Architectural Representation in Medieval Textual and Material Culture 9781802700008, 9781802700763

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ARCHITECTURAL REPRESENTATION IN MEDIEVAL TEXTUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE

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PLACES AND SPACES, MEDIEVAL TO MODERN Further Information and Publications www.arc-​hum​anit​ies.org/​sea​rch-​resu​lts-​list/​?ser​ies=​pla​ces-​and-​spa​ces-​ medie​val-​to-​mod​ern

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ARCHITECTURAL REPRESENTATION IN MEDIEVAL TEXTUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE Edited by

HANNAH M. BAILEY, KARL KINSELLA, and DANIEL THOMAS

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2023, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

The author asserts their moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/​29/​EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94–​553) does not require the Publisher’s permission. ISBN (HB): 9781802700008 eISBN (PDF): 9781802700763

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Introduction: Architectural Representation in Medieval Textual and Material Culture HANNAH M. BAILEY, KARL KINSELLA, and DANIEL THOMAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 1. Designing the Regensburg Spire and Harburg Tabernacle: The Geometries of Two Great German Gothic Drawings ROBERT BORK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Chapter 2. Wilfrid’s Restoration of the Church at York and the Permanence of Sacred Buildings in Post-​Conversion Northumbria CONOR O’BRIEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Chapter 3. Heaven-​Roofs and Holy Altars: Envisioning a Seventh-​Century English Church in Aldhelm’s Carmina Ecclesiastica 3 SHANNON GODLOVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Chapter 4. “Beaten Down and Built Anew”: Saint Erkenwald and Old St. Paul’s BRENDAN O’CONNELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Chapter 5. Castle Viewscapes in Literature and Landscapes SCOTT STULL, MICHAEL TWOMEY, and MICHAEL ROGERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Chapter 6. Architectural Alignment in Early Medieval English Settlements: Zoning, Meaning, and Function ANASTASIA MOSKVINA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

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Table of Contents

Chapter 7. Underneath the Arches: Peter of Eboli and the Orderly Architecture of Norman Sicily PHILIPPA BYRNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Chapter 8. Reading the Saint’s Church: A Northern Perspective CHRISTIANIA WHITEHEAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Select Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.

Detail of carving, Shenington, Holy Trinity Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Figure 3.

a. Top, the steps in pinnacle design after Matthäus Roriczer, 1486. b. Bottom, basic geometrical relations in quadrature and “octature” . . . . . . . 20

Figure 2.

Figure 4.

Figure 5. Figure 6. Figure 7. Figure 8.

Figure 9.

a. Left, the Harburg tabernacle drawing. b. Centre left, the Regensburg single-​spire drawing. c. Centre, the bottom half of the Harburg tabernacle drawing. d. Centre right, modern redrawing of the Regensburg single-​spire drawing. e. Right, the top half of the Harburg tabernacle drawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 a. Left, overall elevation (bottom) and detail (top) of present Regensburg Cathedral façade, after survey drawings from 1935. b. Middle, triangular porch as seen in single-​spire drawing (top), and as built (bottom). c. Right, alignment of plan and elevation of Ulm Minster ((left), contrasted with misalignment between Ulm Minster plan and single-spire drawing from Regensburg (right)’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Comparison showing alignment between ground plan of Regensburg Cathedral and single-​spire drawing from Regensburg, with geometrical overlay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Upper-​middle section of Regensburg single-​spire drawing, with geometrical overlay (left). b. Upper section of Regensburg single-​spire drawing, with geometrical overlay (right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 a. Harburg tabernacle, lower section (geometrical armature). b. Harburg tabernacle, lower section (drawing). c. Harburg tabernacle, lower section (plan)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

a. Harburg tabernacle, lower section (detail with geometrical overlay). b. Harburg tabernacle, upper section (geometrical overlay). c. Harburg tabernacle, upper section (drawing). d. Harburg tabernacle, upper section (plans) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Sebba and Ethelred (monument)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

Figure 10. St. Paul’s, the nave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

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viii List of Illustrations Figure 11. St. Erkenwald (monument) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

Figure 12. Trim Castle Keep, Co. Meath, Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Figure 13. Trim Castle and the River Boyne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Figure 14. View of Porchfields from Trim Castle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Figure 15. Fourteenth-​century bridge in Trim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Figure 16. 3D scanning team at Trim Castle, 2016 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Figure 17. Point cloud record of Trim Castle and landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Figure 18. Digital reconstruction of missing north tower, Trim Castle . . . . . . . . . . 113 Figure 19. Reconstructed view from missing north tower, Trim Castle . . . . . . . . . 114 Figure 20. Lancelot crossing the sword bridge while Guinevere looks on from the tower, ca. 1475 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Figure 21. David gazes at Bathsheba from a tower, late fifteenth century . . . . . . . 120 Figure 22. Yeavering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Figure 23. Cowdery’s Down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Figure 24. Cowage Farm  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Figure 25. Chalton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Figure 26. Drayton-​Sutton Courtenay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Figure 27. Sprouston   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Figure 28. Palermo at the death of William II, with the different areas of the city depicted in mourning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Figure 29. Constance’s arrival in Messina, with some geographical and architectural features of the city shown and labelled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Figure 30. The colonnades within the royal palace, labelled by region . . . . . . . . . . 164 Figure 31. The scheme of the six ages within the chambers of the royal palace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors of

this volume would like to express their gratitude to Graham Child and Lincoln College, Oxford, for their support in bringing this book to press. We would like to acknowledge the dedication and hard work of all of the contributors to the volume and express our thanks to them and to all those who have participated in the Architectural Representations in the Middle Ages research network at earlier stages of the project, most especially Laura Varnam for her significant organizational and theoretical contributions. We also gratefully acknowledge the support the project received through grants from the John Fell Fund, University College, Oxford, the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature (SSMLL), Oxford Medieval Studies (OMS), The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), and the Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute. Our thanks as well to Matt Stevens for supplying the photo of Holy Trinity Church Shenington, and to Sam Fogg of the Sam Fogg Gallery in London and Hermann Reidel of the Bistums-​Kunstsammlungen in Regensburg for their permission to reproduce the Harburg and Regensburg drawings.

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Introduction

ARCHITECTURAL REPRESENTATION IN MEDIEVAL TEXTUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE Hannah M. Bailey, Karl Kinsella, and Daniel Thomas* 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 red-​ brown appearance.1 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.2 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, * Hannah M. Bailey is Lecturer in Early Medieval English at Wadham College, Oxford. Karl Kinsella is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Aberdeen. Daniel Thomas is Departmental Lecturer in Old and Early Middle English at the University of Oxford. 1 The Ironstone Benefice, https://​ironst​onec​hurc​hes.wordpr​ess.com/​ (accessed June 26, 2021).

2 Ironstone Benefice Pilgrimage, www.iron​ston​epil​grim​age.org/​ (accessed June 26, 2021). On the embodied experience of medieval spaces and places facilitated by modern pilgrimage routes and heritage trails, see Carole M. Cusack, “History, Authenticity, and Tourism: Encountering the Medieval While Walking St. Cuthbert’s Way,” in Journeys and Destinations: Studies in Travel, Identity, and Meaning, ed. A. Norman (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 1–​21, and Jonathan M. Wooding, “Changing Roles of Pilgrimage: Retreating, Remembering, Re-​Enacting,” in The St. Thomas Way and the Medieval March of Wales: Exploring Place, Heritage, Pilgrimage, ed. Catherine A. M. Clarke (Leeds: Arc Humanities, 2020), 25–​36.

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2 H. M. Bailey, K. Kinsella, and D. Thomas

Figure 1. Detail of carving, Shenington, Holy Trinity Church. Used with permission of Matthew Stevens.

which disrupts the otherwise regular ashlar-​faced wall, hints at a subtly awkward effort of spoliation, or reuse of earlier material.3 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? A biblical scene, perhaps? An episode from one of the lives of the saints? Perhaps a local legend or a miracle involving some local herdsman? The posture of the human figure—​standing with forearms raised from the sides, palms facing forwards—​suggests an attitude of prayer, reminiscent of the orans position. But what is the relationship between this figure and that of the ox? Is the figure blessing the animal or could the posture be read instead as an impulsive gesture of surprise or fright, or even rebuke? What, if anything, does the detail of the clothing tell us about the date of the carving 3 The description of the church in the Victoria County History volume covering the parish of Shenington states that the south aisle in which the carving is located, which dated originally to the thirteenth century, was rebuilt in the fourteenth century (“Parishes: Shenington,” in A History of the County of Oxford, vol. 9, Bloxham Hundred, ed. Mary D. Lobel and Alan Crossley (London: Institute of Historical Research, 1969), 139–​50, digitized at British History Online, www.brit​ish-​hist​ory.ac.uk/​ vch/​oxon/​vol9/​pp139-​150 [accessed February 9, 2021]). Whether the carving was part of the older structure of the church or dates to the rebuilding of the south aisle is unclear.

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Introduction

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or about the gender or status of the figure depicted? And what of the ox itself? Is the surviving scene part of a narrative in which the animal figured or is the ox intended symbolically rather than literally (and, if it is symbolic, of what)? An observer seeking answers to such questions would be frustrated in their desire. Almost every available source of information about the church at Shenington mentions the carving, but none provides a satisfactory explanation of it (or, indeed, any explanation at all). Turning first to the various websites dedicated to the parish, the village, or the Benefice, the observer will find descriptions of the carving, variously labelled either “interesting” or “intriguing,” but no explanation of its origin or significance.4 Leafing through the relevant volumes of the Victoria County History or Pevsner’s “Buildings of England” series offers little more enlightenment. The former merely notes the presence of “a medieval sculpture representing a man and an ox.”5 The latter, in an entry written by Jennifer Sherwood, describes “a lively rustic carving of a man and an ox under a C14 canopy.”6 A determined search might unearth the work of local historian Nan Clifton, who contributed a history of “the village on the shining hill” to the Banbury Historical Society’s magazine in 1974. In her description of the church, Clifton goes so far as to suggest that the human figure in the carving is “possibly a priest,” but ultimately concludes that “[w]‌hat these figures represent is not known.”7 The contributors to this volume, to whom we showed the carving, were also unable to solve the mystery of “that funny little fellow from Shenington.” The heavily framed archway in which the figure stands seems to imply a threshold, suggesting a distinction between internal and external spaces. The arch itself—​a five-​lobed pointed arch—​recalls contemporary ecclesiastical architecture, not entirely dissimilar from the fourteenth-​century Gothic window next to which the carving is located. The scene may, therefore, reflect concerns about the boundaries of sacred space (“no cows in church, please!”).8 But the apparently fragmentary nature of the scene continues to frustrate 4 See, e.g.: “Shenington Holy Trinity,” The Ironstone Benefice, https://​ironst​onec​hurc​hes.wordpr​ ess.com/​about/​she​ning​ton-​holy-​trin​ity/​; “A Church Near You,” The Church of England, www.ach​ urch​near​you.com/​chu​rch/​480/​find-​us/​; Shenington with Alkerton Parish, http://​she​ning​tona​lker​ ton.btck.co.uk/​(all accessed May 10, 2021).

5 “Parishes: Shenington,” 139–​50, British History Online, www.brit​ish-​hist​ory.ac.uk/​vch/​oxon/​ vol9/​pp139-​150 (accessed February 9, 2021). 6 Jennifer Sherwood and Nikolaus Pevsner, Oxfordshire, The Buildings of England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 754. Cf. Jennifer Sherwood, A Guide to the Churches of Oxfordshire (Oxford: Robert Dugdale in association with Oxfordshire Historic Churches Trust, 1989), 165.

7 Nan Clifton, “Shenington: The Village on the Shining Hill,” Cake and Cockhorse 6, no. 1 (1974): 5–​ 12 at 10. Clifton’s article is accompanied by a pen-​and-​ink drawing of the carving executed by the cartoon-​strip artist Hugh Stanley White (11, fig. 4). Either White exercised considerable artistic license in “restoring” the carving in his illustration, or the figures have undergone alarming weathering during the past half century. 8 For a discussion of the problems posed by the violation of sacred space in the later medieval period, see Laura Varnam, The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 150–​51.

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4 H. M. Bailey, K. Kinsella, and D. Thomas attempts to interpret it. Our contributors felt that the carving, which may well not be in its original location, could have been part of a sequence of panels whose narrative and/​ or iconographic significance has now been irretrievably lost. The example of the Shenington carving epitomizes the double effect of attraction and alienation that so often results from modern encounters with medieval architecture. This small man in an arch oddly positioned on a church wall is just sufficiently legible and just sufficiently unexpected to exercise a strange draw that compels everyone who speaks of the church to mention it, and just opaque enough to close down claims about it beyond an affective response to it as “lively” or “curious.” It provides a moment of contact for a modern viewer, gazing upon a scene which must have been part of the daily experience of individuals occupying the same physical space over a period of some six or seven centuries, promising but also, in its unreadable state, denying access to the worldview of those responsible for the commission, design, creation, installation, and preservation of the carving. Whilst it is possible for us to find meanings in the carving today, the meanings that we see are unlikely to correspond exactly to the various meanings which the scene has conveyed to viewers in the past.9 This simultaneous sense of proximity and distance, of accessibility and remoteness, that characterizes encounters with the architecture of the past provides the starting point for this volume’s exploration of the importance of architecture as a category of medieval thought. As the Shenington carving shows, architecture’s power to build meaning extends beyond the mere physical remnants which survive today. The carving itself is an architectural feature—​both a decorative detail and, as part of the fabric of the wall of the south aisle, an integral part of the church building. It accrues meaning in context through its incorporation into the totality of the church and in relation to the various individual features—​such as the Gothic windows—​which comprise that building. But the carving also represents architecture in its depiction of the arch in which the human figure is framed. Understood as an ecclesiastical feature, this arch stands in a complex (if ultimately unknowable) metonymic relationship both to the church on which it is depicted and, further, to the ideal of sacred ecclesiastical space and community of which the church itself is an iteration. The Shenington carving is thus both an example of a representation/​depiction of architecture and an example of representation/​symbolism expressed through architecture, and so epitomizes the expanded definition of “architectural representation” which is embraced in this multi-​ disciplinary volume. 9 On “the longevity of medieval works and the aspect of time as a factor in shaping our interpretations of them,” see Jennifer M. Feltman, “Why the Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture? An Introduction,” in The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. Jennifer M. Feltman and Sarah Thompson, AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science and Art 12 (London: Routledge, 2019), 1–​14 (quotation at 1) and the essays collected in that volume. See also the discussion by Stull, Twomey, and Rogers, in chap. 5, concerning modern responses to medieval castle architecture and the potentialities of digital reconstruction.

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Introduction

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Architectural Representation: Sources and Approaches The term “architectural representation” (and variations thereon) has traditionally been used in art historical and architectural contexts to refer specifically to more-​or-​ less formal architectural drawings or, increasingly, computer modelling and designs (whether in two or three dimensions), understood (in Pari Riahi’s words) as “the intermediary between thought and action in architecture.”10 The study of the European tradition of such representations through history stretches back to the medieval period and beyond. In the first century BC, the Roman architect Vitruvius outlined three types of architectural representation: plans, elevations, and drawings in perspective.11 Vitruvius’s De Architectura Libri Decem was available throughout the European Middle Ages, even before its supposed “rediscovery” in 1416 by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini. Parts at least of the text were known to Carolingian scholars such as Einhard, Alcuin of York, and Hrabanus Maurus, and manuscript copies of the De Architectura, sometimes transmitted in abbreviated form, are known from the tenth century onwards.12 Following the post-​Roman decline of the professional architect, architectural drawings were, however, apparently rare during the early medieval period.13 But the early thirteenth century witnessed a re-​emergence of plans and elevations which coincided with the development of the Gothic style throughout Europe.14 10 Pari Riahi, “Expanding the Boundaries of Architectural Representation,” Journal of Architecture 22, no. 5 (2017): 815–​24 at 822. See also the other articles collected in this special issue, to which Riahi’s article serves as the introduction, which focuses on “The Medium of Architecture and the Dilemmas of Representation.” 11 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture 1.2, ed. and trans. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24–​25.

12 Carol Herselle Krinsky, “Seventy-​Eight Vitruvius Manuscripts,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 36–​70; Kenneth J. Conant, “The After-​Life of Vitruvius in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 27 (1968): 33–​38; John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 91–​94; Anat Tcherikover, “A Carolingian Lesson in Vitruvius,” in Medieval Architecture and its Intellectual Context: Studies in Honour of Peter Kidson, ed. Eric Fernie and Paul Crossley (London: Hambledon, 1990), 259–​67; Tessa Morrison, “Architectural Planning in the Early Medieval Era,” Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association 5 (2009): 147–​63. See also Hugh Plommer, Vitruvius and Later Roman Building Manuals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

13 The “St. Gall Plan” (St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex Sangallensis 1092; ca. 820) is perhaps the best-​known medieval architectural plan from before the thirteenth century. Made in the ninth century by a Carolingian monk, the plan’s intended purpose remains uncertain. See Walter Horn and Ernest Born, The Plan of St. Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery, 3 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–​1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 229–​38. 14 There is no extended study of architectural drawing over a medieval longue durée. Most discussions of the subject begin, however, with the portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt in the second quarter of the thirteenth century (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Fr 19093;

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6 H. M. Bailey, K. Kinsella, and D. Thomas Such drawings, examples of which are discussed by Robert Bork in the first essay in this volume, may have fulfilled a variety of functions. In addition to their possible use as plans for construction, they could (as Bork discusses) have been used to impress prospective patrons or to attract commissions, as well as serving as repositories both for technical aspects of building design and for the aesthetic ideals associated with particular architectural styles.15 They may increasingly have also fulfilled legalistic and programmatic functions, not only as plans per se but as representations of an envisaged or promised structure.16 Such representations were, however, not only practical and necessary documents but also cultural artifacts. They embody particular attitudes toward and ideas of architecture and the wider world. As such, they not only serve as representations of architecture, but also reveal something of architecture’s own rich and complex representational power. It is this representational power—​defined by the semiologist Umberto Eco as architecture’s communicative capacity—​which provides the connecting impetus for the essays collected in this volume.17 With regard to physical monuments, architecture’s representational value is expressed through both design and use. Theoretical approaches to the study of the built environment have repeatedly demonstrated that architectural meaning exists as a negotiation between intended meaning and perceived meaning, and is fundamentally multivalent, dynamic, and conditioned by context and by the lived experience of a given individual.18 Attempts to read the medieval built environment ca. 1230). Despite the wealth of literature on Villard, little is known about him except that he was a talented artist with a strong interest in the built environment. For an edition and facsimile of the portfolios, see: The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Fr 19093): A New Critical Edition and Colour Facsimile, ed. Carl Barnes, Jr. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). For further discussion, see: Francois Bucher, Architector: The Lodge Books and Sketchbooks of Medieval Architects, vol. 1 (New York: Abaris, 1979); Roland Bechmann, Villard de Honnecourt: la pensé technique au xiiie siècle et sa communication (Paris: Picard, 1993); Arnold Pacey, Medieval Architectural Drawing (Stroud: Tempus, 2007); Robert Bork, The Geometry of Creation: Architectural Drawing and the Dynamics of Gothic Design (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Jean Wirth, Villard de Honnecourt: architecte du XIIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2015). 15 Robert Branner, “Villard de Honnecourt, Reims and the Origin of Gothic Architectural Drawing,” Gazette des Beaux-​Art 61 (1963): 129–​46.

16 Franklin Toker, “Gothic Architecture by Remote Control: An Illustrated Building Contract of 1340,” The Art Bulletin 67 (1985): 67–​95.

