Friday 30 July 2010

Not about St Olaf

Unfortunately for a person whose plan for the summer was “write as much as possible”, I’m finding myself largely unable to write anything – academic, fiction, or even blog posts. I couldn’t even muster up anything intelligent to say yesterday about St Olaf of Norway (whose feast day it was) although he's interesting to me for any number of reasons: chiefly, being a Scandinavian saint who was culted in medieval England (there are several churches named after him, including a good number in London), being both an ex-Viking and a royal saint, and being one of the opponents whom awesome badass Cnut comprehensively routed on the way to acquiring his empire. Oh well; perhaps another time.

Instead, here's a picture of a medieval priest. It's from the church of Brookland in Kent, which also has an interesting thirteenth-century wall painting of the murder of Thomas Becket and an unusual Norman font, but I'll post about those when I can put complete sentences together.

I think this is a priest rather than a monk, but to be honest I'm not sure; my knowledge of medieval vestments is limited...

No comments: