Fluid and queer sex is featured in a new medieval exhibition at the Met Cloisters in New York during winter 2025-26
Author: Medieval Histories
Putin’s Medieval Dream of Ruling an Empire
At his Alaska meeting with Trump, Putin made a curious demand that cut to the heart of the war: he wants to rule as Czar of a medieval-style empire
“Mr. Putin also demanded guarantees that Russian should be an official language in Ukraine, and that security should be established to allow the Russian Orthodox Church to be reinstated as the leader of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine”, wrote New York Times in a reference to Putin’s and Trump’s negotations in Alaska.
In truth, these demands appear downright bizarre. Consider the context: Russia has waged a war of aggression that, so far, has cost around a million Russian lives or ruined their health, without securing any meaningful territorial gains. And yet, Putin shows up in Alaska with demands that, beyond territorial concerns, peace should also reinstate the Russian language and the Russian Orthodox Church as national cultural focal points in the future Ukraine. Why is this so important to him? What is this war really about? Generally, three explanations are put forward:
Putin, the man
The first type of explanation is individual-oriented. Here we note that Putin, for one reason or another, appears as a character deviant. Maybe he is also ill (Parkinson’s has been mentioned). What we have witnessed since 2014, when Crimea was annexed, really looks from the outside like the work of a madman. For who else but psychopaths with delusions of grandeur start a war whose main manifestation is terror-bombings of civilians in Kyiv and the rest of Ukraine? And where more than a million Russian soldiers have ended up dead or maimed in the meat grinder of the battlefield since 2022?
Further on, commentators have attempted to dig deeper into Putin’s personal history. He was born in 1952 in Leningrad as the youngest son of a factory worker and soldier. His childhood home was undoubtedly also marked by a couple of other circumstances, namely that his grandfather had been cook for both Stalin and Lenin, while his mother was a dedicated churchgoer and believer. There must have been a certain “cognitive dissonance” in that home. In addition, it would have been marked by the stories of one of his two brothers, who died of hunger in Leningrad in 1942. The Revolution and the war would have been ghosts that haunted his childhood and youth. After school and university, where he studied law and economics, he was recruited in 1975 to the KGB. He then served in the GDR as liaison officer until 1989. After the coup against Gorbachev, however, he changed horses in midstream to support the restoration of the defunct Russia. In 1998 he was appointed head of the FSB (the KGB’s successor), until he was elected president in 2000. Might this be enough of an explication? Somehow, it does not quite suffice to explain the odd demands quoted here. We need more context
Putin, the medieval emperor
Although the sources are sparse, there is a straight line from Putin’s deeply felt regret over the collapse of the Soviet Union to his self-proclaimed preoccupation with Russia’s medieval history and the Russian Orthodox Church. He has himself mentioned this as a background for his political positioning.
This preoccupation with the Middle Ages is clearly linked to his desire to re-establish the world order that prevailed before the invention of the “nation” in the 1500s as the primary political “actor”. In short, the idea of a Europe of imagined communities configured as nations consolidated during the 15th and 16th centuries, to be finally codified in 1648 in Westphalia. Since then, the idea spread in a way that made it seem “natural.” Today in the Western world we no longer think in terms of empires, but rather nations shaped by the basic dictum: cuius regio, eius religio, with our addition, eius lex. The original dictum was confirmed in 1555 in Augsburg, though first formulated in 1582. It means: “Each kingdom, its religion (and its law.)”
The consequences of this “naturalness” with which we live with the national idea were according to his own words experienced acutely by Putin when the Russian Empire definitively collapsed after 1989, and everything from the Baltic States to Kazakhstan broke out of the Soviet imperial iron fist.
Putin, the latter-day Czar
Thus, there seems at least on the discursive and narrative level to be a clear connection between Putin’s loathing of the idea of “national independence,” his desire to restore “the Russian Empire,” and his preoccupation with Russian history as rooted in the Kievan Rus’ Empire.
