Obituary Notice

Abstract

St Vitus’s Cathedral, founded in 1344, is a prime example of 14th-century cathedral Gothic, a product of the cooperation between the ingenious architect Peter Parler and his patron, Emperor Charles IV. The unusual layout consisted of a pair of choirs set side by side in the eastern section of the cathedral, an arrangement inspired by the earlier Romanesque double-choir basilica. One was dedicated to St Vitus and was used by the canons, the other to the Virgin Mary and operated by the mansionars. The royal and imperial necropolis was placed in the latter of the two choirs, with Charles IV’s tomb-chest protected by a sculptured canopy and surrounded by the cenotaphs of deceased family members and later kings and queens. The form of two choirs is probably the result of an extensive rearrangement of the earlier project completed in the 1350s, when initial plans to locate the royal burial ground in the canons’ choir were abandoned. The main choir contained a tabernacle of remarkable design, dating from c. 1365. There may originally have been plans for a third choir to be built around the tomb of St Adalbert located in the middle of the nave, the work on which was initiated in 1392.     

Mediæval Military Architecture in England

Recent survey of the late twelfth- to early thirteenth-century chancel of St Mary's church, New Shoreham (Grade I listed) has revealed traces of two consecutive medieval paint schemes on the architecture, dating from c. 1210. No previous research or publication has taken account of these remains, which indicate the original interior appearance of this large and historic parish church. Samples of the paint have been scientifically analysed, revealing the pigments used and their stratigraphic relationship across the survey area; the identification of carbon black on architectural features is particularly important. Comparison with other ecclesiastical buildings in England and on the Continent indicates that St Mary's chancel is a key example of a widespread decorative scheme of red-and-black architectural polychromy, reinforcing its significance as an exemplar of early Gothic style in medieval England.     

Somatic Styles of the Early Middle Ages

‘Somatic Styles’ examines how classical modes of gender played significant roles in carving out competitive arenas between clerical and lay elites, c.600–900 CE. The paper explores the hermeneutical obstacles standing between the contemporary theorist of gender and the complex nature of the early medieval texts under scrutiny. The analysis reconstructs classicising techniques of gender deployed by early medieval churchmen, and it does so in a way that both challenges the stranglehold of the ‘one‐sex’ model on pre‐modern understandings of gender and heals the ‘rupture’ between the ‘Ancient’ and the ‘Dark Age’. Finally, the essay maps early medieval somatic and gendered styles onto an architectural space where lay and consecrated bodies met – a ninth‐century monastic basilica.     

The knighthood in and around late medieval Brussels

This article focuses on the social and political features of the knighthood in one of the most densely populated areas of the Low Countries, the administrative district of Brussels, known as the ammanie, in the fifteenth century. A systematic identification of all knights (rather than a selection) enables us to correct Huizinga’s picture and that of other, more recent, historians of the late medieval nobility as a social group in decay. Moreover, this case study contributes to ongoing debates on the position and status of late medieval knighthood. First, the data make it possible to assess the impact of Burgundian policies on the social, political and military relevance of the knighthood of Brabant. Second, special attention is given to their feudal possessions, in particular lordships and fortified residences, in order to establish stratification within the knighthood. Finally, the status and position of bannerets within the Brabantine knighthood is highlighted since they played a crucial role as intermediaries between the duke of Brabant and the urban elites of Brussels.     

The 14th-Century Rebuilding of the Collegiate Church of St Mary’s,Warwick

The 14th-century rebuilding of the collegiate church of St Mary’s by the earls of Warwick has received surprisingly little scholarly consideration, despite the status of its patrons and the distinctiveness of its architecture. This article uses drawings of the building before the fire of 1694, which destroyed its west end, together with the college’s extensive cartulary and other records, to reconstruct the 14th-century church. From this a timeline for the construction of the church is proposed. Regional, national and international stylistic precedents and antecedents are explored and used to test the validity of the ‘centre/periphery’ model of architectural change. The article concludes with a brief discussion of methodological insights drawn from the analysis.     

Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting,Llangollen, 1877

Abstract

The mutilated remains of the choir furniture in this remote parish church disclose the evidence of a 14th-century double-credal decorative scheme. It is a unique British survival of this iconography in the medium. This paper analyses the monument in terms of patronage, style and dating, and recounts its remarkable afterlife. In attempting to place it within an English medieval credal context, it is apparent that, in any medium, such schemes are a rarity. As a result, possibly with one important exception, relating to the chapel glass at Hampton Court, Herefordshire, the subject has neither lent itself to the publication of a wide-ranging archaeological monograph, nor to an adequate discussion of the central importance of the creed and its visual expression in catholic Christian theology. As well as bringing to light the history and archaeology of the Astley programme, it was necessary to make amends by conducting a survey of medieval credal schemes in all media surviving in Europe, including the late-medieval Savoyard group of choir-stalls, with their carved-wood figures of prophets and apostles on the seat backs.     

