Gone Medieval - St. Christopher & Summertime Saints

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

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 >St. George & Springtime Saints >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 for more information.

From long-loss 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 Jarniger, 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 forward slash subscribe. 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. 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 Jeff's author of Saints, a new legendary of heroes, humans and magic. Join me here on Gone Medieval to tell us about St. Edward the Confessor and a few other splendid saints associated with the first wintry 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 uncumber, the saint called upon by women seeking liberation 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. 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. First, he sought to serve the king of men, a mighty ruler whose name struck terror into all who heard it.

Serve me well, giant, said the king. Serve me, if you are to be true to your strength. Towering over him like a mountain, scoundrel stood in the king's service. but he soon grew restless. 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.

You seek power, said the devil. Then join me, and the world shall cower at your feet. 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. Why do you serve a master who flees from the light? asked the monk. 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. The king of heaven does not demand power, said the monk. He offers salvation. Will you leave behind your pride, your strength, and serve him? 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. 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. 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. Will you carry me across, mighty man, past the child?

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 top. current. 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 burdens 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, the child spoke. His voice, now rich with divine. power. 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 can. Forever changed, scoundrel, now known as Christ-bearer or Christopher, knelt upon the shore. His heart ablaze with faith. So he had carried the weight of the Saviour, and in doing so he had found the strength of true service,

the strength that was not of the body, but of the soul. Christopher had become the patron of travellers. Welcome back to God Medieval, Amy, here to talk about Summer Saints, just as the temperature is ramping up here in the UK at least. Yeah, it's wonderful to be fitting with the windows open talking about these characters who were so entangled with things like the harvest and Sirius in the night sky. 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 metaphor and stories in the medieval mind. 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, the scy 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 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 is this real feeling of heat and power. This was also the month for what were known as the Diaz Caniculars 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 Astrea and the Virgin Mary bringing in the grain, the means for making the years 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. 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. Yes, this was years ago. I was visiting my then-boyfriend's house in a little village called Presby outside Cheltenham. We decided to walk to Hales, which is beyond a village called Wynchcom. 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 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 it 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 crossed some kind of threshold 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 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 10 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 St 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 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.

And 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 elderly border collie was really resentful. So it sowed the seed for this idea that there was something very enchanting about the stories and the kitchens. characters in the medieval cult of saints. 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. There's something wonderful about going into a church that is more in touch with this post-Reformation side, let's see. 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 15th century sequel to the Canterbury Tales. It is by the author called Berrin. 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 12th 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. But the miller and the pardiner 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 St. Catherine, St. 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?

And you're also talking the book a bit about with St Christopher, there's even some meaning in the etymology of his name. How do we arrive at the name Christopher? I think his was 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 popularised in Jacobus de Varanais' 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, and his name is reprobatus, like reprobate. I translate it as a scoundrel. So he's this giant called scoundrel, which kind of alerts straightway. He'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 high.

this 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 borne 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. And at that point, the Christ child confers on him the name Christopher, which is from the Greek Christophorus, so like Christ bearer. In Latin, it could become Christi or Ferro, 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 St. 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 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. And also I guess where they sit on the sliding scale of good to evil, because we tend to think of giants being 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. 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 130 surviving wall paintings of Christopher in medieval church. 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 as he's saying you're not going to die an evil death, which means you won't die that day without having first said confession, which was the next best thing for a medieval Christian. Yeah, if you've got to go, at least he's promising you'll go the right. way. 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 baptized, 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 enmesh. 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. well. How does he become so closely associated with travellers and journeys? I guess there is

very strong, died 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 has 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,

there was one badge that was sold at the shrine of Thomas Beckett that showed Thomas Beckett 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 onto at 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 were 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 hand raised in blessed

So he's blessing the road ahead of you. The peacock looking at the road with its great big squawking face. So that's important. Like cockrels and peacops are squawking animals. They 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 cockrels 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. collection that showed St Christopher, unmistakably St Christopher. Christopher, it was a little open work badge, smaller than a credit card, a shield shape with St Christopher standing inside the shield with the Christchard on his shoulder, and St Christopher is holding a staff. And on top of the staff, instead of the sprouting leaves and flowers that you'd expect from 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 St 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. 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.

Yeah, I was going to 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. Yeah. And if we're going to 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? 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 reside. in the minds of people who weren't writing text 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 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. 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. Yeah. By the later period, there is a real skepticism. 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 country's 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 pilgrim souvenirs on their hat. And it's a kind of expression by the patrons of the artwork 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. And I guess for the church, there is an element of if people are carrying these badges, 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? I think there was a kind of threshold of 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 and 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 and the Museum de Pluny these things dredged up from the Thames or from the Sen 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 Beckett.

