Janina lovely to have you here to see you again.
Oh so good to see you cuz we go back a long way don't we? We do indeed rather too long!
It's been a long time indeed. I'm so pleased because again with everything you've
done and all your research you're moving into the world of saints and the
anglo-saxons which we have in common, that's like my passion-area too. Pilgrimage, cult
of saints, medievalism and anglo-saxonism. Absolutely. I'm very happy to be here talking
about these things with you. Lovely to have you here today thank you.
Okay so first of all can you provide a sort of brief overview of St. Cuthbert
and his life? Well St. Cuthbert, I wrote a book about the saints, of all of the saints
Cuthbert for me is the one that reconciles the the the disparate aspects of what it
meant to be an anglo-saxon saint most completely, because he has an early life
possibly as a warrior, possibly it was certainly in a secular world he's
probably from a noble family, and from this life he then enters a Celtic
monastic environment, which is different to the Benedictine rules that we see
rolled out on the continent, but he he develops within this this context and
then he goes to Lindisfarne at a point really that that Lindisfarne is
having to redefine itself, having to set itself up as a place where Roman and
Celtic ideas can be merged together, and what we hear about Cuthbert we don't get
it from him, we get it from the people that write about him, that write about his
his life and the art works that survive associated with him, which is all very
carefully coordinated in order to present him in a certain way. What we
learn is that he is this wonderful kind of point of reconciliation, he is all
things to all men, he's the perfect saint, the perfect monk,
the perfect bishop. Of course that isn't possible as a living breathing
individual, but but that's the impression we get from him through down the ages
and actually the stories you do read about him, there's a lot of stories
associated with him and nature, lovely stories about him talking to the ravens
and talking to the otters and those things kind of humanized him in a way
but we always had to be a bit careful that we are getting a secondhand account
who he is. Absolutely yes so you mentioned actually the creation
of the art and the literature so how do you think this sort of the power of the
art and literature has shown to be an influential propagandist tool in the
creation and promotion of his cult in the later years and the early
years too in fact? Well it was very there was quite clear guidelines within
anglo-saxon England of how you developed a cult of saints. Saints were big
business they meant masses of income tourism, investment and relics were
changing hands as to the equivalent of fine artworks, they were a big big
business. But when it came to anglo-saxon cults of Saints you've got these
different groups particularly in the north of England who are all slightly
different, they're all offering alternative setups, so over at Jarrow and
Monkwearmouth if you've got a hotbed of scholarship of scriptorial
activity, "more Roman than Rome" with its glass windows with stone buildings and
its massive Bibles, over at Hexham and Ripon you've got Wilfrid and he is
modeling himself much more on the all-powerful Bishop-monks of Gaul so he
has inpurpled manuscripts, he has caskets that replicate our ivory caskets
that's his setup. Lindisfarne develops its own brand its own unique approach to
the cults of Cuthbert which is deliberately blending Celtic art, Celtic
ideas with Roman influences and very self-consciously so as an art historian
you know I can look at it and say right those
swirls and spirals are Celtic that Germanic pattern-work there is
anglo-saxon that's Roman, but they are doing that deliberately it's like
graphic design you know they're cultivating it to show that the saint
himself but also the community is bringing all these ideas together. Yes
and do you think it's particularly significant that Eadfrith, Bishop of
Lindisfarne created the Lindisfarne Gospels himself, well we think he did,
himself do you think that's particularly significant? Absolutely, absolutely - so
I've worked with an amazing scribe Satminder Sehmi and we took him to an
anglo-saxon hall and tried to get him to recreate part of the Lindisfarne Gospels
in the right environment with the right equipment so inking shells and
sitting on a bench he said after around an hour and a half it was he was in pain
because the conditions, he was freezing cold the vellum was curling up the inks
were drying up if you closed the window shutters you didn't get the light if you
open the shutters the wind came through he said the idea that Eadfrith did this at
all was remarkable almost miraculous but we do you can see the consistency in the
painting in the artwork and in the text right the way through, the hand of one
man, and not just any man - a bishop, so on top of making this this manuscript he's
got his duties as a bishop of this community it's a huge investment and and,
a real sense of personal sacrifice I think. So what do you think then made a
saint a saint within the anglo-saxon era and how do you think or do you
think that differed in the medieval era? Yeah yeah that's why I wrote the book 'The Private Lives of the Saints'
that's the point it's a completely different set of criteria, what we
