Gone Medieval - The Power of Medieval Icons

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

In the Middle Ages, how did art - particularly Christian icons - serve to connect humanity with heavenly realms?  How did such images spread from the Eastern Roman Empire to the rest of Europe?  What did they represent and how could they sometimes be misused to justify war and imperialism?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega explores these questions with art historian and theologian Professor Matthew Milliner, author of Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. 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. In the year 730, John of Damascus, a Syrian monk, celebrated musician and respected theologian was hard at work writing a text called In Defensive Icons. In this work, he strove to argue that religious images were acceptable within the Christian faith and that using them for prayer was in no way sacrilegious. In his own words, he said, An image is a likeness of the original with a certain difference,

for it is not an exact reproduction of the original. Things which have taken place are expressed by images for the remembrance either of a wonder or an honour or dishonour or good or evil to help those who look upon it in after times that we may avoid evils and imitate goodness. It is of two kinds, the written image in books, as when God had the law inscribed on tablets and enjoined that the lives of holy men should be recorded and sensible memorials be preserved in remembrance.

So now we preserve in writing the images and the good deeds of the past. Either, therefore, take away images altogether and be out of harmony with God who made these regulations or receive them with the language and in the manner which people. befits them. Why would such a defense be necessary in the first place? How could a religious image be taken as anything but that? What was so powerful that whole books needed to be written about it? I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonigua, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit,

I'm joined by the brilliant Matthew Milliner, Associate Professor of Art History of Wheaton College, and the author of Mother of the Lamb, the story of a global icon, to discuss, well, icons, which is to say religious images. We'll find out how arts served as an important connection between the living and the divine, how such images spread from the Eastern Roman Empire to the rest of Europe in the Middle Ages, and how it was sometimes misused and even still is today to justify war and imperialism. Matt, thank you so much for coming on to Gone Medieval.

Thanks, Eleanor. I am incredibly delighted to have you here because today we're going to talk about one of my favorite things. in the entire world, which is icons. Woo! Yeah, they're really cool, right? They're really cool. The original, not these contemporary replacements, but the original icon. Absolutely.

Can you just explain for the benefit of our listeners who may have other hobbies what an icon is? Yeah, these are not the apps on your cell phone. Obviously, we know that. But they're portals in a way. They're intended to be, in some senses, gateways to the heavenly realities as the the theologians would say to the prototypes themselves. So an image of St. Peter isn't just a picture that ends there. It's a picture that puts you in touch with a heavenly personage, Peter himself, who is awaiting the resurrection, but who exists in a mysterious way in the communion of saints.

So that's what these icons are trying to do. And even sometimes art historians miss that. They forget the spiritual purpose. My favorite quote is Pavel Florensky, a great Russian martyr and theologian and art historian, he said, what would we say to an ornithologist who all that he cared about birds was collecting plumage and feathers? You have to see the birds in their natural habitat. In the same way, when you go into an Orthodox church, you see the incense and the candles, and then you get a sense, oh, these icons aren't supposed to be in a museum. They're portals to another realm. I think it's really important to emphasize that because I think that within a modern context, we really do tend to look at the art of things. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that.

But I think it could sometimes be hard for us to kind of get in the mindset of a very religious world and a very religious way of thinking about things. And this desire for a direct connection to heaven, which is what icons offer. And, you know, for a medieval person, that's pretty understandable, right? Because you also have this sort of thing going on with relics, where if you have, you know, a bone of a saint or I don't know if it's somebody very special like Mary, you know, a bit of her veil. And then that allows you almost kind of like a telephone line up to them and a way to connect with them, which is something that people really want is to understand themselves to be connected with the divine.

Surely. And the icon in some sense is we couldn't get the piece of the body. And so we're satisfied with the picture. And I think we all do this. When a beloved friend or relative dies, you don't just cart up all their stuff. off and throw it in the tomb with them. Those are relics of sorts. This is grandmother's lace. This is the briefcase that my father used to carry around. So we all sense that, and this is a collective sensibility of the medieval church. We want to be in contact because these body parts are

awaiting the resurrection of the dead. They'll be reconstituted to the saint itself. So in some senses, they're in anticipation of that future event. The Art Institute of Chicago, there's a piece of John the Baptist tooth still stuck in a reliquary. And there it is. You walk by it and they haven't removed it yet. And so in some senses, there's a liveliness, a piece of John the Baptist, not just an image of John the Baptist in a museum. I just think that this is such an incredible thing. And I love these little connections that we can have from the past. And, you know, one of the things that I do with my collection of icons is, you know, I can't have the real thing. I can't have an actual medieval one. But I satisfy myself with modern reproduction.

of medieval icons. And that in a lot of ways is also the same thing, I think. I hope it is, because I can't afford the real ones either, nor would certain European countries want me to walk away with any of them. And I think we have to be satisfied with those reproductions. One of the things I'm experimenting with now is there are some forgotten saints from the Middle Ages that are completely neglected and the texts have been recovered. One of them is Afu, this African saint who did wonderful things. He was neglected for so long. And now that we have the text, but we don't have any iconography because he was forgotten, I'm in some sense, is using AI to generate an image of a foo that might be suitable for devotional purposes.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. I've been tinkering around with it. But we need not be wedded to, it has to be done in egg tempera and jesso and sacred wood. In some senses, machine-made icons today, which many churches, it's all they can afford. They also can be equally effective in putting you in touch with the prototype if the prototype is what matters. If all you care about is the aesthetic kick, which is why some people love icons, it's just fine. In some senses, that's defeating the purpose. The idea is to combine them with the essential indispensable ingredients of prayer and silence, and then they can have that impact. And it doesn't

matter necessarily if they're done in the traditional style, if that's what you're after. Now, speaking of prayer and silence, I think that we can take a moment here. I wanted to also discuss briefly because we could go all day on this. But along with this, the concept of iconoclasm, because I think that iconoclasm or iconoclast, this is a word that a lot of people hear, but they don't really understand it. You know, now when we use it a lot of the time, we mean, you know, a rock star who does cool new things, right? But can you very briefly touch on what the kind of movement of iconoclasm was as opposed to people like us who you'd call iconophiles or icon of jewels are into. Sure. So there was a panic in the Eastern Christian Empire when Islam was making some encroachments

and they said, what's going on? Is this the judgment of God in one sense or another? And there was one particular emperor, Constantine V, who was very effective on the battlefield. And along with Leo, another emperor, they came along and they said, obviously the problem is the images. We have these an iconic, imageless, Avengers that are judging us for our idolatry. And so there's a lot of contestation as to how much we can trust the sources, but it nevertheless does seem to be the case that images were deemed suspect. And so this idea of an icon of Peter, let alone an icon of Jesus or Mary, was deemed impermissible. They started to tear them down. There were some exaggerations in the account,

but again, there seems to be something that occurred. Some people describe it, the only civil war in human history fought over the matter of images. And over, a period of centuries, great defenders of icons, namely John of Damascus, protected by Muslims so that he could make these arguments. And then Theodore the studied, patriarch Nisphras, come along and they say, hey, this is allowed, because we're not fantasizing what we think God is like, because God imaged God's self in Christ. And we're just imitating and mimicking that ultimate image. So that's the case that they made. And so in the year 843, there was a vindication of icons, a great celebration. Hey, we can do this. It reminds me of pop art like

Andy Warhol. After a time where you could only have abstract expressionism in New York City, that was the only kind of art. Then finally, the pop artists like Littgenstein said, hey, we want to get back to images. So there was this new energy and outburst of images that came forth as a result of the triumph of the icon lovers or iconophiles over the icon of class, the icon breakers. Yeah, I find it such a really interesting debate, too, because it's a weird one in terms of sources, you know, if you're just a straight historian like myself, because we hear a lot from the iconophiles because it's one of these things where, you know, I don't like it when people say history is written by the winners, but in this case, we have a lot about every time the icons are kind of brought back. And we have very little from the iconoclast themselves, you know, in terms of what their theological output is. But I also kind of dig it from the perspective of how I always like to make. about women. And I like how one of the big pro-icon groups is royal women. So a lot of the time, it'll be, you know, an emperor bands, icons. And then an empress says, no, we're bringing them back. Yes. In both cases, it was empresses that reversed the decision, Irene and then