This is Thomas Beckett's death in 1170, sort of precipitated the market for pilgrim souvenirs. The first thing they have is these ampoli little flasks of Beckett's liquid, as it was called, the kind of diluted. Yeah, sounds gross. 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 Beckett's martyrdom On an ampula. Later you just have a bad showing his martyrdom. And I guess if we're being slightly cynical

They're good money-making ruse as well. 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-Cumbar,

at least as not as familiar as St. Christopher. Could you tell us a little bit about St. Uncumber and why St. Uncumber is important in the summer? Yes, so I should have said that Christopher's Feast Day falls on the 25th of July. St. 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 post-dates 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 canonisation process from that point on and the whole thing becoming a lot more legal, more like a legal process. But Uncumbus emerges as a story set way back in the midst of time as not a clear kind of start date or a date for her life. 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 a caird, which is of a bearded figure wearing a crown, but with a sort of female costume, so dress,

often by the later period, like a tightly lace bodice. She was known by various names. One of her names was Will the Fortis, that was her Latin name, is thought that might come from Virgo, 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 Moore writes about how women would leave a pecker votes at her image. Or at least one of the characters in his dialogues talks about this, to get rid of unwanted husbands. And the interlocutors are in the dialogue says, well, why a pecker votes? Is that for the horses of the unwanted husbands that they can write? away. In French she was called Debeira, like get rid of. In German commoness, a caring, like,

si common is 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 Looker, 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 Northwest Europe. Northwestern Europeans would have been more familiar with Christ in the loincloth suffering.

And so it's thought that maybe depictions of the crucifix from this Italian site made their way into northwestern 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 explain, 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 that Uncumble was Solicitor, and it's in that form that she makes her way into the first edition of the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. 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. 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, the image of Saint-uncumber, kicks the other golden shoe into his hand in front of all the crowds and they realize that he has indeed been

blessed by the saint. She's magic. It's really interesting iconography that you don't kind of see anywhere else in medieval Christianity to have 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 an 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? 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 becoming more holy. There's sort of a joke version of it. It's in the actual life of St Jerome. There's a fantastic illustration of it in the Belle Ur, commissioned by Jean-Duc de Berri, who did the famous Trey Richer of that we know, like, its aesthetic was used for sleeping beauty. Like, you just recognise it straight away.

In the Belle Earth, 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 in to this really lovely, tight-fitting slash-sleeve blue dress with the low-cup neckline. And Jean-Dugsparry was a real hedonist, and I think there's a great deal of pleasure must have derived from seeing St Jerome with his sort of patriarchal little beard and looking very Abrahamic for 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 St. Jerome because he's a man that's ended up dressing in women's clothes. 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 veer in it, man in Latin, and where we get the word virtue. And so I think that you could almost imagine that Uncumber has undergone this transition. and she's therefore a masculine protector for women from other men who are not virtuous.

Is there an element there of the church kind of, because the church is developing, particularly around, you know, 1,200, 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. is not what I think at all before anyone shouts at me. 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 the similar. similar to what we were talking about with the giant St. Christopher, the kind of arasmataz of having inverted a stereotype. And there's just a basic narrative aesthetic appeal about that and it's memorable and it's surprising. And you mentioned there's the leaving a pile of oats to venerate St.

Incumbra. Do we get to the bottom of what that is about? Why do you leave oats for St. and Cumber? 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 an 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.

Yeah, fantastic. And I guess if your wife comes home with a pilgrims 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? 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 into idiom and other ideas. So the basic story is that they are among this 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 attendance 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 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 face. 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 some 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 sleeping inside blocked in. They're none the wiser.

And covert Christians have witnessed this. They've 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. He's really hungry.

And so you think, I'm going to go into Ephesus and get some bread. and the others say, can you get a better bread than he did last time else I was rubbish so they got waking up to. And so he goes down into the city and he just notices 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 has been chopped down but there's a really big stump where this little thorn tree was and he's odd. And he gets to 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 like 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 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' 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. 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 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 vaporise and die. And then everyone goes, oh, wow! And then they die.

But that is the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus. 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? well. 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 ill. 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. 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 do 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, folk rule, that kind of thing and that they can be read together and with that kind of critical distance. Some saint's lives like there's St.

Hapolitus is killed by being dragged along by wild horses that seems to be clearly linked to the Greek myth as Hippolytus. But it's a fascinating melting pot is all I can say. How is that kind of early, really early Christian story then preserved and kind of spread throughout medieval Europe over the centuries that follow? It's in the early martyvologies and it's in Jacobus de Brojone'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, 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. about St. Swithin's Day and if it rains on St. Swithin's Day, there'll be rain every day for four weeks afterwards or for 40 days. The seven sleepers were also weather saints. So Zubenschliyafer Tag in

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, Zeben Shleifer, seven sleepers for dormice. And I was like, what? This is fascinating. And did some reading and discovered that actually in lots of dialects of English, dorm mice were called seven sleepers. And in the English context where I've read about this that 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 houseguised as 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 Confessor is at a feast and he has a vision that tells him something's bad going to happen and you see the illustration he's looking over his shoulder imagining

and there's this kind of almost that 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. 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 know, 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. Yeah, and I think it's just very 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 this 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. 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. Yes, I'd love that. Thank you, Matt. 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. And if you haven't heard them already, please do go back and listen to our previous episodes with Amy on Edward the Confessor and New Year Saints and St George and Springtime Saints. There are new installments 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 Hits podcasts ad-free. Head to historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Go on. You can do it now. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.