Journal articles on the topic 'Nicholas Church (Great Yarmouth)'

This paper deals with the attribution of several icons from the treasury of the Praskvica monastery in Pastrovici. The earliest is the icon of Great Deesis, painted in 1680 by the painter Radul, for the iconostasis of the monastery Church of the Holy Trinity. The works by his apprentice, Dimitrije of Risan - the Great Deesis, the Deesis icon, and the icon of St. Demetrius with an unknown holy woman - we repainted in 1693 and in tended for the earlier monastery church dedicated to St. Nicholas. The same painter was the author of the icon of the Mother of God with Christ and the Royal Deesis, in Praskvica to day, which were painted for the iconostasis of the Church of St. Nicholas in Podostrog. The monastery of Praskvica also houses the icons painted by Maksim Tujkovic in 1714, the Hospitality of Abraham and the Crucifixion, preserved in fragments, which were initially positioned on the iconostasis in the Church of St. Nicholas.

The Church of Saint Nicolas in Bari, in southern Italy, is known as a church of great renown and importance, in view of the fact that it was built to receive the remains of Saint Nicholas, which are still kept in the church?s crypt, in the part of the building from where its construction began, at the end of the XI century. This church played a highly significant role in the creation of the specific, Romanic style of architecture in this region, so several important buildings were constructed using the basic typological and stylistic characteristics of the Church of Saint Nicholas. It was built as a triple-naved basilica with a transept and a dome designed at the intersection of the main nave and the transept, and the specific rendition of the altar section, with side towers and a flat facade wall that encloses the inner apse was applied in a similar manner on several churches in Apulia. Its great renown in the Christian world is well-known, reflected both in the strong connection between the churches in Bari and Kotor, and through the donations by the medieval Serbian rulers, among which is the large icon of Saint Nicholas, a gift from Stefan Decanski, which is still preserved in the church?s crypt. The importance of this and the other churches in Apulia was undoubtedly one of the factors that have led to discussion in literature about the question of their possible influence on architectonic creation in related artistic fields, including the monuments of the Raska stylistic group, particularly in connection with the architectural and sculptural plastics on portals because of the similarity of some of the shapes and motives in the stonemasonry...

In this paper for the first time the Royal Doors from the church of St Nicholas at Prisovjani are published. According to style, the selected woodcarving motifs, and the iconography of the Annunciation these doors belong to the group of Royal Doors that are linked to Ohrid and its existing artistic workshops from the mid 16th century. Namely, the Royal Doors from the church of St. Clement in Ohrid (now housed in the National Museum in Ohrid), from the church of St. George in the Vlach district of the city, from an unidentified church in Ohrid or its surrounding (now kept in the National Museum in Belgrade) from St. Panteleimon in Nerezi, and the those from the church of St. Nicholas at Korenica. The Royal Doors from Prisovjani bear two key features from the above mentioned works, the carving and the painting. The carving is distinct by the concept of the tablets, and the motifs: the interlacing ornament, known as 'Solomon's seal', the running meander, and the ornament resembling a maggoty effect. The style of the icon painting, and the manner in which the depiction of Archangel Michael and the Holy Virgin were achieved had led previous scholars to believe that these works were accomplished under the influence of the Cretan painting of this period. The Royal Doors from Prisovjani are dated to the mid 16th century, the period of the Ohrid Archbishop Prochor, a period of great prosperity in all arts moreover since the archbishop himself was one of the great patrons.

In his biography of Nicholas Ferrar, A.L. Maycock speaks volumes in describing the Ferrar family's transition in 1625 as a movement from one venture (the Virginia Company) to another, the “great adventure” of Little Gidding. In this one phrase Maycock comprehends the view of its founders that no less than the Virginia Company's epic plantation of true religion among the Indians, the community at Little Gidding ranks as a heroic enterprise, the discursive preoccupation of which proves to be the very nature of Christian heroism itself. Even if readers of the Ferrar papers do not know how highly Nicholas Ferrar prized the Acts and Monuments, it is impossible for them to miss the Foxeian narratives of “heroic suffering” so pervasive in the “story books” left as folio records of the dialogues performed by the so-called Little Academy.

In this text the unknown parts of the wall paintings from the Church of the Virgin at the island of Mali Grad (The Great Prespa Lake) are analyzed: the figure of a monk praying to St. Paraskeve, on the southern wall of the nave, as well as the painting on the southern fa?ade with the depictions of St. George on horseback, the Virgin as Empress enthroned, and the bust of two saints, St. Paraskeve and St. Nicholas. The monk is identified with the hegoumenos Jona, mentioned in the donor?s inscription dating from 1369.

AbstractThe London churches built by Nicholas Hawksmoor – the architect required by the Commission for the Fifty New Churches to provide a template for the new churches according to the principles laid down in 1712 – are often regarded as the idiosyncratic creations of the architect’s individual genius. They were, however, as much the creation of the particular intellectual, theological and political context of the late Stuart period, an expression of a high church attempt to reconnect the Church of England with the early centuries of the Christian Church, particularly the great basilicas built under Constantine and Justinian. Conservative in intent, they were at the same time fed by the new spirit of intellectual enquiry led by the Royal Society and the expansion of global trade at the start of the eighteenth century. These express a new Anglican denominational identity as the inheritor of the ‘purest’ traditions of the ‘primitive’ church, ancient yet modern, orthodox and, at the same time, reformed: one that still influences discussion across the Communion today.