Theodora. Just total flip. It was women that made the difference. And you know, speaking of this, one of the big subjects of icons in general is, of course, a woman. And there's this great term that you have in the Eastern Greek church for images of the Virgin Mary, who's the Theotokos, the mother of God. I was wondering if you could talk us through the importance of her as a subject. Yeah, there was this understanding that is the incarnation a phantasm? Is it a brief appearance of the godhead only to dissipate into imagelessness again? And there was this assertion of the early Christian church that, no, God really became human, which dignifies what it means for us to be human. And as they came along and thought that through at the end of his life, the beginning of his life,

they came to the conclusion, when did he become human? Was it like when he was two years old or five years old? He's already human. And when did he become God when he was like three? No, he had always to have been God. And that means he was even God when he's in the mother's womb. And in some senses, if you want to resist the residual patriarchy that is lingering in the society, one way to do that is to say, God had to humble himself in the womb of a woman.

woman that many people didn't really want to contemplate, but the manner of the incarnation forced them to contemplate the dignity of a woman's womb because God himself dwelt in there. And the articulation, theologically of that was the term bearer or mother of God, Theo Tocos. And it was proclaimed in 431 in the very city where Artemis slash Diana was once worshipped, who, interestingly enough, was not maternal. because in the pantheon of goddesses, that wasn't really her role. And so there was this replacement.

And there was a loss of faith in Artemis in the ancient world when the vandals would sack the temple. She can't do anything. And then there was plague and famine. And so she was already on the rocks. And then all of a sudden, this new woman comes along. They're like, hey, mother of God, we like her. And so the poor loving bishops of Ephesus won the hearts of the population.

because in this new regime, even the poor were privileged more than perhaps under paganism. This is what some of the great books examining the cult of Artemis and the shift to the veneration of Mary and Jesus instead seem to articulate. I just think that it's such a wonderful thing to kind of look at from a social perspective. Because, again, everybody always kind of talks about the art and they're beautiful. Icons are absolutely gorgeous. But one of the things that's so interesting about icons is they do have the, this real meaning for the sense of a city or the sense of an empire, this sense of individuals that really can tack onto them and say, you know, this is something that represents us

and is a way for us to express our highest needs with the divine. And I find it incredibly moving, I suppose. As much as I'm also a partisan of Artemis, I mean, I think she's pretty cool. It is really interesting to see the way that people really react to these things. It's meaningful to them. You know, this is something that can be personal on an individual level and also work as a society as a whole. And I find that just absolutely fascinating. Yeah.

Athena would protect the ancient Paulus, right? She would be there to defend Athens against any intruders. And this is taken up by the Byzantine Eastern Christians. And they would sometimes describe Mary processing the walls and protecting the city. And sometimes people look at that and say, oh, see, it's just the residual. Paganism, nothing changes. But if you read the accounts closely, they say, but she declared the victory not through spears, but through tears. These moving moments where it was her compassion and sorrow, which is something glittering images of in the pagan world, but they're just a brief flashes. For the

most part, if you lost a battle, Athena's, oh, sorry, I'm out of here. But Mary, she was there with her son at his darkest hour. And so she can be there with a satchez. city as well, which is, I think, really what makes the difference is she does serve a protective role, but it's more than just protection. So you've got to something that I was really interested to talk to you about, which is also the, I suppose, diffusion of icons that we then see throughout Europe, because you and I've been talking quite rightly about the Eastern Roman Empire Byzantium, which is really kind of the place to go get icons. But they don't end up staying there. And it's, usually not for reasons of someone came over and said,

oh, that's a great icon, I'd like to have one. It's usually a bad news story when an icon ends up in Western Europe, right? Yeah, this is this wonderful work of an art historian named Hans Belting, who died last year. And essentially, he changed the history of art because he said, this thing we call the Renaissance, you know how that started? It was by these icons. I start to describe it sometimes to my students.

