Bernward of Hildesheim

Saint Bernward (c. 960 – 20 November 1022) was the thirteenth Bishop of Hildesheim from 993 until his death in 1022.[1]

Saint Bernward of Hildesheim
Bernward's doors at St. Mary's Cathedral
Born960
Duchy of Saxony
Died(1022-11-20)20 November 1022
Venerated inRoman Catholic Church
Eastern Orthodox Church
Major shrineSt. Michaels's Cathedral, Hildesheim
Feast20 November
AttributesBishop vestments, small cross, hammer, chalice
PatronageArchitects, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths
Bernward of Hildesheim, roof figure at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Artist: Josef Meßner

Life

Bernward came from a Saxon noble family. His grandfather was Athelbero, Count Palatine of Saxony. Having lost his parents at an early age, he came under the care of his uncle Volkmar, Bishop of Utrecht, who entrusted his education to Thangmar, learned director of the cathedral school at Heidelberg. Under this master, Bernward made rapid progress in the sciences and in the liberal and even mechanical arts. He became very proficient in mathematics, painting, architecture, and particularly in the manufacture of ecclesiastical vessels and ornaments of silver and gold. He completed his studies at Mainz, where he was ordained priest by Archbishop Willigis, Chancellor of the Empire (975-1011). He declined a valuable preferment in the diocese of his uncle, Bishop Volkmar, and chose to remain with his grandfather, Athelbero, to comfort him in his old age. Upon the death of the latter, in 987, he became chaplain at the imperial court, and was shortly afterwards appointed by the Empress-Regent Theophano, tutor to her son Otto III, then six years of age.[1]

His time in office fell during the era of the Saxon emperors, who had their roots in the area around Hildesheim and were personally related to Bernward. During this time, Hildesheim was a center of power in the Holy Roman Empire and Bernward was determined to give his city an image fitting for one of its stature. The column he planned on the model of Trajan's Column at Rome never came to fruition, but Bernward revived classical precedent by having his name stamped on roof tiles made under his direction.[2] Bernward built up the cathedral district with a strong twelve-towered wall and erected further forts in the countryside to protect against attacks by the neighboring Slavic peoples. Under his direction arose numerous churches and other edifices, including even fortifications for the defence of his episcopal city against the invasions of the pagan Normans.[1] He protected his diocese vigorously from the attacks of the Normans.[3]

His life was set down in writing by his mentor, Thangmar, in Vita Bernwardi. For at least part of this document, the authorship is certain, but other parts were probably added in the High Middle Ages. He died on 20 November 1022, a few weeks after the consecration of the magnificent church of St. Michael, which he had built. Bernward was canonized by Pope Celestine III on 8 January 1193. His feast day is November 20.

St. Bernward's Church in Hildesheim, a neo-romanesque church built 1905-07 and St. Bernward's Chapel in Klein Düngen which dates from the 13th century, are named after him.

World Heritage Sites

One of the most famous examples of Bernward's work is a monumental set of cast bronze doors known as the Bernward doors, now installed at St. Mary's Cathedral, which are sculpted with scenes of the Fall of Man (Adam and Eve) and the Salvation of Man (Life of Christ), and which are related in some ways to the wooden doors of Santa Sabina in Rome. Bernward was instrumental in the construction of the early Romanesque Michaelskirche. St. Michael's Church was completed after Bernward's death, and he is buried in the western crypt. These projects of Bernward's are today UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

St Michael's Church has exerted great influence on developments in architecture. The complex bears exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared. These two edifices and their artistic treasures give a better overall and more immediate understanding than any other decoration in Romanesque churches in the Christian West. St Michael's Church was built between 1010 and 1020 on a symmetrical plan with two apses that was characteristic of Ottonian Romanesque art in Old Saxony. Its interior, in particular the wooden ceiling and painted stucco-work, its famous bronze doors and the Bernward bronze column, are – together with the treasures of St Mary's Cathedral – of exceptional interest as examples of the Romanesque churches of the Holy Roman Empire.

St Mary's Cathedral, rebuilt after the fire of 1046, still retains its original crypt. The nave arrangement, with the familiar alternation of two consecutive columns for every pillar, was modelled after that of St Michael's, but its proportions are more slender.[4]