The works by archimandrites Havriil (V. F. Rozanov) and Feodosiy (O. G. Makarevsky), historians A. O. Skalkovsky, D. I. Yavornitsky and V. O. Bidnov were the first documents on the history of the monastery (Novomoskovsk, Dnipropetrovsk Region). The monastery suffered from raids, fires, epidemics and robberies. The monastic archives were largely lost in the military operations. A lot of original documents didnʼt survive. The epidemic of 1750 did a great damage. The paper archive, infected things and monastery items were burned. The archive consisted of clerical documents, volumes of ancient laws, manuscripts and correspondence. The archive contained some other documents of great importance. They are so-called Universals, 11 statements with seals of Zaporizhian Sich Kosh (Leader) and priorsʼ complaints. The monastery archive contained manuscripts by the last Kosh Otaman (leader) − P. Kalnyshevsky. The archive included documents of state and local authorities and supreme church governing boards – reports, orders, decrees, warrants referring to the monastery property, inventories of monastery household items. A certain percentage of documents was correspondence among priors referring to internal discipline and economic life of the monastery. The names of famous visitors of the monastery are known: archimandrites Havriil and Feodosiy, A. O. Skalkovsky, A. P. Chirkov, P. M. Sochinskiy, V. D. Mashukov, D. I. Yavornitsky and V. O. Bidnov. They worked with documents and left published articles, essays and reviews. Except manuscripts the monastery had printed editions. The monastery library kept 150 liturgical books of Kyiv and Moscow publishing of the 17th − 18th centuries. Six printed books from Samara Desert-Nicholas Monastery are kept in Dnipropetrovsk National Historical Museum. The library collection of the 19th century was quite big. The research of the archive and the library of the monastery give an opportunity to highlight some of the unknown facts on library science and find rare editions of Ukrainian culture heritage.

The cult of the saints, according to Emile Male, ‘sheds over all the centuries of the middle ages its poetic enchantment’, but ‘it may well be that the saints were never better loved than during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ Certainly their images and shrines were everywhere in late medieval England. They filled the churches, gazing down in polychrome glory from altar-piece and bracket, from windows and tilt-tabernacles. In 1488 the little Norfolk church of Stratton Strawless had lamps burning not only before the Rood with Mary and John, and an image of the Trinity, but before a separate statue of the Virgin, and images of Saints Margaret, Anne, Nicholas, John the Baptist, Thomas à Becket, Christopher, Erasmus, James the Great, Katherine, Petronilla, Sitha, and Michael the Archangel.

The author has analyzed the content of the bull of Pope Nicholas V of 1450, which is located in the Central Historical Archive in Lviv, in the article. It was found that the pope provided special conditions for Christians to conduct the Jubilee Year in the Kingdom of Poland. Pope Nicholas V had installed specific obligations regarding the celebration of it for the Polish king Casimir IV Jagiellon, his mother Queen Sophia, the papal collector Mykola Spichimir, etc. The Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosz left the information about the peculiarities of the jubilee celebrations in the Kingdom of Poland. Similar jubilee celebrations introduced by Pope Boniface VIII were celebrated for the sixth time in the Latin Church. The need for their conduct was further substantiated in the 14th century. The creation of the investigated document was due to the fact that the lands of Rus were vulnerable to constant attacks by the Tatars. The khan of the Great Horde Sa'id-Akhmat who with the Tatars subordinated to him had been made the raid on the Galician and Podolian lands in the autumn of 1450, directly caused to the creation of the bull. The mechanism of protection of the Eastern European borders by Сatholics was reflected in the content of the document.

The monastic day continued at its steady, unhurried, unvarying pace. Vespers was sung in church, followed by a light supper of bread and fruit, washed down with a glass of ale.Kenelm and Elaf were absent from the table, however. Hungry by the time of Vespers, they were famished when the bell for Compline summoned the monks to the last service of the day. As they shuffled off to the dormitory with the other novices, they were feeling the pangs with great intensity.Escaping the dormitory to look for something to eat as soon as their peers were asleep, the novices are disturbed and take refuge in the bell tower. There Elaf falls across an obstruction and lets out a yell of sheer terror: he is lying across the stiff, stinking body of a man. ‘The missing Brother Nicholas had at last been found’.

Philip Moore (b. 1943) has had a distinguished career as a cathedral musician, organist and, increasingly in recent years, as a composer. He began his career as a music master at Eton College and subsequently held a number of important positions, firstly at Canterbury and Guildford Cathedrals and latterly as Master of the Music at York Minster (1983–2008). His impressive catalogue of 400 works contains a substantial body of church music, but he has also written instrumental music and some larger works with orchestra including an organ concerto. His music draws on a wide sphere of influences with a strong tilt towards Vaughan Williams, Howells and Britten, plainchant and Duruflé and those whom he regards as the great classical architects of music: Bach, Brahms, Mozart and Hindemith amongst many others. On 20 November 2010 his new cantata Ode to St Cecilia was premièred in Guildford Cathedral. The composer has said that the genesis and design of the work derives from Britten's St Nicholas to which he hopes it will be seen as complementary. This interview took place in October 2009 before a recital devoted entirely to Moore's organ music at St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Saint Anthim of Iberia was one of the most cultured people of his time. He is a creator of a whole epoch in Wallachian and, in general, Romanian history. A highly learned metropolitan, he was also one the greatest Orthodox theologians of the time, a master of morality and doctrine, and finally a wise politician, who played a great role in the very complex social, political and cultural life of the Wallachian Principality. He harshly criticized the illiteracy and the greed of clergy, Eastern Patriarchs’ craving for wealth and power, and he relentlessly denounced the corruptness and the moral degradation of the ruling classes. His efforts to ally with Russia to liberate Wallachia from the Ottoman yoke led him to conflict with his great contemporary, Constantin Brâncoveanu, and then, even more gratingly, with the Voevoda Nicholas Mavrocordatos (1716-1730), described by some historians of the time as unwaveringly loyal to the Ottomans. The Phanariote Nicholas Mavrokordatos, who was only interested in the Ottoman Empire, replaced the Wallachian princes. Mavrokordatos was suspicious of Metr. Antimos and ordered the metropolitan to resign. Mavrokordatos appealed to Patriarch Jeremiah after Metr. Antimos refused to do so. The Patriarch convened a council of bishops, without any Romanian representation, that condemned the metropolitan to anathema and excommunication. Not satisfied in a finding that denied Metr. Antimos his title of Metropolitan of Hungro-Wallachia, Mavrokordatos order the metropolitan to exile to St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai. On September 14, 1716, while en route to his place of exile, Metr. Antimos was ambushed by Turkish soldiers on the bank of the Tundzha River, near Gallipoli, as it flowed through Adrianople, and butchered him. Then, they threw his remains into the river. This brutal action ended the earthly life of a great man who had dedicated his strength, talent, and knowledge to the revival and strengthening of Orthodox Christianity among the people of Wallachia. The faithful Romanian people, considering, from the beginning, the sentence of defrocking as unjust and illegal, not only never stopped honoring Anthim the Iberian as chief priest also after his abusive defrocking, but with the passage of time increased their acts of piety and honor, considering him one of the most worthy hierarchs who pastored the Romanian Orthodox Church and a martyr, who sacrificed his life, with dignity, for the Orthodox faith and for the freedom and independence of the Motherland, which, since his adoption, he served as the most devoted and loving son.