It's as if migrating birds went to South America and came. came back with all these seeds on their back, which caused new flora to emerge in England. And in the same way, these icons come over, and those are the seeds that you wait 150 years for them to germinate, and then you get Fra Angelica or ultimately Leonardo, because they're, in some sense, is indebted to this great Eastern tradition. And on the one hand, in Belting's research, he says, if you had to go on Pogamwich to Jerusalem, but let's say you couldn't get there, you had some obstruction. You can bring back an icon and that counted.

And so that's one evidence of how it came through. And then what you're alluding to, sadly, is, of course, sometimes they would talk about it wasn't just barbarians and pagans that sacked cities. It was Christians that sacked cities. And the Eastern Empire asked help from the Latins and they gave more than help. And they sacked the city of Constantinople in 1204. And that's how we get some of the greatest icon collections in San Chappelle in Paris, in San Marco in Venice.

and even there are beautiful places in the countryside of England that go back to, oh yeah, this guy went over and he brought back some stuff after the Crusades. And you can understand why this is something that people would want. I mean, they're very beautiful. And, you know, it's not as though the Latin Church doesn't also have a rich tradition of liking images. You know, you see beautiful statues of the Virgin Mary all over the place and endless saints and this sort of thing. But it's much more of a kind of tradition of frescoes or stuble. statues and not icons as an object, right? Right, and the allure was their antiquity.

There was often a legend that St. Luke himself would have done this from life as he was looking at the Virgin Mary in Jesus. And so there was a sense of, okay, we've got this fancy Gothic statuary and a beautiful fresco here somewhere in Florence, but this goes all the way back. And so that was the allure. That's what gave them reverence and sanctity. When you have eyes for this, you'll never not see it. So, for example, let's say you go in a Renaissance tour to the Brancacchi Chapel in Florence, because you want to see Massaccia. You go in there and you'll look at the way he deploys one-point perspective and say, yay, Renaissance. But then if you take a step back, you realize, wait, what's at the center of this chapel?

What's the point of this chapel? It's an icon. There's an ancient icon. Lo-fi, not glitzy, no one-point perspective, gold background in the sky, not blue. there was this reverence for something that had the aura of sanctity and age. Like a fine wine, we might say. If you have a choice between a 1980 bottle of wine that's been perfectly cared for and something that you picked up that was harvested last year, what are you going to go for?

And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's from, you know, the nicest vineyard in the world. You know that there is something about that age that is going to give it that oomph. And, you know, for medieval people as well, there is, of course, the call out to theoretical mythology of, oh, this was painted from life, and of course, that's wonderful. But there's also this idea that the further back you go in the past, the closer you are to the Garden of Eden, the closer you are to the divine itself. And they feel this really keenly. You know, medieval people really revere the past. And this is something that I think kind of gets lost a lot of the time in the discussion

of the Renaissance. It's like, oh, and medieval people were idiots. And they didn't know how to do X, Y, and said, it's like, they love it. They're thrown under the bus. And the funny thing is that even in the Renaissance, they were taken in the beautiful way by this. Michelangelo himself, we now know for certain all this new Michelangelo research that's come out over the last couple decades, he was drawn to the icon precisely because he was able to generate the slick sculptures and frescoes that everybody loved. He wanted something that could refresh his soul that wasn't just visual pyrotechnics. And so there are these beautiful books by Alexander Nagel and other Renaissance actor historians that show the way that Michelangelo was imitating these icons. One of the great,

great wines of the world is Chateau de Kemp. It has what is called noble rot. These grapes are almost rotting. And you capture them at just this moment, you put them into this spot. And it almost feels like it's an organic thing alive in your mouth because of the antiquity of the vineyards, the grapes almost on the edge of destruction. That's, I think, what Michelangelo saw in these icons, especially because they were battered and bruised and not as shiny as you might have thought. He was drawn to that, and I think maybe we with our slick screens today might be drawn to these ancient images as well. What else can account for the crowds right now pouring into the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the African Byzantine exhibit, to say nothing of the previous blockbuster exhibitions. I heard one account of a woman, a really sharp scholar who said, when I walked into the Faith and Power exhibition at the Met and I compared it to the contemporary art exhibitions just outside the walls, even the Renaissance,

