St Catherine in Bruges

Jean our sacristan and her husband have been on holiday in Bruges and spotted this image of St Catherine in the city museum, part of a group from 1623 including St Barbara and the Magdalene. I like the fact that she's treading on a bit of the wheel.

Year's End

By mid-day on Christmas Eve, the church and the outbuildings were starting to get chilly. Still warmer than my house, but not very warm. This was because there was no heating, and that in turn was because the gas had been turned off on Saturday evening. The carbon-monoxide alarm in the kitchen had sounded. It had sounded on the Thursday evening (the 18th), but I didn’t learn about this until the hirers told me they’d taken the alarm off the wall, wrapped it in a towel and put it in a drawer so it didn’t disturb the concert taking place in the church. By that stage nobody needed actually to go in the kitchen so I decided to leave it until Friday morning. I wasn’t even sure what to do; I hadn’t realised there is a company that maintains the gas network and it’s them you call when this kind of thing happens. Our boiler engineers told me on Friday to run the heating system and see if it happened again; it didn’t, so I left it. Until Saturday, when it happened again, and this time there was no avoiding action. I thought it might be due to one of the stove’s gas rings that seemed to be misbehaving. 

So on Christmas Eve, about noon, the engineers arrived, spent quite a while investigating, and concluded – wonder of wonders – that the original alarm was faulty. They put up a new one, turned the gas back on, and left with the plea that we not use the hob anyway as the ventilation was insufficient and it should never have been fitted. But at least we had heat. 

At least we had heat – especially welcome when ten or so souls turned up half an hour early for the Crib Service because the wrong time had been on the church website and they hadn’t checked (why would they?) since it was put right. This year the Cribbage was so full that I, the server, and the children bringing up the crib figures could barely move around: I think somewhat over 300 people were present. Attendance at the other Christmas services was similar to last year, but that was remarkable, easily the highest we have had since we last had donkeys attending many years ago. My final seasonal duty, as usual, was at Smallham Chapel where the carol service went beautifully smoothly including our customary visit to the barn to sing a carol to the nonplussed sheep. 

And this week I am off. Yesterday I was in Salisbury having not looked properly round the cathedral for many years. There are two relatively modern images of St Catherine, one on the reredos in the chapel of St Martin, and one on an altar frontal. I also add one from the Ashwellthorpe Triptych, seen by friends at Norwich Castle Museum. Happy New Year all!

Lincolnshire (and Bucks): Big Churches and Things In Them

Of course one of my stopping-points in Lincolnshire was the Cathedral, gigantic and splendid. I was glad the presence of the Imp was pointed out, so I could avoid photographing it by accident and taking its baleful influence with me ("that which holds the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel ..."). I paid my respects to Bd Edward King, whose statue presumably depicts him raising a hand in blessing, but it always looks as though he's just saying hello. And then there was this wonderfully pompous 18th-century clergyman who is surely thinking, 'God thinks I am a thoroughly fine fellow, and who am I to dissent from the Lord's opinion'.

But there was also a range of huge churches in modest places. St James's Louth was first, with its scary paper angels:

Followed by St Botolph's, Boston, and its carved knight who is surely Death:

And then St Wulfram's, Grantham, where the scary artefact is the shrine of St Wulfram itself:

(And then there was St James's Grimsby, 'Grimsby Minster' as it is now known, which I couldn't get into).

All these buildings are almost shockingly big for churches which have no history of belonging to religious communities - contrast Lincs with my native Dorset, where all the big churches - Christchurch Priory, Wimborne Minster, Sherborne Abbey, and Milton Abbey - were all monastic at one point. That partly reflects the medieval wealth of this part of the country, but also some other historical factor that led to these towns maintaining one major parish church rather than a collection of them. Stamford, which I visited on the way home, is different, though just as prosperous once: there are five surviving medieval churches there, out of at least as many again. 

But visiting High Wycombe, where I used to live, this week, I was reminded that the situation was the same there. All Saints' is the only old parish church, and, like the Lincolnshire examples, is bigger than it needs to be. I was pleased this time to find it open, which it hasn't been for some time. 

Was St Catherine present? She was, though all in relatively modern images; from the left, a window at Louth, carved above the choir stalls of the Cathedral, a window in the crypt at Boston which has a good stab at looking medieval, and a statue at High Wycombe, very unusually holding what I suppose is intended as a small globe. How can I not have noticed it in the seven years I lived in the town?

