Introduction: Sicilian Palimpsests

One of the truisms of writing on medieval Sicily is that its surviving archaeological and material remains can be taken as a kind of palimpsest, revealing layers of use and reuse by successive rulers, each attempting to put their stamp on the territory. Much has been written about Palermo, in particular, as a city that was made and remade according to the needs of different conquerors. Within my own period of specialism, the twelfth-century Norman kingdom of Sicily (1130–94) provides us with a wealth of complex buildings—the Cappella Palatina, the Zisa, the Cuba—whose significance has been expertly unpacked. Recent approaches have combined discussion of architecture, art, ecology, and horticulture. They have observed the debt owed by Norman building programs to other regions and models. It is with trepidation, then, that one approaches the task of saying anything new—at all—about the architecture of Norman Sicily. But most often that discussion has focused on what architectural features themselves represented—of water, of inscriptions, of gardens—rather than how architecture was represented in other media.

The following contribution aims to draw attention to an understudied area: the transition, in the final decade of the twelfth century, from Norman kingdom to Staufen kingdom. The Staufen emperor, Henry VI, claimed the right to the kingdom through his marriage to Constance, the surviving daughter of Roger II of Sicily (r. 1130–54). Just as we recognize the significance of architecture (and the use of space and place) to the self-expression of the twelfth-century Norman monarchy, we should—a necessary concomitant—examine how the role of architecture changed after the collapse of that monarchy, with the death of William II in 1189. Here we encounter a historiographical curiosity. We have a good (and ever-deepening) sense of what Norman rulers constructed up to 1189; we have some (though a far from complete) sense of what the later Staufen ruler of Sicily, Frederick II, built, from the 1220s onwards, but little attention has been paid to the “in between.” How should we configure the rule of Henry VI in Sicily: should this be seen as a break with Norman traditions, or a coda to them?

Some small part of that transition from Norman to Staufen rule can be understood through the representation of architecture and public space.

A twenty-first-century tourist in search of the architecture of Northumbria's “Golden Age” will be struck by two things. First, how little of it there is. The grand ruins at Whitby and Lindisfarne are of later medieval establishments, leaving our tourist with little more than small, though evocative, elements in the existing churches at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, the dark crypts of Ripon and Hexham (assuming someone is available to open them), or the completely mysterious magnificence of the little church at Escomb. The second thing our tourist will probably notice is that these churches require constant streams of money to be maintained; the success of St. Paul's church at Jarrow in hosting an annual lecture, sales of the printed text going to the church restoration funds, has been mimicked by an increasing number of other ecclesiastical sites for the simple reason that such revenue is important. Anyone who has ever bought a house in England will have had to take out Chancel Liability Insurance and will know about the potentially ruinous cost of medieval church upkeep. Our tourist will, therefore, know that most early Northumbrian churches were anything but permanent and that protecting the permanence of those few that have survived is a constant battle. What they might not know is that these are not modern issues—early Northumbrian Christians also grappled with the problems and costs of ensuring the permanence of sacred buildings. This chapter shows how one episode from Stephen of Ripon's account of St. Wilfrid sheds light on just these issues; one hagiographer's brief representation of architecture opens a window for us on to the stresses and strains of a fast-changing world.

The Cleansing of the Church of York

Wilfrid was one of the early Northumbrian church's most controversial leaders. After his success at the Synod of Whitby in 664 arguing against the traditions of the Columban/Ionan community who ruled the Northumbrian see from Lindisfarne, Wilfrid became the kingdom's bishop. His subsequent career was marked by numerous attempts to withdraw, divide, and move his bishopric, as well as by Wilfrid's own energetic efforts to resist. Within a few years of his death in 710, Stephen, a member of Wilfrid's former community at Ripon, had written a Life of Wilfrid, notable amongst other features for its interest in architecture.