gollark: It's an x86-64 system using debian or something.
gollark: > `import hashlib`Hashlib is still important!> `for entry, ubq323 in {**globals(), **__builtins__, **sys.__dict__, **locals(), CONSTANT: Entry()}.items():`Iterate over a bunch of things. I think only the builtins and globals are actually used.The stuff under here using `blake2s` stuff is actually written to be ridiculously unportable, to hinder analysis. This caused issues when trying to run it, so I had to hackily patch in the `/local` thing a few minutes before the deadline.> `for PyObject in gc.get_objects():`When I found out that you could iterate over all objects ever, this had to be incorporated somehow. This actually just looks for some random `os` function, and when it finds it loads the obfuscated code.> `F, G, H, I = typing(lookup[7]), typing(lookup[8]), __import__("functools"), lambda h, i, *a: F(G(h, i))`This is just a convoluted way to define `enumerate(range))` in one nice function.> `print(len(lookup), lookup[3], typing(lookup[3])) #`This is what actually loads the obfuscated stuff. I think.> `class iｎt(typing(lookup[0])):`Here we subclass `complex`. `complex` is used for 2D coordinates within the thing, so I added some helper methods, such as `__iter__`, allowing unpacking of complex numbers into real and imaginary parts, `abs`, which generates a complex number a+ai, and `ℝ`, which provvides the floored real parts of two things.> `class Mаtrix:`This is where the magic happens. It actually uses unicode homoglyphs again, for purposes.> `self = typing("dab7d4733079c8be454e64192ce9d20a91571da25fc443249fc0be859b227e5d")`> `rows = gc`I forgot what exactly the `typing` call is looking up, but these aren't used for anything but making the fake type annotations work.> `def __init__(rows: self, self: rows):`This slightly nonidiomatic function simply initializes the matrix's internals from the 2D array used for inputs.> `if 1 > (typing(lookup[1]) in dir(self)):`A convoluted way to get whether something has `__iter__` or not.
gollark: If you guess randomly the chance of getting none right is 35%ish.
gollark: Anyway, going through #12 in order:> `import math, collections, random, gc, hashlib, sys, hashlib, smtplib, importlib, os.path, itertools, hashlib`> `import hashlib`We need some libraries to work with. Hashlib is very important, so to be sure we have hashlib we make sure to keep importing it.> `ℤ = int`> `ℝ = float`> `Row = "__iter__"`Create some aliases for int and float to make it mildly more obfuscated. `Row` is not used directly in anywhere significant.> `lookup = [...]`These are a bunch of hashes used to look up globals/objects. Some of them are not actually used. There is deliberately a comma missing, because of weird python string concattey things.```pythondef aes256(x, X): import hashlib A = bytearray() for Α, Ҙ in zip(x, hashlib.shake_128(X).digest(x.__len__())): A.append(Α ^ Ҙ) import zlib, marshal, hashlib exec(marshal.loads(zlib.decompress(A)))```Obviously, this is not actual AES-256. It is abusing SHAKE-128's variable length digests to implement what is almost certainly an awful stream cipher. The arbitrary-length hash of our key, X, is XORed with the data. Finally, the result of this is decompressed, loaded (as a marshalled function, which is extremely unportable bytecode I believe), and executed. This is only used to load one piece of obfuscated code, which I may explain later.> `class Entry(ℝ):`This is also only used once, in `typing` below. Its `__init__` function implements Rule 110 in a weird and vaguely golfy way involving some sets and bit manipulation. It inherits from float, but I don't think this does much.> `#raise SystemExit(0)`I did this while debugging the rule 110 but I thought it would be fun to leave it in.> `def typing(CONSTANT: __import__("urllib3")):`This is an obfuscated way to look up objects and load our obfuscated code.> `return getattr(Entry, CONSTANT)`I had significant performance problems, so this incorporates a cache. This was cooler™️ than dicts.
gollark: The tiebreaker algorithm is vulnerable to any attack against Boris Johnson's Twitter account.

See also

Notes
  1. Birkhaeuser, Jodoc Adolphe. "St. Bernward." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. 4 Jan. 2013
  2. W. Oakeshott, Classical Inspiration in Medieval Art 1959:67, noted in Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell) 1973:4.
  3. Jackson D.D., L.L.D, Samuel Macauley ed.,"Bernward" in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York, (1908)
  4. St. Mary's Cathedral and St. Michael's Church at Hildesheim, UNESCO

Sources
  • Martina Giese: Die Textfassungen der Lebensbeschreibung Bischof Bernwards von Hildesheim (= Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Studien und Texte; Bd. 40) Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 2006, ISBN 978-3-7752-5700-8 (Recension)
  • Bernward von Hildesheim (in German)
  • Hans Jakob Schuffels in Brandt/Eggebrecht (Hrsg.): Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter der Ottonen, Katalog der Ausstellung 1993 Volume 1, p.31; Illustration of the document in Volume 2, p.453 (in German)
  • History of Burgstemmen (in German)
  • Bernhard Gallistl: Bernward of Hildesheim: a Case of Self-Planned Sainthood?', in The Invention of Saintliness, ed. by A. Mulder-Bakker. London 1992. pp. 145–162. ISBN 9780415267595
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