17 Umberto Eco, “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture,” in Signs, Symbols, and Architecture, ed. Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt, and Charles Jencks (Chichester: Wiley, 1980), 11–​69. See also The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, ed. M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

18 For a cogent summary, see William Whyte, “How do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 153–​77. For recent discussions, see also Holger Kleine, The Drama of Space: Spatial Sequences and Compositions in Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2018) and the essays collected in The Production Sites of Architecture, ed. Sophia Psarra (New York: Routledge, 2019) and Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Literature and Art from Classical to Contemporary, ed. Jane Griffiths and Adam Hanna (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Such ideas are, of course, far from exclusively

7

Introduction

7

must, therefore, pay attention to the shifting and transient historical, cultural, and ideological factors governing its production and use. In bringing together this collection, we have therefore assumed a definition of architectural representation that extends beyond a restrictive, traditional definition to include not only the communicative or representational capacity of physical architecture itself, but also representations of architecture in a variety of media and genres. Our use of the term is deliberately open, intended to attract a wide range of different critical and methodological approaches and to place the study of traditional architectural drawing in dialogue with modes of representation that encompass literary and pictorial representation as well. The volume consciously juxtaposes approaches to medieval architectural sources from a range of different scholarly disciplines. It is our contention that architecture as a category of medieval culture not only rewards, but in fact requires such a multi-​disciplinary approach.19 In taking this approach, we do not assume a dynamic that progresses from thought, to representation, to action. We recognize instead that the dynamic of the representational program, conditioned by thought and imagination, very often begins rather than ends with the architectural product, and, further, that the cultural value of architectural representation (of whatever sort) is not fully, and often not primarily, determined by its relationship to actual buildings (whether surviving or not).20 The scope of the volume therefore includes representations of hypothetical, symbolic, or imagined architecture, as well as representations of structures which may have existed (or been thought to exist) in other times and places. The evocation of architecture is, of course, a deliberate choice, and one which has its origins in architecture’s communicative capacity. Several of the essays collected here therefore focus on the symbolic and figurative use of architecture within medieval literature and art. The borrowing of real or imaginative structures in this context was inevitably inflected by the concerns and aims of the individual authors who wielded their representations as a force of symbolic or allegorical thought. And so, part of our aim is modern. See, e.g., William Whyte, “Ecclesiastical Gothic Revivalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, ed. Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 433–​46, and Edward N. Kaufman, “Architectural Representation in Victorian England,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 46, no. 1 (1987): 30–​38.

19 It was this belief that led to the formation in 2015 of a multi-​disciplinary research network dedicated to Architectural Representation in Early Medieval England. As the project progressed, it became clear that the national and period boundaries imposed by our reference to “Early Medieval England” were as limiting and artificial modern constructs as the disciplinary boundaries we had originally set out to overcome. In 2017, we formally expanded the chronological and geographical scope of the network to cover Architectural Representation in the Middle Ages. 20 Within a medieval context, see, e.g., Mary Carruthers’s seminal work on the use of imagined architectural structures as “mediative machines” within monastic mnemonic systems (“The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages,” New Literary History 24 (1993): 881–​904 at 895; The Craft of Thought, 228–​31). See also the discussion on this point in Godlove’s chap. 3.

8

8 H. M. Bailey, K. Kinsella, and D. Thomas to demonstrate how various levels of architectural representation—​the literal and the allegorical—​can sit together well enough to propose new ways of thinking about the past, as well as the objects and people who inhabited it.

The Volume

In organizational terms, this collection begins with a painstaking and illuminating investigation of two surviving examples of medieval architectural drawing and their use of geometric principles of design; it ends with a masterful panoramic study of architecture as an abstract site of allegory in medieval hagiographic discourse. It would be a mistake, however, to see these two approaches to architectural representation—​ arising, as they do, out of the formally (but artificially) separate disciplines of art history and literary scholarship—​as fundamentally distinct, or even as two opposite points on a spectrum from concrete and literal to abstract and figurative. The essays share with each other and with the other essays collected here a concern with investigating imaginative and artistic engagement with architecture and its capacity as a site of embedded meaning which transcends the apparent differences in the immediate subject matter and the authors’ particular approaches and concerns. The organizational principle of this volume is, accordingly, juxtaposition; we have arranged the contributions in a sequence which we hope highlights the surprising resonances and moments of clarity that arise when we do not sequester readings of medieval architectural representation in separate silos according to modern disciplinary or period boundaries. Attending to the conversations and intersections between the chapters therefore requires the reader to move from the particular to the general and back again, providing the grounds for a more holistic understanding of architecture as a source of meaning across multiple domains of medieval culture. Our intention is to demonstrate that it is possible to link these conversations in a way that has never been fully attempted before and that the results are fruitful to the wider analysis of medieval architecture and architectural representation. Individually, the essays represent valuable contributions to their respective scholarly fields of enquiry, demonstrating new methodologies and cutting-​edge technology, challenging prevailing orthodoxies, and filling demonstrable gaps in existing scholarship. Taken together, they also offer new insights into both modern scholarly interpretations of the medieval architectural and the interpretative strategies applied to architecture by medieval figures themselves. A number of the essays began as papers presented at a two-​day conference on Architectural Representation in the Middle Ages held at the University of Oxford in 2017. Others were chosen for inclusion in order to highlight the common ground among studies of medieval architecture and representations of architecture in medieval culture that might otherwise exist in isolation from one another due to boundaries of discipline, geography, or periodization. The collection begins with a focus on the representation of ecclesiastical architecture and the development of design technologies which enabled the creative imagination of medieval draftsmen to envisage fantastical and intricate Gothic forms. Robert Bork’s

9

Introduction

9

geometrical analysis of two surviving architectural drawings for an unrealized Gothic spire and a tabernacle provides innovative insight into the creative practices which underpinned the Gothic style. The essay paves the way for a clearer appreciation of the direct connection between images on parchment and structures on the ground. Demonstrating continuities and movements of expertise, style, and technique across both time and space, Bork’s work shows how geometric analysis can help to locate and date such drawings and reveals how idealized but unrealized designs can contribute to our understanding of Gothic architecture. Such architectural representations help to shed light upon the intentions of those people responsible for commissioning and creating the monumental structures of Gothic architecture. Developments in architectural technology often serve not only aesthetic, but also ideological purposes. The political work which architecture can do is the focus of the chapter by Conor O’Brien. O’Brien offers a new contextualization of Stephen of Ripon’s early eighth-​century hagiographical account of Bishop Wilfrid’s restoration of the stone church at York in the 670s: while Stephen’s extensive use of biblical phraseology in his account of Wilfrid’s cleansing and renovation of the existing early seventh-​century structures has previously been read typologically or dismissed as a rhetorical flourish, O’Brien demonstrates that Stephen’s prose (and Wilfrid’s rebuilding) does urgently topical ideological work on more than one level. First, he argues that the restoration of the church makes a theological point about the permanence of a church as a sacred space—​a point which was radically novel in a context in which buildings were typically understood to have limited life-​cycles, stone churches were vanishingly rare, and the pre-​Christian practices the church was supplanting may not have included the use of any distinctly “religious” class of building. Secondly, O’Brien situates Stephen’s writing in the context of the introduction of legal innovations such as charters (which sought and often failed to provide political stability to religious foundations), the general volatility of elite society, and the ideological reorientation of Northumbria’s ecclesiastical establishment from Lindisfarne and Iona to York and Rome. Wilfrid (in Stephen’s account) uses the representational power of architecture in order to transcend the essential impermanence of contemporary landholding, writing ecclesiastical permanence into the landscape of seventh-​century Northumbria. The focus of Stephen’s account is on the meaning ascribed to the church building as a unified architectural statement. His account of Wilfrid’s restoration of the church therefore emphasizes repairs to the structural and spatial integrity of the building through the bishop’s attention to the roof, walls, and glazing of the church. Stephen notes in passing, however, that Wilfrid also “adorn[ed] the inside of the house of God and the altar with various kinds of vessels and furniture.”21 The interior architectural features of ecclesiastical buildings were, throughout the early medieval period and beyond, fertile subjects for allegorical interpretation in their own right. Just such an 21 Stephen, Vita sancti Wilfridi 16, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave, The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 34–​35: “Iam enim non solum domum Dei et altare in varia supellectili vasorum intus ornavit.”

10

10 H. M. Bailey, K. Kinsella, and D. Thomas allegorizing impulse is the concern of the chapter by Shannon Godlove, which, though touching upon issues of permanence and Romanitas raised in the previous chapter, focuses specifically upon the representation of interior ecclesiastical architecture in the Anglo-​Latin poetry of Wilfrid’s West Saxon contemporary, Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Aldhelm’s Carmina Ecclesiastica are a set of verse commemorations of churches and altars which largely follow the epigraphical conventions of Roman tituli. The third poem in the series departs, however, from the typically hagiographical focus of such inscriptions to offer an extended ekphrasis on the interior and furnishings of the church which it commemorates. Godlove argues that Aldhelm’s encomium on this church—​ which was built by the Abbess Bugga—​blends Latin and vernacular literary conventions in moving the reader through the building to construct an idealized space orientated on a motif of ascent. Aldhelm employs the physical architecture of the church as a “machine for thinking” about the relationship of the parts to the whole and, simultaneously, the relationship of the earthly church to its counterpart in the heavenly citadel. Aldhelm’s epigraphic poems stage for the reader an imaginative engagement with an architectural structure which would have been unfamiliar to at least some of the texts’ audience. As such, Aldhelm is concerned with an ideal representation of ecclesiastical space. The following chapter by Brendan O’Connell considers instead the representation of a major ecclesiastical monument which draws upon the existing symbolic value which the structure would have carried for a medieval audience. O’Connell examines the textual architectural encounters in the understudied fourteenth-​ century Middle English alliterative poem Saint Erkenwald, which depicts a miracle that occurred during an imagined phrase of rebuilding in the early history of St. Paul’s in London. The eponymous Erkenwald, bishop of London in the late seventh-​century, was a contemporary of Wilfrid, and the rebuilding represented in the poem stands, therefore, as a sort of southern counterpart to the story of Wilfrid’s renovations at York. As O’Connell demonstrates, however, the architectural setting of Saint Erkenwald cannot simply be read as commentary on the church in the abstract; it is about a church and its meaning for its original audience is rooted in that specific architectural reality. Saint Erkenwald relies upon its audience’s easy familiarity with the medieval Gothic cathedral of Old St. Paul’s—​the centre of religious life in London and simultaneously a symbol of endurance and continuity, a site of regeneration, and a canvas for developing architectural styles—​to construct a mutually enriching experience of narrative and architecture. Read in this light, Saint Erkenwald emerges as a sophisticated work of art in which the intrinsic relationship between the textual and the architectural promotes the poet’s subtle theological and ideological agenda. O’Connell’s reading of Saint Erkenwald ends with a consideration of how the poem can be appreciated afresh in the light of a modern “representation” of the sights and sounds of Old St. Paul’s as they existed before the cathedral’s destruction in 1666. The opportunity, afforded by modern technological advances, to experience through approximation the absent space of Old St. Paul’s facilitates an appreciation of the cathedral’s existence through time which (O’Connell argues) captures something of the fourteenth-​century poem’s play with ideas of time and space. A similar notion of reconstructing and

11

Introduction

11

reexperiencing the architecture of the past is central to the following chapter, which moves from the focus on ecclesiastical architecture in the opening of the volume to a consideration of architecture as an expression of secular power. Scott Stull, Michael Twomey, and Michael Rogers take us through the process of creating a cutting-​edge modern representation of medieval architecture in its landscape environment: using LiDAR scanning to build a digital reconstruction of Trim Castle, which was built during the Anglo-​Norman conquest of Ireland. This technology does not simply allow them to create a digital representation of what the castle would have looked like in its medieval prime, but also to reconstruct the viewscape that it would have afforded over the surrounding area. As part of the reconstruction process, they were able to digitally rebuild the castle’s missing tower and to explore the sight-​lines its windows would have provided. The work at Trim demonstrates the value of such state-​of-​the-​art technology for the study of in situ architectural remains. By using this technology, the authors are able to reconstruct the ideology and power relations established and reinforced by the viewscapes of Trim Castle. Their analysis of these viewscapes as an expression of secular authority is supported by a comparative reading of the widespread use of the narrative motif of looking out castle windows in French and English literature of the time. A similar concern with locating medieval architecture within a social landscape informs Anastasia Moskvina’s study of the archaeological evidence for functional grouping and zoning in late sixth-​ to early seventh-​century English settlement sites such as Yeavering and Cowdery’s Down. The ephemeral nature of the evidence for such sites reflects early medieval concerns, apparent in earlier chapters of this volume, with the (im)permanence of architectural structures: we read them as representations in archaeologists’ diagrams, interpretations of the existence through time of structures now known only by the shadowy footprints they have left behind in the ground. Through careful study of this body of evidence, Moskvina identifies an inclination for axial alignment in the design of these sites and demonstrates a hitherto underappreciated tendency for functional zoning in the arrangement of architectural structures. She argues that this development can be read as an expression of evolving social patterns and cultural models: as in the case of Trim Castle, social practices are thus inscribed on the landscape and represented in material form in the structure of the buildings and through the spatial relationships between them. The role of architectural representation in articulating ideology in a period of change links Moskvina’s work to the following chapter, despite the geographical and temporal differences in the subject matter. Philippa Byrne’s contribution focuses on Sicily’s transition from Norman to Staufen rule in the last decade of the twelfth century. There have been prior studies on both the architecture of Norman Sicily and on the Staufen buildings erected some decades later, but Byrne takes us into the very moment of transition between the two regimes through an examination of the representation of architecture in the text and images in the sole extant manuscript of Peter of Eboli’s Liber ad Honorem Augustii. She argues that this unusual Latin poetic text draws on widespread medieval tropes such as the category slippage of architecture and ecology and architecture as cosmos to authorize its depiction of the Palace at Palermo as a

12

12 H. M. Bailey, K. Kinsella, and D. Thomas metonym encompassing the whole Staufen empire. By doing so, Peter appropriates the explanatory power of architectural representation to present Staufen rule of Sicily as crucial to the inevitable unfolding of imperial and providential history. The final chapter of the volume returns to a focus on the representation of ecclesiastical architecture, as it simultaneously signifies the whole span and exists within discrete moments of providential history. Christiania Whitehead’s chapter asks what happens when patristic and scholastic allegorical readings of church architecture in the timeless abstract meet the specific temporal material reality of individual churches as depicted in northern English saints’ vitae, and the abstractly representational becomes enmeshed with the embodied and affective. Though modestly framed, this masterful chapter in fact takes the reader on a journey through the shifting relationships between materiality and allegory that spans a full eight centuries, from the early medieval to the late, with implications for every one of the preceding chapters. It traces subtle developments across the chronological span of the volume, not only in the representational significance of architecture, but in the broader cultural assumptions about the mechanisms of representation itself. Despite their frequent differences in subject matter, time periods, and scholarly approaches, the chapters collected here are connected by attention to persistent themes that recur across the volume as a whole. Meaningful connections between the contributions thus develop not only out of the linear, chapter-​by-​chapter progression of the volume outlined above, but also through the force of constellation working across the volume. One major theme in the collection is the interaction of architecture and power, as inscribed in text, image, and on the landscape. At a most literal level, this theme is addressed in relation to the landscape of power uncovered at Trim by Stull, Twomey, and Rogers, but it is equally evident, for example, in Byrne’s discussion of how Peter of Eboli reimagined the architecture of medieval Sicily in order to promote the providential authority of the Staufen regime. Architecture can also be seen as a medium for the expression of authority in Stephen of Ripon’s emphasis on permanence in his account of the stone-​built church at York. But O’Brien’s discussion of this source also emphasizes a second major theme of the collection: the relationship between architectural construction and repair and notions of identity and ideology. This theme, which is reflected in O’Brien’s analysis of the theological and political work performed by the account of Wilfrid’s restorations, is also a major theme in Moskvina’s discussion of functional zoning and alignment as reflecting realities of social and cultural identity. Whilst both of these discussions relate to realized architectural structures, Bork’s conclusions regarding the aspirational potential of unrealized drawings shows how the connection between architecture and identity extended beyond the literal built environment. Indeed, a further connecting theme within this volume relates to the ways that art and literature can defamilarize and thus modify encounters with familiar buildings. This is evident not only in Byrne’s account of the reimagining of the Sicilian landscape mentioned above, but also in O’Connell’s description of how the Saint Erkenwald-​poet

13

Introduction

13

draws upon the audience’s awareness of Old St. Paul’s in order to instill a new awareness of the civic life of the cathedral through time. In this way, O’Connell’s chapter also plays into the volume’s thematic emphasis on abiding concerns with sacred time. Such concerns, together with a focus on the relation of the earthly to the heavenly, are evident, for example, in the tensions between timeless allegory and temporal realities discussed in Whitehead’s concluding chapter, but also in Godlove’s discussion of the salvific dimension of ecclesiastical architecture as depicted in Aldhelm’s poetic ekphrasis. This introduction began with a reflection upon the multi-​faceted nature of architectural representation as embodied in the curious case of the Shenington man. In keeping with that sculpture’s invitation to stop and reflect on architectural representation’s role in the study of the past, readers of this volume and the chapters herein are encouraged to make their own connections between the chapters, find their own way through the history of architectural representation, and join in the conversation, of which this volume is only the beginning.

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15

Chapter 1

DESIGNING THE REGENSBURG SPIRE AND HARBURG TABERNACLE: THE GEOMETRIES OF TWO GREAT GERMAN GOTHIC DRAWINGS Robert Bork* 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.1 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.2 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

* Robert Bork trained as a physicist before earning his PhD in architectural history from Princeton University in 1996. He has taught art history at the University of Iowa since 1998.

1 On the social and developmental history of such ambitious spire projects, see Robert Bork, Great Spires: Skyscrapers of the New Jerusalem (Cologne: Kölner Architekturstudien, 2003). 2 See Achim Timmermann, Real Presence: Sacrament Houses and the Body of Christ, c. 1270–​1600 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009).

16

16 Robert Bork of their creative virtuosity.3 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.4 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. It shows the front elevation of a church façade dominated by a colossal axial tower that carries a slender openwork spire wreathed by three stacked sets of decorative flying buttresses (Figures 2b, 2d). The drawing thus depicts a façade whose overall format differs radically from the two-​tower format of the actual Regensburg Cathedral facade, whose south tower was already standing by 1380, at least somewhat prior to the execution of the drawing, which has been dated on stylistic grounds to the decades around 1400. Because of this discrepancy of format, the drawing has sometimes been dismissed as an architectural fantasy, or as a design intended for another church, even though it introduces some motifs that would be incorporated into the later portions of the Regensburg Cathedral façade.5 As subsequent discussion will show, geometrical analysis can help to shed light on this issue, by demonstrating that the drawing was rooted more deeply than has usually been assumed in the traditions of the Regensburg Cathedral workshop. 3 François Bucher, “Micro-​Architecture as the ‘Idea’ of Gothic Theory and Style,” Gesta 15, no. 1/​ 2 (1976): 71–​89. 4 The hundreds of Gothic drawings preserved in the Germanic world have recently been catalogued in three massive volumes produced by Hans Josef Böker and his associates, all titled Architektur der Gotik. The first of these volumes, which appeared in 2005, dealt with drawings from Vienna, while the last, from 2013, dealt with the Rhineland. Of greatest relevance for this article is Böker et al., Architektur der Gotik. Ulm und Donauraum: ein Bestandskatalog der mittelalterlichen Archtekturzeichnungen aus Ulm, Schwaben und dem Donaugebiet (Salzburg: Salzmann, 2011). For the much smaller sets of drawings from Spain, Italy, and France see respectively: Begoña Alonso Ruiz and Alfonso Jiménez Martín, La traça de la iglesia de Sevilla (Seville: Cabildo Metropolitano, 2009); Valerio Ascani, Il Trecento Disegnato: Le basi progettuali dell’architettura gotica in Italia (Rome: Viella, 1997); and Étienne Hamon, “Fantômes et revenants: les dessins français d’architecture gothique,” Livraisons de l’histoire de l’architecture 30 (2015): 13–​27. For England, where even less survives in terms of Gothic architectural drawing, there is no comparable publication. 5 The drawing has probably been preserved in Regensburg since its creation in the Middle Ages. The form of its spire was reproduced in a 1655 engraving by Melchior Küssell showing an idealized vision of Regensburg Cathedral completed with two such spires; see Der Dom zu Regensburg: Tafeln, ed. Achim Hubel and Manfred Schuller (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2010), 192. This document demonstrates that the drawing was understood in relation to the cathedral in the seventeenth century. The original drawing was noted in the Regensburg Cathedral treasury in 1828; it was briefly sent to Munich, but returned to Regensburg by 1833. See Markus Huber, Die Westfassade des Regensburger Doms (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2014), 263, 397. The drawing now holds inventory number D 1974/124b in Regensburg’s episcopal archives (Diözesanarchiv). Executed on parchment, it measures 442 × 142cm. See Böker et al., Ulm und Donauraum, 31–​37.

17

Designing the Regensburg Spire and Harburg Tabernacle

17

Figure 2. a. Left, the Harburg tabernacle drawing. Used with permission of Sam Fogg, of the Sam Fogg Gallery in London. b. Centre left, the Regensburg single-​spire drawing. Used with permission of the Bischöfliches Zentralarchiv, Regensburg (BZAR). c. Centre, the bottom half of the Harburg tabernacle drawing. d. Centre right, modern redrawing of the Regensburg single-​ spire drawing, after Heinz-​Rudolf Rosemann,”‘Die zwei Entwürfe im Regensburger Domschatz,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst (1924): 230–​62. e. Right, the top half of the Harburg tabernacle drawing.