are. She said, I wept in the gift shop because I was so taken aback by the antiquity and the beauty of these images. Even if it's not true that they go all the way back to St. Luke, they still have comparative age next to the rest of the stuff in the museum. The monks of Mount Sinai, which is the cache of icons on the foot of Mount Sinai in St. Catherine's Monaster in Egypt, where we had to rewrite the history of art when these were rediscovered in the 1950s. When they bring those icons to New York or London or anywhere, they actually purchased plane tickets for the accompanying monk and the icon. And I always like to think, do they get the full meal? But all this to say, you got to imagine this icon strapped up because they're afraid to put it in the cargo bin because

of how ancient. These things go back to the year 600. It's astonishing. I love that about them. And I love this kind of pining that you've got to get on the part of the Latin Church, this idea that you know, there's something going on over there in the East. And if you can bring an icon back, I think a lot of the time when we talk about crusaders going East and then changing the world when they come back, it's overdone. And then that's not quite the thing. But if you can come back from the East and you've got an icon, you know, for everyone who can't make this incredibly dangerous and expensive trip out East, if you've got something that you're saying is coming, you know, from the Holy Land or, you know, hey, Eastern Rome, who's to say?

That is a way of kind of doing a pilgrimage almost when you can't. If you can be in the presence of this venerable object, that allows you to kind of have a gloss of it in the same way. It's like you would take a selfie when you go to a place. You want proof. You want some sense of your being there. If they had that technology, they would have done it. The closest they could get was, hey, I brought back. And by the time a couple centuries ago, the relics are out.

They're all gone, right? So at some point, they wanted to amplify the relics. So what they would do is, seriously, they would put a relic in a vat of oil. And then they would give you little deposits of oil in a flask with an image on it to say, okay, you had something that was close to the bone of the saint. But even then, that's going to run out after a while. And the icons became the way, in some senses of mass producing this contact with the holy. Because, of course, the holy is not limited to a place.

The holy can be everywhere. As Nicholas of Cusa said, God is the circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere. In some senses, the icon reminds you that God is in all places. There are many New Jerusalem. I wanted to ask you and pick your brain too about various motifs that you get for some of them. And so I have a favorite icon. And my favorite icon is the triumph of orthodoxy. And I love the triumph of orthodoxy because it's very meta.

So the Triumph of Orthodoxy is an icon that was created after the iconophiles win, after the kind of battle with iconoclasm over in Byzantium. And there had been a big icon of the Virgin Mary on the gates of the imperial palace, and that had to come down when the iconoclasts were in power. But then when the iconophiles were back, that icon was put back. And it was huge. But the tribe of Orthodoxy shows all of the monks. putting the icon of the Virgin Mary back on the gates. So it's an icon of an icon. And I just think that

it is this incredible statement and kind of window into the way that this faith works. So they're willing to kind of commemorate almost a theological battle and say that this is something that happened and make a picture of it. And I find it's incredibly modern in a way. It is. It's funny. That image at the British Museum, it's about the year 1400. looking back in 600 years thinking about okay look at this moment this is how we choose to remember that history and you might say i want to put on my skeptical hat and say how much it is it true there's a wonderful thousand-page book by leslie brue baker and john howden john howden i studied with him and wonderful kind of critical examination did all this really happen and from a marxist perspective

that in some senses wants to take some of the legend out of it And I read that and appreciated it, but at the end of the day, as true as it is that maybe there are some exaggerations, as I said before, that does seem to have been to an extent what did occur, whether or not we know all the details we want to know. And what you've got there is below. You have the empress and her regent next to the people veiling the icon and below, and again, empress, not emperor, you've got all these people who were martyrs who had their hands burned by, hot irons because they were still making art and other people who were put to their deaths in these exaggerated accounts because of images. But in some sense, says, no, we want to make. We want to paint. Imagine if we banned creative activity. So I think it's something to be celebrated and loved. In one case, they punished a guy for making icons by printing poetry, tattooing it on his forehead, and they made sure it was in bad Greek so that it was really insulting to the guy.