中世纪研究在美国的建立及其早期风格

自19世纪70年代以来,美国的中世纪研究开始形成较为完整的知识与话语体系,亨利·亚当斯、赫伯特·亚当斯以及乔治·亚当斯在这个过程中扮演了重要角色。在早期建设阶段,业余学者和专门学会成为了推动学术发展和学科专业化的主要参与者,大学培养模式则主要受德国和法国的影响。到20世纪30年代,美国的欧洲中世纪研究形成了重视教科书写作、在对欧洲中世纪历史理解中的他者性和继承性相互叠加、宏大视野与碎片化研究相互交织等特色。这些早期风格塑造了美国中世纪研究的核心范式,同时也对20世纪中期以来国际中世纪史学界的发展产生了深远影响。     

Original Documents.-No. I

St Faith’s chapel is situated beyond the south wall of the south transept of the Gothic abbey church, built by King Henry III (r. 1216–72) at Westminster. The chamber’s paintings, corbel heads and the use of Purbeck marble for wall shafts and corbels, together with 13th-century floor tiles, mark it out as a locus of high status. The paper promotes the claims of St Faith’s chapel to have been the sacristy and vestry of the Benedictine church through an examination of its fittings, sculpture and painted decoration.     

The Church of Saint-Jouin-de-Marnes in the Eleventh Century

Abstract

One bay of the choir, the transepts and most of the nave survive from the eleventh-century church of Saint-Jouin-de-Marnes. Construction probably began in the first quarter of the century with the choir and transepts and proceeded, with a change of style, through a remodelling of the transepts to the nave. Completion might have been delayed until the third quarter of the century. The architecture and sculpture betray a transition from early medieval to Romanesque forms, the former in the choir and the latter in the nave. Early Romanesque Corinthian capitals and ornate archivolts exist alongside archaising block capitals, and all reveal new combinations of traditional forms, leading to Romanesque innovations.     

Islamic glass in the Christian Kingdom of Alwa: Chemistry of shards from Soba,Nubia, Sudan

Excavations at Soba, the capital of Alwa, between 2019 and 2022 yielded more than 30 glass fragments in addition to a glass cosmetic bottle. An analysis of 30 glass samples has identified glass belonging to a number of compositional groups. The majority of fragments were made of plant ash-soda glass produced in the Middle East (Iran, Iraq) between the 9th and 10th centuries, and in the Eastern Mediterranean (Levant and Egypt) between the mid-10th and mid-12th centuries. Seven fragments were made of mineral–soda-lime glass produced in 9th-century Egypt and three high-lead glasses find analogies in the 9th- to 11th-century glass. Archeological evidence, as well as textual sources, leave no doubt about Alwa’s intense transcultural connections. This article provides the first insight into the chemistry of glass shards from medieval Nubia, and the results of analysis contribute to evidence for long-distance contacts of Soba, the capital of one of the medieval kingdoms of Sahelian Africa.     

Reading Kafka Visually: Gothic Ornament and the Motion of Writing in Kafka’s Der Process

Through close examination of the chapter ‘Im Dom’ in Kafka’s novel Der Process, this articles explores how a particular visual mode can shape the writing of a text. The mode analysed here inheres in the setting of Kafka’s chapter: the architecture of the Gothic cathedral, which the art historian Wilhelm Worringer, a contemporary of Kafka’s, saw embodied in the figure of ornament. This encounter between literary language and Gothic space as two phenomena mutually engendering each other opens a perspective onto the ‘motion of writing’ within the text, and onto its visuality and resonance with space. A dynamic and complex current; a chaotic tangle of lines; expression prevailing over meaning; an absent centre; vertigo and pathos — these are the principles shared by Worringer’s Gothic and Kafka’s writing.     

COMPOSITIONAL CHARACTERIZATION OF FRENCH LIMESTONE: A NEW TOOL FOR ART HISTORIANS*

Limestone from quarries known to medieval craftsmen and from the monuments they built and embellished, as well as from carvings now in museum collections, has been characterized by neutron activation analysis. Specimens from 38 quarries in the Lutetian and Jurassic limestone formations of France and from sculptures in American and French museums have been tested, and the results have been compiled in a data base to which art historians may refer when attempting to determine provenance for sculptures. Multivariate statistical analysis of concentration data shows stone from a particular quarry in the Paris basin to be compositionally homogeneous and distinguishable from other quarries in the same formation. The same approach to data related to quarries near the Burgundian abbey of Cluny finds general agreement between classifications based on compositional and on petrographic data, but the number of samples available for analysis at the time of writing was insufficient to achieve the finer distinctions reported for the Paris basin.     