18

18 Robert Bork The second drawing under consideration here, measuring 3.18m high, shows an exceptionally elaborate design for a sacramental tabernacle (Figure 2a, 2c, 2e). This remarkable drawing, rather surprisingly, has only recently come to scholarly attention. Discovered in Harburg Castle near Augsburg in 2017, it was sold by the castle’s princely owner, and subsequently acquired by the Sam Fogg Gallery in London.6 The attribution, dating, and intended destination of the drawing are somewhat unclear. An inscription on the drawing gives the name Lorenz Lechler, one of the most important builders active in southwest Germany around 1500, but the inscription appears to date only from the seventeenth century, and it also includes the date 1302, which is clearly incompatible both with Lechler’s lifespan and with the late Gothic style of the drawing. In broad terms, the tabernacle in the drawing resembles an overgrown cousin of the one that Lechler erected for St. Dionys in Esslingen in the 1480s, but its base appears considerably simpler than the Esslingen base, and the drawing also incorporates some details, such as the hanging frieze of arches on its central shrine story, that are more old-​fashioned than the articulation of the Esslingen tabernacle, even though the drawing otherwise presents a more ambitious and more complicated design.7 So, while the drawing may well have been produced by Lechler or by someone in his circle, this attribution cannot be called secure in the absence of further corroborating evidence.8 Geometrical analysis of the Harburg drawing, in conjunction with examination of its formal vocabulary and figural program, may eventually help to clarify both its authorship and its intended destination. More immediately, though, close attention to the proportions of the drawing can reveal both the intended three-​dimensional shape of the depicted tabernacle, which is unusually complex even by the standards of its genre, and the geometrical logic of its design, which nevertheless remains crisp and lucid. To set the stage for these analyses, some mention must be made of the basic principles of Gothic design, in which building elevations were generated by stacking modules already defined in the ground plan of the structure.9 These principles were used with remarkable consistency throughout the whole of the Gothic era, but they were not clearly explicated in writing until the fifteenth-​century builder Matthäus 6 The Harburg drawing now holds accession number 2022.256 in the Cloisters Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When this essay was first drafted, the drawing was in the Sam Fogg Gallery in London, with stock number 19733. The original discoverer of the drawing was Günter Haegele, the head of special collections of Augsburg University Library. Thanks are due to the Sam Fogg Gallery for encouraging the present investigation, and particularly to the gallery’s medieval specialist Jana Gajdošová for sharing this information on the drawing’s condition and provenance. Like the Regensburg drawing, the Harburg drawing was executed on parchment, which testifies to its high level of pretension; most other surviving tabernacle drawings were executed on paper. 7 On Esslingen, see Timmermann, Real Presence, 129–​34.

8 The Harburg drawing closely resembles another drawing of a sacrament house that appeared in a Stuttgart auction in 2011, which Böker et al. provisionally attributed to Burkhard Engelberg, a late Gothic designer active mostly in Augsburg and Ulm. See Ulm und Donauraum, 194–​201.

9 See Robert Bork, The Geometry of Creation: Architectural Drawing and the Dynamics of Gothic Design (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

19

Designing the Regensburg Spire and Harburg Tabernacle

19

Roriczer described this method in a small booklet on pinnacle design.10 Although this topic appears narrow, it demonstrates in microcosm principles of broader application, serving thereby as a Rosetta Stone of sorts for analysis of the Gothic design process, with particularly obvious relevance for the study of axially symmetrical structures such as spires and tabernacles. Roriczer illustrates in step-​by-​step fashion how he would first develop the ground plan of a pinnacle by the inscribing of rotated squares within a framing square, and then extrude his composition into the third dimension by stacking equivalent squares to form first the shaft and then the tapering tip of the pinnacle (Figure 3a). In the ground plans Roriczer shows, the crucial operation is the nesting of squares within each other, a process known as quadrature. In the top left corner of Figure 3a, Roriczer starts with a simple square; immediately below he inscribes a diagonally rotated square within the first; and then a small square within the diagonal one. In the fourth plan, he rotates the diagonal square back straight, creating a nested pattern of three similarly oriented squares. The scale factor between each square is √2, which is the ratio between the diagonal of a square and its side. The middle-​sized square in this fourth plan is thus 1/​√2 =​ 1/​1.414 =​ .707 as large as the original, and the innermost square is 1/​(√2)2 =​½ =​.500 as large as the original. To complement this picture, the larger bottom left graphic in Figure 3b shows this relationship in slightly different terms, expressing the fact that the second square can be inscribed in a circle inscribed within the first square. In modern mathematical parlance, therefore, one would say that the scaling factor of .707 is the cosine of the 45-​degree angle between the equator of the square and the diagonal to its corner. Any regular polygon can be sequentially nested into circles in analogous fashion. As the rightmost graphic in Figure 3b illustrates, for example, the equivalent nesting figure for octagons involves a scaling factor of .924, which is the cosine of the 22.5-​degree angle between the equator of the octagon and its corner. Although Gothic builders would not have expressed these geometrical relationships in such mathematical terms, it is important to keep them in mind when examining Gothic drawings and buildings, since the occurrence of such proportions can provide valuable hints about the logic of the designs in question. Both quadrature and “octature” played important roles in spire and tabernacle design, as did the principle of stacking illustrated in Roriczer’s pinnacle handbook; these similarities make good sense, given that pinnacles and tabernacles were in essence miniature spires. In this context, it becomes evident that interpretation of the Regensburg spire drawing should take into account its geometrical structure. Geometrical analysis can shed light not only on the compositional principles that guided its creation, but also on the thorny question of its possible relationship to the Regensburg Cathedral workshop. As noted previously, the axial tower format shown in the drawing appears wholly 10 See Lon R. Shelby, Gothic Design Techniques: The Fifteenth-​Century Design Booklets of Mathes Roriczer and Hanns Schmuttermayer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977).

20

20 Robert Bork

Figure 3. a. Top, the steps in pinnacle design after Matthäus Roriczer, 1486. Used by permission of Guido Pressler Verlag. b. Bottom, basic geometrical relations in quadrature and “octature.”

21

Designing the Regensburg Spire and Harburg Tabernacle

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incompatible with the twin-​towered format of the actual cathedral façade, whose south tower was already largely complete by the late fourteenth century (Figure 4a). It is significant in this connection that the Regensburg archives also preserve a second large drawing very similar in style to the single-​spire drawing, which shows the north tower and central bay of an elaborate two-​tower façade, but not the southern tower. Scholars unanimously view this drawing as a scheme for the completion of the Regensburg Cathedral façade dating from the final years of the fourteenth century, but interpretation of the closely related single-​spire scheme has proven more controversial.11 Some authors have seen it as a serious proposal for the completion of the Regensburg façade, while others have seen it as an architectural fantasy, or as a proposal for another building project altogether. Most notably, Hans Böker and his collaborators have argued in recent years that the drawing should be understood as an early proposal for the axial tower of Ulm Minster, developed by Heinrich Parler the Younger, who led the Ulm workshop in the late 1380s before leaving for Milan in 1391.12 The attribution to Parler appears plausible on stylistic grounds, particularly if one accepts the idea that this was the same Heinrich mentioned in roughly contemporary documents from Nuremberg as the designer of the Schöner Brunnen in that city, an elaborate spire-​like fountain canopy wrapped by two stories of decorative flying buttresses, which thus has a silhouette comparable to the spire shown in the drawing. Significantly, too, ideas seen in the Regensburg drawing would be implemented in the construction of the Ulm tower; the central window into the upper nave of the Ulm tower, for instance, resembles the side aisle windows in the drawing, in that each is screened by a triplet of gabled lancets supported by slender pinnacled buttresses.13 More broadly, scholars have long recognized that the two great drawings from Regensburg reflect the impact of ideas developed by members of the Parler family, including most famously Peter Parler, who led the Prague Cathedral workshop in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Although attribution of the Regensburg drawings to Heinrich Parler seems well-​ motivated in this context, there are good reasons to suspect that the single-​spire scheme was actually developed with Regensburg rather than Ulm in mind. By roughly 1420, already, the Regensburg workshop had equipped the façade of their cathedral with a strikingly unconventional triangular porch, a reduced and simplified version of the two-​ story porch shown in the drawing (Figure 4b). Within another decade or so they had begun to construct the western wall above the porch, which is pierced by two small and rather squat lancet windows, rather than by a single larger window, as would have been more typical (Figure 4a). Here again, the chosen design solution seems to represent a 11 For a survey of the literature on the two-​tower drawing, see Böker et al., Ulm und Donauraum, 161–​64. For its geometrical structure, see Bork, Geometry of Creation, 307–​13. For its relationship to the façade as built, see Huber, Die Westfassade, 263–​75. 12 Böker et al., Ulm und Donauraum, 31–​37.

13 This detail can be seen through careful scrutiny of Figure 4c.

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22 Robert Bork

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Figure 4. a. Left, overall elevation (bottom) and detail (top) of present Regensburg Cathedral façade, after survey drawings from 1935. b. Middle, triangular porch as seen in single-​spire drawing (top) and as built (bottom). Photograph by Zairon from Wikimedia Commons, https://​ comm​ons.wikime​dia.org/​wiki/​File:Regens​burg​_​Dom​_​St._​Peter​_​Por​tal.JPG. c. Right, alignment of plan and elevation of Ulm Minster (left), after Rudolf Pfleiderer, Das Münster zu Ulm und seine Kunstdenkmale (Stuttgart: Wittwer, 1905). contrasted with misalignment between Ulm Minster plan and single-​spire drawing from Regensburg (right).

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24 Robert Bork reinterpretation of forms seen in the drawing; in this case, the two second-​story windows of the salient porch in the drawing appear to have been compressed into the plane of the present façade. These borrowings demonstrate that the single-​spire drawing was seen as relevant, fairly soon after its creation, for the construction of the Regensburg façade. At Ulm, conversely, the great tower begun in 1392 by Heinrich Parler’s successor Ulrich von Ensingen differs in many important respects from the one shown in the Regensburg drawing. Its triple-​arched entry porch, for example, resembles those of Prague Cathedral or Vienna’s Stephansdom, fitting directly between the main tower buttresses instead of protruding like the one built at Regensburg and foreseen in the drawing. Geometrical analysis, meanwhile, reveals that the proportions of the single-​spire drawing from Regensburg differ markedly from those of Ulm Minster. The most obvious mismatch with Ulm involves the relative widths of the tower and the flanking aisles. At Ulm, the aisles are immense, with spans closely comparable to those of the main nave (Figure 4c). These vast aisles were begun in the tenure of Heinrich Parler the Elder, who led the Ulm workshop from its inception in 1377, and the younger Heinrich certainly must have known them well.14 In the single-​spire drawing from Regensburg, though, the aisle bays are significantly narrower than the tower bay. As Figure 4c shows, therefore, the lateral buttresses of the Ulm Minster aisles would stand far out beyond the lateral buttresses of the façade depicted in the drawing, if the scheme in the drawing was scaled so that its principal tower buttress axes aligned with the wall axes of the nave, like the axes of the tower buttresses actually built by Ulrich von Ensingen. At this scaling, meanwhile, walls built behind the outboard frontal buttresses in the drawing would intrude dramatically into the space of the Ulm aisles, as the figure also shows. At this scale, the height of the tower would be 183m, considerably taller than the 161m height of the actual Ulm tower, which has reigned since its eventual completion in 1890 as the tallest church tower in the world. If the scheme in the drawing were further enlarged to cover the full width of Ulm Minster, its height would rise to 195m, and there would be significant misalignments between the tower structure and the nave walls. Regardless of the scaling, the proportions of the Regensburg drawing simply do not match those of Ulm Minster.

14 Following the discovery of structural distress in the Minster’s fabric in the 1490s, architect Burkhardt Engelberg added rows of slender columns subdividing each of the aisles, but their walls are original, and the original form of their vaults can still be traced in arch profiles on their eastern terminal walls, in the roofed space above the current vaults. See Reinhard Wortmann, “Hallenplan und Basilikabau der Parlerzeit in Ulm,” in 600 Jahre Ulmer Münster: Festschrift, ed. Hans Eugen Specker and Reinhard Wortmann (Ulm: Kohlhammer, 1977), 101–​25. In Figure 4c, the plans are oriented unconventionally, as if seen from beneath, so that the left–​right orientation matches that of the façade seen from the west. Most of the exterior buttress faces at Ulm lie approximately 1 +​1/​ √2 =​1.707 nave spans from the building centreline, but the southern buttress of the west façade is placed slightly further out than the rest, which is why the very rightmost vertical line in Figure 4c (right) misses the redrawn Regensburg scheme by a tiny bit more than its northern pendant does.

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Conversely, the proportions of the Regensburg drawing match those of Regensburg Cathedral with exquisite precision. This might at first seem surprising, given the visionary character of the drawing in general, and its omission of the cathedral’s south tower, in particular. Geometrical analysis reveals, though, that the proportions of the drawing derive directly from those of the cathedral’s thirteenth-​century choir, which was one of the most advanced German buildings of its day when construction began in the 1270s.15 The ground plan of the Regensburg choir thus deserves attention both for its own sake, and for what it can reveal about the genesis of the controversial single-​ spire drawing. Octagons played a crucial role in the plan of Regensburg Cathedral’s east end, as the bottom half of Figure 5 shows. The main choir vessel terminates in an apse whose eastern facets correspond to three sides of a regular octagon, and the same format occurs at smaller scale in the two secondary apses that flank the choir while terminating the side aisles. In describing the geometry of the east end, it will be convenient to refer to the free span between the walls of the choir as one unit.16 A red octagon with face-​ to-​face diameter of one unit can be seen at the bottom of the figure, with its edges tangent to the mullions of the three eastern apse facets; an analogous half-​octagon also appears further up on the page, just above the depicted portion of the ground plan. A circle circumscribed around the bottom octagon reaches to the back wall behind the mullions of the eastern bays. More strikingly, perhaps, red verticals rising from the sides of the octagon coincide with the inner surfaces of the walls separating the choir from the flanking chapels, while orange verticals rising tangent to the circumscribing circle coincide with their outer surfaces. These surfaces thus stand .500 and .541 units out from the building centreline, respectively, as the labels in the middle row of the figure indicate. The whole layout of Regensburg Cathedral’s east end can be established by a short sequence of geometrical steps from this starting point, as the remaining coloured lines in Figure 5 show. The central axes of the lateral chapels, for example, can be found by simply extending yellow diagonals from the endpoints of the upper orange circle’s diameter until they intersect the yellow horizontals drawn through the midpoints of the red octagon inscribed within it. So, while the internal walls of the choir vessel will each lie .500 units from the building centreline, the yellow axes of the lateral chapels will lie .895 units from that centreline. Since the inner faces of the chapels are .541 units out from the centreline, reflection around the yellow chapel axis locates the inner faces of 15 Der Dom zu Regensburg, ed. Hubel and Schuller (Regensburg: Pustet, 1995), 12–​36.

16 This is convenient because the span between the walls is readily measured, and because this span seems to have served as the fundamental dimension from which the geometry of the choir was unfolded, as subsequent discussion will demonstrate. This makes the nomenclature “natural” to the drawing in some important sense. In principle, however, one could describe the drawing using any units, including “intrinsic” dimensions such as its own total height, or “extrinsic” units such as feet or centimetres.

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26 Robert Bork

Figure 5. Comparison showing alignment between ground plan of Regensburg Cathedral and single-​spire drawing from Regensburg, with geometrical overlay.

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the outer walls 1.248 units from the building centreline.17 At Regensburg, the buttresses flanking the chapels are separated from the choir at ground level by narrow passages. The outer surfaces of these passages stand 1.414 units out from the building centreline; as the blue constructions in Figure 5 show, this dimension can be found by extending the diagonal of the original red octagon until it intersects the top of the figure .707 units from the building centreline, and then drawing two blue semicircles, the first concentric with the chapel axis, and the second centred on the chapel wall surface, with their point of tangency 1.082 units out from the centreline. The exterior surfaces of the buttresses can be found 1.519 units from the centrelines by unfolding one of the octagonal facets of the chapel octagon until it intersects the angled ray through that octagon, as the indigo construction shows. The outer surface of the plinth supporting the building, finally, can be found 1.602 units out from the centreline by simply adding one full chapel width outside of the chapel axis, as the violet diagonals indicate. The preceding lines admittedly make for gritty reading, but the power of geometrical analysis should nevertheless be evident in the fact that such a relatively concise recipe can determine all of the main dimensions in the east end of a major cathedral.18 The components of the Regensburg choir just described line up quite precisely with the building elements depicted in the single-​spire drawing, as the top half of Figure 5 shows. When the width between the main buttress axes in the tower is defined as one unit, so that these axes align with the inner wall faces of the choir, the following correspondences are immediately evident (with their respective distances from the building centreline listed in parentheses): the centre axes of the façade portals align with the centre axes of the choir chapels (.895); the axes of the forward-​facing façade buttresses align with the inner wall surfaces of the chapels (1.248); the outermost façade pinnacle axis aligns with the outside edge of the buttress passage (1.414); the outer edge of the façade wall at the level of the aisle windows aligns with the outer edge of the choir buttresses (1.519); and the plinth edge of the façade aligns with the plinth edge of the choir (1.602). The inner and outer edges of the aisle portals in the drawing, finally, can be found .791 and .998 units out from the building centreline, respectively, simply by finding the points where diagonals cut the centre-​to-​corner rays of the green octagons defining the choir chapels. These precise alignments demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the proportions of the single-​spire drawing derive from the geometry of the Regensburg Cathedral choir. By contrast, the proportions of the drawing disagree dramatically with those of Ulm Minster, as noted previously. These facts together strongly suggest that the drawing was prepared as a proposal for construction in Regensburg, no matter whether the drawing was created by Heinrich Parler or by some other up-​to-​date

17 This follows since .895 +​(.895 –​.541) =​.895 +​.353 =​1.248.

18 For a more complete discussion of these steps, including the determination of the east–​west dimensions, see Bork, Geometry of Creation, 313–​17.

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28 Robert Bork designer in his milieu. The close geometrical relationship between the drawing and the thirteenth-​century choir design attests, in any case, to strong continuity of expertise in the Regensburg workshop and its environs. While the horizontal proportions of the single-​spire drawing reflect those of the Regensburg Cathedral choir, its vertical proportions reflect a variety of other octagon-​ based constructions. The tops of the aisle portals and the base of the main porch gables both lie at height .500, an interval equal to the half-​span of the choir. The point at this height on the façade midline can be taken as the centre of an octagon framed by the buttress uprights. When the upper diagonals of this octagon are extended, they converge at height 1.207, locating the base of the traceried parapet on the porch chapel. A larger octagon with the same centre can be framed by the blue uprights 1.414 units out from the building centreline; its upper lateral corners, at height 1.088, locate a prominent horizontal moulding that runs across the primary façade buttresses. An even larger octagon concentric with this can be framed by the black plinth axes 1.602 units from the building centreline; the top of this great octagon falls at height 2.102, aligned with the miniature flying buttress on the main buttress pinnacles, and with the top edge of a major horizontal transom across the front face of the tower. The right margin of the parchment, interestingly, seems to have been trimmed around the great circle circumscribing this octagon. The rays from the octagon centre to its upper corners, meanwhile, intersect the main tower buttress axes at height 1.707; the top edge of the parapet on the last square tower story falls at height 2.707, exactly one unit higher. As Figures 6a–​b show, the overall proportions of the tower and spire are set by a simple process of module stacking. Above the parapet edge at height 2.707, further punctuation points follow at regular intervals: a window sill at height 4.207; gable bases at height 4.707; the next window sill at 5.207; the top of the tower shaft at 6.207; and the geometrical apex of the spire cone at 9.707; and the very tip of the spire at 10.707. Further details could be added to this picture, but these basic relationships already suffice to demonstrate the centrality of the module stacking scheme in this design.19 The essentially uniform width of the parchment in the tower zone further attests to the consistency of this stacking process. The geometry at the tip of the Regensburg spire deserves note, because it shows the enduring relevance of fairly large octagons even at this point where the depicted structure has tapered to become far narrower than the geometrical armature defined by the module stack. An octagon centred at height 9.707 and framed by this armature has its upper lateral corners at height 10.000, right where the parchment begins to taper, and its top edge at height 10.500, where another small parchment piece has been appended to provide space for the spire tip; this tip sits at height 10.707, where the continuations of the upper diagonal octagon facets converge. The width of the uppermost set of flying buttresses equals one quarter the width of the overall tower armature, as the four 19 For the details of the stacking geometry, see Bork, Geometry of Creation, 317–​19.

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Figure 6. Upper-​middle section of Regensburg single-​spire drawing, with geometrical overlay (left). Upper section of Regensburg single-​spire drawing, with geometrical overlay (right).