Saint Sampson, whose feast is celebrated on June 27, was depicted among holy physicians. However, his images were not frequent. He was usually accompanied with Saint Mokios (in Saint Sophia in Kiev, the Transfiguration church in the Mirozh monastery and the church of the Presentation of the Holy Virgin in the Temple in the monastery of Saint Euphrosyne; possibly also in Saint Panteleimon in Nerezi and Saint Demetrios in the village of Aiani near Kozani; furthermore, in the church of Saint Nicholas in Manastir and, afterwards, in the katholikon of the Vatopedi monastery). In a later period, he was usually shown in the vicinity of Saint Diomedes (in the churches of Saint Achillius in Arilje, Saint George in the village Vathiako on Crete, Saint Nicholas Orphanos in Thessaloniki, the Annunciation in Gracanica, the narthexes of the Hilandar katholikon and the church of the Holy Virgin in the monastery of Brontocheion at Mistra, the katholicon of the Pantokrator monastery and the church of Saint Demetrios in Markov Manastir). There are no substantial data regarding the identity of the saints depicted next to him in the metropolitan Church of Saint Demetrios at Mistra, while in a number of cases the image of the saint shown next to him has not been preserved (e.g. Saint Irene in the village of Agios Mamas on Crete, Gregory?s Gallery in the church of Saint Sophia in Ohrid and the church of the Holy Virgin (Panagia Kera) near the village Chromonastiri on Crete). On the other hand, in the church of the Holy Virgin in Mateic, Saint Sampson is, exceptionally, depicted among bishops, while in the church of the Holy Archangels in Prilep and the chapel of the Holy Anargyroi in Vatopedi, he is, as usual, surrounded by holy physicians but his mates are not featured - neither Saint Mokios, not Saint Diomedes. The earliest known commemorative text dedicated to him is the extensive hagiography - Vita Sampsonis I, composed in the seventh or the early eighth century. Other hagiographies, which mostly date from the tenth century, are completely based on the earlier writing. Such a composition can be found in the Synaxarion of the Church of Constantinople. In the extensive text (Vita Sampsonis II), Symeon Metaphrastes added a part that included detailed descriptions of a number of posthumous miracles, mostly healings; all these events are also mentioned in the short Hagiography. Finally, in the late thirteenth century, Constantine Akropolites wrote the still unpublished Hagiography (Vita Sampsonis III), in which he presented an account of events from the later history of the Saint?s hospital. The hagiographies inform us that Sampson was a Roman by birth and a kin of Emperor Constantine. He inherited a fortune, which he distributed to the poor. Then, he departed for Constantinople, where he found a modest home. Patriarch Menas ordained him a priest. Relying on the medical knowledge, Sampson was saving the sick and he even cured Emperor Justinian from an incurable disease. For that reason, the Emperor found a large house, in which he established and fully equipped a xenon (hospital, ?????), whereas Sampson was appointed as the skeuophylax of the Great Church. The Blessed continued to work there until his death. His venerable leipsana, which rested in the church of Saint Mokios, constantly issued the cures. His feast was celebrated in the hospital founded by him. Long time had passed between the period in which the Saint had lived and the epoch in which his earliest hagiography was compiled. During that time, some events could have fallen into oblivion and accounts of other events could have been invented. Accordingly, the results of the researchers of Saint Sampson?s xenon?s history are valuable. The hospital was housed in Sampson?s home, where he provided not only health care, but also food and bed. It was presumably founded in the fourth century. The xenon was burned in the Nika riots in 532 and Emperor Justinian had it renovated and expanded. Based on some documents issued in the Empire of Nicaea, it may be concluded that the xenon had vast estates. The Crusaders first sacked it, to subsequently use it for their own needs, as they established the Order of Saint Sampson. The hospital soon received many properties in Constantinople and its environs, Hungary and Flanders. It seems that after the liberation of Constantinople, the activities of Saint Sampson?s hospital were ceased and that there was a monastery at its place in the Palaiologan period. Anyway, the reputation of its holy founder persisted throughout the thirteenth century. Constantine Akropolites wrote the already mentioned Hagiography, and in one of his letters he spoke of the Saint, who was also mentioned in a poem by Manuel Philes (died around 1345). In Constantinople, the veneration of Saint Sampson had two centres - the hospital named after him and the church of Saint Mokios, where his leipsana rested. According to the synaxaria of the Typikon of the Great Church and the Church of Constantinople, the feast dedicated to the Saint was celebrated at his xenon. The former text informs us that the service was held by the Patriarch, whereas Symeon Metaphrastes relates that the vigil on the eve of the feast took place over the relics in the church of Saint Mokios. The Patriarch celebrated the feast dedicated to Saint Sampson with hospital clergy in the church within the xenon, both mentioned by Metaphrastes. It was either this church or a shrine from a later period that housed the iconostasis noted down by Constantine Stilbes, an eyewitness of the Latin capture of the Byzantine capital. Written sources and archaeological finds are consistent in that the hospital was located between the churches of Saint Sophia and Saint Irene. However, the first excavations carried out at the site of the xenon were not properly documented, whereas archaeologists involved in further investigations could not rely on reliable data, though they carefully examined all finds. The question arises why Saint Sampson was at first usually depicted in the company of Saint Mokios, a presbyter who died a martyr?s death in Constantinople (May 11), and later, together with Saint Diomedes, the physician who died in Nicaea (August 16). Therefore, this paper briefly presents the hagiographies of the two saints and the churches in the Byzantine capital where their relics rested - the monastery of Saint Mokios, which did not exist in the mid-fourteenth century, and Saint Diomedes, which was counting its last days in the fourteenth century, reduced to a small monastery. Dobrynja Jadrejkovic (subsequently Antony, archbishop of Novgorod) noted down around 1200 that the saint?s stick, epitrachelion and robes were kept at the hospital of Saint Sampson, whereas in the church of Saint Mokios, under the altar, rested Saint Mokios and Saint Sampson. He also mentioned that water flew from the latter?s grave, as well as that the church of Saint Diomedes was near the Golden Gate and that the relics of Saint Diomedes rested there. However, the Russian pilgrims who visited Constantinople during the Palaiologan period mentioned neither Saint Sampson?s hospital, not the church of Saint Mokios, whereas the church of Saint Diomedes, but not his relics, was noted down only by an unknown traveller who described the pilgrimage undertaken between the late 1389 and the early 1391. The answer to the question of what happened to the leipsana that once laid in these churches is not possible to provide. The fate of the relics of Saint Sampson, previously kept in his xenon, is not known, nor is it known where the commemorations of the three saints were held in the capital during the Palaiologan period. Anyway, the depictions of Saint Sampson accompanied by Saint Diomedes - whose oldest examples are preserved in Arilje - indicate that the connection of these two priest-physicians had already begun by the time when the church was painted (1295/1296), but, judging by the available sources, the only evidence on the process is given by the paintings. Although Saint Sampson founded the hospital which was probably the oldest in Constantinople, and though his leipsana, kept in the church of Saint Mokios, had healing powers, while his relics in the xenon were visited by pilgrims, it seems that the respect for this saint in the Byzantine capital was not reflected in the frequency of his images among holy physicians: he was fairly rarely shown among them. As a matter of fact, the earliest representations of Saint Sampson originated from Constantinople. They can be found on lead seals made for the hospital in the second half of the sixth and during the seventh century. On the other hand, there is no any known preserved depiction of this saint in the mural decoration of the early churches. Accordingly, it may be assumed that the veneration of Saint Sampson was initially limited to Constantinople, and that it was only later, since the time when his short hagiography was included in the synaxarium and his extensive hagiography was written for the Metaphrastes?s comprehensive work, that it was adopted in other areas of the East Christian world. It may seem paradoxical that the preserved images of the Saint dating from the period when his xenon flourished are less numerous than those from the time when the hospital, in all probability, did not exist. It seems that after the liberation of Constantinople from Latin rule, Saint Sampson was earnestly honoured and that the believers frequented the monastery at the site of the old xenon, though the hospital did not exist anymore. The former assumption is corroborated by the writings of Constantine Akropolites and Manuel Philes, whereas the latter is supported by the coins from the Palaiologan period found in the sacral building within the complex that once belonged to Saint Sampson?s hospital. Although his miraculous leipsana rested in the church of Saint Mokios, the posthumous miracles of Saint Sampson, described in later hagiographies, mostly took place in his xenon, which housed the relics that were visited by pilgrims and where commemorative services dedicated to him were held. The veneration of the Saint was long fostered within the institution founded by him - the ancient hospital where trained doctors worked - i.e. it was nurtured between the reputation of medical skills based on secular knowledge and miraculous healings.