currently associate with sanctity it goes to the congregations of the saints
in the Vatican, they have to perform certain miracles, they have to have lived a
certain life and it's incredibly critical and difficult to be declared
the saint now. Going back through the medieval period it becomes increasingly
more more centralized and organized but going back to the anglo-saxon period
early the seventh, eighth century anything goes
because the community declares somebody a saint. So you've got this incredible
variety, on the one hand you've got mad individuals like Guthlac (one of my
favourites) who who is famous for fighting invisible
demons, which really just means there's a man in the Fens waving his arms around
at nothing, but he gets declared a saint by his community, then you've got everything up
to princes, princesses, nobility, royalty who are having cults contrived
for them, but you've got men you've got women, you've both genders
represented and you've got all of society represented because everybody
from a pauper to a prince could be a saint in the anglo-saxon period and it's
that that beautiful variety that I find so fascinating and we lump them all
together we give them halos stick 'em on you know two-dimensional icons and we
dehumanize them, but the human beings behind these names are fascinating. Why
do you think Oswald granted Aidan and his companions that small tidal island
itself, why there, to found that monastery? Why? Location, location,
location - it's all about the location so that Island is opposite Bamburgh Castle
and Bamburgh Castle is the stronghold of the northumbrian royal family an
incredible natural plateau with potential fortifications on it that date back to
Iron Age but that has become the the the powerhouse of these Northumbrian
Kings who are toying with different types of Christianity, they're poised on
a moment of great change so we talk about Edwin of Northumbria as the
first christian Northumbrian King but this is a point when they don't know
which direction to go in. Christianity comes with a sort of two-pronged attack
to the anglo-saxons, so Columba and the Irish form mysticism is establishing in
Iona and then of course with Aidan it starts to creep over towards Lindisfarne
but simultaneously almost St. Augustine arrives with the missionaries
from Rome in Kent and Northumbria is that a wonderful melting pot where the
two parties meet and have to negotiate which is orthodox, which is the right way
to go and so granting Lindisfarne to Aidan to
the Celtic movements is quite a radical decision by the Northumbrian
royal family, but the location was important too because one of the things
you see in Celtic monasticism is this idea of leaving the world behind, trying
to find a 'desert', the closest thing to a desert which is often an island or a
mountain or something inaccessible so the fact that Lindisfarne is tidal and
an island makes it the perfect location for a Celtic monastery. Absolutely you
mentioned location, location, location and obviously St. Cuthbert lived on the
tidal islands out on St. Cuthbert's Isle and then he also lived at Inner Farne too
- now do you think therefore that the heremetical lives that they lived on
them affected the Saints and therefore their behaviour? I mean you talk about
Guthlac and his behaviour, odd behaviour as we would put it today do you think
that affected them? I get asked a lot about how retrospectively from a modern
point of view looking backwards, if these people had mental health issues or
if yeah what medical terms from a modern perspective could we apply to these
people? Now they have no conception of this as a mental health or or
medical issue - to a lot of these people there must be a spiritual reason if
they're seeing things or if they're experiencing things it has to be either
from God or the Devil. And that is difficult for us to deal with from a
modern point of view, but I do think that just the conditions under which these
hermit-saints are living, they must have been deeply affected on an emotional and
a physical level. One of the things I found recently interviewing the
archaeologists that worked on Skellig Michael, the cemetery at Skellig Michael,
was the extreme physical trauma that the skeletons displayed, so the monastic
community there dates to about 800 AD and they're on the top of this sub-
aquatic mountain, in a set of cells hundreds of feet up a mountain that
sheer like this, and all of the skeletons in the cemetery showed extreme trauma to
the bones, the shoulders and the back from carrying things but most upsettingly
the feet bones, the bones on these peoples' feet were actually sort of cut
through, shredded to ribbons from walking up and
down this mountain, and what what is that what is it that is making them leave
behind the comfort of the shore, go to this place of isolation and then punish
their bodies? That is the intention is to suffer like Christ, but it also becomes a
cult of pain in many ways that you know they are there being more extreme than
the next person and Cuthbert can't do that, he can't go to Skellig, he can't
cut himself off completely, but taking himself to Farne and we know (Inner Farne)
and we know that he had a cell that sort of shut out the world and just looked at
the sky and that is all in emulation of these these these sites that are on
these mountain islands. So the Durham monks returned to Lindisfarne with St.