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30 Robert Bork quadrature steps inward indicate, in yellow. Finally, the steeply sloping green lines describing the sides of the spire cone converge at height 10.000, aligned with the upper lateral corners of the framing octagon. From base to tip, therefore, this drawing has a strikingly coherent geometrical structure, with the proportions of the base designed to align perfectly with those of the Regensburg Cathedral choir. If built with that alignment in mind, the height of the spire would have been 149m, far less than if the drawing were scaled to Ulm Minster, but still large enough to be taller than any stone spire completed in the Middle Ages.20 Although the specific circumstances of the single-​spire drawing’s production remain murky, it is tempting to imagine that it was prepared as an ideal plan for what could be done at Regensburg Cathedral if cost were no object, and if the already extant stories of the south façade tower could be neglected or swept aside.21 Because of the obvious difficulties involved in such a wasteful scheme, the alternative two-​tower drawing was likely created simultaneously or soon thereafter as a more cost-​effective alternative, one that would still give the cathedral an impressive façade. The two-​tower option, not surprisingly, was chosen to guide the main lines of the project, but ideas from both drawings continued to be used throughout the construction of the façade. As noted previously, for example, both the triangular porch and the double window over the porch reflect the influence of the single-​spire drawing. In the later fifteenth century, Regensburg figured prominently in two events that have helped to bring the nature of Gothic architectural culture into sharper focus for later generations. In 1459 Regensburg hosted a meeting at which nineteen of the leading masons from the Holy Roman Empire gathered in an effort to standardize guild practices across this vast territory.22 The leader of the Regensburg workshop at that point was Konrad Roriczer, whose son Matthäus would go on to publish his previously mentioned booklet on pinnacle design in 1486. The pinnacles he illustrated exemplify in elementary fashion the basic principles of ground plan generation and extrusion into the third dimension via stacking that Gothic designers had applied already for centuries. In the decades around 1500, the design principles that Roriczer had explicated for pinnacles were applied with unprecedented virtuosity in the design of sacramental tabernacles, as consideration of the Harburg drawing will demonstrate. Several other ambitious tabernacle projects seem particularly relevant for interpretation of the drawing. That of Ulm Minster, the largest of them all, was completed already by the 20 Since the span between the Regensburg choir walls is 13.9m, a stack of 10.707 units of that size reaches a height of 149.0m. The tallest stone spires of the Middle Ages, by comparison, are those of Strasbourg (142m) and Vienna (137m).

21 Conceivably, e.g., the spire and its axial tower could be built to the west of the present façade, obviating the need to demolish the whole south tower, although joining the structures would be tricky, at best. 22 Anne-​Christine Brehm, “Organisation und Netzwerk spätmittelalterlicher Bauhütten: Die Regensburger Ordnungen und ihr Initiatoren,” Ulm und Oberschwaben 58 (2013): 71–​101.

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middle of the 1470s, with extremely elaborate but fairly straightforward articulation, in which the statues stand isolated within their individual niches, which are composed of recognizable architectural elements.23 Lechler’s Esslingen tabernacle, completed in 1489, was only half as tall, and its statues, which were destroyed in the Reformation, would still have occupied individual niches, but many of the pinnacles in the framing architecture bend and sway, some of the elements are carved in the form of naturalistic branchwork instead of conventional architecture, and some of the buttress elements are linked through looped flying buttresses that look almost like fans of coral.24 The Harburg drawing incorporates all of these elements, of which the latter is particularly unusual, buttressing the case for its attribution to Lechler or his circle. The Harburg drawing also incorporates an elaborate figure program which, however, appears to have been added by a second artist, since the figures overlap the lines of the architecture, and since they are drawn in a browner ink.25 Most strikingly, the superstructure of the depicted tabernacle frames a broad and scenographically coherent depiction of the Last Supper, even though the separate statue bases at this level suggest that the draftsman responsible for the architecture had originally imagined a more conventional series of standing figures. The placement of the Last Supper high in the superstructure is particularly unusual. In other tabernacles that include the Last Supper, this narrative scene typically appears in a relief immediately above the corpus, but below the superstructure, as in famous sacrament house of the Lorenzkirche in Nuremberg, carved by Adam Kraft and his assistants between 1493 and 1496.26 Another such Last Supper scene was carved for the sacrament house of Cologne Cathedral commissioned in 1508. This great tabernacle was unfortunately destroyed in 1768, before the details of its appearance were recorded, but the relief still survives in Cologne’s Schnütgen Museum, along with several other fragments including a matching relief depicting Christ at the Mount Olives, which presumably would have been mounted on an adjacent facet of the tabernacle.27 The broad kinship between the Last Suppers depicted in the Harburg 23 Timmermann, Real Presence, 80–​89.

24 Timmermann, Real Presence, 129–​34.

25 In this respect the Harburg drawing differs from the otherwise very similar Stuttgart drawing discussed in Böker et al., Ulm und Donauraum, 194–​201, where the figures appear to have been drawn before the architecture was inked, based on the way lines terminate at their borders. 26 Timmermann, Real Presence, 144–​52.

27 See Timmerman, Real Presence, 11–​12, and Anton Legner, “Das Sakramentshäuschen im Kölner Domchor,” in Verschwundenes Inventarium: Der Skulpturenfund im Kölner Domchor, ed. Ulrike Bergmann (Cologne: Schnütgen Museum, 1984), 61–​78. The Cologne Last Supper relief measures 71cm high, with Christ’s head measuring approximately 6cm high. If the Harburg Last Supper was meant to have the same scale, then the depicted tabernacle would be 22m high, somewhat taller than the Cologne tabernacle as built (Legner, “Das Sakramentshäuschen,” n. 28, suggests that the latter structure would have had a maximum height of 18.2m, so as to fit under the arcade arches of the choir, while Timmermann, Real Presence, 11, credits it with a height of at least 20m). Even this impressive height estimate for the Harburg tabernacle may be conservative, since it would

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32 Robert Bork drawing and in the Cologne fragment deserves note, because it raises the possibility that the drawing might depict a preliminary proposal for the Cologne sacrament house, one of the few tabernacle projects of the era ambitious enough to require the stunning level of formal and structural elaboration seen in the drawing.28 Although this scenario must remain hypothetical, the formal logic of the drawing can be reliably recovered through geometrical analysis. The Harburg tabernacle, like the examples mentioned above, had a plan with fourfold symmetry, and constructions based on quadrature helped to govern its elevation, as well.29 Figure 7a shows the basic geometrical armature governing the lower half of the drawing, Figure 7b shows the corresponding part of the drawing, and Figure 7c shows the plans of the depicted tabernacle’s successive stories. Figure 8a shows further details of the tabernacle’s lower half at left, followed by the armature of the upper half in Figure 8b, the upper half of the drawing itself in Figure 8c, and the plans of its upper stories in Figure 8d. The very lowest part of the drawing shows the foot of the tabernacle from a slightly elevated point of view, so that its forward corner descends more deeply on the parchment than its lateral faces. Further up, where the structure achieves its full width, the triangular spurs supporting its outer buttresses are depicted as if from below, suggesting that even the base of this story lies above eye level.30 Such pseudo-​ perspectival depth cues are relatively rare in Gothic drawings; they have no place in the Regensburg drawing, for example. Nevertheless, they had been used occasionally since the thirteenth century, and they do not attest to the use of true linear perspective

imply that some of the smallest figures on the edges of its corpus would be around 8cm high, which is much smaller than one typically sees in comparable tabernacle sculptures. It seems clear, in any case, that the Harburg tabernacle was meant to be among the largest and most impressive of its type.

28 The kinship between these depictions of the Last Supper is admittedly imprecise. The Cologne relief is taller than it is wide, for example, while the scene in the Harburg drawing is shorter than it is wide. More fundamentally, the Cologne scene appears in relief, while the draftsman responsible for the Harburg figures rendered them as if they were dining within the open spatial framework defined by the tabernacle’s buttress uprights. Even if one imagines that the Harburg drawing was produced as a preliminary proposal for Cologne, therefore, it would have differed in significant respects from the executed version. 29 The Cologne tabernacle had a square plan, according seventeenth-​century observations by Hermann Crombach, cited in Legner, “Das Sakramentshäuschen,” 63. The Stuttgart drawing, contrary to the comments in Böker et al., Ulm und Donauraum, 194, also appears to have been planned with fourfold symmetry. Other plans were sometimes seen, e.g., octagonal and hexagonal, but even in such cases the elevation geometry tends to involve the stacking of squares. For example, see the analysis of the tabernacle drawing with inventory number 16.838 in the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, as discussed in Bork, Geometry of Creation, 365–​70 and figs. 5.6–​5.7.

30 The equivalent spurs in the Stuttgart drawing, by contrast, are rendered as if seen from above, perhaps suggesting a smaller scale for that proposed tabernacle.

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Figure 7. a. Harburg tabernacle, lower section (geometrical armature). b. Harburg tabernacle, lower section (drawing). c. Harburg tabernacle, lower section (plan).

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34 Robert Bork

Figure 8. a. Harburg tabernacle, lower section (detail with geometrical overlay). b. Harburg tabernacle, upper section (geometrical overlay). c. Harburg tabernacle, upper section (drawing). d. Harburg tabernacle, upper section (plans).

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as developed in Renaissance Italy.31 Instead, the Gothic draftsmen applied these cues rather superficially to a geometrical framework that remained strictly orthogonal. In the Harburg drawing, the now-​truncated foot of the tabernacle fits into a square box between the heights labelled 0 and 1, while the stem of the tabernacle fits into a second square between heights 1 and 2. Leaving aside for the moment the details of these stories, which will be discussed further in the context of Figure 8a, one sees in Figures 7a–​c that the next zone of the tabernacle corresponds to yet another such box filling the space between heights 2 and 3, and that a circle circumscribed around this box gives the width of the main corpus, or host shrine, which rises above level 3. Within this frame of width √2, the front face of the corpus, which would have been closed with a grill, has a width of exactly one unit. In a typical sacrament house, access to this grill would have been unimpeded, but in the Harburg tabernacle, a trio of slender buttresses stands on the triangular spur in front of each face; the central buttress of each group appears with green shading in Figure 7b. These buttresses were evidently meant to help in supporting the elaborate wreath of branching gables and pinnacles that crowns the corpus starting around height 6. The perceived need for such supports suggests that the designer was planning an unusually large and elaborate tabernacle.32 The outer corners of these buttresses align with the large circle centred at height 3.707, which has diameter 2, and which is circumscribed around the square filling the space between heights 3 and 4.414. As one moves up from ground level, therefore, the geometrical armature of the tabernacle expands through a series of two quadrature steps, from a base of width 1, to a corpus of width √2, to a buttress framework of width 2.33 The next sections of the tabernacle fit neatly into a stack of three large squares, each two units on a side, which thus rise from height 4.707 to 10.707. More specifically, the square-​planned corpus and its flanking buttress triplets rise smoothly to height 5.207, one quarter of the way up the first square, where the main arch on the front face springs, and where swaying arches begin to cantilever out from the buttresses to prepare the way for the wreath.34 The main wreath itself springs from the middle of the square, at 31 In the thirteenth century, Villard de Honnecourt had used such pseudo-​perspectival depth cues in his exterior view of the tower of Laon Cathedral, in a drawing which nevertheless has a rigid and non-​perspectival frame. See Bork, Geometry of Creation, 37–​40.

32 Not even the giant sacrament house of Ulm includes such intermediate buttresses. The Stuttgart drawing discussed in Böker et al., Ulm und Donauraum, 194–​201, presents one of the only other tabernacle designs to share this feature with the Harburg drawing, but in much simpler form, with just a single buttress on each face of the square-​planned corpus, instead of a triplet of buttresses. In general terms, in fact, the Harburg design registers as an amplified and beefier version of the svelte Stuttgart scheme, with both likely drawn by the same hand.

33 The blue lines of shallow slope descending from level 4.707 intersect the blue diagonals of this first square in points that locate the blue verticals framing the corpus of the tabernacle; these blue verticals will be 2/​3 of a unit from the centreline, placement whose consequences Figures 8a–​d will note. 34 The springline of the main corpus arch certainly lies at height 5.207, but there is a slight discrepancy between the height of the lateral lancets within this frame; the head of the right lancet

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36 Robert Bork 5.707, and it is fully developed by height 6.207, three-​quarters of the way up the square. Its plan is complicated and unusual, even as seen in the simplified graphics in Figure 7c, in which the outlines of the swaying gables are rendered as straight lines. From each side of the corpus, two cantilevered sets of arches protrude, so that the overall plan of this level reads as an irregular star octagon, with narrower facets on the cardinal faces and broader ones on the diagonals. These arch sets spring from the green-​shaded buttresses in the middle of each corpus face, and from the corners of the corpus, which are articulated as pairs of pinnacles, shown as pairs of white dots in the schematic plan. Each of the green buttress uprights also carries a large pinnacled statue canopy, which appears with yellow shading in both the plan and elevation; these rise nearly to height 9, flanking the next story of the tabernacle. Above the elaborate wreath of arches, in the large square between heights 6.707 and 8.707, the structure becomes lighter and more open, and its plan becomes simpler. The outer cage of the structure was to be formed from a set of eight slender buttress uprights, shaded in orange in Figure 7b. The spacing between them suggests that they were meant to be evenly spaced at the corners of a regular octagon, subtly offset from the irregular octagon of the wreath below. Nearly hidden behind these outer uprights, but crucial for the support of the structure, are the inner uprights shaded in black in the figure, which were evidently meant to comprise a square array rising from the corners of the corpus. Framed by these uprights are large multi-​tiered statue bases, one on each cardinal face of the tabernacle. The one at left shows Christ at the Mount of Olives, and the one on the right shows the kiss of Judas; the one in the middle, which evidently would show the crowning with thorns, appears occluded by the yellow-​shaded statue niche in the foreground. At the top of the large open space above the figures, branchwork flying buttresses knit together into a crown whose schematic plan would be a regular star octagon, as shown at right, although the branchwork profiles would obviously complicate this outline somewhat. The next square, between heights 8.707 and 10.707, now frames the Last Supper scene; as noted previously, however, the arrangement of bases in this zone strongly suggests that the draftsman responsible for the architectural part of the drawing originally foresaw a more conventional group of twelve standing figures, with three on each cardinal face of the tabernacle. The buttress uprights framing this level, which are shaded red, are very slightly offset from those below, so that the spacing between them becomes larger on the cardinal faces than on the diagonals. This exceptionally subtle geometrical differentiation, which may have been designed to facilitate visual access to the sculpture groups, corresponds to an explicit formal differentiation between the flying buttresses crowning this level: those on the cardinal faces carry complex friezes of interlaced branchwork, while the slightly smaller ones on the diagonal sides carry more conventional hanging friezes of cusped arches. The plan of this buttress crown, as springs lower than the left lancet, as visible compass prick points in the drawing clearly show. The offset between the two levels closely approximates the half-​width of the buttress in front of the corpus, but this correlation may not have been intentional.

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Designing the Regensburg Spire and Harburg Tabernacle

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shown at right, is thus an irregular star octagon, but one with the pattern of major and minor facets rotated compared to that seen in the main wreath of branchwork crowning the corpus below. In elevation, meanwhile, these upper buttresses reach height 11.414, a level found by striking diagonals inward from the points on level 10.707 that align with the midpoints of the large octagon framing the Last Supper. This use of these verticals internal to the square heralds the narrowing of the geometrical armature in the upper parts of the tabernacle, which is also signalled by the tapering of the parchment in this zone; indeed, the parchment has been trimmed to pass precisely through the upper left of the armature at height 11.414. Before going on to explore the relatively simple composition of the Harburg drawing’s upper half, it is appropriate to consider in greater detail the geometry of the lower half, as illustrated in Figure 8a.35 The foot of the tabernacle is fairly complex, although it rather surprisingly seems less richly articulated than the foot of Lechler’s tabernacle from Esslingen.36 Each of the four main supports rising from the Harburg foot appears to have been inscribed by quadrature within the larger quadrature of this zone, as the small white circles resting on level 2 indicate. From the equator of the foot, which lies halfway between levels 0 and 1, blue verticals descend from the midlines of the outer supports, until they intersect the red diagonals of the square filling this zone. A blue semicircle drawn through these intersection points sets the total width of the foot. Another blue quadrature scheme inscribed within this one sets the size of the small blue-​shaded squares that frame the white octagons on the foot’s diagonal faces. The sides of the somewhat larger star octagons on the foot’s corners are set back from the foot’s framing square by a distance equal to the radius of the tiny white circles between the small octagons and their framing squares. The centres of the large circular drums protruding from the foot’s sides lie an equivalent distance further into the composition.37 All of this can be inferred directly from the widths of the elements depicted in the pseudo-​perspectival rendering of the foot, even though the quality of draftsmanship seems notably less precise here than in the rest of the drawing.38 35 It is appropriate, but not strictly necessary: the reader can follow subsequent discussion of the superstructure without assimilating the intervening three paragraphs, since the superstructure geometry emerges from the main framework of the lower section rather than from its details. 36 Most notably, perhaps, the Harburg foot appears solid and conservative because it lacks the carved arches that visually dematerialize the facets of the Esslingen foot.

37 Since these drums protrude from the generating square, the diagonal faces of the foot have to be slightly creased to make way for them, as the draftsman indicated with emphatic shading at this crease line. This, however, is one of the few elements of the foot whose width was not drawn correctly, perhaps because the tangent to the circle cannot easily be constructed without drawing it explicitly. At the worksite, however, the tangent could easily be found just by placing a straightedge against the carved drum or its scribed outline. The local imprecision of the crease line in the drawing may thus offer an interesting commentary on the tensions between architectural representation and carving. 38 In this respect, among many others, the Harburg drawing resembles the Stuttgart drawing, whose foot is illustrated in Böker et al., Ulm und Donauraum, 195. In the Stuttgart drawing, the

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38 Robert Bork At the level of the corpus, the geometry depends strongly on the placement of the blue verticals along its edges, which align with the axes of the sculpted groups pendant from its corners. As the blue constructions in Figure 7a show, these verticals are two-​thirds of the way out the large red circle framing this part of the composition. In Figure 8a, the plans of the sculpture groups at the corpus corners are indicated by squares outlined in white, whose inner faces are halfway between the blue verticals and the red verticals framing the corpus grill. When a large white octagon is drawn so that its diagonal faces pass through the centres of these white squares, its vertical faces will locate the geometrically crucial white verticals of the buttress axes flanking the corpus. An even larger octagon, offset from the first by the diagonal span of the square, locates the verticals that pass through the outermost pinnacles of the main corpus wreath. A white circle circumscribed around this octagon traces the edge of the parchment, at right, and verticals rising from the equator of this circle frame the edges of the parchment up to height 6.707. As seen at level 5.707, meanwhile, the vertical tangents to the large octagon frame not only the pinnacles of the main wreath, but also the circles within which the hexagonal plans of the statue niches can be constructed. In the first open level above the corpus, the composition depends on the construction of a circle framed by the white verticals rising from the interior corners of the buttresses flanking the shrine. The slender buttress uprights are tangent to this circle, and their outermost pinnacles are co-​axial with these white verticals. In the next story, at the level of the Last Supper, the outer pinnacles lie on a circle framed by these verticals.39 As noted previously, however, they do not form a regular octagonal array. Instead, their placement involves the construction of a set of concentric circles centred at level 9.707. The innermost of these has a diameter of one unit, so that it would fit precisely within the grill of the corpus. The outermost complete circle is larger by a factor of 1.307, which is just a quadrature factor of 1.414 diminished by an octature factor of .924, as the white constructions near level 9.122 indicate. The circle halfway between these two circles defines the outer edge of the four inner buttress uprights at this level, which are shown with triangular cross-​sections in the plan graphic. The slender outer buttresses align with the midpoints of these inner uprights, while the flying buttresses they carry on the cardinal faces of the tabernacle converge to points on the outermost complete circle.40 After consideration of these subtleties, it comes as something of a relief to consider the dramatically simpler geometry of the tabernacle superstructure. As Figures 8b–​c show, the armature of this section comprises a fairly straightforward stack of boxes of foot was drawn in a rather clumsy and even incoherent manner, in sharp contrast to the great refinement of the tabernacle superstructure. In both drawings, one gets the impression that a master has drawn the superstructure, while leaving the rendering of the foot to less talented apprentices. This would be rather surprising, since tabernacle feet could be striking showpieces, as Lechler’s work at Esslingen shows, but that is how the drawings appear. 39 Interestingly, too, this circle intersects the rays of the octagon at points lying on a seam between two of the parchments in the drawing, as the white horizontal just below level 10.707 indicates. 40 The alignment is perfect at level 11.414 on the left, but the parchment is stretched on the right.