From about 880–1100 a group of Nordic Vikings ruled over a huge territory that stretched from the Black Sea to the tundra in the north and across the Pontic steppe to the German forests in the west. Although this empire waxed and waned, it ruled the territory until 1240 when the Mongols sacked Kyev. Only with the Mongols’ final defeat by the Russians in 1480 did the center of gravity finally move eastward to Moscow. Apparently, it is this Viking empire that Putin has feared might re-emerge as a strong economic center. One, which perhaps even in the long run draw Belarus into its orbit, further reducing Russia to an even more insignificant periphery – a nation among other nations, leaving the global scene to USA, China and India.
To put it simply: Just as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great had ambitions of being almighty Czars, the same applies to Putin. In this game he has of course received financial support from the oligarchs, who early on understood how to seize the Soviet Union’s massive natural resources, including the vast gas deposits. Lately, there was presumably a growing concern among these power brokers that Europe was moving toward a sustainable transition to more CO₂-neutral energy production, energizing the plans for “more control”. And following this, the war on Ukraine.
Given these economic interests, it is nevertheless significant that throughout the lead-up to the war in 2014 and the massive escalation of hostilities after 2022, Putin has consistently advanced “cultural,” “historical,” and “religious” rather than economic reasons for the war’s necessity.
Thus, Putin has also found support in the Russian Orthodox Church and its ambitions to once again control the Ukrainian church, which achieved independence in 2019 as a result of the schism between the leadership of the Russian church and the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople. It is probably another reason why Putin could be quoted by the New York Times as having stipulated that supremacy over the Ukrainian church must again lie in Moscow.
These historical and cultural narratives have from the very beginning been intertwined and fairly unambiguous. The story is that Ukraine had adopted the West’s decadent culture and was heading toward membership in the EU (and perhaps NATO). Since Ukraine, however, had historically always been the starting point for Russia and therefore a natural part of the Russian Empire, this was an intolerable situation for an imperialist like Putin. In his view, Ukraine could not, historically speaking, continue as an independent nation.
Putin, an imperialist?
It is clear that in Putin’s eyes only empires should exist – that is, centralized spheres of power – and not nations. Which, incidentally, is a perspective he shares with Trump, who also regards nations – for example Canada and Greenland – as political perversions.
But the explanation is not only cultural and historical. It is also economic, in that we are observing here a former centre’s attempt to recapture its previous identity as an empire.
In other words: an entirely necessary insight from what in the social sciences is called “World System History” seems crucial to understanding what is happening.
Within this framework of understanding, Ukraine must be characterised as a former periphery that managed to stage a revolt against the former weakened centre’s economic exploitation. Culturally, Ukraine then escaped by reinventing itself as a cosmopolitan Western country complete with southern-style cafés, its own church, its own language, and a magnificent nature. In an increasingly tense militarized environment in Moscow and its surroundings, the newly established periphery – the nation-state Russia – then prepared to subjugate the former periphery in order, at the same time, to re-establish the Russian Empire as culturally superior and thereby (also) position itself as an economic power.
That Putin in this perspective has drawn heavily on the neo-medieval narrative of Russia’s cultural, popular, and economic superiority is no surprise. But in reality it is banal: it is about strong feelings of powerlessness and the dream of regaining power; and envisioning it as an empire.
It amounts to an almost medieval approach to the future world order of the 21st century.
Karen Schousboe
READ:
World System History. The Social Science of Long-Term Change.
Ed. by Robert A. Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, and George Modelski.
Routledge 2008.
Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1900:
By C. Tilly
Blackwell 1990
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Natural disasters in the Middle Ages were met with resilience in a number of different ways: migration, rebuilding, re-settlements.
York Apocalypse
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Apocalyptic thinking was a common topic in Late Antiquity, reaching into the early Reformation. The following lists recent books outlining the history behind the topic and its different forms of artistic renditions.
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Santo Toribio de Liébana
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Apocalypse – Yesterday and Today
New exhibition in Paris at the Bibliotheque Nationale Française enlightens us about the history of our apocalyptic thinking in the past and present
Medieval Feast for the Celebration of Notre-Dame de Paris 1182
What might the Archbishop of Paris have served at the banquet following the solemn consecration of the Altar at Notre-Dame de Paris in 1182?