And so the sense was like, hey, you can't keep images down. They cannot be suppressed. God is an artist. And so, therefore, people made in God's image are going to be artists too. And so I'm with you. I think it's something worth celebrating and looking at, if you get a chance to go to London, you've got to spend some time with that beautiful image. But I know that you've kind of got, well, if not a very favorite icon.

Your book, Mother of the Lamb, talks a lot about one particular motif that we see. a lot on icons. And can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. As true as it is, as we just discussed, that Mary was used in military warfare and still is used today. There is an alternate witness. And sometimes icons would be marshaled for defensive purposes or even offensive purposes to go on the attack. And I was well aware of that. There's been some good studies pointing out that reality. But what interested me as a graduate student, as I combed those accounts, said, is that the entirety of the story? And it turns out that even though Virgin Mary images may have been used to propel the Crusades, there was one famous image that was a response to the Crusades.

And in particular, it happened when Richard the Lionheart conquers the island of Cyprus to use it as a cash cow to conquer Jerusalem. In 1191, he invades, and then he sells it to the Knights Templar. They tried to subjugate the Orthodox population unsuccessfully. They're like, You don't want this anymore. They sell it to the French. And in 1192, this Orthodox icon painter, whose name we know? Theodore Opsevdiz retreats into the mountains and responds, not by grumbling and complaining or trying to go on the attack. Instead, he paints this gorgeous mourning image of the Virgin Mary with two angels above her bearing the instruments of the passion.

In effect, what Theodore is saying with his patron, who is paying for the image, we're now back at the conditions that the original Jesus and Mary were facing. They're subjugated by an emperor. They're not in control as they wish they were. And they have to learn new virtues and resources to manage this situation. You might say, okay, fine. Okay, cool, curious, minority report. Meanwhile, there's all these aggressive Virgin Mary's.

It's not a minority report. That icon spread like wildfire as much as a medieval image could go viral. This went viral. And if you want to see what I mean by that, just go into your Google Maps and put in Our Lady of Perpetual Help. And you'll probably find that within 10, 20, 30 miles of you, if not even nearer, there's a church named after this icon. And if you look at it, you will see there are the angels with the instruments of the passion. And so for me, this image that is all over the world, maybe in London, the biggest appearance. In 2012, Meserite Defar, an Ethiopian Orthodox athlete, won the 5,000-meter race.

And she starts fiddling with her jersey at this great moment. You're like, what's she doing? She should be cheering. What she was doing was grabbing this icon, Our Lady Perpetual Help, and holding it up for the whole world to see. And I like to tell people that more people probably saw the image in that moment. It was one of the most televised events in history than there were on the planet when the image was first created. it. So in some senses, this beautiful icon of suffering love is just beginning its history. Now, and I really love this particular icon because I think it is so moving in its imagery.

So you have Jesus being held by Mary and there's these two angels on either side that are holding kind of the instruments of the passion. They're kind of saying these are the things that are going to befall Jesus because he's come into the world and he's ordained to die. But it's kind of the bravery and the maternal love. It's kind of a very universal story about love anyway. You know how when you love anyone or anything, you know, you're kind of entering into a pact about how someday someone's going to die. And this is such a universal expression of it that is so gorgeous. And we see it come from such a sad and hopeless place. And I find it really cheering, you know, this idea that, you know, things can be awful, but they keep going.

And that's what love means. Exactly. Sometimes I refer to her as Our Lady of the Occupine because she appears not only for everyone who goes through personal suffering of one kind or another, but she particularly appears under oppressed communities. And so I was surprised as an American. Here I am. I used to study Byzantium and now I'm in North America.

I can't afford to go there all the time to Greece. So I started to study Native American communities and surprised. I found this icon all. all over Native American communities because in some senses, she spoke to their conditions as well. There's a massive cathedral in South Dakota, Rapid City, dedicated to the Saigon, another one in Oklahoma City. And so she shows up with famous Native American artists like Norville Moryso. It's incredible that you can't get away from this image. So I found that this was in some sense as a universal testimony.

