Postdoctoral researcher
E-mail: mwj@teol.ku.dk
Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen holds an MA in Medieval Archaeology; PhD-student from 2007 to 2010 at The Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals located at the Department of Church History, University of Copenhagen. His dissertation "Changing Interiors: Danish village churches c. 1450-1600" is currently being assessed.
Project: Saints in the churches and saints in the landscape:
In his part of the project, beginning in the summer of 2011, Martin W. Jürgensen will undertake a number of thematic surveys in order to analyze the memory and invocation of saints within the Øresund-Gotland region from the Middle Ages and up until the present day. The surveys of the medieval period will primarily deal with the role of saints in the decoration and furnishing of church interiors, how ‘local’ saints transformed church architecture by means of the alms and donations from pilgrims and which role local, regional and national saints played compared to the universal saints commonly venerated. The questions concerning the Post-medieval and post-Reformation centuries aim to probe how the now in principle obsolete saints continue to manifest in the landscape. How does the memory of previous devotion linger in place names and sites understood as being invested with a special tie to a saint. How does a Lutheran society cope with the memory of saints? The exact nature of these thematic surveys is still to be defined but will deal equally with artistic representations of saints as well as written source material.