pilgrim badges — Blog — Medieval Badges

Sint-Dimpnakerk, Geel, Belgium. Image courtesy of WikiCommons.

SAINT DYMPHNA, LOST HEADS, AND MATERIAL REVELATION

Two years ago, I became interested in several Saint Job pilgrim badges from a village church in Wezemaal, Belgium. This church saw throngs of medieval pilgrims flock to its site for healing and protection from physical ailments. I now find myself drawn to another pilgrimage site just thirty-five kilometres north of Wezemaal in Geel, Belgium, where pilgrims flocked not for healing of their bodies, but of their minds. Sint-Dimpnakerk (the Church of Saint Dymphna) marks where the legendary seventh-century Dymphna is honoured as both patron saint of the city and of mental illness.

According to tradition, Dymphna was an Irish princess, born to the pagan king and his devout Christian wife. Following her mother’s death and her father’s subsequent incestuous advances towards her, Dymphna is said to have fled to Antwerp with her confessor to maintain her Christian vows. Her father and his men eventually found them near Geel and when Dymphna again refused him, martyred them both – cutting off her head.

The gothic church honouring Dymphna was erected in the fourteenth-century. Pilgrims would visit her relics at the church for healing from mental illnesses. Some legends suggest that she could heal mental illness because she was able to resist her insane father; others suggest that people with mental illnesses were healed at her beheading. That which ties Dymphna to mental illness is thought by art historian Katharina Van Cauteren to be her head. Van Cauteren writes, “It is not clear why Dymphna was elevated to her position as patron saint of the mentally ill. Perhaps it was because she lost her head. Many saints are supposed to protect against the physical torments that killed them or the agonies they endured.”[1] Regardless of the provenance of this association, the connection between Dymphna and those with mental illness has left a strong legacy in Geel. Geel has been recognized internationally for its community-based care model for people with mental illnesses. The home-based care that continues today stems from the pilgrimages in the late Middle Ages, when an overflow of pilgrims seeking healing would be taken in and cared for by its citizens.

I was drawn to Saint Dymphna and so turned my attention to the thirty-nine surviving pilgrim badges of Dymphna listed on the Kunera database. Niels Schalley points out certain iconographic traits that are common to Dymphna representations – such as a sword (indicating Dymphna’s beheading); a devil (madness); a crown (nobility); and a Bible (virtue) – which are likewise seen in the pilgrim badges.[2] When looking through the badges online, I noticed another trait that several of the badges curiously had in common: Dymphna’s headlessness.

Pewter badge, Dymphna with sword standing on devil in gothic frame with pilgrim on her left, inscription [S DY]MPNE TE G[EEL], Geel, Belgium, 1400-1449, found in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 29 x 37 mm. Van Beuningen Family Collection, inv. 2348 (Kunera 00181). Photograph courtesy of the Van Beuningen Family Collection.

Pewter badge, crowned Dymphna with sword standing on devil in a gothic frame, Geel, Belgium, 1400-1449, found in Nieuwlande, the Netherlands, 30 x 38 mm. Van Beuningen Family Collection, inv. 1377 (Kunera 24437). Photograph courtesy of the Van Beuningen Family Collection.

Pewter badge, Dymphna with sword standing on devil in gothic frame with pilgrim on her left, inscription SANCTE DYMP[NA], Geel, Belgium, 1400-1449, found in Nieuwlande, the Netherlands, 30 x 33 mm. Van Beuningen Family Collection, inv. 0065 (Kunera 00180). Photograph courtesy of the Van Beuningen Family Collection.

Above are three of the nine surviving badges from the Kunera database where Saint Dymphna is headless. A headless pilgrim badge is surely not unusual. One can find many headless figures in surviving badges: birds, knights, angels, saints like Servatius and Bridget and even the Blessed Virgin Mary. The fragility of pewter badges offers a simple explanation to this phenomenon. The heads were broken off somehow at some point. Given the material of the badges, this is unsurprising. And yet despite this material reality, headless badges of someone like Saint Dymphna – whose beheading is central to her martyrdom and the pilgrims participating in her martyrdom story – take on special significance.

Because of this, I want to imagine beyond a mere natural reality that offers an obvious explanation for the absent Dymphna head. Instead, I assume that the headlessness of surviving Dymphna pilgrim badges is not a material coincidence, but a material revelation. This kind of imagining, I think, brings me closer to the medieval pilgrims who carried these badges, for whom the revelatory aspects of the material world were vital.