Introduction

Castles have a long tradition of being studied either as military centres or as symbolic constructions of power. This binary distinction, which Creighton and Liddiard call a “false dichotomy,” does not encompass the range of lived experience of medieval European life, which was multi-faceted and complex, simultaneously incorporating many different elements. This chapter will use a cultural landscape approach to study the medieval built environment and the interdisciplinary collaboration of the disparate fields of archaeology, physics, and literature to develop a more holistic understanding of the medieval castle and the society of which it was a part. This approach looks at castles as an integrated part of the construction of social hierarchy and draws on both modern and medieval perspectives on the medieval cultural landscape. Most studies of this nature focus on one or the other perspective; the interdisciplinary nature of this study puts both into a single arena, creating a more comprehensive view of the medieval architectural and experiential world.

When modern people examine castles, our experiences are shaped by our own sense of perception. Castles are heritage sites, and as such they confer a sense of history and a set of spatial experiences that are distinctly different from those inspired by the modern built environment. These experiences provide a step toward understanding medieval life. Walking through the halls and chambers gives us a fragment of what life in those spaces was like, but it is only a fragment. To gain a deeper understanding, we need to gain access to other aspects of medieval life, and one way to do that is through documentary and literary sources. Every document is written with a purpose and intent, and analysis allows us to understand both the intent and the underlying beliefs integral to the medieval worldview. This brings us a step closer to understanding the medieval lived experience. A further challenge is that castles are not in the same physical condition they were in during the medieval period. Castles still in use have been modified, while castles that went out of use have suffered the decay of time. Physical reconstruction is often impossible for many practical reasons, but digital reconstruction is a viable option because it creates a model that can be compared with castles as they are depicted in historical and literary texts.

The late fourteenth-century poem Saint Erkenwald opens with the construction of St. Paul's Cathedral on the site of a pagan temple which is “beten doun and buggyd efte new” (“beaten down and built anew,” l. 37). The poet demonstrates a keen sense of the place that St. Paul's has, for centuries, occupied in the cultural imagination of “London in Englonde” (“London in England,” l. 1). Then, as now, the monumental structure occupying the site was a symbol of continuity and endurance; at the same time, the evolving form of the building—destroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries—charts the tumultuous history of the city and celebrates the resilience and adaptability of its people. The Gothic cathedral that dominated the medieval skyline was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666, posing a challenge for modern readers who seek to imagine the space of St. Paul's as it was understood when Saint Erkenwald was written. Compounding this difficulty, some influential studies have tended to erase Old St. Paul's from the poem by arguing that the poet's true interests lie with events and debates that centred on other sacred spaces, such as Westminster Abbey. The setting in Old St. Paul’s, however, is much more than a backdrop to the action. By mapping the events of the poem onto what we know of the building as it stood in the late fourteenth century, we can come to understand that, as both a monument to eternity and a chronicle of the turbulent history of church and state, Old St. Paul's provides an essential foundation for the poem's argument. By excavating the literary traces of the now-lost cathedral, we can start to recover the history of medieval buildings that have been erased or substantially altered over time, and better understand how those spaces were read and interpreted at earlier historical moments.

The action of Saint Erkenwald unfolds, with striking specificity, within the grounds of St. Paul's Cathedral. After a brief historical prelude, which traces the history of Britain with a particular focus on the arrival of the “Saxones unsaght” (“hostile Saxons,” l. 8) and the mission of St. Augustine, the poem launches into a description of a great pagan temple that is demolished and rebuilt, as part of a program to convert pagan places of worship into churches (in this case, St. Paul’s).

The architect ure of the early medieval period in England is known mostly through archaeology rather than standing buildings. While this limits our direct engagement with material evidence, archaeological investigation has made it possible to see a broader planning context of individual buildings, to reconstruct the relationships between the buildings within settlements, and to explore what those relationships may have meant to the people using these buildings. My approach is based on a detailed examination of archaeological evidence for sixth-and seventh-century phases of occupation at a number of well-recorded sites, followed by an observation of spatial relationships between the structures and an assessment of recurring elements and similarities in planning principles. This work leads to a proposal that there is an intrinsic link between the grouping of buildings, frequently marked by distinctive axial arrangements, and the recurring functions of these groups, including those associated with authority and religious ritual, as well as the more mundane ones focusing on serving the settlement.