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Designing the Regensburg Spire and Harburg Tabernacle

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diminishing size, all based on basic parameters already established in the lower half of the drawing. The large boxes framing the previously described tabernacle stories, for example, frame an octature figure based at level 11.414, which sets the width of the rotated square filling the space between that level and height 13.262, where two statue bases stand. The blue verticals framing the circle at that level are smaller than the large boxes below by a single quadrature factor. The intersections of this blue circle with its red diagonals locate the points through which rise the vertical axes of the satellite pinnacles, which are thus one unit apart from each other. Each of these pinnacles has its own quadrature-​based plan, echoing in microcosm the overall plan of the tabernacle in this zone.41 At level 13.970 these four pinnacles comprise the full structure, but intermediate uprights halfway between them emerge just above, which are shaded in orange in Figure 8c, alongside four yellow-​shaded supports closer to the tabernacle’s central axis. Between heights 13.970 and 16.970, the geometry corresponds to a set of three red boxes, each equal in size to those framing the tabernacle foot at the bottom of the drawing. After another crown of gables knits the structure together around level 16.470, the armature diminishes in size by another quadrature factor, as shown in the blue axes that rise to height 19.695.42 Further quadrature reductions introduce the red lines above this level and the even more narrowly spaced blue ones further up, as the plan of the tabernacle shifts successively from square to rotated square and back again. The top of the final statue niche falls at height 22.704, but unresolved lines at that level suggest that a final piece of parchment containing the tabernacle’s terminal finial became detached at some point in its history, and that the full scheme would thus have been even taller than it now appears.43 Geometrical analysis of the Harburg drawing thus reinforces several crucial lessons already seen in the case of the Regensburg drawing. First, it again shows that the basic design principles of stacking and quadrature described by Roriczer could apply to structures of considerably greater scale and sophistication than pinnacles. Second, however, it shows even more clearly the degrees of freedom and creativity that Gothic designers enjoyed in applying such principles, and the closely related idea of octature, which has received far less attention in the scholarly literature on Gothic geometry. The Harburg tabernacle design displays particular virtuosity in the way that its plan transforms from one kind of irregular star octagon in the main wreath to another in the superstructure, perhaps in order to help frame lines of sight to its sculpture groups. While the geometrical analysis presented here does not yet suffice to connect the Harburg drawing to a specific church in the same way that the Regensburg drawing 41 The outer faces of the satellite pinnacles are .604 units from the centreline; this is two octature steps and one quadrature step down from the size of the corpus (.924 × .924 × .707 =​ .604). The axes of the pinnacles are .500 units from the centreline. 42 The parchment is trimmed to the width of the blue uprights at the top of the box centred at height 18.737.

43 This bears on the question of the drawing’s intended function, since if it was very tall, it could only have been designed for a very large building.

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40 Robert Bork can now be firmly connected to Regensburg Cathedral, this close examination of the tabernacle’s geometrical and formal logic should nevertheless provide evidence useful for further efforts in that direction. More broadly, consideration of the Regensburg and Harburg drawings underscores both the central importance of spires and spire-​ like tabernacles in Late Gothic architectural culture, especially in the German world, and the crucial role of drawings in conveying the aspirations of medieval designers and their patrons. The Regensburg spire design was never realized, and the Harburg tabernacle scheme likely was not either, unless it was used in planning a destroyed sacrament house like that of Cologne Cathedral.44 These impressively scaled and superbly crafted drawings nevertheless deserve attention alongside completed monuments, so as to provide a fuller picture of what medieval builders and their patrons hoped to achieve. Since they were hand-​made by the designers themselves, moreover, such drawings rank among the most intimate surviving traces of their creative process. The Regensburg and Harburg drawings thus serve as spectacular reminders that the history of Gothic architecture deserves to be understood in light of the history of architectural representation.

44 If the drawing was offered as a proposal for a prestigious commission, but then rejected in favour of another option, this could explain both its lavish execution, and its subsequent obscurity. While an accepted drawing might be preserved in the workshop for which it was intended, a rejected drawing might more readily revert to its author, later to become lost in the dispersal of his family’s possessions.

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Chapter 2

WILFRID’S RESTORATION OF THE CHURCH AT YORK AND THE PERMANENCE OF SACRED BUILDINGS IN POST-​CONVERSION NORTHUMBRIA Conor O’Brien* 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.1 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/​ * Conor O’Brien is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of The Queen’s College. He works on early medieval religious and intellectual history, with a particular focus on the Insular World.

1 In England and Wales, chancel repair liability may apply to property which previously formed part of the rectorial lands of a medieval church. It confers upon the landowners (as “lay rectors”) the liability for the upkeep of the church chancel formerly pertaining to the rector of the parish.

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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.2 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.3 In ­chapter 16, the saint, having been established as bishop of York, found that the “stone buildings” of the church there, which had been founded during the reign of Edwin, the first Christian king of Northumbria, had fallen into “a ruinous condition.” The roof was leaking, the windows unglazed, and the church building home to the nests of birds who had made a complete mess of it. Stephen declared in portentous tones: “When our holy bishop saw all this his spirit was vexed within him, as Daniel’s was, because he saw that the house of God and the house of prayer had become like a den of thieves; so, forthwith, in accordance with the will of God, he made a plan to restore it.”4 Wilfrid set about reroofing the building in lead, putting glass in the windows, washing the walls “and, in the words of the prophet, ma[king] them ‘whiter than snow’.”5 Spring-​cleaning has rarely been described in such dramatic terms and with such weighty scriptural allusions: not only the explicit references to Daniel and the Psalms but also the very obvious comparison of Wilfrid’s work with Christ’s cleansing of the temple. Some readers have not approved of such grandiose biblical references being used to describe washing bird excrement off a church’s wall. Beryl Smalley described Stephen’s use of the Bible here as “naively pretentious.”6 In this chapter I want to defend Stephen against this charge and to suggest that his use of the Bible in ­chapter 16 may have been rather considered and purposeful when situated within the context of post-​conversion Northumbria, and, indeed, that it may reflect a similar level of consideration on the part of Wilfrid himself, when the saint made the York basilica fit for worship again. By restoring the church at York in the 670s, 2 For overviews of Wilfrid’s career: Catherine Cubitt, “The Chronology of Stephen’s Life of Wilfrid,” in Wilfrid: Abbot, Bishop, Saint; Papers from the 1300th Anniversary Conferences, ed. N. J. Higham (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2013), 334–​47; D. H. Farmer, “Saint Wilfrid,” in Saint Wilfrid at Hexham, ed. D. P. Kirby (Newcastle: Oriel, 1974), 35–​59. 3 For the dates: Clare Stancliffe, “Dating Wilfrid’s Death and Stephen’s Life,” in Wilfrid, ed. Higham, 17–​26. 4 Stephen, Vita sancti Wilfridi [hereafter: VW] 16, The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 32–​34: “beatae memoriae Wilfritho episcopo metropolitano Eboracae civitatis constituto, basilicae oratorii Dei, in ea civitate a sancto Paulino episcopo in diebus olim Eadwini christianissimi regis primo fundatae et dedicatae Deo, official semiruta lapidea eminebant. … Videns itaque haec omnia sanctus pontifex noster, secundum Danielem horruit spiritus eius in eo, quod domus Dei et orationis quasi speluncam latronum factam agnovit, et mox iuxta voluntatem Dei emendare excogitavit.” 5 Stephen, VW 16, 34: “Parietes quoque lavans, secundum prophetam super nivem dealbavit.” See Ps. 50:18–​21 (Vulgate).

6 Beryl Smalley, “L’exégèse biblique dans la littérature latine,” Settimane di Centro italiano di Studi sull’alto medioevo di Spoleto 10 (1963): 631–​55 at 644.

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Wilfrid made a point about the permanent sanctity of the consecrated building, putting forward a view of religious architecture which was probably unknown in pre-​Christian Northumbrian culture; by highlighting in turn that permanence of sacred architecture in the 710s, Stephen emphasized the special status of ecclesiastical property against a background of the political tensions and social changes which had been unleashed by conversion to Christianity.7 Mark Laynesmith has already begun the process of defending Stephen’s highfalutin biblical rhetoric in describing Wilfrid’s work at York, which he suggested should be read with reference to Christian figural exegesis.8 In this light the restoration of the building represented Wilfrid’s reform of the Northumbrian church: this church had been correctly established by the Roman missionary Paulinus during Edwin’s reign, but its orthodox purity had been sullied in subsequent years when it had been ruled by heterodox clerics from the Columban monastery of Iona, whose incorrect method of dating Easter Wilfrid had rebutted at the Synod of Whitby. For Stephen, the state into which the church at York had fallen functioned as a condemnation of thirty years of Columban dominance in Northumbria—​building on the reality that the Ionan bishops of Northumbria had ruled from Lindisfarne, not York, whose cathedral they seem to have abandoned. The story represents Wilfrid as a much-​needed new broom, restoring the institutional, as much as the material, church. The biblical echoes of Christ’s cleansing of the temple have a clear relevance to this message, as does the mention at the end of the chapter of Samuel, to whom, as the holy priest who replaced the old, corrupt priesthood of Eli, Stephen frequently compared Wilfrid.9 But other aspects of Stephen’s use of the Bible direct our attention to the physical building, not just the institutional church it represents. Stephen’s claim that Wilfrid’s efforts left the walls “whiter than snow” is a reference to David’s penitential psalm where he asked God to forgive him his sin in winning Bathsheba—​only then would the sacrifices of the altar of holocausts be pure and acceptable to the Lord.10 Stephen chose to highlight that Wilfrid purified a cultic site, a place of sacrifice; indeed, throughout the life Stephen compared Wilfrid’s churches to the Jewish temple and I have shown elsewhere that in doing so he displayed what seems to have been a common understanding of the church building in early eighth-​century 7 Wilfrid took up office as bishop in York in 669 and presumably began work on restoring the church there shortly thereafter: Cubitt, “Chronology of Stephen’s Life,” 343. For the evidence of Stephen writing ca. 712–​ca. 714: Stancliffe, “Dating Wilfrid’s Death and Stephen’s Life,” 22–​25.

8 Mark D. Laynesmith, “Stephen of Ripon and the Bible: Allegorical and Typological Interpretations of the Life of St Wilfrid,” Early Medieval Europe 9, no. 2 (2000): 163–​82 at 173–​74. See also Sandra Duncan, “Prophets Shining in Dark Places: Biblical Themes and Theological Motifs in the Vita Sancti Wilfridi,” in Wilfrid, ed. Higham, 80–​92 at 82–​85.

9 Laynesmith, “Stephen of Ripon,” 169–​70; Mark D. Laynesmith, “Anti-​Jewish Rhetoric in the Life of Wilfrid,” in Wilfrid, ed. Higham, 67–​79 at 76. Stephen, VW 16, 34: “Tunc sententia Dei de Samuhele et omnibus sanctis in eo implebatur: Qui, inquit, me honorificat, honorificabo eum; erat enim Deo et omni populo carus et honorabilis.” 10 Ps. 50:18–​21 (Vulgate).

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Northumbria as a temple-​like place of eucharistic sacrifice.11 Stephen also explicitly mentioned Daniel’s reaction to his vision of the four beasts, symbolizing four kingdoms which pass away to be replaced by a permanent kingdom whose eternal status the scriptural text stresses.12 This situates the issue of permanence and impermanence at the heart of the chapter, which after all is about Wilfrid implicitly rebuking those who had effectively abandoned the church at York. The Northumbrian heartland shifted northwards after Edwin’s death, apparently leaving the royal settlement at York and its associated religious buildings to become dilapidated.13 Wilfrid’s decision to establish himself as bishop at York, abandoning Lindisfarne in the north from where Ionan appointees had ruled the Northumbrian church, was in part simply political, possibly even a claim to metropolitan status.14 But it also made the point that the abandoned structure of the York basilica remained a “house of prayer,” deserving to be maintained in an honorable ritual purity. That might seem rather a banal point to us, which probably explains Smalley’s accusations of pretension, but may not have been quite so unexceptional in a world where most buildings were assumed to be transitory.15

The Conversion of Sacred Structures

Recent archaeological work has shown that the wooden structures which formed such a large part of the built environment of early medieval England had a culturally recognized life-​cycle in which the building’s “death” seems to have been the most important part. Timber buildings might be deliberately abandoned or knocked down, being provided with “grave goods”-​like deposits at the time, or possibly even cremated, in a process which seems to have had cultural significance.16 Anglo-​Saxons recognized the limited 11 Conor O’Brien, “The Cleansing of the Temple in Early Medieval Northumbria,” Anglo-​Saxon England 44 (2015): 201–​20. Note the importance of the congregation taking communion as part of the dedication of the church at Ripon, something which I should have referenced in my previous article: Stephen, VW 17, 36: “altare quoque cum bassibus suis Domino dedicantes pupuraque auro texta induentes populique communicantes, omnia canonice compleverunt.” 12 Dan. 7:15.

13 Bede states that Edwin’s royal vill at Yeavering was abandoned after his death: Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum [hereafter: HE] 2.14, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). 14 Alan Thacker, “Wilfrid, his Cult and his Biographer,” in Wilfrid, ed. Higham, 1–​16 at 6.

15 O’Brien, “Cleansing of the Temple,” 214. Ideas about the special, sacred, status of church buildings only emerged over time in the early Middle Ages; for a recent overview of the process: Miriam Czock, Gottes Haus: Untersuchungen zur Kirche als heiligem Raum von der Spätantike bis ins Frühmittelalter (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012).

16 Clifford Sofield, “Shaping Buildings and Identities in Fifth-​ to Ninth-​Century England,” Leeds Studies in English 48 (2017): 105–​23; John Blair, “The Archaeology of Religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-​Saxon Archaeology, ed. David A. Hinton, Sally Crawford, and Helena Hamerow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 727–​40 at 729; John Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 84–​86.

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life-​span of a piece of architecture, as the Beowulf-​poet did, foreseeing Heorot’s fiery demise even at the very moment of the great hall’s building.17 Obviously, artistic choices influenced the poet’s fatalism, but it probably also arose from the experience of his audience, who lived amongst wooden buildings just as mortal as humans themselves. Building in timber does not necessarily mean that you must perceive your architecture to be impermanent: the “oldest” temples in Japan are wooden structures rebuilt in their entirety every twenty years.18 But the early English do seem to have understood their buildings as ephemeral beings like themselves; Wilfrid’s decision to renovate the church at York may have been an attempt to teach them that churches were different, a defence of the permanence of sacred, stone buildings—​a viewpoint eventually generally accepted it would seem, considering Michael Shapland’s evidence for stone buildings as symbols of eternity.19 In southern England, in Kent, the permanent sanctity of the stone church may have been recognized due to continuity with the Roman past and ongoing contact with Christian Francia: such buildings were in use in the late sixth century in Canterbury or restored by the missionaries from Rome shortly thereafter.20 Northumbria was different, its main Christian influences coming from the British and Irish worlds where wooden churches were the norm.21 The church at York seems to have been the only stone church built during the early seventh century (Bede states that only the altar of Edwin’s church at Campodonum was of stone) and even that began as a wooden structure.22 Only around the 670s did a new generation of Northumbrians, with connections to Rome and Francia, begin to construct stone churches across the kingdom at places like Ripon 17 Beowulf, ll. 82–​84. Cited from Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 6.

18 Tomás Ó Carragáin, Churches in Early Medieval Ireland: Architecture, Ritual and Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 145. 19 Michael G. Shapland, “Meanings of Timber and Stone in Anglo-​Saxon Building Practice,” in Trees and Timber in the Anglo-​Saxon World, ed. Michael D. J. Bintley and Michael G. Shapland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 21–​44. On the choice of stone or timber construction for ecclesiastical building, see further Godlove’s chap. 3.

20 Bede, HE 1.26, 1.33. Charles B. McClendon, The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600–​900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 60–​65.

21 Michael Shapland, “The Cuckoo and the Magpie: The Building Culture of the Anglo-​Saxon Church,” in The Material Culture of the Built Environment in the Anglo-​Saxon World, ed. Maren Clegg Hyer and Gale R. Owen-​Crocker (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 92–​116 at 95–​97 and 116. Even after stone churches started to appear in Northumbria, they remained different to those in Kent in both design and material: Meg Boulton and Jane Hawkes, “The Anglo-​Saxon Church in Kent,” in Places of Worship in Britain and Ireland, 300–​900, ed. P. S. Barnwell (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2015), 92–​118 at 112–​13.

22 Bede, HE 2.14; the York church was actually incomplete at the time of Edwin’s death, King Oswald finishing off its construction, possibly as an ideological statement of continuity with Edwin and acceptance of his type of Christianity: N. J. Higham, Ecgfrith: King of the Northumbrians, High-​ King of Britain (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2015), 70.

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and Hexham, Wearmouth and Jarrow, making a strong statement about their cultural connections and ecclesiastical loyalties in so doing;23 Wilfrid’s work on the basilica at York began a new trend and consequently came at a time when most churches remained part of the passing world of decaying material, as evidenced by Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury’s apparent need, at this time, to give instructions as to what kinds of reuse of the wood from a church were permissible.24 Even when Stephen wrote in the 710s, stone churches, although favoured by the Roman-​leaning clergy of Northumbria, remained unusual in England.25 Gregory the Great’s letter to Mellitus (601) suggests that the pagan inhabitants of England possessed sacred buildings sufficiently well-​built to justify their dedication as churches. In the letter the pope urged the Roman missionaries to Kent, rather than uprooting the people entirely from their familiar religious rites, to remove idols from pagan holy structures, consecrate these to God, and thus graft Christianity on top of traditional forms of religiosity.26 The debate as to what, if anything, Pope Gregory actually knew about contemporary religious practices in Kent continues to rage: certainly Gregory drew heavily on purely biblical imagery when writing to Mellitus.27 For a long time, Gregory’s words contrasted with the overwhelming majority of the evidence that most northern European and “Germanic” pagan religions did not use temples or dedicated sacred structures.28 In the last years of the twentieth century, John Blair and Ian Wood, 23 Shapland, “Meanings of Timber and Stone,” 28–​31. For the wider context of artistic and architectural change in response to external cultural influences (and the differing responses of rival parties in church politics to them): Carol L. Neuman de Vegvar, The Northumbrian Renaissance: A Study in the Transmission of Style (London: Associated University Presses, 1987).

24 Poenitentiale Theodori 2.1.3, ed. Arthur West Haddan and William Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1871), 3:190; trans. John T. McNeil and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 199. For discussion: Czock, Gottes Haus, 112–​13. 25 Jane Hawkes, “Iuxta Morem Romanorum: Stone and Sculpture in Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Anglo-​Saxon Styles, ed. Catherine E. Karkov and George Hardin Brown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 69–​99 at 71. There seems to have been a cessation in quarrying of stone in the post-​Roman period, which made ecclesiastical builders dependent upon the reuse of stone from pre-​existing Roman structures: Nicholas Brooks, Church, State and Access to Resources in Early Anglo-​Saxon England (Brixworth: Friends of All Saints’ Church, 2002), 7–​9. 26 Bede, HE 1.30.

27 Flora Spiegel, “The tabernacula of Gregory the Great and the Conversion of Anglo-​Saxon England,” Anglo-​Saxon England 36 (2007): 1–​13; Chris Wickham, “The Comparative Method and Early Medieval Religious Conversion,” in The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World: Converting the Isles I, ed. Roy Flechner and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 13–​37 at 30. Similar arguments have been made regarding Bede’s description of Northumbrian pagan shrines: Julia Barrow, “How Coifi Pierced Christ’s Side: A Re-​Examination of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History II, Chapter 13,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 62, no. 4 (2011): 693–​706.

28 Ian N. Wood, “Pagan Religions and Superstitions East of the Rhine from the Fifth to the Ninth Century,” in After Empire: Towards an Ethnology of Europe’s Barbarians, ed. Giorgio Ausenda (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), 253–​79 at 255–​56; John Hines, “Religion: The Limits of Knowledge,”

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amongst others, suggested that there were non-​Christian cult buildings in Kent when the Roman mission arrived in 597, but that these represented a comparatively recent phenomenon, arising from contact with and influence from Christianity.29 Northumbria’s distance from the muscular and confident Christianity of the Frankish world may have given its local brand of paganism a less institutionalized feel than that of Kent. Nonetheless, it is in Northumbria that the best archaeological evidence for Gregory the Great’s pagan-​temple-​turned-​Christian-​church has been found. Building D2 at the Bernician (that is, northern Northumbrian) royal site of Yeavering was discovered to contain a large pile of ox skulls, while a human cemetery surrounded it; evidence of temporary external shacks or huts made from wattle matched Gregory’s suggestion for religious festivals in the letter to Mellitus, where the pope described huts of tree branches set up around a shrine for ritual feasting on oxen, and so D2 has been interpreted as a temple that Roman missionaries Christianized according to Gregory’s prescriptions.30 Mass baptisms certainly took place at Yeavering during Edwin’s reign, but Bede claimed that not a single Christian church or cross was established in Bernicia until after Edwin’s death, suggesting that any transformation of sacred space from paganism to Christianity which took place there had little long-​term influence in Northumbria.31 Perhaps the memory of the transformation of temple into church at Yeavering was suppressed, but that seems unlikely, as Bede could have made the conversion of an old pagan temple a story of triumph if one had been known to him from his own region.32 The Pantheon in Rome only received its dedication as a church in the seventh century and Bede, in his chronicle, actually added a triumphalist contrast between the old and

in The Anglo-​Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective, ed. John Hines (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), 375–​410 at 388–​89; Martin Carver, “Agency, Intellect and the Archaeological Agenda,” in Signals of Belief in Early England: Anglo-​Saxon Paganism Revisited, ed. Martin Carver, Alex Sanmark, and Sarah Semple (Oxford: Oxbow, 2010), 1–​20 at 11–​14. For (problematic) evidence for northern continental pagan temples as sacred spaces: Czock, Gottes Haus, 205–​7. 29 John Blair, “Anglo-​Saxon Pagan Shrines and their Prototypes,” Anglo-​ Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 8 (1995): 1–​28; Ian N. Wood, “Some Historical Re-​Identifications and the Christianization of Kent,” in Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, ed. G. Armstrong and I. N. Wood (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 27–​35; John Blair, The Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 51–​57. Also: Hines, “Religion,” 387.