It seems to me that there are two central alternative ways of understanding the headless Dymphna badges, both of which have within them a myriad of sub-possibilities. The first way is to assume that the Dymphna heads were intentionally broken off by pilgrims. This possibility is an argument against looking at surviving badges as objects of time alone and instead as social objects that are acted upon by pilgrims with symbolic intent. If this were the case – and I like to assume that it is – the impossible question to answer is why. It might have been an act of remembrance or reverence for the saint when a pilgrim was cured of mental illness. It may have been an act of defiance by a pilgrim – devout or disobedient – displeased to see the saint again donning a head. Perhaps after the journeys back home, to the Netherlands, for instance, where the majority of headless badges in the Kunera collection were found, the heads were broken off to symbolise an end to the object’s purpose and the badges then discarded or forgotten.

The second possibility is that pilgrims did not break the heads off, but that the badges, as spiritual objects, disclosed their own realities. I am not advocating that the badges broke themselves, though the idea compels me; rather, that the manner of intervention that caused the head to break off was secondary to the outcome. Perhaps the badges broke while being pinned on a hat or stuck in a pilgrim’s pocket; they may have fallen on the ground and been stepped on or hit against something unintentionally. I don’t suppose that Dymphna badges that became headless during a pilgrimage would have been seen as worthless but enchanted, especially for the pilgrim who encountered this change. Instead of a material coincidence, medieval pilgrims might frame this change in the badge as a revelatory occasion: one imbued with the presence of Dymphna. How much more valued would a pilgrim badge of Saint Dymphna be if it mirrored the martyrdom of the saint it represented? This second possibility sees a headless badge, as I do, as an occasion of and for further meaning making. It assumes the badge to be a special kind of spiritual participant in the pilgrimage.

Though thinking about these different possibilities excites me, the passage of time prevents me from knowing the truth of them. Despite this, I intend to continue learning about Dymphna and will be going on a research pilgrimage to the city of Geel at the end of May. I look forward to sharing more about what I find on this blog in the coming weeks. There is still much to learn from Dymphna and the pilgrim badges that represent her.

H. Dimpna van Geel, polychrome wood sculpture, 1501-1600, 122 cm. Kerk Sint-Amandus, Geel, Belgium. Photographer: Jean-Luc Elias, KIK. © KIK-IRPA, Brussels, cliché X029117*.

[1] Katharina Van Cauteren, “Goosen Van der Weyden’s Dymphna altarpiece: A material witness to something intangible,” in Crazy about Dymphna, pp. 16-20; here p. 18.

[2] Niels Schalley, “The Cult of Saint Dymphna in Image and Prayer,” in Crazy About Dymphna, pp. 282-94; here p. 284.

Further Reading

Chen, Angus. “For Centuries, A Small Town Has Embraced Strangers With Mental Illness.” NPR, July 1, 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/07/01/484083305/for-centuries-a-small-town-has-embraced-strangers-with-mental-illness.

Flemish Masters in Situ - Sint-Dimpnakerk Geel, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_3nKU4EwI8.

Jay, Mike. “Geel: Where the Mentally Ill Are Welcomed Home | Aeon Essays.” Aeon, January 9, 2014. Accessed March 14, 2023. https://aeon.co/essays/geel-where-the-mentally-ill-are-welcomed-home.

McCrary, Lorraine Krall. “Geel’s Family Care Tradition: Care, Communities, and the Social Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 11, no. 3 (October 1, 2017): 285–303. https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2017.23.

Van Dorst, Sven, ed. Crazy about Dymphna: The Story of a Girl who Drove a Medieval City Mad. Hannibal Publishing, Veurne, 2020.

Written by Hannah Gardiner.

Margery Kempe and Pilgrim Badges

Today marks the commemoration day of a remarkable English mystic, Margery Kempe, a middle-class, medieval woman born in what is now King’s Lynn, Norfolk around 1373, where she died after 1439. We know of Kempe’s life through the chance discovery of her dictated work, The Book of Margery Kempe, in the twentieth century. From her Book, which is considered the first autobiography written in English, we learn that Kempe was married and bore fourteen children before negotiating a chaste marriage. After the birth of her first child, Kempe suffered from demonic visions before having a saving vision of Christ. The heart of Kempe’s Book is her love for God: her visions of Christ, the grand tears she wept for him, her afflictions for his love, and the many religious pilgrimages she undertook where these accounts took place.