The inherent connection between the structure of the spaces we live in and the structure of our lives is best formulated in Pierre Bourdieu's seminal essay on the ways the Berber house mirrors Berber social order and fundamental existential concepts. In the essay, the Berber house is seen as a model of architectural expression built on dichotomies between light and dark, life and death, the domestic and the public, the masculine and the feminine—the categories that encompass everyday functions, religious and cultural concepts, as well as fundamental cosmological paradigms. The geometry of the house is mapped onto the ideas larger than the house itself. In the same way, any form of geometry we intentionally choose to impose on our dwellings and social environment can be read as a form of identification or a signifier of our relationships with the surrounding world and with each other, beyond one house, but within and across a settlement and different social circles. The investigation of such forms of geometry in the context of early medieval England reveals two critical aspects in the design of the settlements of this period: linearity and zoning.

Linearity, or alignment, is the arrangement of two or more buildings in one line on the same axis. It was prominent in the built environment in England starting around 600 and continuing through the pre-Conquest period.

In the high ground in the far north of Oxfordshire, where the hills around Banbury slowly rise up toward their rim at Edge Hill with its sharp drop to Warwickshire's broad Vale of the Red Horse beyond, there lies the cluster of eight medieval churches whose seven parishes form the “Ironstone Benefice” of the Church of England—named for the principal building material which gives these churches their distinctive redbrown appearance. The present churches are predominantly fourteenth-century in date, although most incorporate earlier features stretching back to the Norman period. Each year, visitors are attracted by the combination of fine architecture and picturesque settings, together with an assortment of surviving medieval wall paintings, window glass, and carvings, and the eight churches of the Benefice are now connected in the landscape for both tourist and worshipper following the inauguration in 2015 of a 12.6-mile circular pilgrimage route.

One of the churches of the Benefice is that dedicated to the Holy Trinity at Shenington, best known today as reportedly the last parish in Britain to continue the tradition of “grass-strewing” (whereby the floor of the church is covered with fresh-cut grass for the three weeks following Whitsunday). Standing at the edge of the hilltop village, the church offers its broad south side to the sun. There on the outer wall of the south aisle, positioned between a drainpipe and a window, is a small relief carving of an ox (or possibly a bull) standing in profile with its face turned toward the viewer, and beside it a figure (apparently male) with raised hands standing inside some sort of arch or niche (Figure 1). The carving is badly weathered. The animal's hindquarters have worn away almost to nothing and the face of the standing figure has been largely obscured. In its current state it is not clear what this scene is meant to represent. It may be incomplete, beyond the simple effect of weathering, and the irregular shape of the ironstone block, which disrupts the otherwise regular ashlar-faced wall, hints at a subtly awkward effort of spoliation, or reuse of earlier material.

Located just too high to get a good look at from ground level, the carving is nevertheless sure to arouse the interest—and, perhaps, the bafflement—of those who notice it. Such an unusual image must, it seems, represent something definite, but what?