And then I saw when the horrible war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, I saw this image show up on my newsfeed in a bomb shelter in the Ukraine because of what these people were undergoing. And that for me, I'm not saying that's the entirety of the story of the Virgin Mary and Christianity. I know there's oppression and violence too. But it certainly is neglected and maybe even dominant strain of the story, that really it's about suffering love, not conquering violence. I think it's such an incredibly gorgeous thing. But I mean, just to also talk about uses of icons here because, you know, this is a beautiful one that I think we can all really get behind its use in a lot of ways.

But icons, as much as they do this beautiful function of putting people in touch with the divine and they serve as this really great reminder of what's important in life, they also get misused. So I have this source that I teach with a lot, which it's actually seven years. 17th century. And it's a book. And what it was done is kind of like a report back to the Tsar about expansion into Siberia. And it has all these great images as well, which are very ridiculous and very, you know, early 17th century. And you have all these kind of like triumphant Russians who are moving into the taiga and they end up fighting the Central Asian peoples that live there. And one of the big things that they show over and over again is they have a flag that has Jesus on it. And they report several miracles that go with this flag where, you know, they will be being shot at by arrows in their boats as they go down a river.

And the flag of Jesus goes out into the middle of the river and it parts the clouds of arrows so that all of their boats are able to get through. Or St. Michael shows up holding the flag at one point in time when they want to win a pivotal battle. And, you know, it's very classic kind of early modern. These guys have no idea who the step peoples are. You know, they, of course, have an image of them worshipping. quote unquote a pagan god and it's got like a little Greek god a stylist and it's like I don't think anyone in any of the conates was doing that it fits their purposes to perceive them that way but you definitely see these kind of

trotted out in the name of expansion and in the name of violence that you know you can kind of you know slap a holy gloss on it and say oh we're destined to do this and it's very good you know because here we have our flag of Jesus but it's still kind of being misused as well is that correct that is correct it's certainly true that not only Jesus but the Virgin Mary as well, I have a colleague, Rita Turkovic, who wrote a beautiful book about Christians, Muslims, and Mary in some of the convergence points, but also some of the conflict points. And in images of the Battle of Lepanto, she showed an image not just of Mary and Jesus used in violence, but the little Christ child is holding the severed head of a Muslim in his

hand. And it's, whoa, and Jesus, look at this. And all of that is true, because in some senses, Mary and Jesus are instantiations of what the church wants to be at a given moment. And so we have to concede that. I would be the first to say that's done and it's now even done in the present day. However, in each of those cases, I can point to these icons that show Christianity at its best as well. And so as true as it is, that there is an image of the suffering Virgin Mary that I mentioned. The Virgin of the Passion is its title in Orthodoxy, Our Lady of Perpetual Help in the West. in the bomb shelter of Ukraine, there's also the Times of London article that says Putin's war in Ukraine is blessed by a church icon.

This image of Mary was given to the head of the National Guard to speed the quick conquering of Ukraine. Now, that was almost two years ago today, so it doesn't seem to have been effective. But what I like to point out is that the reality of Russia is that it has this tradition as well. When I was completing the research for the book, I found that there was a church, dedicated to this particular image called the Strasnaya, which in Russian means of the passion, at the heart of Moscow. It was bulldozed by Stalin, and it is now a suppressed church that some people were arguing for its recovery. And I thought that was an ideal image of Russian Orthodox Christianity at its best, trying to come back and speak against this imperialized

violence, that many Russians who are making that case, who are themselves profound Orthodox Christians, are being imprisoned for suggesting that. But this icon represents that you cannot underestimate Christianity or assume that just because you see these news headline-grabbing instances, that's the entirety of the story. Again, there is the suffering love as well. And I think that there's something interesting about where we live now, you know, here I am in the UK and you're in America. These are very Protestant societies, right? And there was in the history of Protestantism a kind of move away from religious imagery more generally.