Cuthbert's relics as we know by the early 12th century and they then
established a permanent cell of the Durham community there, its purpose as we
know was to reaffirm the link between anglo-norman Durham and anglo-saxon
Lindisfarne and to establish the right of the Norman monks of Durham to be the
guardians of St. Cuthbert's legacy, so how do you think this was then enacted?
I know it's a tricky question. Actually it's all down to politics isn't it because I
think that yeah when we get the Viking incursions 793 Lindisfarne
is sacked, the community is decimated but they managed to retain
this their their primary relics, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the coffin and
remains of Cuthbert, but also the head of Oswald as well, and that
mobility, that movement of those relics is in a way documented much later, as
being about the survival of the community, as long as those objects are
with a handful of the surviving monks there is still a Lindisfarne, a concept
of Lindisfarne, but what we have then is the reappropriation of that concept; when
the Normans arrived and radically transformed everything from States and
and religious politics down to a micro level, once they're redoing all of the
redesigning society they had to embrace cults of saints, and there's two ways
that they do this; one is to reject Saints, to declare them null and void so
there were many many anglo-saxon cults that have been lost, the other way is to
appropriate them so we see them appropriating,
appropriating Edmund the martyr, different saints of different locations and Bury
St. Edmunds, but we see them doing that with Cuthbert and at Durham and Durham is
I mean anyone that's been to Durham cathedral, the way that West front is designed it
is castle architecture, a castle cathedral and that is a powerhouse again
of how the Normans want to be perceived and validating it with the remains of
Cuthbert and Bede and Oswald, that is all about supporting and bolstering that
place yep. So finally then a lot of what we see on
Lindisfarne today and on Inner Farne too - was actually built in the later medieval
period, 14th century, so it isn't contemporary with Cuthbert's life, can
we therefore look at it as a bit of a sort of tourist attraction, theme park
for the for the medieval pilgrims what do you think about that? Oh I first got
taken to Lindisfarne by my now husband then boyfriend for Valentine's Day when
we don't even known each other for a few months and I remember thinking if he
thinks that a valentine's trip to Lindisfarne in February is a good idea,
then clearly he knows me well - he's a keeper!
So we went over to Lindisfarne for the first time and it's like any of these but it's a bit like Iona as
well although Iona has a purity to it because it's so sparsely populated
around there, um there is a sense in which the whole place is focused on
these particular characters, this particular perceived Celtic Christianity
that actually is quite intangible and there is a sort of Disneyland aspect to it,
but I think that what is what you do get is the sense of the tides and actually
every time I've been you know you've been to it, you are fighting
the tides, if you miss the tides you are stranded either on or off the island and
that hasn't changed for a millennium so that takes me back
and there is an authenticity to the space and actually archaeological digs
going on at the moment, the archaeology that's coming out of the ground at the
moment about the anglo-saxon community at Lindisfarne is is really exciting and
it shows that where we do have that later medieval building, the
community itself is very nearby and actually that site was the site of
Cuthbert and Aidan's community so so there is there is continuity and with
anything anglo-saxon, it's very hard to reconstruct the space realistically in a
genuine way, because they built in timber predominantly, and a lot of it is lost, so
yeah it is a bit of a Disneyland for medievalists but but again it's about
the site. You could say the same about Whitby couldn't you? You've got Whitby
abbey, that iconic kind of Gothic structure on the landscape and yet the
space goes back to Hilda it goes back to the 7th century and I still feel that
you get that essence of continuity of use from the place. It's more about
the inherent sacrality? I think and the importance of location again you
know why are they on headlands? Why are they on tidal Islands? There's a choice
and they've they're chosen because there's their beautiful spiritual
special places. Yes absolutely well thank you very much that was absolutely
fantastic. it's been lovely talking to you my love.
you