In my 2003 book, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory, I explored a long-running patristic and scholastic tradition of architectural allegory, and traced the way that biblical architectures such as the temple, tabernacle, and ark were systematically allegorized as the body of Christ, that is, as the Christian church, in commentaries and treatises such as Gregory the Great's Homiliae in Ezechielem, Bede's De Templo and De Tabernaculo, Richard of Saint-Victor's Benjamin Major (an allegorization of the Ark of the Covenant), Hugh of Saint-Victor's De Arca Noe Morali and De Arca Noe Mystica, and Robert Grosseteste's De Templum Dei. Typically, in these exegeses, the length of the temple was equated with the dimension of time and with the progression of the church through salvation history, the breadth with the sum of believers, and the height with the volumes of scripture. The Old Testament building became an imaginative diagram summing up Christian doctrine and all who lived in accordance with it, through God's temporality. It was a closed, intact, unambiguous figure. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a very similar allegorical process was applied to the contemporary church edifice by a series of high-ranking ecclesiastics: Honorius Augustodunensis (1080–ca.1140), John Beleth (fl. 1182?), Sicardus of Cremona (1155–1215), Pope Innocent III (1161–1216), and most famously Durandus, bishop of Mende (1230–96). In their liturgical and eucharistic manuals, the walls, roof, columns, pavement, and portals of the church were interpreted as symbols of the people and beliefs that made up the Christian ideology. Hence, the portal was Christ, the door into Christian belief, while the internal columns of the church were its bishops who supported the superstructure of the faith. In addition, extensive allegorical attention was given to the offices enacted in the church and the furnishings it contained: its altars, candlesticks, images, sanctuary spaces, and the priest's vestments. The aim of these manuals was to explain the inner significance of liturgical performance and practice to the clergy, and also to deepen the mystery of the mass. The contemporary church building became a kind of scripture in and of itself: subjected to the same four-fold process of exegesis as the scriptural text and as scriptural architecture.

Many of the most impressive architectural drawings produced in the Gothic era depict spired church towers or spire-like tabernacles. These two similarly shaped monument types differed in scale, but each had particular qualities that made them crucially important for Gothic designers and their patrons. Spires were the most prominent elements on the skylines of medieval cities, sometimes reaching well over 100m in height, and the more complicated ones typically shown in surviving drawings were extremely expensive, which meant that their construction required close administrative oversight. Finely executed drawings could be used to document the designs in question for the approval of the patrons, and they could even be used in fundraising initiatives. Importantly, too, spires were necessarily built from the bottom upwards, without the kind of horizontally repeating modular structure seen in the main bodies of their host churches. Drawings were thus essential tools for designers who wished to establish the overall format of spired towers that might not be completed in their lifetimes. The stakes in tabernacle design were also high, in their own way. Most of the tabernacles depicted in surviving drawings were intended to enshrine the consecrated host wafers that were considered to be the truly present body of Jesus, making them crucial devotional foci in a church interior. Although these shrines are often described as micro-architectural, they often reached impressive heights on the order of 15–20m, with the largest of them, in Ulm Minster, reaching 26m. This was certainly large enough to make a dramatic impression on any viewer, but small enough that considerations of structural stability and cost were less constraining than in the construction of full-scale spires. Designers thus had both the motivation and the means to indulge their wildest fantasies in the design of tabernacles, which became showpieces of their creative virtuosity. By the end of the Gothic era, therefore, tabernacle drawings had begun to reach a level of scale and sophistication that had previously been reserved for drawings of full-scale spires. The dialogue between these monument types was liveliest in the Germanic world, which preserves more Gothic drawings than any other region. This chapter uses geometrical analysis to shed light on two particularly spectacular drawings, one in each of these genres.

The first drawing, which has long been preserved in Regensburg, measures an impressive 4.42m high.

