at me?

• 38:32Speaker 06

  It's a shedding of the stereotypically feminine responsibilities of household and childbearing. And it's been argued that it was perceived as almost more impressive for a woman to dress as a man and go and live in the desert in a hermitage for 35 years and become people's spiritual guide because she was a woman. They're almost like more impressive than male hermits that begin the story as men by doing this. I think it's a similar to what we're talking about with the giant Saint Christopher, the kind of razzmatazz of having inverted a stereotype. And there's a, just a basic narrative aesthetic appeal about that, and it's memorable and it's surprising.

• 39:12Matt Lewis?

  And you mentioned there's the leaving a pile of oats to venerate Saint Um Kumba. Do we get to the bottom of what that is about? Why do you leave oats for Saint Um Kumba?

• 39:21Speaker 06

  We don't get to the bottom of it, but just chucking out of the air a possibility, maybe it's to do with what women might have been able to access, especially if they were poor and suffering in abusive relationships. It's that what can I give you, poor as I am? Maybe it's something to do with that and women being associated with things like brewing and making bread and basic kind of food production.

• 39:44Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fantastic. And I guess if your wife comes home with a pilgrim's badge or something like that of a crucified woman with a beard, she's trying to tell you something. And the final sort of, I say saint, but group that we wanted to talk about a little bit is the seven sleepers of Ephesus. Can you tell us a little bit about their story and how it becomes entwined with Christianity?

• 40:06Speaker 06

  This is an example, I think, of a story that everyone knew, that vanished with the Reformation. And they didn't just know it on its own terms, but it had got in to idiom and other ideas. So the basic story is that they are among the sort of early martyrs persecuted by the Romans. In this case, the Emperor Decius is the kind of baddie in their story. And they are seven young men who live in Ephesus in Greece, and they are attendants in the court of the Emperor Decius servants. And he announces that everyone has to renounce Christianity and worship the Roman gods or else. And they defy him. And he says, look, I'm going to go away for a few days. When I come back, I expect you to have changed

• 40:49Speaker 06

  your minds. And they, while he's away, decide among themselves that they're going to sell all their worldly goods. They're going to go to the mountains. They're going to find a cave and they're just going to hide. But they're not going to renounce their faith. So off they go. And the Emperor Decius comes back and they're gone. And he knows that they've defied him. And so he wants to find them. And they are living in the caves. And every now and again, one of them will dress in rags and go into the city pretending to be a beggar. And he buys them bread. But then, the Emperor Decius has a dream, and he finds out through this dream where the young men are. And he sends his men up to the cave. And he has the cave door blocked up in the night, and the young men who are

• 41:30Speaker 06

  sleeping inside blocked in. They're none the wiser. And covert Christians have witnessed this. They followed the officials. They watched the cave door being blocked up. And so they write it down on a little scrap of parchment and fold it up and put it between the stones. Next thing we know in the story, one of the seven young men wakes up and he's really hungry. And so he thinks I'm gonna go into Ephesus and get some bread. And the others say, can you get a better bread than you did last time? Also, it was rubbish, because I got waking up to. And so he goes down into the city and he just noticed a couple of odd things as he leaves the cave. He notices a big pile of stones. And he notices that a thorn tree that was growing there is being chopped down.

• 42:13Speaker 06

  But there's a really big stump where this little thorn tree was, and he's like, oh, that's odd. And he goes into the city gates and he starts wondering if there's been some kind of trick. Because everywhere over the gates and around the city, he can see a symbol of a cross. Which is of course the Christian symbol. And he's thinking, this doesn't make sense. Decius is dead against this stuff. And he goes into the city, he goes to buy some bread. And he uses his coins. And the baker is immediately suspicious because these are solid gold coins. And he says, where is the treasure hoard that you've got this from? Come on, show me. Come on, I won't tell anyone. He's, no, I don't know what you're talking about. This is just my money. He gets dragged by the baker and his apprentice to the officials of the town of Ephesus.

• 42:54Speaker 06

  Who bring a huge crowd of people. He can't see anyone he knows in the crowd. His family's not there. Anyway, it comes out that they say these coins haven't been in production for many decades, maybe centuries. And he says, but I just got them just from home. And he said, look, they've got the Emperor Decius's face on them. Why don't we talk to him? He's been dead for ages. He takes them back to the cave. I have to just show you my six friends that are up in the cave in the mountain. And they go there and they find the parchment and they read the story that the Christians left. And basically, these young men have been in a kind of enchanted sleep for more than a century inside the cave.

• 43:35Speaker 06

  And a shepherd has come along and decided to use the stones that the cave had been blocked up with to build himself a body. And so that he's like opened up the cave, not realising what he was doing. And that is why the young man woke up and he was so hungry to go in and get the bread. And there's then a lovely kind of denouement where I think the Byzantine Emperor comes and sees the miracle. He wants to see the young men in the cave and witness this miracle. At that moment, all the young men start to shine like angels and vaporize and die. And then everyone goes, oh, wow. And then they die. But that is the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus.

• 44:22Speaker 03

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• 45:38Matt Lewis?

  While you're talking, it's striking how almost fairy tale that is. You can see bits of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White kind of wrapped up in this story. Are there any kind of connections to this, kind of love of fairy tales in the human psyche that we're connecting those to saints as well?