30 Brian Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering: An Anglo-​British Centre of Early Northumbria (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1977), 100–​102, 158, 277–​78; Bruno Judic, “Le corbeau et la sauterelle. L’application des instructions de Grégoire le Grand pour la transformation des temples païens en églises,” in Impies et païens entre Antiquité et Moyen Age, ed. Lionel Mary and Michel Sot (Paris: Picard, 2002), 97–​125. For discussion of the Yeavering site, see also Anastasia Moskvina’s chap. 6. 31 Bede, HE 2.14, 3.2.

32 Cf. Lesley Abrams, Bede, Gregory, and Strategies of Conversion in Anglo-​Saxon England and the Spanish New World (Jarrow: St. Paul’s Church, 2013), esp. 14–​16.

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new religions to the Liber Pontificalis’s rather bland description of this event:33 the emperor, Bede exulted, “ordered that a church should be constructed in the old temple called the Pantheon, with the stains of idolatry removed, and dedicated to the blessed ever virgin Mary and all the martyrs; so that where once the worship, not of all the gods but rather all the demons had taken place, there thenceforth should be a memorial to all the saints.”34 We see this rhetorical contrast between heathen past and Christian present also in Bede’s famous description of the Old English pagan names for the months of the year.35 If the early English did not reuse pre-​Christian holy buildings, and (other than the, perhaps misidentified, “temple” at Yeavering)36 precious little material evidence suggests that they did, they would not have been very unusual.37 Across the late antique Christian world, surprisingly little evidence survives of pagan temples being turned into churches and almost none for the Latin West before the very end of the sixth century. Gregory the Great’s suggestions for reusing non-​Christian shrines actually constitute some of the first evidence of a change in attitude.38 With its devotion to Gregory, the early English church was well placed to implement the pope’s ideas if only its members could have found some true pagan temples to consecrate as churches. They certainly seem to have tried to press-​gang pagan religiosity into the service of the new faith: Wilfrid’s church at Ripon was built in alignment with a mound overlooking the site whose local name Elfshowe (elf’s howe?) suggests some kind of pre-​Christian association.39 But when the 33 Liber Pontificalis, ed. Louis Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis: Texte, introduction et commentaire, 2 vols. (Paris: Thorin, 1888–​92), 1:317: “Eodem tempore petiit a Focate principe templum qui appellatur Pantheum, in quo fecit ecclesiam beatae Mariae semper virginis et omnium martyrum; in qua ecclesia princeps dona multa optulit.”

34 Bede, De Temporum Ratione 56.4565, ed. Charles W. Jones, CCSL 123B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1977), 523: “Idem alio papa Bonifatio petente iussit in ueteri fano, quod Pantheum uocabatur, ablatis idolatriae sordibus ecclesiam beatae semper uirginis Mariae et omnium martyrum fieri, ut ubi quondam non deorum, sed daemoniorum cultus agebatur, ibi deinceps omnium fieret memoria sanctorum”; trans. Faith Wallis, Bede: On the Reckoning of Time (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 227. Bede later adapted his own account at HE 2.4. Rosamond McKitterick, “The Papacy and Byzantium in the Seventh-​and Early Eighth-​Century Sections of the Liber Pontificalis,” Papers of the British School at Rome 84 (2016): 241–​73 at 254. 35 Bede, De Temporum Ratione 15, 332.

36 Sarah Semple, “In the Open Air,” in Signals of Belief, 40.

37 Semple, “In the Open Air,” 36, 38–​39; Martin Carver, “Early Scottish Monasteries and Prehistory: A Preliminary Dialogue,” Scottish Historical Review 88, no. 2 (2009): 332–​57 at 337; David Wilson, Anglo-​Saxon Paganism (London: Routledge, 1992), 44–​47. 38 Robert Wiśniewski, “Pagan Temples, Christians, and Demons in the Late Antique East and West,” Sacris Erudiri 54 (2015): 111–​28; Bryan Ward-​Perkins, “Reconfiguring Sacred Space: From Pagan Shrines to Christian Churches,” in Die spätantike Stadt und ihre Christianisierung, ed. G. Brands and H. G. Severin (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003), 285–​90; F. J. Niederer, “Temples Converted into Churches: The Situation in Rome,” Church History 22, no. 3 (1953): 175–​80. 39 Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 185–​86. Also: Semple, “In the Open Air,” 38; Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 97.

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language of Christian architectural triumph was used in England it suggested a clear difference between the sacred architecture of native paganism and Christianity. The West Saxon bishop and poet, Aldhelm, writing a little before Stephen and Bede, crowed that “where once the crude pillars of the same foul snake and the stag were worshipped with coarse stupidity in profane shrines, in their place dwellings for students, not to mention holy houses of prayer, are constructed skilfully by the talents of the architect.”40 Aldhelm’s boasting about the superiority of Christian architecture may not be so much hot air; many pre-​Christian societies elsewhere marked their cult sites with only the most impermanent forms of material culture: temporary enclosures of organic materials, totems or pillars, or even simply trees, decorated with ephemeral items of furniture. The pagans of early medieval England may also have possessed nothing comparable to a full, consecrated, Christian basilica and it is the sites of holy pillars or trees, rather than fully fledged temple structures, which may have attracted missionary efforts at architectural supersessionism.41 We may be misguided even looking for specific sacred sites distinguished absolutely from secular structures; in both a Scandinavian and English context the hall has been recognized as a multifunctional site, hosting social, economic, and cultic functions, as well as playing a role in the expression and creation of secular authority.42 Even when there may have been separate cult buildings in a settlement, we might best think of the hall and “temple” working in concert with each other. A site like Yeavering was a dwelling, a seat of government, a place of worship, and a centre in the management of a tribute-​based economy; indeed, a pagan may have found it difficult to conceptually separate these “different” aspects of the site.43 A close association between the royal hall 40 Aldhelm, Epistulae 5, ed. Rudolf Ehwald, MGH AA 15 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1919), 489: “ubi pridem eiusdem nefandae natricis ermula cervulusque cruda fanis colebantur stoliditate in profanis, versa vice discipulorum gurgustia, immo almae oraminum aedes architecti ingenio fabre conduntur”; trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Herren, Aldhelm: The Prose Works (Cambridge: Brewer, 1979), 160–​61. Aldhelm’s text has also been compared to the 675 charter of King Osric to Abbess Berta for the foundation of a nunnery at Bath (S51)—​Susan E. Kelly, Charters of Bath and Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 53: “ut ubi truculentus et nefandus prius draco errorum deceptionibus seruiebat, nunc uersa uice ecclesiasticus ordo in clero conuersantium Domino patrocinante gaudens tripudiet.” Pre-​Christian sacred architecture is never explicitly mentioned in this text of dubious authenticity (see Kelly, Bath and Wells, 57–​59). Shannon Godlove’s chap. 3 discusses Aldhelm’s poetry on church architecture. 41 Blair, “Archaeology of Religion,” 735–​36; Semple, “In the Open Air,” 40–​41; John Blair, “Holy Beams: Anglo-​Saxon Cult-​Sites and the Place-​Name Element Bēam,” in Trees and Timber, ed. Bintley and Shapland, 186–​210. 42 Olof Sundqvist, An Arena for Higher Powers: Ceremonial Buildings and Religious Strategies for Rulership in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (Leiden: Brill, 2015), esp. 95–​102; Jenny Walker, “In the Hall,” in Signals of Belief, ed. Carver, Sanmark, and Semple, 83–​102.

43 Michael G. Shapland, “Palaces, Churches, and the Practice of Anglo-​Saxon Kingship,” in Churches and Social Power in Early Medieval Europe: Integrating Archaeological and Historical Approaches, ed. José C. Sánchez-​Pardo and Michael G. Shapland (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 495–​522 at 502–​3; Helena Hamerow, Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-​Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford

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and the original church at York, the two linked by a square or court, is suggested by the early eighth-​century Vita of Gregory the Great from Whitby, which contains perhaps the only description of the buildings at York other than that Stephen provided.44 Against this background of a general early English view of buildings as subject to limited life-​cycles, a specific Northumbrian ecclesiastical culture where stone churches were rare, a pre-​Christian background which did not utilize permanent religious structures or even distinctly religious buildings at all—​against all this background, Wilfrid’s actions in restoring the basilica at York may take on some significance. Since Stephen suggests that he personally accompanied Wilfrid to Rome on the occasion of the saint’s second appeal to the papacy,45 and the Vita Wilfridi was written under the patronage of individuals (Bishop Acca of Hexham and Abbot Tatberht of Ripon) who had been close to its hero,46 the Life may give an accurate impression of what Wilfrid himself sought to stress when he established his cathedral in the old stone church at York: that having once been a house of God, a church remained a house of God, the stone church fundamentally operating on a different temporal plane to the wooden hall. This message may have seemed all the more significant in 670 within a culture which was still only learning to make such distinctions between sacred and secular, religious and areligious.47 In other words, the ritual of the restoration of the basilica at York, with its heavy biblical language, argued that the church was a new and special type of building that local tradition had not hitherto recognized. University Press, 2012), 106–​9; Walker, “In the Hall,” 95–​97; Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering, 266, 278–​81. Also: Godlove, chap. 3.

44 Vita Gregorii 15, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave, The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 96. For discussion: R. A. Hall, “Sources for Pre-​Conquest York,” in People and Places in Northern Europe, 500–​1600: Essays in Honour of Peter Hayes Sawyer, ed. Ian Wood and Niels Lund (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991), 83–​94 at 84; C. Daniel, “York and the Whitby Author’s Anonymous Life of Gregory the Great,” Northern History 29 (1993): 197–​99; Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 135–​36.

45 Stephen, VW 53, 112. D. P. Kirby, “Bede, Eddius Stephanus and the ‘Life of Wilfrid’,” English Historical Review 386 (1983): 101–​14 at 102–​4, argued that Stephen had limited personal knowledge of Wilfrid, but to reject the identification of Stephen as Eddius hardly negates all evidence of a connection between the saint and hagiographer. See: Richard Abels, “The Council of Whitby: A Study in Early Anglo-​Saxon Politics,” Journal of British Studies 23, no. 1 (1983): 1–​25 at 13.

46 For the importance of Acca and Tatberht as patrons of the work: Richard Sowerby, Angels in Early Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 160–​62 and Richard Sowerby, “The Heirs of Bishop Wilfrid: Succession and Presumption in Early Anglo-​Saxon England,” English Historical Review 571 (2019): 1377–​1404.

47 For a similar suggestion that it was only the introduction of monotheism that led to a conceptual difference between religion and non-​religious cultural activities in the late antique Mediterranean: Robert A. Markus, “The Secular in Late Antiquity,” in Les frontières du profane dans l’antiquité tardive, ed. Éric Rebillard and Claire Sotinel (Rome: École française de Rome, 2010), 353–​61 at 354; Éric Rebillard, Christians and their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–​450CE (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 93–​94.

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The Threat of Impermanence in the Early Northumbrian Church But Stephen’s elaborate biblical language in the Life of Wilfrid, and in particular the association of church and Jewish temple, could also have had significance in the context of the writer’s time since the relevance of the relationship between the sacred and the secular, the permanent and the impermanent, had not disappeared by the 710s. The Christian church was theoretically a place unlike any other, standing at an angle to the temporal world all around; a separation particularly powerfully suggested by the reuse of Old Testament accounts of the temple, with its Holy of Holies.48 But in reality most early English churches probably had their origin at the heart of the temporal world, in the dwelling places of the elite who both built and inhabited the religious communities which started to multiply in late seventh-​century Northumbria.49 No lord’s hall would have been built of the stone which provided the material for the churches at Wearmouth-​Jarrow, but other than that they would have looked (in outline and design) strikingly similar to any other high-​status dwelling; the religious site mirrored the secular properties in which its elite occupants had been raised.50 Such secular settlements, however, remained subject to the life-​cycle of timber buildings, or rather they were necessarily transitory displays of ostentatious power and wealth.51 Pressures from kin, kings, and rivals, exacerbated by the aristocratic life-​cycle (moving ideally from family land, to service at court, to an estate granted by royal command) and lifestyle (necessarily peripatetic in an age of itinerant kingship and tribute-​in-​kind), meant that the elite were never permanently secure in any given estate.52 Clearly some of that insecurity threatened the permanency of the new Christian establishments of the seventh century; Theodore of Canterbury’s penitential famously demands that if a monastery moves then provision must be made for the continuing cultic and pastoral responsibilities of any churches it leaves behind.53 The instability of ecclesiastical institutions suggested by Theodore’s ruling probably derived from the elite, and therefore highly political, environment in which most early English churches and monasteries emerged. 48 O’Brien, “The Cleansing of the Temple,” 214–​15.

49 Hines, “Religion,” 390–​91; Alecia Arceo, “Rethinking the Synod of Whitby and Northumbrian Monastic Sites,” The Haskins Society Journal 20 (2008): 19–​30; Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 131–​36.

50 Sam Turner, Sarah Semple, and Alex Turner, Wearmouth and Jarrow: Northumbrian Monasteries in an Historic Landscape (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2013), 193–​94. For the archaeological difficulty of differentiating between a monastic and high-​status secular site: Sarah Foot, Monastic Life in Anglo-​Saxon England, c.600–​900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 247–​48. 51 Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 123–​31.

52 On the vulnerability of all landholding in the period: Scott Thompson Smith, Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-​Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 8–​15.

53 Poenitentiale Theodori 2.6.7, 3:195; trans. McNeil and Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance, 204.

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Wilfrid’s own life remains perhaps the most famous display of the problems which could result from this. The bishop was twice deposed from his see, in a long and never fully successful battle to defend his right to permanent control over his own lands and ecclesiastical establishments. Even today this is sometimes represented as the result of Wilfrid’s personality, his individual pride or love of material display, rather than the natural result of royal and aristocratic support for monasticism: the dark side of Northumbria’s “Golden Age.” Wilfrid’s career inhabited the extreme end of a more general phenomenon. We know that churchmen were worried about the impermanence of religious communities in early eighth-​century Northumbria: Bede’s Life of Cuthbert not only reveals that Cuthbert and his brethren were expelled from Ripon by their royal patron (the beneficiary, in fact, being Wilfrid himself), but sets that change in a wider context when, earlier on, Bede described how what during Cuthbert’s youth had been a male community on the banks of the Tyne has now become a female house, “changed like all else by time.”54 Since Barbara Yorke has shown that female monasticism provided a common mechanism for kings to promote their own family’s interests, with some nunneries being “adjuncts of royal and noble family power rather than … representing a quite separate stream of ecclesiastical authority,” the switch from men to women in this monastery looks suspiciously like a royal assertion of control.55 Similar concerns over change emerge in the sources for Bede’s own community, which in the 710s seems to have broken its last links with the family of its founder, Benedict Biscop, but remained anxious to assert that neither Biscop’s family nor anyone else had legal claims to the monastery’s land.56 In other words, early eighth-​century Northumbrian clerics had cause to fear for their communities’ material well-​being: even perhaps for their physical safety as a group of aristocrats (apparently without land of their own) seem to have burnt down at least one of Wilfrid’s monasteries.57 While the secularization of early English monasteries amidst 54 Bede, Vita sancti Cuthberti 8 (Ripon), 3 (Tynemouth), ed. Bertram Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 160–62, 180: “nunc mutato ut solet per tempora rerum statu.”

55 Quotation from Barbara Yorke, “The Anglo-​Saxon Kingdoms 600–​900 and the Beginnings of the Old English State,” in Der frühmittelalterliche Staat—​europäische Perspektiven, ed. Walter Pohl and Veronika Wieser (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 73–​86 at 80–​81; Barbara Yorke, Nunneries and Anglo-​Saxon Royal Houses (London: Continuum, 2003), 30, 34–​36. 56 Note both the rejection of biological kin and the emphasis that Wearmouth-​Jarrow did not gain its land at anyone’s expense in Bede, Homily (I.13) on Benedict Biscop 8, ed. and trans. Christopher Grocock and I. N. Wood, Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (Oxford: Clarendon, 2013), 10–​12; Ian N. Wood, “The Gifts of Wearmouth and Jarrow,” in The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 89–​115, esp. 95–​98. 57 Stephen, VW 67, 144–​46. For discussion: Thacker, “Wilfrid, his Cult and his Biographer,” 14; P. S. Barnwell, “Conclusion: Churches, Sites, Landscapes,” in Places of Worship, ed. Barnwell, 209–​26 at 212–​13.

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evidence of heightened tensions between kings and religious is often assigned to the middle of the eighth century, the evidence of Bede and Stephen suggests that this process began when the Northumbrian “Golden Age” was still in full swing.58 Boniface wrote an admonitory letter to King Æthelbald of Mercia in 746–​7 which dates royal interference in monastic privileges to the reigns of Ceolred of Mercia and Osred of Northumbria, both of whom died violently in 716.59 His choice of these kings probably derives from the memorable nature of their deaths that cried out, it seems, for a moralizing reading; rhetorical purposes, therefore, and his desire for persuasive negative exempla likely underlie Boniface’s dating, rather than any firm conviction that things dramatically changed during the reigns of these kings. If concerns about the security of monastic communities and their property did intensify at this time, then that would provide a close context for Stephen of Ripon’s work around 712, but it seems clear that he was drawing on a deep history of concern for ecclesiastical property and rights within the Wilfridian community. The Wilfridians knew that they could not take the permanence of their religious houses nor that of their landholdings for granted. Charters were the new legal technology which the church introduced from the 670s to defend its property claims, and Stephen’s Life of Wilfrid shows the extent to which they mattered to the Wilfridian community; but the Life also reveals just how insufficient such written documentation could be in protecting a saint’s rightful claims to his land, as Wilfrid found the validity of his documents questioned.60 The introduction of charters seems to have been broadly simultaneous with the emergence of concerns over forgery and falsity in legal writings. The concern of the Wearmouth-​Jarrow community to emphasize that their papal privileges had been accepted by the Northumbrian court and bishops is suggestive of the well-​recognized importance of getting legal documents confirmed by a local elite for them to have any validity.61 Consequently, by 734 Bede accepted that monastic charters were themselves utterly impermanent and tried to appeal to higher ideals of the righteousness of the religious community being

58 See Yorke, “The Anglo-​Saxon Kingdoms,” 78–​79; Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 90–​91 (on pre-​existing tensions), 121–​34 (on their surfacing from the 740s on); Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 137–​38 (on the ending of the monastic efflorescence by 740).

59 Boniface, Epistolae 73, ed. Michael Tangl, Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, MGH Epistolae Selectae 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1916), 152–​53. 60 Stephen, VW 34, 70. Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–​800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 318; Scott Thompson Smith, “Inextricabilis Dissensio: Property, Dispute, and Sanctity in the Vita S. Wilfridi,” Mediaeval Studies 74 (2012): 163–​96; Catherine Cubitt, “St Wilfrid: A Man for his Times,” in Wilfrid, ed. Higham, 311–​30 at 316–​19; David A. Woodman, “Hagiography and Charters in Early Northumbria,” in Writing, Kingship and Power in Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. Rory Naismith and David A. Woodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 52–​70. 61 Wood, “Gifts of Wearmouth and Jarrow,” 104–​5.