As the former capital of Dalmatia, Zadar abounded in monuments produced during the 17th and 18th century, especially altars, statues, and paintings. Most of this cultural heritage had been lost by the late 18th and the first decades of the 19th century, when the former Venetian Dalmatia was taken over by Austrian administration, followed by the French and then again by the Austrian one. Many churches were closed down, their furnishings were sold away or lost, and the buildings were either repurposed or demolished. One of them had been home to two hitherto unpublished angels-putti located on the top of the inner side of the arch in the sanctuary of Zadar’s church of Our Lady of Health (Kaštel) at the end of Kalelarga (Fig. 1). Both marble statues were obviously adjusted and then placed next to the marble cartouche with a subsequently added inscription from 1938, which tells of a reconstruction of the church during the time it was administered by the Capuchins. The drapery of the right angel-putto bears the initials I. G., which should be interpreted as the signature of the Venetian sculptor Giuseppe Groppelli (Venice, 1675-1735). This master signed his full name as IOSEPH GROPPELLI on the base of a statue of St Chrysogonus, now preserved in the Permanent Exhibition of Religious Art in Zadar (Fig. 2). Same as the signed statue of St Anastasia by master Antonio Corradini (Fig. 3), it used to form part of the main altar in Zadar’s monumental church of St Donatus, desacralized in 1798. Recently, two more angels have been discovered, inserted in the tympanum of the main altar in the church of Madonna of Loreto in Zadar’s district of Arbanasi, the one to the right likewise bearing the initials I. G. (Fig. 4). Undoubtedly, these two artworks were once part of a single composition: the abovementioned former altar in the church of St Donatus, transferred to the cathedral in 1822 and reconstructed to become the new altar in the chapel of St Anastasia. Giuseppe and his younger brother, Paolo Groppelli, led the family workshop from 1708, producing and signing sculptures together. Therefore, the newly discovered statues produced by Giuseppe are a significant contribution to his personal 174 Damir Tulić: Nepoznati anđeli Giuseppea Groppellija u Zadru... Ars Adriatica 6/2016. (155-174) oeuvre. It is difficult to distinguish between his statues and those by his brother, but it is generally believed that Paolo was a better artist. It is therefore important to compare the two sculptures, as they are believed to have been made independently. Paolo’s statue of Our Lady of the Rosary (1708) was originally located in the former Benedictine church of Santa Croce at Giudecca in Venice, and acquired early in the 19th century for the parish church of Veli Lošinj. If one compares the phisiognomy of the Christ Child by Paolo to that of Giuseppe’s signed sculpture of angel-putto in Zadar, one can observe considerable similarities (Figs. 5 and 6). However, Paolo’s sculptures are somewhat subtler and softer than Giuseppe’s. The workshop of Giuseppe and Paolo Gropelli has also been credited with two large marble angels on the main altar of the parish church in Concadirame near Treviso, as they show great similarity in style to the angels in Ljubljana’s cathedral, made around 1710 (Figs. 7, 8, 9, and 10). The oeuvre of Giuseppe and Paolo Gropelli can also be extended to two kneeling marble angels at the altar of the Holy Sacrament in the Venetian church of Santa Maria Formosa, with their marble surface somewhat damaged (Figs. 11 and 12). Coming back to the former main altar in Zadar’s church of St Donatus, it should be emphasized that it was erected following the last will of Archbishop Vettore Priuli (1688-1712), that contains a clearly expressed desire that the altar should be decorated as lavishly as possible. As the construction contract has been lost and the appearance of the altar remains unknown, it can only be supposed what it may have looked like (Fig. 13). It is known that the altar included an older, 13th-century icon of Madonna with the Child, which was later transferred to the Cathedral and is today preserved in the Permanent Exhibition of Religious Art. Scholars have presumed that the altar may had the form of a triumphal arch, with pillars enclosing the pala portante with an older icon and statues placed lateraly. However, it can also be presumed that the executors of the archbishop’s last will, canons Giovanni Grisogono and Giovanni Battista Nicoli, found a model for the lavish altar in Venice, in the former altar of the demolished oratory of Madonna della Pace. That altar had been erected in 1685 and included an older Byzantine icon of Madonna with the Child. It was later relocated to Trieste and its original appearance remains unknown, but can be reconstructed on the basis of its depiction on the medal of Doge Alvise IV Mocenigo (1764), preserved in the parish church of Plomin (Fig. 14). This popular solution undoubtedly served as a model for the main altar in the church of Madonna delle Grazie at Este (Fig. 15), constructed between 1692 and 1697. Today’s appearance of the chapel of St Anastasia does not reveal much about its previous altars (Fig. 16). A recently discovered document at the State Archive of Zadar sheds a new light on the hypothesis that the old main altar was transferred from St Donatus in 1822 and became, with minor revisions, the new altar of St Anastasia, demolished in 1905. According to a contract from 1821, the saint’s altar was designed by Zadar’s engineer and architect Petar Pekota, and built by parish priest Giovanni Degano by using segments from older altars, including that of St Donatus. The painting ordered for the new altar, Martyrdom of St Anastasia by Giuseppe Rambelli from Forli (Fig. 17), is the only surviving part of the 19thcentury altar. The overall reconstruction of the chapel of St Anastasia took place between 1903 and 1906, according to a project of architect Ćiril Metod Iveković, which intended to have the chapel covered in mosaics ordered from Venice. However, during the reconstruction works, remnants of 13th-century frescos were discovered in the apse and the project had to be altered. The altar from 1822 was nevertheless demolished and a new marble mensa was built, with a new urn for the saint’s relics, made in the Viennese workshop of Nicholas Mund, as attested by receipts from 1906 (Fig. 18). A hundred years after the intervention, another one took place, in which the marble altar was disassembled and replaced by a new one, made of glass and steel, yet bearing the old marble urn of Bishop Donatus.

A Rooted Man and a Sacred PoetBy Viggo MortensenA Review of A.M. Allchin: N.F.S. Grundtvig. An Introduction to his Life and Work. With an afterword by Nicholas Lossky. 338 pp. Writings published by the Grundtvig Society, Århus University Press, 1997.Canon Arthur Macdonald Allchin’s services to Grundtvig research are wellknown to the readers of Grundtvig Studier, so I shall not attempt to enumerate them. But he has now presented us and the world with a brilliant synthesis of his studies of Grundtvig, a comprehensive, thorough and fundamental introduction to Grundtvig, designed for the English-speaking world. Fortunately, the rest of us are free to read as well.It has always been a topic of discussion in Denmark whether Grundtvig can be translated, whether he can be understood by anyone except Danes who have imbibed him with their mother’s milk, so to speak. Allchin is an eloquent proof that it can be done. Grundtvig can be translated and he can be made comprehensible to people who do not belong in Danish culture only, and Allchin spells out a recipe for how it can be done. What is required is for one to enter Grundtvig’s universe, but to enter it as who one is, rooted in one’s own tradition. That is what makes Allchin’s book so exciting and innovative - that he poses questions to Grundtvig’s familiar work from the vantage point of the tradition he comes from, thus opening it up in new and surprising ways.The terms of the headline, »a rooted man« and »a sacred poet« are used about Grundtvig in the book, but they may in many ways be said to describe Allchin, too. He, too, is rooted in a tradition, the Anglican tradition, but also to a large extent the tradition taken over from the Church Fathers as it lives on in the Orthodox Church. Calling him a sacred poet may be going too far.Allchin does not write poetry, but he translates Grundtvig’s prose and poetry empathetically, even poetically, and writes a beautiful and easily understood English.Allchin combines the empathy with the distance necessary to make a renewed and renewing reading so rewarding: »Necessarily things are seen in a different perspective when they are seen from further away. It may be useful for those whose acquaintance with Grundtvig is much closer, to catch a glimpse of his figure as seen from a greater distance« (p. 5). Indeed, it is not only useful, it is inspiring and capable of opening our eyes to new aspects of Grundtvig.The book falls into three main sections. In the first section an overview of Grundtvig’s life and work is given. It does not claim to be complete which is why Allchin only speaks about »Glimpses of a Life«, the main emphasis being on the decisive moments of Grundtvig’s journey to himself. In five chapters, Grundtvig’s way from birth to death is depicted. The five chapters cover: Childhood to Ordination 1783-1811; Conflict and Vision 1811-29; New Directions, Inner and Outer 1829-39; Unexpected Fulfilment 1839-58; and Last Impressions 1858-72. As it will have appeared, Allchin does not follow the traditional division, centred around the familiar years. On the contrary, he is critical of the attempts to focus everything on such »matchless discoveries«; rather than that he tends to emphasize the continuity in the person’s life as well as in his writings. Thus, about Thaning’s attempt to make 1832 the absolute pivotal year it is said: »to see this change as an about turn is mistaken« (p. 61).In the second main section of the book Allchin identifies five main themes in Grundtvig’s work: Discovering the Church; The Historic Ministry; Trinity in Unity; The Earth made in God’s Image; A simple, cheerful, active Life on Earth. It does not quite do Allchin justice to say that he deals with such subjects as the Church, the Office, the Holy Trinity, and Creation theology.His own subtitles, mentioned above, are much more adequate indications of the content of the section, since they suggest the slight but significant differences of meaning that Allchin masters, and which are immensely enlightening.It also becomes clear that it is Grundtvig as a theologian that is the centre of interest, though this does not mean that his work as educator of the people, politician, (history) scholar, and poet is neglected. It adds a wholeness to the presentation which I find valuable.The third and longest section of the book, The Celebration of Faith, gives a comprehensive introduction to Grundtvig’s understanding of Christianity, as it finds expression in his sermons and hymns. The intention here is to let Grundtvig speak for himself. This is achieved through translations of many of his hymns and long extracts from his sermons. Allchin says himself that if there is anything original about his book, it depends on the extensive use of the sermons to illustrate Grundtvig’s understanding of Christianity. After an introduction, Eternity in Time, the exposition is arranged in the pattern of the church year: Advent, Christmas, Annunciation, Easter and Whitsun.In the section about the Annunciation there is a detailed description of the role played by the Virgin Mary and women as a whole in Grundtvig’s understanding of Christianity. He finishes the section by quoting exhaustively from the Catholic theologian Charles Moeller and his views on the Virgin Mary, bearing the impress of the Second Vatican Council, and he concludes that in all probability Grundtvig would not have found it necessary to disagree with such a Reformist Catholic view. Finally there are two sections about The Sign of the Cross and The Ministry of Angels. The book ends with an epilogue, where Allchin sums up in 7 points what modem features he sees in Gmndtvig.Against the fragmented individualism of modem times, he sets Gmndtvig’s sense of cooperation and interdependence. In a world plagued with nationalism, Gmndtvig is seen as an example of one who takes national identity seriously without lapsing into national chauvinism. As one who values differences, Grundtvig appeals to a time that cherishes special traditions.Furthermore Gmndtvig is one of the very greatest ecumenical prophets of the 19th century. In conclusion Allchin translates »Alle mine Kilder« (All my springs shall be in you), »Øjne I var lykkelige« (Eyes you were blessed indeed) and »Lyksaligt det Folk, som har Øre for Klang« (How blest are that people who have an ear for the sound). Thus, in a sense, these hymns become the conclusion of the Gmndtvig introduction. The point has been reached when they can be sung with understanding.While reading Allchin’s book it has been my experience that it is from his interpretation of the best known passages and poems that I have learned most. The familiar stanzas which one has sung hundreds of times are those which one is quite suddenly able to see new aspects in. When, for example, Allchin interprets »Langt højere Bjerge« (Far Higher Mountains), involving Biblical notions of the year of jubilee, it became a new and enlightening experience for me. But the Biblical reference is characteristic. A Biblical theologian is at work here.Or when he interprets »Et jævnt og muntert virksomt Liv paa Jord« (A Simple Cheerful Active Life on Earth), bringing Holger Kjær’s memorial article for Ingeborg Appel into the interpretation. In less than no time we are told indirectly that the most precise understanding of what a simple, cheerful, active life on earth is is to be found in Benedict of Nursia’s monastic mle.That, says Allchin, leads us to the question »where we are to place the Gmndtvigian movement in the whole spectmm of Christian movements of revival which are characteristic of Protestantism« (p. 172). Then - in a comparison with revival movements of a Pietistic and Evangelical nature – Allchin proceeds to give a description of a Grundtvigianism which is culturally open, but