• 45:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it's just fascinating and unknowable, but it is, I think, testament to the interconnectedness of stories. And I think that there was a kind of a smear campaign in the Protestant Reformation that Equated any superstition, anything that the medieval church had been doing, called it paganism and papacy became like synonyms. And I think that has lived on to an extent. But now we consider paganism to be quite interesting. We don't have that reformation horror of pre-Christian religions. And so therefore, anything interesting that medieval Christianity does, we automatically think, oh, it must be a relic or a fossil from an earlier pre-Christian culture.

• 46:38Speaker 06

  We find ourselves maybe rejecting the history of Christianity because we think, oh, that's just boring. And anything interesting it's doing. I think there is this tendency sometimes, what somebody describes like a queasy post-Christian culture, that to find the interesting stuff, you have to get the Christianity out of the way. These stories emerge in the first few centuries of Christianity and presumably they merge in dialogue with non-Christian narratives, folk narratives, folklore, that kind of thing. And that they can be read together and with that kind of critical distance. Some saints' lives, like there's Saint Hippolytus is killed by being dragged along by wild horses. That seems to be clearly linked to the Greek myth of Hippolytus.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  But it's a fascinating melting pot is all I can say.

• 47:24Matt Lewis?

  How is that kind of early, really early Christian story then preserved and kind of spread throughout medieval Europe over the centuries that follow?

• 47:34Speaker 06

  It's in the early Martyrologies and it's in Jacobus de Barjele's Golden Legend, which I've mentioned before, that was a Latin text, but translated into many different vernaculars and into very engaging verse lives and these kinds of things that might have been. The word legend is from the Latin legenda. We get it from the cult of saints because it means to be read out on the saints' feast day. And so you might celebrate seven sleepers by. Almost sitting down with your family, if you had any kind of means, maybe having it read out to you, or going to a performance or seeing it in a play in your town, you might have encountered the story in that way. We still have weather saints. We talk about Saint Swithin's Day, and if

• 48:17Speaker 06

  it rains on Saint Swithin's Day, there'll be rain every day for four weeks afterwards, or forty days. The seven sleepers were also weather saints. So Zieben schläfer tag in Germany is a day on which, if you see rain, you'll see rain thereafter for four weeks. I had a really exciting moment when I was reading to, I've got some family in Austria, and so they had sent some children's books in German, including a sort of little catalogue of animals. And it was while I was writing this book, I was reading this picture book full of different kinds of animals, and the names of the animals are given in German, and I was reading them out. And there was a picture of a family of dormice snuggled up. And underneath it said, Zieben schläfer, seven sleepers, for dormice. And I was like, what?

• 49:01Speaker 06

  This is fascinating. And did some reading and discovered that actually in lots of dialects of English, dormice were called seven sleepers. And in the English context, where I've read about this, often the reasons given that they sleep for seven months of the year. But I thought, actually in German context, the theories put forward that it was good luck to find a family of dormice sleeping under your eaves, that they were like house geist, the spirits, like friendly spirits of your house, that they represented like a blessing from the seven sleepers of Ephesus. We find this idea of seven sleepers to do with good or bad luck, or even prognostication, like weather saints, in the verse life of Edward the Confessor. And there's a moment when Edward the

• 49:43Speaker 06

  Confessor is at a feast, and he has a vision that tells him something bad's gonna happen. And you see the illustration, he's looking over his shoulder, imagining, and there's this kind of almost a thought bubble with his vision taking place. And he sees the seven sleepers rolling, I think, from their right sides to their left. In his vision, and he knows therefore that bad luck is coming, bad things are coming for his kingdom.

• 50:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. It's fascinating that all three of these saints kind of talk to the connection between old folklore, old folk stories, old folk memories, and how they become sort of wrapped up with Christianity. You've got giants who can turn out to be good guys. You've got bearded women, you leave them oats, they'll get rid of your husband. We've got the seven sleepers. There is something in the way that Christianity is tolerating those connections to folk stories that we might not associate with the medieval Catholic Church being quite strict in trying to drive those almost pagan things away.

• 50:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I think it's just so exciting to think, we can think about the Middle Ages and the broader populations of medieval Christendom as being people whose lives were often brutally short, who would have, although they spent half their time at church because of the saintly calendar, we imagine them having to work long hours. I'm not sure how true that always is, but it's kind of backbreaking labour. And yet you can be three years old and enjoy a story. You can be 90 years old. There was still a delight and appetite for a good story this whole time. And that the same things crop up over and over again, like you said, the giants, the enchanted sleep, the woman turned powerful kind of protector of other women. That appetite has never faded.

• 51:25Matt Lewis?

  I mean, that's a great way to sell the book, isn't it? There are endless brilliant stories to be found in there. Well, thank you so much for joining us again. Hopefully we can tempt you to come back when the leaves begin to turn and the mist begins to rise and we can talk a little bit about autumn saints.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  Yes, I'd love that. Thank you, Matt.

• 51:41Matt Lewis?

  Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us, Amy. It's been brilliant. I hope you'll look forward to Amy coming back in the autumn for some more saints associated with that season of mist and mellowness.

• 51:53Matt Lewis?

  And if you haven't heard them already, please do go back and listen to our previous episode with Amy on Edward the Confessor and New Year Saints, and St George and Springtime Saints. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free. Head to historyhit.com/subscribe. Go on, you can do it now. Anyway, I'd better let you go.

• 52:36Matt Lewis?

  I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

• 52:56Speaker 03

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• 53:30Speaker 07

  In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  It's one of the first times really that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers. If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure.

• 53:53Speaker 07

  In Our Time, listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Tea or coffee? Love a cup of tea.