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enriched to explain why some monasteries should benefit at the expense of other, more “useless” houses.62 Wilfrid’s career had been shaped by the saint’s failure to gain consistent social acceptance of his charters and privileges—​and Stephen’s hagiography consequently sought to respond to such failure by stressing, for instance, the intrinsic authority of the written word by even, on occasion, mimicking the language of contemporary legal documents;63 the Life also contains an episode where the noble Frisian king, Aldgisl, declared that God would destroy anyone who does not keep an agreement (pactum), suggesting an attempt to shore up the legal authority of the documents which record such pacta.64 But Stephen also seems to have tried to move beyond the sacrality of the written word to strengthen ecclesiastical claims to land by linking them to the permanent sanctity of the church building. Part of Wilfrid’s “beautification” process in York was that he endowed the basilica with landed estates, which no doubt contributed to financing its continual upkeep.65 In the following chapter of the Life, Stephen provided an account of the dedication of the church at Ripon, during which Wilfrid publicly announced the donations of land which had been made to him; the ritual, as recounted by Stephen, linked the temple-​like stone church to the landed endowment which underpinned its existence.66 Maintaining a church, then as now, was an expensive business and the early medieval English knew that. To demand permanence for church buildings constituted an (implicit) claim for permanence of ecclesiastical landholdings. The architecture represented in Stephen’s ­chapter 16 stands, by a kind of synecdoche, for a whole related series of social changes which had occurred in late seventh-​century Northumbria. To build in stone, to glaze windows, to embrace continental-​style architecture in general—​these were not simply aesthetic choices, but also political ones.67 Alongside, and in tandem with, these architectural changes, Northumbria witnessed the ideological shift from an Ionan religious establishment to a self-​consciously Roman church which emphasized universality; it saw the introduction 62 Bede, Epistola ad Ecgbertum episcopum 10–​11, ed. and trans Grocock and Wood, Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, 140–​46. Conor O’Brien, Bede’s Temple: An Image and its Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 130–​31; Conor O’Brien, “Kings and Kingship in the Writings of Bede,” English Historical Review 559 (2017): 1473–​98 at 1492–​93. 63 Woodman, “Hagiography and Charters,” 54, 68.

64 Stephen, VW 27, 52–​54. For discussion: James T. Palmer, “Wilfrid and the Frisians,” in Wilfrid, ed. Higham, 231–​42.

65 Stephen, VW 16, 34: “Iam enim non solum domum Dei et altare in varia supellectili vasorum intus ornavit, verum etiam, deforis multa territoria pro Deo adeptus, terrenis opibus paupertatem auferens, copiose ditavit.” 66 Stephen, VW 17, 36.

67 Martin Carver, “Why That? Why There? Why Then? The Politics of Early Medieval Monumentality,” in Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain: Essays in Honour of Rosemary Cramp, ed. Helena Hamerow and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001), 1–​22.

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Wilfrid’s Restoration at York

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of charters and therefore the permanent possession of land by clerics and eventually, of course, by aristocrats in general, which itself led to more intensive forms of economic exploitation of agricultural estates.68 The great boom in monasticism spearheaded by the likes of Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop was financed by a large, and unprecedented, transfer of land into the hands of communities at York, Ripon, and Wearmouth-​Jarrow, amongst others—​a change that inevitably led to tensions in elite society.69 In the early eighth century the shock waves from all these traumatic changes flowed into Stephen’s Life of Wilfrid and we can see him dealing with many of them in this single chapter. His account of the restoration of the basilica at York condemned the old ecclesiastical establishment, celebrated the introduction of new architectural and aesthetic tastes, and justified the transfer of landed wealth to a churchman like Wilfrid who would ensure that it contributed to the permanent and pure worship of God. The Life of Wilfrid sought to justify the bishop’s role in the religious and political life of Northumbria throughout the late seventh century, but ­chapter 16 went beyond that to present a theology of the church building which made sense within the context of the stresses of Stephen’s own time of writing in the 710s also.

Conclusion

I have suggested then that we can potentially read Stephen’s ­chapter 16 in two ways, from the perspective of two different periods; its biblical flourishes appear “naively pretentious” from neither perspective. Around 670, the new bishop of York sought to establish the idea of the church as a new type of sacred building, one which would last as a place of sacrifice forever, hitherto perhaps unknown in Northumbrian culture; 68 Changing aesthetics and their ideological meaning: Neuman de Vegvar, The Northumbrian Renaissance; Ó Carragáin, Churches in Early Medieval Ireland, 60–​65; Richard N. Bailey, “St Wilfrid—​ a European Anglo-​Saxon,” in Wilfrid, ed. Higham, 112–​23 at 116; Eric Cambridge, “The Sources and Function of Wilfrid’s Architecture at Ripon and Hexham,” in Wilfrid, ed. Higham, 136–​51. Charters and economic intensification: Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 314–​22, 347–​51; John Moreland, “The Significance of Production in Eighth-​Century England,” in Archaeology, Theory and the Middle Ages: Understanding the Early Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 2010), 208–​54; Cubitt, “A Man for his Times,” 319–​23; Duncan W. Wright, “The Church and the Land: Settlement, Economy, and Power in Early Medieval England,” in Churches and Social Power in Early Medieval Europe: Integrating Archaeological and Historical Approaches, ed. José C. Sánchez-​Pardo and Michael G. Shapland (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 367–​86; Martin J. Ryan, “ ‘To Mistake Gold for Wealth’: The Venerable Bede and the Fate of Northumbria,” in Making Early Medieval Societies: Conflict and Belonging in the Latin West, 300–​1200, ed. Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 80–​103 at 92–​93. 69 Michael Roper, “Wilfrid’s Landholdings in Northumbria,” in Saint Wilfrid, ed. Kirby, 61–​79; N. J. Higham, The Kingdom of Northumbria: AD 350–​1100 (Stroud: Sutton, 1993), 132–​39; Fred Orton and Ian Wood, with Clare Lees, Fragments of History: Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 199–​200; Ian Wood, “Entrusting Western Europe to the Church, 400–​750,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 23 (2013): 37–​73 at 53–​57.

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Conor O’Brien

shortly after 710, the late bishop’s hagiographer sought to use the sanctity of the church to protect the permanence of a new type of land, ecclesiastical property, protected otherwise only by the thin parchment of a charter. These two perspectives should not be set against each other: in Wilfrid’s lifetime the significance of ecclesiastical property must already have been clear and, assuming that Stephen’s account of the consecration of the church at Ripon is accurate, the saint himself sought to link the house of God with the land which financed it. With due allowance for the changing issues in Northumbrian religious culture over the late seventh and early eighth century, both men, saint and scribe, tried to remove the church from the temporal cycle of architectural life and death to which the early English building had hitherto been subject.

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Chapter 3

HEAVEN-​ROOFS AND HOLY ALTARS: ENVISIONING A SEVENTH-​CENTURY ENGLISH CHURCH IN ALDHELM’S CARMINA ECCLESIASTICA 3 Shannon Godlove* The Carmina Ecclesiastica form a curious grouping of Latin verses written by the seventh-​century West Saxon abbot and bishop Aldhelm of Malmesbury.1 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).2 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.3 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 * Shannon Godlove is Associate Professor of English at Columbus State University, Georgia, USA. She is the author of several articles on Old English and Middle English literature, and the co-​editor (with Michel Aaij) of A Companion to Boniface, a collection of essays on the early medieval English saint and missionary, for Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition series.

1  Aldhelmi opera omnia, ed. Rudolph Ehwald, MGH AA 15 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1919), 11–​32. Translations are taken from Aldhelm: The Poetic Works, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Rosier (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), 46–​60. The grouping of these poems under the heading Carmina Ecclesiastica (henceforth CE) is modern and editorial.

2 It seems probable that the poems in the CE were written by Aldhelm for churches built or furnished by himself or his close associates. Our evidence for Aldhelm’s building activity largely comes from William of Malmesbury (see Gesta pontificum Anglorum I: Text and Translation, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom with R. M. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 5.498–​663). For additional information about Aldhelm as church builder, see Michael Lapidge, “The Career of Aldhelm,” Anglo-​Saxon England 36 (2007): 15–​69 at 66 and G. T. Dempsey, Aldhelm of Malmesbury and the Ending of Late Antiquity (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 175ff. 3 Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 28–​39; on characteristics of church inscriptions, see Dennis Trout, Damasus of Rome: The Epigraphic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17 and Michael Roberts, The Humblest Sparrow: The Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).

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58 Shannon Godlove 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.4 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.5 Literary scholarship on the Carmina Ecclesiastica has primarily focused on establishing the Latin sources for Aldhelm’s information,6 and identifying borrowed Latin phrases and formulae,7 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.8 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.9 It is certainly true, as Joanna Story writes, that Aldhelm had a “literary debt to the epigraphy of Christian Rome.”10 However, by associating the Carmina Ecclesiastica so closely with tituli,11 scholarship has overlooked the ways in which the longest of these poems, CE 3, does not conform to the model of Roman inscriptions in terms of its length, structure, content, and inclusion of architectural detail. Tituli tend to be brief, and while they sometimes begin with praise for the appearance of the church or tomb where they are inscribed, they tend to devote more space to the 4 CE 3.1–​37.

5 Lapidge, “Career,” 58.

6 Findings summarized in Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 42–​44.

7 Andy Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-​Saxon England 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

8 Aldhelm visited Rome, most likely in the company of Cædwalla of Wessex, in 688–​89; see Lapidge, “Career,” 52. Joanna Story has presented convincing evidence that Aldhelm recorded inscriptions in situ and has raised the possibility that Aldhelm may have travelled to Rome more than once: “Aldhelm and Old St Peter’s, Rome,” Anglo-​Saxon England 39 (2010): 7–​20. While the earliest extant manuscripts containing syllogae from England date from the mid-​ninth century, there is evidence for continental syllogae circulating in England as early as the mid-​seventh century: see Patrick Sims-​Williams, “Milred of Worcester’s Collection of Latin Epigrams and its Continental Counterparts,” Anglo-​Saxon England 10 (1981): 21–​38 and Religion and Literature in Western England, 600–​800, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-​Saxon England 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 328–​59.

9 On Aldhelm’s borrowings from Latin epigraphy, see Orchard, Poetic Art of Aldhelm, 203–​12, 236–​ 37; for a general discussion of knowledge of the inscriptions of Damasus in Anglo-​Saxon England, see Patrizia Lendinara, “Gregory and Damasus: Two Popes and Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Rome and the North: The Early Reception of Gregory the Great in Germanic Europe, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Kees Dekker, and David Johnson (Louvain: Peeters, 2001), 137–​56 at 142. 10 Story, “Old St Peter’s, Rome,” 19–​20.

11 Lapidge and Rosier even suggest the poems should be called “Tituli” or “Sylloge Titulorum” instead of Carmina Ecclesiastica; see Poetic Works, 229n1.

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saints and their intercession and to praise of the donor, usually in that order.12 The tituli of Damasus, with which Aldhelm’s CE are most often associated, are between four and fifteen lines in length, and focus on promoting the martyrs as exemplary Romans, or on the role of Damasus as patron of the saints, with little comment on the architectural features or decoration of the tombs or churches themselves.13 Aldhelm’s CE 1 and 2 on Saints Peter and Paul, and Mary, and CE 4–​5 on the altars of the apostles seem to more or less fit this typical structure of verse epigraphy, yet the poem on Bugga’s church (CE 3) differs markedly from the conventional titulus. Michael Lapidge has questioned whether CE 3 was ever intended to be displayed as an inscription in a real, physical church, since at eighty-​six lines it appears to be too long to be inscribed on a plaque.14 Aldhelm’s CE 3 differs from the tituli of Damasus and other Roman epigraphical poets in its detailed description of the church, its treasures, and the activities that take place within it. It also includes a lengthy genealogy praising West Saxon kings, preceding the description of the church and the liturgical celebrations on the day of its dedication.15 The patron saint of Bugga’s church, the Virgin Mary, is almost entirely absent from CE 3; Aldhelm sings her deeds and praises in CE 2. These differences suggest that, in his poem on the dedication of Bugga’s church, Aldhelm may 12 Trout, Damasus, 17; Roberts, The Humblest Sparrow, 62.

13 Trout, Damasus, 12; Marianne Sághy, “Scinditur in partes populus: Pope Damasus and the Martyrs of Rome,” Early Medieval Europe 9, no. 3 (2000): 273–​87 at 286. It may be telling that the majority of Aldhelm’s borrowings from Damasus are found in the Enigmata and Carmen de Virginitate, not, as one might expect, in the CE poems. On Aldhelm’s borrowings from Damasian epigrams, see Orchard, Poetic Art, 236–​37.

14 Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 40–​42. In his article on “The Career of Aldhelm,” Lapidge notes that “the first sixteen lines [of CE 3] were possibly intended as a titulus for the unidentified church, the apse of which was dedicated to the Virgin Mary” (58) but does not explain why he considers only the first sixteen lines as possibly intended to serve as an inscription and not the remaining eighty lines. Lines 1–​16 of CE 3 announce the building of the church by Bugga, presumably the daughter of Centwine, and then go on to offer praise of Centwine and a short account of his military achievements, conversion to Christianity, entrance into the monastic life, and entrance to heaven upon death.

15 Aldhelm’s CE 3 more closely resembles the poems in praise of churches by Venantius Fortunatus or the ekphrastic Natalicia poems of Paulinus of Nola (especially Carmen 27) than the tituli of Damasus or other Roman verse epigraphy. Little attention has been paid to the possible influence of these works on Aldhelm’s CE poems, but it seems plausible that they may have provided some inspiration or conceptual influence for those elements of CE 3–​5 that do not seem to fit the conventions of a titulus. On Aldhelm’s familiarity with these poets, see R. W. Hunt and Michael Lapidge, “Manuscript Evidence for the Knowledge of Poems by Venantius Fortunatus in Late Anglo-​ Saxon England,” Anglo-​Saxon England 8 (1979): 288–​89, and Neil Wright, “Imitation of the Poems of Paulinus of Nola in Early Anglo-​Latin Verse,” Peritia 4 (1985): 134–​51, and “Imitation of the Poems of Paulinus of Nola in Early Anglo-​Latin Verse: a Postscript,” Peritia 5 (1986): 392–​96. On the church poems of Venantius, see Roberts, The Humblest Sparrow, 61–​71; on Paulinus of Nola, see Dennis Trout, Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 160–​89.

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60 Shannon Godlove have been doing more than simply transplanting Roman tituli and building encomia onto West Saxon soil. This chapter explores other ways of reading Aldhelm’s CE 3, moving beyond the search for Latin sources and the poems’ indisputable claims for the Romanitas of the early medieval English church. I consider how vernacular poetic traditions of architectural description familiar to Aldhelm, such as imagery associated with timber great halls and motifs of creation as a building and “heaven as a roof,” as found in Cædmon’s Hymn and other Old English poems, informed the CE alongside Aldhelm’s more widely recognized Latin influences.16 I argue that Aldhelm combines these literary conventions within an explicitly monastic framework of architectural representation as a medium for envisioning abstract Christian truths. Mary Carruthers has shown how medieval monastic writers utilized real and imagined buildings to enable contemplation and express rhetorical and theological concepts through spatial metaphors and the relationships between meaningful architectural features.17 Aldhelm’s poem on Bugga’s church likewise plays with space and place in ways similar to what Carruthers describes, moving the reader’s “mind’s eye” between dedicated altars and the ceiling or roof of the church. These concrete architectural features resonated with concepts of the world as a built structure, a hall or citadel covered and protected by the vaulted “roof” of heaven (or “the heavens”) found in early medieval Christian texts in both Latin and Old English. By guiding readers upward through the physical, if imagined, spaces of this church, Aldhelm’s poem points the way to the heavenly roof as the ultimate destination for the saints and for his Christian readers. Aldhelm wrote during a period of radical cultural and religious transformation as early medieval England became increasingly Christianized.18 He was very possibly the son of King Centwine of Wessex (676–​85);19 if so, that would make Aldhelm a prince whose grandfather, King Cynegils (611–​42), had been baptized in 635 by the Italian missionary Birinus.20 Aldhelm’s connections to the West Saxon royal dynasty enmeshed him in an aristocratic network that extended beyond Wessex and influenced the nature and subject matter of his works.21 Aldhelm was writing to and for an audience of individuals who were like himself: high-​born and among the early generations of West Saxon Christians. 16 Ruth Wehlau, The Riddle of Creation: Metaphor Structures in Old English Poetry (New York: Lang, 1997), 3; Kathryn Hume, “The Concept of the Hall in Old English Poetry,” Anglo-​Saxon England 3 (1974): 63–​74 at 68; Lori Ann Garner, “Returning to Heorot: Beowulf’s Famed Hall and its Modern Incarnations,” Parergon 27 (2010): 157–​81 at 162–​67.

17 Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–​ 1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16–​21. 18 John Blair, The Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 187. 19 Lapidge, “Career,” 20–​22.

20 Lapidge, “Career,” 21.

21 Emily V. Thornbury, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-​Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 150–​51.

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Such people were earnest in their embrace of the Romanitas that came with their new religion, and eager to engage with the learned and intricate Latin compositions of Aldhelm.22 Yet, their world was also that of the great hall. As John Blair has shown, elites in the northern, central, and southern regions of seventh-​century England brought their opulent high culture and aristocratic values with them into the church and the monastic life, creating hybrid art-​forms and literary expressions.23 A West Saxon prince-​ bishop and Insular Latin writer, Aldhelm was one such hybrid figure. In form and substance he borrowed extensively from classical, late antique, and patristic authors, but Aldhelm’s alliterative style and formulaic methods of composition also drew upon the structures and practices of Old English poetry.24 William of Malmesbury and other medieval sources preserve accounts of Aldhelm as an exceptional composer of verse in the vernacular.25 While no extant Old English poem can be definitively assigned to Aldhelm,26 it has become increasingly accepted that the stories told by William contain a kernel of truth: Aldhelm was an Old English scop, as well as a Latin auctor.27 Aldhelm was a (possibly slightly older) contemporary of Cædmon, the divinely inspired Northumbrian cowherd whose ability to express Christian themes in the traditional modes of Old English poetry was recounted by Bede in his Historia 22 Alan Thacker, “Rome of the Martyrs: Saints, Cults, and Relics, Fourth to Seventh Centuries,” in Roma Felix: Formation and Reflections of Medieval Rome, ed. Éamonn Ó Carragain and Carol Neumann de Vegvar (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 13–​20; Thornbury, Becoming a Poet, 154.

23 John Blair suggests that the great hall complex appears to have been a “spectacular but short-​lived phenomenon” confined primarily to the first half of the seventh century, with a notable concentration in those “midland and westerly” areas of England where Aldhelm was living, writing, and founding churches: Building Anglo-​Saxon England (Princeton: Princeton University, 2018), 114, 116. Aldhelm may have visited at least one of these great hall complexes (Cowdery’s Down, Basingstoke) during his lifetime (see n57 to this chap. for more information). On the opulence and hybridity of seventh-​century elite English culture, see Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 135–​36. 24 Orchard, Poetic Art, 70–​72 and passim.

25 See Christopher Abram, “Aldhelm and the Two Cultures of Anglo-​Saxon Poetry,” Literature Compass 4 (September 2007): 1354–​77 at 1360.

26 Nonetheless, several Old English poems have been associated with Aldhelm in scholarship: see Michael Lapidge, “Beowulf, Aldhelm, the Liber Monstrorum and Wessex,” Studi medievali, 3rd ser., 23 (1982): 151–​91 and “Aldhelm’s Latin Poetry and Old English Verse,” in Anglo-​Latin Literature 600–​899 (London: Hambledown, 1996), 247–69 and 270–311; Christopher Abram, “In Search of Lost Time: Aldhelm and The Ruin,” Quaestio: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-​Saxon, Norse, and Celtic 1 (2000): 1–​19; Paul G. Remley, “Aldhelm as Old English Poet: Exodus, Asser, and the Dicta Ælfredi,” in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-​Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Andy Orchard, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 90–​108.

27 Abram, “Two Cultures,” 1371, cites a prefatory macaronic poem Aldhelm appended to a late tenth-​or early eleventh-​century manuscript of De Virginitate that refers to Aldhelm as both bonus auctor (“good author”) and æþele sceop (“noble poet”).

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62 Shannon Godlove Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum.28 Although the works that have come down to us from Aldhelm are all in Latin, we find in Aldhelm, too, a marriage of Christian themes and vernacular poetic techniques, imagery, and perhaps even genres. The composition of vernacular poetry was integral to the Insular high culture of which Aldhelm was a part. Like Abbess Hild and her counsellors admiring Cædmon’s reshaping of Old English poetic formulae and the image of the world-​hall into a poem in praise of the Christian God’s Creation,29 Aldhelm’s aristocratic-​monastic audience would have recognized and appreciated his boundary-​blurring poetic performances.30 In Aldhelm’s CE 3 we may be catching a glimpse of a nearly lost Old English genre of praise poetry commemorating the construction of a royal monumental building, otherwise seen mainly in the description of the building of Heorot in Beowulf.31 While CE 3 is of course an emphatically Christian poem celebrating the Roman splendour of a church in Latin verse, it is also a triumphal poem about the wealth, power, and leadership of a succession of kings and their royal kinswoman. While I would not posit any sort of relationship between Beowulf and Aldhelm’s poem, there are some intriguing, if broad, parallels between the two works in terms of how the descriptions of Heorot in Beowulf and Bugga’s church in CE 3 are set up. Just as the Beowulf-​poet prefaces the account of the building of Heorot by narrating deeds and deaths of kings in the line of Scyld Scefing—​Scyld, Beow, Healfdene, and Hrothgar—​Aldhelm’s poem prefaces his description of Bugga’s church and the rituals within it by recounting the deeds of three West Saxon kings.32 The first line of CE 3 28 Bede, Historia Eccelesiastica Gentis Anglorum 4.24, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969).