nevertheless has close affinities with a medieval, classical, Western monastic tradition: a theocentric humanism. »It is one particular way of knitting together the clashing archetypes of male and female, human and divine, in a renunciation of evil and an embracing of all which is good and on the side of life, a way of making real in the frailties and imperfections of flesh and blood a deeply theocentric humanism« (p. 173).Now, there is a magnificent English sentence. And there are many of them. Occasionally some of the English translations make the reader prick up his ears, such as when Danish »gudelige forsamlinger« becomes »meetings of the godly«. I learnt a few new words, too (»niggardliness« and »esemplastic«) the meaning of which I had to look up; but that is only to be expected from a man of learning like Allchin. But otherwise the book is written in an easily understood and beautiful English. This is also true of the large number of translations, about which Allchin himself says that he has been »tantalised and at times tormented« by the problems connected with translating Grundtvig, particularly, of course, his poetry. Naturally Allchin is fully aware that translation always involves interpretation. When for example he translates Danish »forklaret« into »transfigured«, that choice pulls Grundtvig theologically in the direction that Allchin himself inclines towards. This gives the reader occasion to reflect. It is Allchin’s hope that his work on translating Grundtvig will be followed up by others. »To translate Grundtvig in any adequate way would be the work of not one person but of many, not of one effort but of many. I hope that this preliminary study may set in train a process of Grundtvig assimilation and affirmation« (p. 310)Besides being an introduction to Grundtvig, the book also becomes an introduction to past and contemporary Danish theology and culture. But contemporary Danish art, golden age painting etc. are also brought in and interpreted.As a matter of course, Allchin draws on the whole of the great Anglo-Saxon tradition: Blake, Constable, Eliot, etc., indeed, there are even quite frequent references to Allchin’s own Welsh tradition. In his use of previous secondary literature, Allchin is very generous, quoting it frequently, often concurring with it, and sometimes bringing in half forgotten contributions to the literature on Grundtvig, such as Edvard Lehmann’s book from 1929. However, he may also be quite sharp at times. Martin Marty, for example, must endure being told that he has not understood Grundtvig’s use of the term folkelig.Towards the end of the book, Allchin discusses the reductionist tactics of the Reformers. Anything that is not absolutely necessary can be done away with. Thus, what remains is Faith alone, Grace alone, Christ alone. The result was a radical Christ monism, which ended up with undermining everything that it had originally been the intention to defend. But, says Allchin, Grundtvig goes the opposite way. He does not question justification by faith alone, but he interprets it inclusively. The world in all its plenitude is created in order that joy may grow. There is an extravagance and an exuberance in the divine activity. In a theology that wants to take this seriously, themes like wonder, growth and joy must be crucial.Thus, connections are also established back to the great church tradition. It is well-known how Grundtvig received decisive inspiration from the Fathers of the Eastern Church. Allchin’s contribution is to show that it grows out of a need by Grundtvig himself, and he demonstrates how it manifests itself concretely in Grundtvig’s writings. »Perhaps he had a deep personal need to draw on the wisdom and insight of earlier ages, on the qualities which he finds in the sacred poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, in the liturgical hymns of the Byzantine Church, in the monastic theology of the early medieval West. He needs these resources for his own life, and he is able to transpose them into his world of the nineteenth century, which if it is no longer our world is yet a world in which we can still feel at home. He can be for us a vital link, a point of connection with these older worlds whose riches he had deciphered and transcribed with such love and labour« (p. 60).Thus the book gives us a discussion - more detailed than seen before – of Grundtvig’s relationship to the Apostolic Succession, the sacramental character of the Church and Ordination, and the phenomenon transfiguration which is expounded, partly by bringing in Jakob Knudsen. On the background of the often observed emphasis laid by Grundtvig on the descent into Hell and the transfiguration, his closeness to the orthodox form of Christianity is established. Though Grundtvig does not directly use the word »theosis« or deification, the heart of the matter is there, the matter that has been given emphasis first and foremost in the bilateral talks between the Finnish Lutheran Church and the Russian Orthodox Church. But Grundtvig’s contribution is also seen in the context of other contemporaries and reforming efforts, Khomiakov in Russia, Johann Adam Möhler in Germany, and Keble, Pusey and Newman in England. It is one of Allchin’s major regrets that it did not come to an understanding between the leaders of the Oxford Movement and Grundtvig. If an actual meeting and a fruitful dialogue had materialized, it might have exerted some influence also on the ecumenical situation of today.Allchin shows how the question of the unity of the Church and its universality as God’s Church on earth acquired extreme importance to Grundtvig. »The question of rediscovering Christian unity became a matter of life and death« (p. 108). It is clear that in Allchin’s opinion there has been too little attention on this aspect of Grundtvig. Among other things he attributes it to a tendency in the Danish Church to cut itself off from the rest of the Christian world, because it thinks of itself as so special. And this in a sense is the case, says Allchin. »Where else, at the end of the twentieth century, is there a Church which is willing that a large part of its administration should be carried on by a government department? Where else is there a state which is still willing to take so much responsibility for the administration of the Church’s life?« (p. 68). As will be seen: Allchin is a highly sympathetic, but far from uncritical observer of Danish affairs.When Allchin sees Grundtvig as an ecumenical theologian, it is because he keeps crossing borders between Protestantism and Catholicism, between eastern and western Christianity. His view of Christianity is thus »highly unitive« (p. 310). Grundtvig did pioneer work to break through the stagnation brought on by the church schisms of the Reformation. »If we can see his efforts in that way, then the unfinished business of 1843 might still give rise to fruitful consequences one hundred and fifty years later. That would be a matter of some significance for the growth of the Christian faith into the twentyfirst century, and not only in England and Denmark« (p. 126).In Nicholas Lossky’s Afterword it is likewise Grundtvig’s effort as a bridge builder between the different church groupings that is emphasized. Grundtvig’s theology is seen as a »truly patristic approach to the Christian mystery« (p. 316). Thus Grundtvig becomes a true all-church, universal, »catholic« theologian, for »Catholicity is by definition unity in diversity or diversity in unity« (p. 317).With views like those presented here, Allchin has not only introduced Grundtvig and seen him in relation to present-day issues, but has also fruitfully challenged a Danish Grundtvig tradition and Grundtvigianism. It would be a pity if no one were to take up that challenge.