Traditional Rural Houses Along the Missouri-Kansas Border

I-houses and I-cottages predominate in the pre-1940 rural landscape along the Missouri-Kansas border, a region settled by people from different culture areas of the eastern United States. Cultural heritage explains part of the housing pattern, particularly the distributions of I-cottages and one-story bungalows, but for the most part, regional culture associations are not strong. The housing situation is understood better historically. To judge from various external indicators, local I-structures have been influenced by both the Georgian and the Gothic architectural traditions. More recent house types, although often not considered to be products of the folk tradition, nonetheless have traits that link them with this past. Using the construction of I-structures as a general measure, one can say that traditional architecture has been in decline since at least 1880 and that the rate of decline has accelerated through time.     

Singers without borders: a performer’s rotulus and the transmission of jeux partis

The jeu parti – a debate in song weighing questions of love, sex, wealth, ethical behaviour – enjoyed popular acclaim across social classes in thirteenth-century France. Despite the appeal of these texts as historical sources, suggestive of the mentalité of a medieval community through frank discussion of taboo subjects, jeux partis have received sporadic scholarly attention. A rare scroll, copied by an Anglo-Norman scribe (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1681) supplies new evidence of the genre’s transmission outside the pages of a codex and outside northern France. The only known document of its kind to contain jeux partis, it has been overlooked by scholars for a century, yet it suggests that the transmission of music and culture could be achieved textually, borne along the performance circuits of medieval Europe. This study investigates how jeux partis were composed, transmitted and refashioned for new audiences with the aid of text and improvisation.     

Archaeology and Myth in Early Medieval Europe: Making the Gods of Early Ireland

THIS ARTICLE CRITICALLY EXAMINES medieval¹1 Archaeology and Palaeoecology, School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK. p.gleeson@qub.ac.uk archaeology’s relationship with myth. A surge of research examining pre-Christian belief has seen mythology, place names and folklore increasingly utilised to reconstruct mentalities and cosmologies. As a wider global phenomenon, this trend comes with pitfalls that must be addressed more systematically. This article examines these issues through early medieval Ireland, beginning with an overview of recent trends in cognate disciplines, before proceeding through case studies of Tara, Brú na Bóinne (both Co Meath), and Nenagh (Co Tipperary). Far from being relics of prehistoric cult practices, many deities populating these landscapes may have been consciously invented for political, allegorical and exegetical reasons during the medieval period. This creative process had a marked 8th-century monumental dimension, contemporary with the floruit of saga literature. This precludes such evidence being utilised to reconstruct pre-Christian cosmologies. This has broad implications for research across European medieval archaeology that would seek to access ritual, belief and religion.     

Mead-Halls of the Oiscingas: A New Kentish Perspective on the Anglo-Saxon Great Hall Complex Phenomenon

THE GREAT HALL complex represents one of the most distinctive and evocative expressions of the Anglo-Saxon settlement record, and is widely cited as a metaphor for the emergence of kingship in early medieval England. Yet interpretation of these sites remains underdeveloped and heavily weighted towards the excavated findings from the well-known site of Yeavering in Northumberland. Inspired by the results of recent excavations at Lyminge, Kent, this paper undertakes a detailed comparative interrogation of three great hall complexes in Kent, and exploits this new regional perspective to advance our understanding of the agency and embodied meanings of these settlements as ‘theatres of power’. Explored through the thematic prisms of place, social memory and monumental hybridity, this examination leads to a new appreciation of the involvement of great hall sites in the genealogical strategies of 7th-century royal dynasties and a fresh perspective on how this remarkable, yet short-lived, monumental idiom was adapted to harness the symbolic capital of Romanitas.     

In Medio Chori: The Tomb of Thomas of Corbridge,Archbishop of York,in Southwell Minster

Four medieval archbishops of York died in their palace at Southwell in Nottinghamshire. Three archbishops were buried in Southwell Minster. Archbishop Thomas of Corbridge was buried in an important position in the middle of the choir. His tomb had a marble top with an inlaid brass memorial. Thus Corbridge was held in high esteem and there is some evidence that he may have been regarded as an unofficial saint.     

Dorsetshire Numismatics; The Ancient Mints,with Notices of Some Medals Connected with the County

For several years, studies of popular religion within pre-Reformation England have tended to emphasize that religious practice within the medieval parish church had become increasingly privatized and exclusive, as a result of the foundation of so-called ‘private’ chantry chapels. In many cases, these works have neglected the wider role of the chantry in shared religious experience at parish level, a deficit that has only recently been challenged by historians. This paper sets out to consider how the structural analysis of surviving above-ground evidence for former chantry chapels can uncover a wider context for chantry foundation in the medieval parish church. This paper based on recent research in the south and west of England discusses how the analysis of church space, light and, particularly, vision enables the reconstruction of aspects of chantry chapel foundation and can illustrate their wider social dimension. It examines the nature of the architectural feature known as the ‘squint’ and discusses how it can help in the analysis of former ritual topography and shed light on the level of private and communal piety. Furthermore, this paper shows how the use of archaeological approaches can illuminate aspects of medieval religious practice only hinted at in historical documents.