You know, there's a big battle for this in the imaginations and the theological expression of things in, especially kind of the 16th century moving forward where they say, oh, well, this is all popery. If you're showing images of things in general, this is not really about religion. this is about magical thinking. And so I think that sometimes when we see the misuse of icons now, because of the societies we live in and kind of coming out of that, we are really prone to kind of taking the worst possible view of it just because of the context that we are kind of raised it to a certain extent.

I'm glad you brought that out. I'll give you one example that I think will excite people about the suppression of Marion images. And that might seem, how would you do that? And I'll explain. The beautiful Virgin of Regensborg was this statue that was venerated even worshipped by so many of what we now call Germany in the Holy Roman Empire by the populace. And the story of this icon was that there was a man who incited anti-Jewish violence and then he was injured in a riot. And the Virgin Mary magically healed him so that he could continue his exploits. And so lo and behold, when monk, who we know as Martin Luther, has this revelation of the mercy and love of God,

he then says about that pilgrimage to the great lady of Regensburg and all of her beauty, he says, you know what, that's not true Christianity, and that thing should be leveled. He saw it as an idolatrous decoy away from the beauty of actual faith. And we might stop there and say, okay, that might have been an abuse, but didn't Protestantism go too far. I believe it did. But Martin Luther had a warm devotion to the Virgin Mary to the end of his life. In fact, as a result of the 2017-500th anniversary of the Reformation, there's all this scholarship that unfurls. Bridget Heel is a great scholar in this regard. All these ways that Luther, not only Lutherans, had gorgeous images of the Virgin.

Men. They said, don't throw away the baby with bathwater. Hold on to the Virgin Mary because she is a confirmation of the dignity of women and how God became human and became utterly dependent upon her for his breakfast, for his nurturing, for his sustaining. And so you might say that Mary, in some senses, is the great bulwark against a patriarchy, that when she was removed, you had a tide of misogyny that many scholars point out what accounts for this. Maybe it's because we didn't honor her properly. And the answer to overly honoring her is not to abandon her altogether, which unfortunately happened in many communities. You know, one of the things that I think is really nice here, though, in the UK is even though we went through a period of it, okay? You know, there was,

oh, boy, boy, howdy. You know, so for example, Chelsea Bonfires. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I'm a big fan of the town of Walsingham. Yes. Where, yes, where there was a famous Marian apparition and a model of the sacred house was built, which I think is wonderful. And we lost a lot of things in this kind of rush towards Protestantism. I love these images. And I think that it's such a sad thing that we lost all these things. But we are also undergoing a resurgence of them, which I think is cool. There's a bit of a reconnection to it within the Anglican church.

In Wilsden, for example, this is urban Walsingham. This was one of the places where the black virgin of Wilsden was burned by Thomas Cromwell. I just, all right, let's get rid of it. Let's do it moreover right next to Thomas Moore's property in Chelsea to really rub his face in it. And that was an iconoclastic act in early modern times. And thankfully, that church has been restored. They have taken a piece of the tree at the original shrine and carved a new image that you can go to Wilsden and see that church fully functioning with the beautiful restored image.

So iconoclasm and the triumph of images in London history. But one of the things that you sometimes won't be told when you go there is that the Anglicans have done the same. And so if you go to the original shrine of Wilston, the Anglican Shrine of Wilston, it still tended. They have wonderful interreligious concord in that community. And there has been a black virgin carved there that you can visit as well. And on one occasion at least, they met in a procession. that is the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics both brought their black virgins and made recompense for that destruction and said, hey, we both think she's a really big deal. As one of my friends says,

she's his mom. Ben, big. Right. So all this to say, I'm cheered by that prospect that not just in Walsingham, but even in London itself, you have this reconciling potential. You know, I think that is as cheerful places we could possibly leave it. Thank you so much for coming and talking to me about what I think is an endlessly fascinating subject. My delight, Eleanor, thank you. Thank you so much to Matthew once again for joining me, and thank you all for listening. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. And if you like what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can always drop us an email at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will make his

triumphal return to Gone Medieval on Friday, and as always, I'll see you again next Tuesday. Until next time.