The article examines the spiritual symbols of the musical and sound structure of Joan’s Aria No. 7 " Forgive me, hills and native fields " from the opera "The Maid of Orleans" by P. Tchaikovsky. The subject of the study is the iconic expositional characteristics of the dramatic development of the image of the protagonist of the opera as a vividly representative historical and symbolic phenomenon, expressed through the centuries-old context of musical spiritual symbols. "Liturgy of John Chrysostom" and "The Maid of Orleans" were marked by a powerful creative core, bravely creating a new level of thinking, opening new opportunities for the Transfiguration. P. Tchaikovsky reflected deeply on the spiritual quality of the man. By the wisdom of the Gospel postulates, one can realize how indissolubly these two works have merged together: "Divine Liturgy" and the history of the Divine feat of the main heroine of the opera. The birth of a new spiritual quality in Tchaikovsky’s music was accompanied by a sufficiently strong resistance of the surrounding psychological field of belief and world outlook. The composer had been working on the opera for about 9 months, which is associatively comparable to the bearing and birth of his "spiritual child". The spiritual meaning of the genre canvas of Aria is liturgical which is the canon of repentance. Syncretism of symbols manifested in systems of semantic and genre assimilation is represented by rhetorical signs and baroque genres. The ostinato spiritual and psychological Credo of the personality of Joan of Arc is explained - 1) in her legendary 19-year-old life, a young peasant girl who could not read and write possessed the greatest gift of purity of thoughts and an unshakable faith in the Spiritual World, which governs the earth; 2) she had intuitive-hearted Mercy to her persecutors, enemies, executioners; 3) she subtly felt the highest signs and symbols that were inaccessible and incomprehensible to her surroundings and contemporaries; 4) Joan at her own and sole discretion considered the form, colors and meanings of her symbols – a white embroidered banner, a coat of arms with holy symbols and a sword that she used only to defend and repel the blows. We should pay attention to the fact that both the composer and the heroine of the the "font" of the spirit materializes. Hence, perhaps, the source of the inner potential of spirituality for the related and beloved female images in his works, embodied by the composer one after another – Tatiana and Joan, – being so distant historically and socially from one another are both so close to the great spiritual potential and victorious level of morality, invigorated by the naturalness of the free space of nature, the inner beauty and sincere kindness, concealing the heroic courage of female charm behind the delicate refinement, able to illuminate many generations of people with the centuries-old example to follow. The 18-year-old Joan at the moment of exhibiting the image in the first act of the opera is shown in the vital fullness of a thinking person, who can follow her Divine Principle. The dramaturgic line of Joan is a mono opera of Spirit in the whole opera. In the context of the analysis of the melody, there attracts attention the symbol of harmony of the "lyrics of light" with the intonations of the achieved through much suffering world of the loving heart – the rhetorical formula of the Baroque era - the figures of "pathopoija:" the excitement of passions " parrhesa "," relatio non harmonia ". In the melody of Aria, there is a tension that arises under another symbol, but does not go into it, but psychologically preserves the previous harmony through inclination to the main tonic. This symbol in music of different styles and creative interpretation in the article is defined as "trial under the sign" - powerful in its might, which originates from the environment of reflective knowledge of the Spirit. In the Aria melody, the symbol tirata is not associated, as is customary, with a "shot" or "lightning," but is a symbol of a sparkling spiritual instrument – a sword. Such is embodied in a rather rare image of St. Nicholas the Miracle-Worker, for example, on the icon in the Church of the Holy Trinity in the monastery of St. Iona in Kiev. Saint Nicholas is depicted with a mighty sword, passionately raised vertically upward in the name of protecting holy justice. The sword is also associated with the power of the spiritual thought-arrow, reflected in the symbols of the graphic hooked notation of Kievan Rus.