At the upcoming celebrations of the restored Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, one of the highlights will be the consecration of the new altar in Notre-Dame de Paris, scheduled to take place on Sunday, December 8th, 2024, during the first Mass to be celebrated in the restored Cathedral.
This date coincides with the second Sunday of Advent and is part of the reopening festivities for Notre-Dame following its extensive restoration after the devastating fire in April 2019. The consecration will be a significant moment in the reopening celebrations, marking the return of religious services to the Cathedral. Archbishop Laurent Ulrich of Paris will preside over this ceremony.
The new altar, designed by French designer and sculptor Guillaume Bardet, is described as having a sober, bowl-shaped form crafted in sculpted bronze. This choice of material is intended to offer a “powerful, timeless and luminous aesthetic” while maintaining a “noble simplicity” in line with the Second Vatican Council’s guidelines for liturgical elements
The consecration of the altar will be part of a larger series of events surrounding the Cathedral’s reopening. To what extent will these celebrations in 2024 echo the events nearly 850 years ago? This is a moot point. We don’t know much, only that the choir was completed in 1177, and the high altar was consecrated on May 19th, 1182, by Cardinal Henri de Château-Marçay, the Papal legate in Paris, and Maurice de Sully, the Bishop of Paris.
Likely, Philippe Auguste – Philip II – was also present as the Cathedral was known to receive generous donations from the King on several occasions. Following his father’s death, he was even designated successor to his father in the great hall of the episcopal palace adjacent to the new church. Later, his first wife was buried in front of the altar from 1182.
Likely, htough, the consecrations was followed by a grand feast celebrated in the episcopal hall next door. What might have been served on this occasion?
A Medieval Feast
We do not have any cook books with collections of recipes preserved in French manuscripts from the 12th century, neither from royal nor episcopal courts. However, in 2013, a small collection of French recipes in a manuscript from approximately 1140 resurfaced in Durham.
These recipes for cooking were hidden among others for medical ointments and cures. Terse in tone, the recipes mainly provide directions for how to cook sauces to accompany mutton, chicken, duck, pork and beef, but there is also a recipe for cooking “Hen in Winter”. The sauces include some Mediterranean flavours, featuring ingredients like parsley, sage, pepper, garlic and coriander. Also, the text describes one recipe as deriving from Poitou in central Western France.
Much ink has been spilt on whether these recipes witness a distinct culinary culture or represent dietetic advice intended to help combat the lack of appetite among ill and feeble persons.
Arguments indicate the former was the case. In the manuscript, the recipes point to the particular dishes they were intended to accompany – beef, chicken etc. Also, one of the recipes is specifically said to derive from Poitou, the salsamentum pictauensium, which is also known from other recipe collections. And Poitou was already in the 12th century known from the gastronomic pleasures, one might look for in the culturally vibrant centre of Aquitaine fostered by the Poitivin dukes. Aquitaine was the inheritance of Eleanor married to first Louis VII and later Henry II, mother of Richard II (Lionheart). She was in constant residence there with her son until 1174, when she was imprisoned in England.
We don’t know many details about these Poitivin delights. However, we know that royal residences at that time were furnished with spectacular kitchens intended to cook for large households and on a grand scale. Thus, John Lackland (another son of Henry II and Eleonore), is known to have ordered the installation of a so-called furnesium at both Marlborough and Ludgershall where two to three oxen might be cooked simultaneously. (1) There is no doubt that bread and meat were the two main ingredients at these royal tables. Most likely, the feast in Paris in 1182 would have served a multitude of fish, but also deer, beef, and fowls.
Also, these meats would have been served with the condiment of a sauce, such as the salsamentum pictauensium.
This classical sauce is a mixture of sage, thyme, pepper, garlic, salt, and parsley pounded in a mortar and mixed with vinegar. A modern version calls for a mixture of two parts fresh thyme to one part sage mixed with garlic, pepper and cinnamon to taste. The recipe claims that mixed with vinegar the sauce might keep for eight days. This version is also especially recommended for being served together with boiled mutton.
Mayhap, the version which might have been served at the celebratory dinner following the consecration of Notre-Dame in 1182, was more delicious. At least, the variety from Durham called for one mixed with verjus (juice from raisins) and was intended to be served with beef. As an especially festive dinner, veal may have been on the menu.