San Flaviano Montefiascone

This time it's Madame Morbidfrog who has photographed St Catherine abroad, at Montefiascone in the Lazio region of Italy. The basilica of San Flaviano there is oddly composed of two churches, one on top of the other; it's the older, lower one that boasts a range of frescos including a nice Triumph of Death and several crucifixions. There are two depictions of St Catherine as an iconic figure, one damaged and the other full-length and very unusual as it has clear Byzantine influence but shows the saint holding her wheel, which wasn't customary in Byzantine images in the 14th century. That's the one Madame captured, and it led me to discover the others.

But there is also a set of images of episodes from St Catherine's legend, which are hard to find online and difficult to interpret as they have suffered over the centuries. The painting of the saint strapped up between the two terrifying flaying wheels (in fact there are even more behind, which I've never seen before - they may represent the wheels breaking apart and crushing the torturers) is pretty clear, and I think we can see Catherine being beheaded too, but it's not obvious what the others depict. In one, gruesomely, the saint appears to be having her breasts cut off, which comes not from St Catherine's legend but St Agatha's, so how did it end up here?

St Catherine in Dijon

Yet another friend - Miss T in this case - has recorded an image of the Great-Martyr while on holiday. This 15th-century wall-painting is in Dijon Cathedral. It's definitely St Catherine (her name appears), though the wheel is not easy to see. It might be in the damaged area of the image beneath where her left hand should be, behind the kneeling figure (a Beguine?).

St Catherine in Henley

I'll write more about aspects of my visits today, but just for now here are the representations of St Catherine I found in Henley-on-Thames. Two, predictably, come from the parish church, a stained-glass one and a a detail (a bit indistinct, the church is quite dark) from the chancel arch's great mural of the Adoration of the Lamb; but the third is more unexpected, a pub sign from the street outside. 

V&A East Storehouse

Alerted by a friend, I found my way yesterday to the new V&A Museum Storehouse halfway between Hackney Wick and Stratford, a slightly otherworldly area of rebuilding, new estates, and gigantic square structures of which the Storehouse is one. The marketing is that this is a new, radical approach to museum display, a warehouse of open storage through which visitors can wander at will, forming their own connections and stories as they look up details of the artefacts they're interested in via QR codes. This is not quite the case. Much of the cavernous space, which really resembles a cross between a cash-and-carry store and the entrance atrium of some vast company office, is out of bounds, and I rather would have liked to inspect, for instance, the five-foot-high plastic anime pandas I could glimpse through the shelves and gantries, but couldn't. There is a rational storage scheme, but operating at the level of 'chair' or 'cabinet' it's less than helpful. 

But it's an interesting experience even if it doesn't do quite what it promises. As well as the artefacts there are some charismatic set-piece displays, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann Office from 1937 (an oppressively soporific space you can't imagine anyone doing a stroke of work in) and the Moorish Torrijos Ceiling, or the frontage from a Robin Hood Gardens flat demolished in the 2000s (we like a bit of Brutalism, we do). Here and there you can peer down a corridor and glimpse a conservator at work. Quite the most startling experience lies around a corner I wouldn't have found without some staff pointing visitors in its direction - a gigantic darkened space with nothing in it but a seat, and a colossal stage cloth copy of a Picasso painting. And I found alabaster panels of the Imprisonment & Martyrdom of St Catherine (very poor photo).

Entry is free, and I wanted to go before the David Bowie archive arrives in September and the whole thing becomes impossible. However, part of the cost may be recouped through the café, where I gibbed at paying £8 for a very small bun made with what looked like burned bread but which is probably artisanal. I had better stop before I start sounding like a member of Reform UK and stress that I went round the corner to a café called Badu run by a Mr Badu and staffed by a polite young woman in a hijab where I had a spicy veg pattie and side salad with a cup of tea and it was very pleasing indeed thank you very much.