The casket of St Simeon the God-Receiver is the most representative work in the applied arts of the Croatian Trecento and, at the same time, one which displays great iconographic complexity. Although it was the subject of two monographs and a large number of individual articles, a whole set of questions remains open and awaits plausible interpretations. Particularly great problems are connected to the interpretation of a number of scenes which were understood differently by different scholars. At the same time, it can be noted that the discussion about the casket’s complex iconographic programme lacks a study which would address it as a unique a coherent whole in which every single scene is viewed as its irreplaceable constituent part. This article aims to demonstrate that the casket’s iconographic programme, especially that of the eight panels on its main body, was selected and arranged according to a carefully developed programme the creators of which were five noblemen of Zadar to whom Queen Elizabeth, the wife of the powerful King Louis I the Great of Hungary (1342-1382), entrusted not only the silver for the making of the casket but other important details connected to the commission such as the choice of the artist and, even more importantly, the selection of the scenes through which the casket communicated with its spectators. There is no doubt that the queen had her own demands with regard to what was depicted as can be seen in the opulent dedicatory inscription which records that she was the patron of the casket but also in the donation scene where she appears together with her daughters. It can also be said with certainty that she gave instructions for the somewhat unusual panel which depicts her standing by the catafalque of her father, Ban Stephen of Bosnia (+1354) who is being sent off to the next world by St Simeon the Righteous. It should mentioned that Ban Stephen was considered a heretic – a Bogomil – which means that being a Catholic queen, his daughter attempted to rectify the past with this panel. All these scenes are at the back of the casket. The queen undoubtedly also had a say in the selection of scenes which were depicted on the front. Those relate to the life of St Simeon which, considering that we know of only one event in his life, was done in a very skilful way: the central panel shows the saint receiving the Christ Child in the scene of the Presentation in the Temple while the panels to its left and right depict the translation of the saint’s relics which have not been identified as such in the scholarly literature. The translation consists of three scenes which are always present in the cases of translation: the finding of the body (inventio corporis), the transport of the body to a new place (translatio corporis) and, finally, the placing of the body to a new site where it would remain in the future (colocatio corporis). These three scenes were interpreted by the noblemen of Zadar in an idiosyncratic way in order to affirm the medieval Zadar and its nobility on the casket itself. The scene of the inventio corporis depicts the rectors of Zadar intervening at the last moment before a group of monks from the outskirts of town get hold of the body and place it in their monastery. In the scene of the colocatio corporis, the body of St Simeon is being carried into the Church of St Mary Major in the presence of King Louis and the grateful citizens who are led by the Bishop Nicholas Matafar. This scene depicts the return of the saint’s body from Venice where, according to the author of this article, it had been taken during the local uprising against the Venetian rule (1346-1358). At the same time, the visual message of the two scenes which flank the central one was to show that the exclusive ownership of the relics belonged to the citizens of Zadar. The conflict with the monks which erupted on a local level is being resolved by the local authorities, that is, the rectors of Zadar. When the problem becomes ‘bilateral’, that is, when it involves Venice, the dispute is settled (to the benefit of the citizens of Zadar) by their sovereign, the king of Hungary and Croatia.The visual interpretation of the translation depicted on the casket relies greatly on the scenes from the cycle of the translation of the body of St Mark from the façade of St Mark’s basilica at Venice (the discovery and exhumation of the body, the transport of the body on a ship, the placing of the body in a new shrine). The author of the article, therefore, frequently compares the scenes on the Zadar casket to those from Venice.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. 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