Were the sauces boiled or served fresh, like modern mustard or Italian pesto sauces? It depends! We are taught by Le Ménagier de Paris (2), who admonishes his wife to master both versions. If boiled, he explains how a thrifty woman would steep some bread in verjus and then pound it in the mortar after the spices and herbs had been grinded together. This would soak up the expensive spices and help smooth the sauce. Vinegar may be rather harsh, and any modernised “Medieval Kitchen” should be familiar with verjus produced from highly acidic juice made by pressing unripe grapes, crab apples or other sour fruit. Sour, unsweetened apple juice is often as good.
Whichever, the exact recipe followed, it appears that at the court of King John, the sources refer specifically to Geoffrey, his sauce maker, who was in charge of the spices in the royal household. He was paid handsomely for his services in 1204, when he received remuneration equalling urban property to the sum of well over 7 £, on par with the minor gentry, writes Thomas (2020, p. 132).
Perhaps we can imagine that King John inherited a passion for grand cuisine from Southern France, whence the first cookbooks are believed to have been produced? And that he shared this with his step-sibling, Philippe Auguste?
Gallinam in Hieme
The consecration of the altar in 1182 was celebrated on May 19th in Paris. December, however, calls for a winterly recipe. Why not try out the Gallinam in Hieme? Not a difficult recipe, it suggests you cook your hen in a winterly soup seasoned with copious amounts of garlic, sage and whole pepper corn while adding some verjus. You can also use non-sweetened or tangy apple juice. When the hen is boiling, and the pan is hot, let it stand for hours and hours in the hay box. Or wrap the pot in a towel and place it beneath your duvet in your bed. The heat kills off any bedbugs. The trick is not to slush soup on the mattress. Haybox or retained heat cooking is used to cook a liquid-based food like a soup or stew in its own heat. An ancient cooking method, it became popular as a way to conserve cooking fuel during WW2. They used hay in a box because the air spaces in the hay were trapped in heat, and the soup or stew was allowed to cook in its own heat. Anything like hay, shredded newspaper, rice hulls, cotton balls, corn husks, etc., would work as long as it was packed loose and created air spaces.
After cooking, the pieces of the hen might be lifted out, and the breast cut off and served aside accompanied with salsamentum pictauensium. The remains are shredded in the soup and should be served in silver bowls with silver spoons.
Why not celebrate the reopening of Notre- Dame with your own medieval feast? Here is a menu suggested in one of the earliest cooking books preserved in Denmark (Vejrup 1993)
- Small patés with marrow from deer
- Lamprey filets in their own sauce
- Hen pastry with thyme sauce
- Hare served in a hot sauce served with walnut bread
- Hot scorzonera roots served with cold almondbutter
- Raisins marinated in verjus
- Almond dessert served with plum compote
(Recipes in the many medieval cookbooks on the market)
NOTES:
(1) Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199-1216
By Hugh M. Thomas
Oxford University Press 2020, p. 126
(2) The Good Wife’s Guide. Le Ménager de Paris. A Medieval Household Book
Tr. by Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose.
Cornell University 2009
SOURCES:
Salsamenta pictavensium: Gastronomy and Medicine in Twelfth Century England
By: Gem Gasper and Faith Wallis
In: The English Historical Review (2016), Vol 131, No 553 pp 1353-1385
Fêtes gourmandes au Moyen Age.
By Jean-Louis Flandrin and Carole Lambert.
Imprimerie Nationale Editions 1998
Til taffel hos Kong Valdemar. Europas ældste kogebog efterto middelalderhåndskrifter fra 1300-tallet.
Hans Vejrup
Systime 1993
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Women in the Viking World
Imagining women’s lives and ways of thinking in another world is complicated. How do we transgress the barriers of our own cultural predispositions? These questions were recently explored at a conference focusing on “Women in the Viking World”.
How should we imagine the lives of Viking women? And in what way – if any – did their lives change with the introduction of Christianity? Did the conversion entail limitations? Or did it create new possibilities for women in terms of equality? For instance, concerning intellectual possibilities inside religious communities?
These questions have been debated in the last 40 years, since the seminal book published by Judith Jesch in 1991, which was based on her research in the 1980s.
In recent years, however, a new archaeological focus has been observed in Viking Studies research on women. This trend took off in 2013, with Gardela’s initial work on “warrior-women” culminating in his book published in 2021. His work followed the footsteps of the research published in 2017, which led to the 2019 publication in Antiquity on reassessing the Viking Warrior women in the Birka grave BJ. 581.
During the summer of 2024, scholars and graduate students gathered in Liverpool in the UK to take stock, exploring questions of identity, gender, status, migrations, settlements, emotions and consciousness, as well as the lived experience as evidenced by archaeology and anthropology.
One conclusion was that “age” appeared more critical than “gender” when mapping status as witnessed by grave goods. However, assemblies of grave goods did indeed signal gender. Another venue explored was based on studies of women’s histories as witnessed in Runic Stones, not least the story of the Danish Queen Thyra, which Danish archaeologists and runologists have recently studied. Following this, the question of how to avoid cultural myopia, for instance, when identifying male rods as “spires” or “sceptres” signalling juridic power as opposed to female rods, which are habitually identified as staffs, signalling otherworldly or religious capabilities.
Finally, the conference explored new ways of reading the Icelandic Corpus of texts to grasp women’s emotional and political realities when dealing with the everyday experience of making a living. One particular effort was represented by papers exploring the normative systems and the space allotted for emotional and practical transgressions in these texts.
“If the conference aimed to provide an arena for the exchange of ideas between disciplines about recent and currently ongoing research projects within Viking Studies, it was most definitely a success. The presenters showed the relevance of prioritizing the study of the women in the Viking world, both in their lived experiences, as evidenced by the archaeological studies, and in the literary representation and depiction of women. Whether this divide itself is possible to bridge cannot be resolved so easily, and the conference hopefully spurs further attempts to engender clarifying research into these areas”, writes Kim Bergqvist from Stockholm University in a fine overview of the conference in a recent issue of Scandia.
PHOTO:
Ane Halsboe-Jørgensen, current minister for Cultur & Church posing as “Vølve”. The Photo was taken as part of series of ten portraits by the artist Jens Lyngvild as part of an exhibition at Køge Museum , Vølver, Guld og Guder / © Jens Lyngvild
SOURCE:
Women in the Viking World. Conference report from the University of Liverpool (27. – 28. August 2024)
Ed by Kim Bergquist
In: Scandia. Journal of Medieval Norse Studies (2024) No 7
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Encounter the women of medieval Europe through their own words, visions and experiences, in an exhibition like no other.
From the courage of Joan of Arc at her trial for heresy, and the visionary experiences of Julian of Norwich, to the artistry of the London silkwoman Alice Claver, the work of female medical practitioners, and the struggles of female rulers like Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, this exhibition explores the challenges, achievements and daily lives of women in Europe from 1100 to 1500. It will tell the history of medieval women through their own words and uncover their lives through manuscripts, documents and artefacts.
Discover the rich and complex lives of women in the Middle Ages, with over 140 extraordinary items that reveal their artistry, resourcefulness, courage and struggles. Tickets are on sale now.
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Break free from traditional narratives and encounter personalities both famous and forgotten who tell the story of medieval womanhood. And discover stories familiar to women today, from the gender pay gap and harmful stereotypes, to access to healthcare and education, as well as challenges faced by female leaders.
Hear the words of medieval women from across the centuries, speaking powerfully for the thousands whose voices have not surfaced as yet – and likely never will.
Digitisation of Charters and Manuscripts
As part of the run-up to the exhibition, the British Library has also been digitising a significant number of their charters and rolls relating to Medieval and Renaissance Women (218 charters at the last count and 25 rolls). They will make a separate announcement when all of these are online — many of them already are. However, the British Library is still working to compensate for the hacking, which took place last year. The new collection ads to the 93 manuscripts earlier digitsed, offering a substantial help to scholars and other interested in exploring the rich collections in the BL pertaining to women and gender studies.
VISIT:
Medieval Women: In their Own Voice.
The British Library, London
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