The Carmina Ecc lesiastica form a curious grouping of Latin verses written by the seventh-century West Saxon abbot and bishop Aldhelm of Malmesbury. The poems commemorate churches dedicated to Peter and Paul (CE 1) and the Virgin Mary (CE 2–3), as well as a series of altars dedicated to the apostles in a church of unspecified dedication (CE 4–5). Some of these poems may have been intended to serve as inscriptions known as tituli. CE 1–2 are typical of inscriptions found in late antique and early medieval churches: they are short, primarily hagiographic in focus, and outline the holy deeds of the patron saint of the church while praying for the saint's protection and intercession. CE 4 is comprised of not one but thirteen poems of varying length on altars dedicated to the twelve apostles within a church. Like CE 1–2, the first twelve poems of CE 4 (and CE 5, which is dedicated to Matthias, the apostle who replaced Judas) each briefly recount the deeds, miracles, and martyrdoms of single apostles, and the concluding poem of the sequence serves as an epilogue wherein Aldhelm prays for the apostles’ intercession. However, CE 3 differs from the other poems in this grouping: rather than praising or memorializing a saint, this poem lavishly describes the interior features and furnishings of a church built by an abbess named Bugga. Aldhelm prefaces the architectural and liturgical descriptions in this poem with an encomiastic royal genealogy, praising the West Saxon kings Centwine (who was Bugga's father and probably also his own) and Cædwalla for establishing Wessex as a Christian kingdom by eventually giving up their thrones for the religious life. The exact location of the church commemorated in CE 3 remains unknown, but it is possible that it was part of the minster complex of Aldhelm's Malmesbury.

Literary scholarship on the Carmina Ecclesiastica has primarily focused on establishing the Latin sources for Aldhelm's information, and identifying borrowed Latin phrases and formulae, especially those from hexameter inscriptions on churches and shrines in Rome that Aldhelm may have encountered in situ or through manuscript collections known as syllogae. The CE are often described as compositions in the style of such Roman inscriptions, like the tituli of the fourth-century poet and benefactor of holy sites, Pope Damasus.

Introduction

In 1634, the Massachusetts Bay Court put forth its first sumptuary law:

For the members of this newly established colony, the message imparted in the law was clear: one’s identity as a Puritan was tied to modest dress, without excess, tied to one’s religion, status, and wealth. Modest dress according to these guidelines was intended for all members, including English and Indigenous men and women who had adopted or were forced to adopt the new religion. To dress outside of the manner dictated by the Bay Colony laws meant that one lived outside of Puritan ideologies—such as Indigenous peoples who were not converted—and outside of social order expected in the early colony where dress identified who you were. Yet colonial order rarely matches colonial reality, where people often lived in between imperial ideologies. That aspect of lived colonialism is found in the material record of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and elsewhere in other settler colonial contexts, in the entanglement of different peoples, objects, and ideologies. Homi Bhabha reminds us of two aspects of lived colonialisms that threaten imperial order: hybridity and mimicry. Notably, hybridities of materiality, identity, ideology, and practice that diverge from imperial expectations, and semblances of mimicry that are a form of mockery and menace.

Introduction

As early as in the Phoenician period, the Mediterranean has been one of the most dynamic spheres of the production and trade of fibres, dyes, and fabrics in the world. Exploring the creative and material processes underlying the design and the making of clothing and textiles in North African coastal cities sheds new light on the still largely neglected study of the everyday life of communities overshadowed by the belligerent events of a predominantly male-centred conventional history. This chapter examines seventeenth- till early nineteenth-century embroidery to present a thus far unknown material and gendered history of vernacular cosmopolitanism and in-between hybridity shaped by the women of early modern Algiers. Based on the analysis of textiles surviving in Algerian and French collections, as well as on ethnographic inquiries with female embroiderers in Algeria, this essay provides an anthropological recontextualisation of a multivalent gendered form of vernacular art in early modern North Africa.

The Objectification of Gendered Histories

For centuries, Algerian tarz or tiraz embroidery embodied a quintessential expression of individual and collective identity for both rural and urban female populations. Women of all generations, who worked autonomously and never belonged to any kind of professional corporation, produced silk thread embroideries in domestic settings. These women transformed the empty undyed surfaces of a broad variety of bath wear, underwear, bedwear, curtains, hangings, and other everyday and ritual articles. Professional female embroiderers existed in Algiers and could be commissioned embroidery artefacts by wealthy families; however, the production of most of the embroidery usually happened at home. It was not meant to constitute a commercial activity, but embroidering could generate consistent incomes to women. Whether made to satisfy their personal and family needs or as commissioned work, embroidery provided conditions of self-expression and self-realisation to women in every social category.