Kempe is an interesting case study for medieval badges because, as a medieval pilgrim, she visited some of Europe’s most famous pilgrimage sites – sites where pilgrim badges were certainly present and in circulation during her fifteenth-century journeys. Despite this, no mention is made to pilgrim badges in her Book. Over the next few blog posts, I will question this omission: Did Margery Kempe collect pilgrim badges but omit discussing them when dictating the Book? Or did she not participate in this practice?

To collect or not to collect?

Because no mention is made to pilgrim badges in her Book, pursuing the connection between Kempe and badges depends not on the question’s answerability but on its possibility. Our speculation, however, is not without clues. Kempe discloses herself to readers in her Book in both practical and personal ways. Practically, we have information about where and when she went on pilgrimage. These details are important because they can be cross-referenced with data on surviving badges to determine the kind of badges that would have been available to Kempe at specific sites and times.

In thinking this question through, I wrote to Dr. Anthony Bale, whose translation of and notes for The Book of Margery Kempe have helped my research. I asked Dr. Bale whether he thought Margery Kempe would have collected pilgrim badges, and he replied that he did:

My feeling is that pilgrim badges were so cheap and ubiquitous in places like Rome, Santiago, Wilsnack and Aachen, that Kempe would certainly have bought them. They were likely not even worth recording - although she does mention in passing other pilgrimage souvenirs like her walking stick from the holy land.

In his reply, Dr. Bale pointed me to surviving badges that were found in Lynn and are now housed in the Thomas Pung Collection in Lynn Museum, illustrating that “pilgrim badges from the places visited by Kempe were common in Lynn.” For example, of the two surviving Wilsnack badges found in England, where Kempe visited during her pilgrimage to Prussia, one of them was found in King’s Lynn.

So, it is likely that a pilgrim like Kempe would have participated in an economy of pilgrim badges – but was Kempe a normal pilgrim? Dr. Anne E. Bailey calls Kempe’s established identity as a pilgrim into question in her article, “The Problematic Pilgrim: Rethinking Margery’s Pilgrim Identity in The Book of Margery Kempe.” If Kempe does not refer to herself as a pilgrim in her Book, perhaps she would not have wanted to identify as one visually on pilgrimage; what use would these badges then have had? I wrote to Dr. Bailey asking her thoughts on my research question. Not committing herself to either side, Dr. Bailey wrote back with her own speculations:

[I]f you follow the logic of my article (and I’m quite open to challenges!) in which I argue that Margery saw herself as being spiritually superior to the common crowd, I suppose you could also speculate that she might avoid the more commercial, popular aspects of pilgrimage such as souvenir buying. If her direct relationship with Christ is the crux of her religiosity, perhaps pilgrim badges were irrelevant? One might even argue that her Book acts as a kind of pilgrim badge: it’s a record and memento of her journeys.
Another thought: did any of the female saints and mystics Margery so admired, and tried to emulate, go on pilgrimage and purchase pilgrim badges? If they didn’t mention pilgrim badges, this may be one reason for Margery’s silence.

Dr. Bailey’s proposal that the Book itself acts as a pilgrim badge is provocative and puts forth questions of the difference between keeping visual mementos or creating textual ones. What if Kempe did both? For the sake of my coming blog posts, I assume that she did. I will trace Margery’s three large pilgrimages – the first great pilgrimage (1413-1415), the pilgrimage to Santiago (1417-1418), and the pilgrimage to Prussia (1433-1434) – to reimagine which of the surviving badges available at those times Margery may have seen and potentially purchased.

Throughout the series, my research question remains in the air: Did Margery Kempe collect pilgrim badges but omit discussing them when dictating the Book? Or did she not participate in this practice? What do you think?

Works Cited

Bailey, Anne E. Personal Correspondence, 24 October 2022.

Bailey, Anne E. “The Problematic Pilgrim: Rethinking Margery’s Pilgrim Identity in The Book of Margery Kempe.” The Chaucer Review, vol. 55, no. 2 (2020): 171-96.

Bale, Anthony. Personal Correspondence, 23 October 2022.

Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Translated with an introduction and notes by Anthony Bale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Written by Hannah Gardiner. Edited by Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen.