A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [144]
One of Hedwig’s beakers is now in the British Museum, and it takes us at once to the high religious politics at the time of the Crusades, the great age of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, and to the unexpected fact that the war between Christians and Muslims was accompanied by a great flourishing of trade. Recent research is now leading us to think that Hedwig’s beakers, revered in central Europe as evidence of a Christian miracle, were most probably made by Islamic glassworkers in the Middle East.
Hedwig was married to Henry the Bearded, Duke of Silesia – a territory that straddles the modern Polish, German and Czech borders. Henry and Hedwig had seven children, including the deliciously named Konrad the Curly, and then in 1209 – perhaps not surprisingly – they took vows of abstinence. By then, the duchess was already displaying distinctly saintly tendencies; she founded a hospital for female lepers and she treated nuns in the local convents with disconcerting reverence:
She used the water in which the nuns had washed their feet to wash her eyes, often her entire face. And more wonderful yet, she used this same water to rinse the faces and heads of her small grandchildren, her son’s children. She was firmly convinced that the sanctity of the nuns who had touched the water would profit the children’s salvation.
Although a duchess, she dressed poorly and went barefoot, even in the snow, where it was reported she left bloody footprints. Almost unheard of in those days, she drank only water. This teetotal behaviour worried her husband a good deal: drinking wine was much safer than water, because water was usually unclean, and he was afraid that she would fall ill. But one day, so the legend goes, the duke watched her raise her glass of water to her lips, and saw that it miraculously turned into wine. Her sainthood, and presumably her health, was assured from then on.
And so was the fame of her glass. Medieval Europe had an insatiable hunger for relics connected to miracles. Among the most famous of them all was a cup that had allegedly been used at the wedding at Cana, where Christ performed his first miracle of turning water into wine. Hedwig’s beakers were part of a proud tradition.
The Hedwig beaker we have in the British Museum – one of the dozen or so glass beakers, all strikingly similar, which were identified by the pious as the vessels from which Hedwig had drunk – is really much more like a small vase than a drinking glass. It is made of thick glass, a smoky topaz colour, about 14 centimetres (6 inches) high. You need two hands to grasp it, and it is not at all easy to drink out of. If I put some water into it, and then try to take a proper gulp, the rim is so wide that it spills. And, sadly, the water does not turn into wine.
But it is a miracle of a different sort that a dozen or so vulnerable, fragile glass objects like this should all have survived the centuries intact. They must have been carefully cherished, and we know that many of them were preserved in princely collections and in church treasuries, so it is probable that many of them were in fact used as chalices in royal chapels and churches. Many of the surviving Hedwig beakers have been mounted with precious metal for use in the mass, and when you look at the foot and the sides of our beaker, you can see that it too once had metal mounts.
Significantly, Hedwig was one of a new sort of saint. By the time she was canonized, in 1267, the number of women saints was at an all time high in the history of the church. This is the point where women broke through the glass ceiling of sanctity. A quarter of all new saints were female. This may have had something to do with the religious revival fostered by the new preaching orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, who believed that the true Christian life should be lived not in the cloister but in the town, and who insisted that women should play a full part in it. So they encouraged royal women to do good works. Hedwig’s support of the lepers was typical, and we all know