For the Record, from Gozo

My friends Lady Wildwood and Captain Jackson were in Malta the other week and visited the Cathedral Museum on Gozo. As well as a mosaic skull wearing a biretta and a range of episcopal buskins in liturgical colours, in the background of one of the Lady's photos I spotted a painting of what was unmistakably St Catherine. Here it is, bent and twisted into proper perspective and sharpened up a bit. I can find out nothing about it - it's interesting that it follows the post-Reformation Iberian iconography of the saint in which wicked Emperor Maxentius appears as a disembodied head rolling at her feet, ironically as she was the who ended up with her head cut off rather than him. It has rather an odd look about it, almost as though it's a pastiche of a 17th-century image of St Catherine rather than the real thing. But it's hard to tell from an image this indistinct. Oh well, nothing for it but to go to Gozo myself : )

Spring Adventures

It feels as though I've been waiting a long while for this week off that is just coming to an end: the lateness of Easter has removed it far from my last break. I spent a couple of days in Dorset, taking my Mum to West Bay and my sister to Knowlton Rings; zoomed to South Wales to see my friend Rain who has been going through all sorts of trouble, taking them to an antiques emporium (their choice) and Llandaff Cathedral (mine); London yesterday to see two more friends, one for lunch in the amazing surroundings of Mercato Mayfair which used to be the church of St Mark North Audley Street, and the other at Pret London Bridge (probably less worthy of a photo), and two exhibitions, Tim Burton at the Design Museum and Secrets of the Thames at the Museum of Docklands; and a final excursion today to Leigh-on-Sea. Funny place, with one old street along the shoreline full of fishing-themed pubs and a more modern one at the hilltop where the shops are. I spent a good amount of my time in Leigh trying to find somewhere that would serve me a sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch rather than fish-and-chips or tapas; I should just have gone to the church where they were offering community lunches!

I was also delighted to be shown a new and unheralded image of St Catherine at the Docklands exhibition - on a gold ring plucked from the Thames. Here she is, just visible, holding a tiny, tiny wheel, the last of a trio with St John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin.

Oxford Springtime

I couldn't have picked a better day to visit Oxford than yesterday. The pellucid blue skies framed the golden-coloured buildings, reminding me of our trip to Florence many years ago (I'm not a very good traveller so it remains a rare foray beyond these shores). Here's a view of one of the Clarendon Building muses (which have an interesting history), seen beyond the Bridge of Sighs along New College Lane.

Although I did get to see some friends, the centrepiece of my day was a visit to the Holy Well of Holywell Manor. The Manor is the graduate block of Balliol College, and although I studied at Balliol it was only as an undergraduate so I never went there, and had only glimpsed the Well through a window in the gate of the Praefectus's garden. Yesterday I was allowed in to examine the site itself - though apparently my request had prompted the Manor's health-and-safety manager to examine the well and decide that it isn't as safe as it could be and needs to be added to Balliol's lengthening list of works! There is a horribly corroded-looking set of steps leading down to into the well-chamber and as Mr H&S had been down there to look that morning I was perfectly happy to rely on his photos. I am still picking through the tangled history of the Well so won't go through it here, but the chamber still seems to contain the stone tub identified by the Clewer Sisters who occupied the Manor in the late 1800s as an Anglo-Saxon font, rather dubiously I fear. The Praefectus's PA gave me a copy of the history of the Manor by Oswyn Murray, who I overlapped with at Balliol all those years ago but who I didn't have anything directly to do with. It has some useful details of ghosts and folklore!

The 'Oracles, Omens and Answers' show at the Bodleian is fun (the central African custom of divination using land spiders was news to me) and I went into St Mary Mag's, rather scandalously for the first time ever considering I lived yards away from it for three years. There is a dramatic statue of St Catherine on the high altar reredos.

St Catherine at the British Library

I learned a variety of things from the 'Medieval Women' exhibition at the British Library yesterday. Among them was that there is a patron saint of ice skating (Lidwina of Schiedam), and what Margery Kempe thought the Devil smelled like (rather nicer than one might presume, as it turns out); that the last ruler of a Crusader state was a woman (Countess Lucia of Tripoli), that Margaret of Anjou had a pet lion, and that about a third of medieval medical practitioners were women (not all of them midwives). There were also two images of St Catherine: a small woodcut made by the sisters of the Bridgettine convent of Marienwater, and the terrible, charismatic painting on the Battel Retable, with its face scratched out like its sister of Maidstone. But there is more: like the other saints depicted on the Retable, she is surrounded by astrological graffiti, charms against witchcraft, and geometrical patterns whose significance remains obscure. She is a saint not merely maimed, but neutered, and recruited to some other cause.

St Catherine at the Trust

I met up with Professor Cotillion at the National Trust's Greys Court. The place was thronged with visitors, such that the car park was one in, one out. Eventually we got in, but took so long over lunch and attending to the needs of the Professor's lovely King Charles spaniels that the house was shut with only half an hour to go before all the patrons were expelled. Well, I'd paid for my ticket, so I snuck in the back door while nobody was looking and made my way around the (not all that inspiring) house in the wrong direction. On the stairs was an unexpected reward for my duplicity, a stained glass image of St Catherine. It looks 17th or 18th-century to me, but more than that I couldn't venture: German, to judge by the black-letter Gothic text? Big sword, I'll hazard that.

An Underground Mystery for St Catherine's Day

Behind the patchouli-scented shop of crystals and esoteric books that looks as though it should be in Glastonbury, an unassuming doorway opens off a yard. Yesterday a small group of intrepid souls followed a lady with a torch down a steep staircase behind this door, into a strange bell-shaped chamber decorated with images roughly scored into the chalk the cave is made from. One of the figures is a crowned woman who holds a wheel - blessed Catherine the Great-Martyr, in whose honour the place has been opened. 'This is who we're all here to see', says the guide. For this is Royston Cave, and the time is about 1pm on St Catherine's Day.

The cave is decidedly eerie. There's no mistaking the Christian nature of the crucifixion scenes - three of them - and the saints, not only Catherine, but Christopher and Lawrence waving his gridiron aloft. But the rest of it, a chaos of figures, insignia, and ambiguous marks, lurches out of the dark into the torchlight and back again, keeping its secrets. That figure might be St George, or it might just be a man with a sword. The man and woman who seem to be wearing crowns were identified by William Stukeley, who saw the cave when it was first discovered in 1742, as Richard I and Queen Berengaria on the grounds that the 'queen''s crown seems to be hovering above her head (Berengaria was never crowned); not one of Stukeley's better guesses, it seems to me. There is an excited pony and what seems to be a sheela-na-gig; there are rows of rough figures that look like versions of the Lewis Chessmen made by a less accomplished hand; there are hands bearing hearts. 

Nobody, whatever they might tell you, knows why this place exists or what it means. One volunteer has written an entire erudite book arguing that it was a secret Knights Templar chapel created after the order was suppressed in 1307: but even if the virtually-vertical entrance shaft was outside the town centre when the cave was made, any surviving loyal Templars would have been pushing their luck coming in and out of such a bizarre and inaccessible site, let alone making it in the first place. Such an argument puts aside the simple fact, too, that there's not one single unequivocal bit of Templar imagery in the whole place. The saints presumably date it to the late Middle Ages, but that's the best we can do. 

When one of the visitors began describing how the Templars were founded to look after the secrets of Atlantis I decided it was time to go! I emerged blinking into the sun and reflected that the long journey was far from a waste.

Holiday Catherines

I'll post further about aspects of my holiday to Lancashire just past, which included swings past Sheffield on the journey up and back to see friends and my niece who's studying at the University; but for now, by way of recording, here are the images of St Catherine I came across last week. First, from the Lady Chapel reredos in Sheffield Cathedral; then two renaissance images from the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; and lastly from the Lady Chapel in the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool. It's interesting in that it's just post-War, when all the stained glass was destroyed, and so it marks the end of the traditionalist style of stained glass, just before it would have embarked on a very different trajectory.

Two Overlooked Martyrs

Reviewing my photos of Surrey churches I realise that somehow I'd overlooked two representations of St Catherine which should go here, as it's the only place they will be recorded. This is from Holmbury St Mary, one light of a window where she appears as a pair with St Lucy:

More remarkable is one from Dunsfold; here St Catherine peeps from a crowd of adoring saints, only just identifiable by a fragment of wheel. It took a while before I noticed her among the faces. Following the great tradition of depicting female saints looking curiously remiscent of stars of the day, I think this Catherine has a touch of Fay Wray.

St Catherine in Maidstone

My holiday last week took me to Wells Cathedral, a likely place to find images of my patron saint, and yet there were none I could see. My archive already contains this stained glass window I have labelled 'Wells', yet I couldn't see anything like it, and Googling doesn't help either:

Instead it was Thursday's visit to Maidstone that brought images to light that were new to me. First, in the Museum, a tiny gold ring, way down in a display case and not at all easy to photograph, and next to it a pilgrim badge. The image on the ring is quite sweet, as much as you can make it out.

The vast edifice of All Saints' Church needs a bit of care and attention: there are parts of the building where the floor is too unsafe for you to tread on, while it took a little while for me to realise that the tapping noise I could hear wasn't a person moving around but rain dripping onto the plastic sheeting covering a group of pews. St Catherine was there on the high altar reredos - looking a little masculine, but surely it's her?

But round the corner was a complete surprise. The tomb of Master John Wootton, first Master of the College of All Saints, is surmounted by a 15th-century wall-painting slightly later than the tomb itself, showing the Annunciation, the Virgin and Gabriel flanked by saints. One of these is St Catherine. In common with the others, she was attacked during the Reformation, her face scratched out and her body scored with sword-cuts. I was feeling a little vulnerable myself at the time, and I think St Catherine Slighted of Maidstone will be my preferred image of her for some while. 

St Catherine at St Cross

On the way back from having fish and chips with my mum and sister in Bournemouth I, Lady Arlen and her daughter stopped at the Hospital of St Cross, the medieval almshouses just south of Winchester, which I last visited in 1991. A lovely interlude aided by tea and ice cream, and I discovered at least one image of St Catherine and possibly two. The window, high up at the east end, is named, and seems to be medieval although St Swithun who is paired with Catherine is modern. The painting is the right-hand wing of what seems to be a Renaissance triptych behind one of the side altars, and I'm not entirely sure it's Catherine. It could be, but though she has a book and a martyr's palm, there's no giveaway wheel.

I also include a snap of a detail from the choir stalls, which were installed in about 1515 and look quite strange, with plenty of imagery which isn't obviously Christian!

Leave Miscellanea

Although I'm not really posting about things that don't relate to the church, my post-Easter leave this week did take me to Dorset and St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury, which I found still a bit forlorn as its west window remains boarded up awaiting repair by English Heritage. For the first time in about twenty years there was no votive deposit at all apart from a few candle stubs and a bundle of dry flowers and the prayer I left on a scrap of paper was the sole offering. 

On Tuesday I had a trip to Rochester having not seen the Cathedral since I left the area in 1997. Not a single image of St Catherine there: in fact there are very few female saints represented at all, and most of the holy figures are military, fitting in with the martial tone of much of the cathedral. I walked along the road to Chatham, checking the house where I used to live (which looks exactly the same) and St John's Church where I once worshipped. When I left the town the congregation was on the brink of decamping to Emmaus, the United Reform Church on the right side of the ring road which had left the poor Anglican church isolated from the town centre, and St John's spent a while derelict before the Diocese of Rochester decided they wanted to reopen it. Now apparently the congregation is moving out to Emmaus yet again - but only temporarily, while the church is refurbished.

Yesterday I was in London and found another tiny St Catherine hiding on some Netherlandish stained glass in Sir John Soane's Museum. I doubt anyone else has ever noticed her!

I was in town to see the Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Wellcome with Lady Wildwood before we both went to hear Bettany Hughes speak about the Seven Wonders of the World, but strangely what caught my interest most was her incidental remark about Karahan Tepe in Turkey, 'a city in a time and place where there shouldn't be one'. She's overstating slightly it being a 'city', but it certainly does seem to be a permanent settlement with sophisticated monuments (including a ritual chamber of gigantic penis pillars) dating back over 11,000 years and possibly more. The carvings show lots of people with six fingers on their hands, and the whole site was deliberately buried after a couple of millennia. I'm mortified I had never heard of this! 

More about Karahan Tepe here.

St Catherine in Guildford

Although I am posting here less these days, it's still the only place I have to disseminate images of the blessed Great-Martyr Catherine I happen to have found. My researches into Surrey Anglo-Catholicism are now taking me on return visits to some churches to check their kit as well as the buildings themselves, and last week I was rifling through the drawers at St Nicolas's in Guildford. One contained this stole embroidered with what seems to be St Catherine even if the wheel isn't all that clear - just a broken fragment emerging from behind the figure, and, oddly, in front of her sword. That must predate about 1930. I wonder why it was made; an awareness on someone's part of the medieval chapel just south of the town, perhaps?

Happily at St Nic's they have just uprooted the slab-like nave altar installed in 1978 and moved it to a side chapel where it serves the Romanian Orthodox community who use the church on Sunday afternoons very nicely. The central axis of the building is now clear again all the way up to the high altar at the far end.