29 Faith Wallis notes that “Cædmon’s Hymn is the oldest evidence for vernacular use of the world-​ hall image”: “Cædmon’s Created World and the Monastic Encyclopedia,” in Cædmon’s Hymn and Material Culture in the World of Bede, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John Hines (Charleston: West Virginia University, 2007), 80–​111 at 92. The image may, however, have been familiar to Bede from native, vernacular sources alongside learned works such as Cosmas Indicopleustes’s Christian Topography or the Pseudo-​Clementine Recognitions, as discussed by Conor O’Brien, Bede’s Temple: An Image and its Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 75–​76. It is also possible that Cædmon may have been influenced in the development of this image by Christian Latin sources he learned about by listening to sermons, or from the catechetical and personal instruction he received from the monks at Hild’s monastery, as argued by Thomas D. Hill, Thomas N. Hall, and Charles D. Wright, “Raising the Roof in Cædmon's Hymn,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 121 (2022): 452–​ 79. I thank Professors Hill, Hall, and Wright for sharing this paper with me prior to publication. 30 Abram, “Two Cultures,” 1372.

31 Using Cædmon’s Hymn as a model, J. B. Bessinger has reconstructed such a hypothetical secular praise poem, substituting epithets for God with formulaic vocabulary for rulers taken from Beowulf; see J. B. Bessinger, “Homage to Cædmon and Others: A Beowulfian Praise Song,” in Old English Studies in Honour of J. C. Pope, ed. Robert Burlin and Edward B. Irving, Jr (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 91–​106.

32 Beowulf, ll. 1–​63. Cited from Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 5. All translations from Beowulf are my own.

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credits Abbess Bugga with the construction of the church of St. Mary, but the second line immediately situates her efforts in the context of a royal genealogy by referring to her as “the renowned daughter of King Centwine” (“Hoc templum Bugge pulchro molimina structum /​ Nobilis erexit Centvvini filia regis,” ll. 1–​2). Aldhelm then devotes next thirty lines of the poem to brief royal biographies of King Centwine and his successor Cædwalla. For example, concerning King Centwine Aldhelm writes: Centwine formerly wielded justly the government of the (West) Saxons, until, rejecting the summits of this temporal realm, he abandoned his worldly wealth and the reins of power by granting many estates to recently established churches in which Christian worshippers now keep their monastic vows. Thereupon he set out to seek the holy way of life as he abandoned his hereditary kingdom in the name of Christ; nevertheless, he had previously waged war in three battles, and had likewise brought them to a conclusion with three victories. Thus he ruled his kingdom happily for several years until, having been converted, he retired to a holy (monastic) cell. Thereafter he sought the heavenly citadels by virtue of his resplendent merits, and was led by an angelic throng to the summits of heaven; united with the citizens of heaven he now rejoices in his celestial desserts.33

These accounts of the victorious reigns, conversions, and pious acts of Kings Centwine and Cædwalla are almost hagiographic in tone. While Aldhelm does mention the two kings’ military and political successes, the emphasis is primarily on their willingness to abandon “worldly wealth and the reins of power” to pursue the monastic life or seek baptism in Rome. It is worth noting that Aldhelm praises Centwine and Cædwalla for doing precisely the opposite of what the kings at the beginning of Beowulf are praised for doing; rather than seeking glory on the battlefield, conquering neighbours and steadfastly protecting their people, Centwine and Cædwalla (after some military victories, to be sure) abdicate their thrones and retreat into the monastic life or depart England to seek baptism in Rome. Aldhelm’s portraits of these Christian kings depend on the audience’s understanding of the expected roles of secular rulers for their paradoxical effect. It is by giving up the heights of temporal power, Aldhelm claims in lines 4–​5, 14–​15, and 31–​32, that Centwine and Cædwalla ultimately reach the heights of heaven.34 By tracing the succession of these West Saxon kings down to the current ruler, Ine, Aldhelm’s poem implies that the earlier Christian conversions and accomplishments of

33 CE 3.1–​16: “Hoc templum Bugge pulchro molimine structum /​ Nobilis erexit Centvvini filia regis, /​Qui prius imperium Saxonum rite regebat, /​Donec praesentis contemnens culmina regni /​ Divitias mundi rerumque reliquit habenas, /​Plurima basilicis impendens rura novellis, /​Qua nunc Christicolae servant monastica iura. /​ Exin sacratam perrexit quaerere vitam, /​ Dum proprium linquit Christi pro nomine regnum; /​Qui tamen ante tribus gessit certamina pugnis /​Et ternis pariter confecit bella triumphis. /​Sic rexit regnum plures feliciter annos, /​Donec conversus cellam migravit in almam. /​Inde petit superas meritis splendentibus arces /​Angelicis turmis ad caeli culmina ductus; /​ Caelicolis iunctus laetatur sorte superna”; trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 47–​48. 34 For more detailed discussion of Aldhelm’s use of the ascension imagery, see later in this chapter.

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64 Shannon Godlove Bugga’s kinsmen indirectly enabled her to construct the church that he will go on to praise: But as these kings—​whose names I have just disclosed—​made their way to heaven on high, a third ruler here took up the noble sceptre, whom all peoples acclaim by the specific name of Ine; he is now duly reigning over the kingdom of the (West) Saxons. During his reign Bugga, a humble servant of Christ, built (this) new church.35

In this way, Aldhelm situates the architectural achievement of Bugga’s church and the liturgical rituals that take place within it in the context of royal great deeds. Just as Hrothgar’s mind turns to hall-​building once he has secured his reign through success in war, so too Bugga’s mind turns to church-​building during the secure rule of Ine.36 The construction of the church of St. Mary, like the raising of Heorot, is portrayed as the culmination of a (here, recently Christianized) royal lineage and serves as a promise of its future glory.37 In the description of Bugga’s church and the religious celebrations carried out within it that follow his account of the kings of Wessex, Aldhelm brings elements of Latin ekphrastic church poetry together with aspects of the symbolic image-​complex of the seventh-​century timber great hall visible elsewhere in Old English poetry, to create a panegyric fit for a princess-​abbess and her pious kinsmen. Several surviving Old English poems, such as Cædmon’s Hymn, have at their heart the concept of the hall as the greatest achievement of a people and their leader, a symbolic communal and ritual space characterized in verse by conventional architectural features and idealized social practices associated with feasting.38 The cluster of images that make up the hall-​concept

35 CE 3.33–​39: “Sed hic principibus caelum penetrantibus altum, /​ Quorum descripsi iam bina vocabula dudum, /​ Tertius accepit sceptrum regnator opimum, /​ Quem clamant Ini certo cognomine gentes; /​Qui nunc imperium Saxonum iure gubernat. /​Quo regnante novum praecelsa mole sacellum /​Bugge construxit”; trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 48.

36 As soon as Hrothgar has secured his reign through success in war, the poet tells us that the king of the Danes begins to consider building a “healreced,” a “medoærn micel … þonne yldo bearn æfre gefrunon” (a “hall-​building,” “a mead-​mansion larger than the sons of men had ever heard of,” Beowulf, ll. 68–​70).

37 It is possible that both Aldhelm and the Beowulf-​poet may have been influenced in their representation of the construction of high-​status buildings as the culmination of royal lineages by examples of Old Testament kings who expressed their power through monumental building projects. Francis Leneghan has pointed out a number of parallels between Beowulf and Old Testament biblical succession narratives, noting that “David’s civilizing influence is symbolized by the construction of walls, ‘a house for David,’ built by carpenters and masons who come from afar (2 Kings 5:9–​12), while Solomon takes advantage of a relatively peaceful period to build the Temple (3 Kings 5–​6). Likewise, Hrothgar’s glorious reign culminates in the construction of the great royal hall of Heorot”: The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf (Cambridge: Brewer, 2020), 213.

38 See Neville, Representations of the Natural World, 64–​65; Stephen Pollington, The Mead-​ Hall: The Feasting Tradition in Anglo-​Saxon England (Ely: Anglo-​Saxon, 2003), 101–​4; and Hume, “Concept of a Hall,” 68.

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in Old English poetry emphasize protection, stability, joy, and the triumph of human ingenuity and artifice over the threatening disorder of nature.39 The “hall-​cluster” comes to be read onto the Christian God precisely because of these positive associations.40 As Jennifer Neville explains: Kings are imagined as builders of havens in the midst of hostility, transformers of chaos and darkness to order and light, and protectors of their constructions, their societies, from the forces around them … in the Old English portrayal of God [we see] an idealized portrait of an earthly lord—​one like Hrothgar, who is blessed with heresped “battle-​ victory” (Beowulf 64b) and who creates a beautiful, safe environment for his people.41

The imagery of the “hall-​cluster” continued on as a nostalgic ideal and a means of communicating powerful concepts of ritualized social order in Old English literature long after the great hall complex ceased to be a visible reality in the landscape.42 The seventh-​century timber great hall and Aldhelm’s churches may have had more in common than we might think, since the early churches praised in the Carmina Ecclesiastica are more likely to have been of wooden rather than stone construction.43 A number of churches built by or associated with Aldhelm were apparently of timber construction, including the wooden church of St. Mary at Malmesbury, still standing in the time of William of Malmesbury,44 Aldhelm’s church near Wareham excavated by Jackson and Fletcher,45 and the timber and thatched-​roof church somewhere in the southwest whose destruction by a mighty storm Aldhelm recounts in his Carmen Rhythmicum.46 A large, apsed timber building, almost certainly a church, has been revealed at the

39 See Hume, “Concept of a Hall,” 67; Wehlau, Riddle of Creation, 16–​17. 40 Hume, “Concept of a Hall,” 28.

41 Neville, Representations of the Natural World, 62, 64.

42 Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 138. 43 Dempsey, Aldhelm of Malmesbury, 175.

44 According to William of Malmesbury, St. Mary’s had a stone floor, but was of wooden construction, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, 546–​49. The same technique appears to have been used in the construction of the churches at Hartlepool and Whitby, and some buildings in Wearmouth-​ Jarrow; see Rosemary Cramp, “Monkwearmouth and Jarrow in their Continental Contexts,” in The Archaeology of Anglo-​Saxon England: Basic Readings, ed. Catherine Karkov (New York: Garland, 1999), 137–​53 at 138–​39. William of Malmesbury also reports a story wherein Aldhelm miraculously corrects the erroneous cutting of one of the church’s wooden beams. 45 E. Dudley, C. Jackson, and Eric G. M. Fletcher, “Aldhelm’s Church near Wareham,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 26 (1963): 1–​5.

46 Aldhelm, Carmen Rhythmicum, in Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Rudolph Ehwald, MGH AA 15 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1919), 524–​28; trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works of Aldhelm (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), 177–​79. Lapidge suggests that this church could have been somewhere near the coast and near to a river estuary in Devon, possibly at Whitchurch, Exminster, or the monastery of Exeter, but ultimately concedes that the evidence is too inconclusive to “permit even a conjectural identification” (173).

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66 Shannon Godlove seventh-​century cropmark site of Cowage Farm, a great hall complex only two miles from Malmesbury and within the bounds of the minster’s seventh-​century estate.47 The construction of churches in timber in early Christian England was common, but it was also a deliberate choice.48 Both timber and masonry building methods were available and each had its own distinct history, associations, and connotations.49 Building in stone was a prestigious and special thing, a bold declaration of Romanitas;50 if Bugga’s church or any of the others Aldhelm writes about were made of stone, he almost certainly would have mentioned it, and probably dwelt on it in some detail. Whereas stone churches emulated Roman church architecture and often reused Roman buildings or included Roman spolia, Insular timber churches were closely associated with British and Irish traditions of church-​building,51 and were modelled on the structures of the great hall and the social practices that shaped those secular buildings.52 Rosemary Cramp has shown that in the seventh century there hardly seems to have been much difference between the two types of building in terms of construction. Some distinctive features of early English churches, such as the squared chancel seen at Escomb and elsewhere in Northumbria, preserve building elements seen in the great hall complexes of Yeavering or Cowdery’s Down.53 Recent studies by Jenny Walker, Heidi Stoner, Michael Shapland, and John Blair have separately highlighted the degrees of overlap between secular great hall complexes and early churches and minsters in terms of architecture, planning, social practice, and ritual use. Shapland explains that 47 Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 214. On the Cowage Farm site, see Moskvina’s chap. 6.

48 Warwick Rodwell, “Anglo-​Saxon Church Building: Aspects of Design and Construction,” in Archaeology of Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. Karkov, 195–​231 at 222.

49 Michael G. Shapland, “Meanings of Timber and Stone in Anglo-​Saxon Building Practice,” in Trees and Timber in the Anglo-​Saxon World, ed. Michael D. J. Bintley and Michael G. Shapland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 21–​44.

50 Jane Hawkes, “Iuxta morem Romanorum: Stone and Sculpture in Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Anglo-​Saxon Styles, ed. Catherine Karkov and George Hardin Brown (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 69–​99; Tyler Bell, The Religious Reuse of Roman Structures in Early Medieval England (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005); Michael Shapland, “The Cuckoo and the Magpie: The Building Culture of the Anglo-​Saxon Church,” in The Material Culture of the Built Environment in the Anglo-​Saxon World, ed. Maren Clegg-​Hyer and Gale R. Owen-​Crocker (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 92–​116 at 98–​99. See also O’Brien’s chap. 2.

51 Shapland, “Building Culture,” 98. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica 3.25, describes building churches out of timber as morem Scottorum, or “after the Irish manner.” On Irish churches of timber construction, see Thomas Ó Carragáin, Churches in Early Medieval Ireland: Architecture, Ritual, and Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 15–​47. 52 Jenny Walker, “In the Hall,” in Signals of Belief in Early England: Anglo-​Saxon Paganism Revisited, ed. Martin Carver, Alex Sanmark, and Sarah Semple (Oxford: Oxbow, 2010), 83–​102.

53 Cramp notes that excavations at Hild’s seventh-​century monastic complex at Hartlepool, e.g., have revealed ecclesiastical buildings “identical in form and constructional development—​from spaced posts to post-​in-​trench—​with Middle Saxon secular buildings” (“Monkwearmouth and Jarrow,” 139).

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There appears to have been a close association between church nave and secular hall in Anglo-​Saxon England … Aspects of social behaviour and spatial organization of pagan halls have also been related to ecclesiastical practice: the lord’s feast becomes communion, and the fire and the dais at the “high” end become the altar and the conventions of those who speak from the high end of the hall—​such as narrative poets—​and those who must listen is analogous to the delivery of a sermon.54

Aldhelm was writing at a time when such hall complexes were still thick on the ground, but as Blair explains, they were increasingly becoming monasticized or closely associated with minsters.55 Aldhelm describes Bugga’s church as a “praecelsa mole” (“lofty structure,” CE 3.38), but a church of this period was likely to be a relatively simple, rectangular double-​ celled building with an eastern chamber, laid out much like an apsed version of the hall and annex structures at Yeavering or Cowdery’s Down, and not like the Mediterranean-​ style aisled building implied by Aldhelm’s use of the term basilica (CE 3.69).56 In form and in practice, the timber-​built church deliberately included aspects of their peoples’ “own buildings of power” as a means of asserting the authority and importance of the new religion.57 This helped to integrate Christianity into social practice and facilitated the process of conversion by overlaying or crowding out one set of meaningful associations with another.58 In a similar way, both Aldhelm’s poems and the West Saxon churches he describes reshape established vernacular poetic and architectural elements into monuments to a new faith.59 The accounts of Heorot in Beowulf and Bugga’s church in the Carmina Ecclesiastica concentrate on a few key features whose conventional associations imbue them with deeper significance.60 As Lori Ann Garner points out, the size and “admirable height” of Heorot, referred to throughout the poem as a “high house” (“hean huses,” l. 116a) and “high hall” (“sele … hean,” l. 713b) and “tall and wide-​gabled” (“heah ond horn-​ geap,” l. 82a), were central to the aesthetic concept of the hall as a monumental house 54 Shapland, “Building Culture,” 106. See also: Walker, “In the Hall,” 83–​102; Heidi Stoner, “Heaven and Hall: Space and Place in Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Place and Space in the Medieval World, ed. Meg Boulton et al. (London: Routledge, 2018), unpaginated; Michael Shapland, “The House of Stilled Time: Stasis and Eternity in Anglo-​Saxon Churches,” in Stasis in the Medieval West? Questioning Change and Continuity, ed. Michael D. J. Bintley et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 127–​ 41; Blair, Church in Anglo-​Saxon Society, 100ff. and Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 125–​36. 55 Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 131–​38.

56 Aldhelm describes Bugga’s church as quadrato in l. 69, which Lapidge and Rosier translate as “rectangular” (Poetic Works, 237n22). For the layout of buildings at Yeavering and Cowdery’s Down, see Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, ­figures 30 and 33 and now Moskvina’s chap. 6. See also: Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 235n22; Shapland, “Building Culture,” 107. 57 Shapland, “Building Culture,” 93. 58 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 54.

59 The effectiveness of this blurring or crowding strategy is evident in the conflation of Christian symbolism and associations with secular places, discussed by Heidi Stoner in “Heaven and Hall.” 60 Garner, “Returning to Heorot,” 164.

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68 Shannon Godlove fit for heroes.61 While there are references to the floors, mead-​benches, doors, and so on, the reader’s attention is most consistently directed to the upper reaches of Heorot, particularly to its high, curved roof,62 which alone withstands the onslaught of Grendel.63 Aldhelm likewise introduces Bugga’s church as a “lofty or towering structure” (“praecelsa mole,” CE 3.38). His descriptions of liturgical celebrations to commemorate the dedication of the church constantly direct the reader’s imagined gaze upward, with incense and voices rising “beneath the roof of the church” (“subter testudine templi,” CE 3.53).64 In representations such as those found in Beowulf or in Bede’s famous “sparrow in the hall” scene in the Historia Ecclesiastica, the space of the hall creates and symbolizes what Jennifer Neville calls a “circle of order and light.”65 It is an interior space of brightness and warmth that can be contrasted with the darkness and chaos of nature without, a shining example of human ingenuity and joy.66 The light emanating from Heorot, a building adorned in gold, gleams over many lands (“geatolic ond goldfah … lixte se leoma ofer landa fela,” ll. 308a, 311). Bugga’s opulent church, too, “gleams brightly” (“coruscant,” CE 3.59) on the day of its dedication, with sunshine streaming in to light upon jewels, silver, and gold. Aldhelm writes: This church glows within with gentle light on occasions when the sun shines through the glass windows, diffusing its clear light through the rectangular church. The new church has many ornaments: a golden altar cloth glistens with twisted threads and forms a beautiful covering for the sacred altar. And a golden chalice covered with jewels gleams so that it seems to reflect the heavens with their bright stars; and there is a large paten made from silver … Here glistens the metal of the Cross made from burnished gold and adorned at the same time with silver and jewels.67

61 Garner, “Returning to Heorot,” 162.

62 The Geats walk “under Heorotes hrof” (“under Heorot’s roof,” l. 403a) and Grendel’s arm is hung from the “geapne hrof” (“curved or wide roof,” l. 836b), with Hrothgar looking up to the “steapne hrof” (“high roof,” l. 926b). Heorot is described as “geap ond goldfah” (“curved or wide and gold-​adorned,” l. 1800a), and “heah ond horngeap” (“high and with wide or curved gables,” l. 82a).

63 Beowulf, ll. 999b–​1000a: “hrof ana genæs /​ealles ansund” (“the roof alone endured all intact,” ll. 999b–​1000a). See further: Garner, “Returning to Heorot,” 163. 64 On the possibilities and “potential difficulties surrounding a modern consideration of the spatiality of the medieval gaze,” see Meg Boulton, “Space, Symbolism, and Eschatology in the Wilfridian Crypts at Ripon and Hexham,” Leeds Studies in English 48 (2017): 21–​42 at 24; and “Art History in the Dark Ages: (Re)considering Space, Stasis and Modern Viewing Practices in Relation to Anglo-​Saxon Imagery,” in Stasis in the Medieval West?, ed. Bintley et al., 69‒86.

65 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica 2.13; Neville, Representations of the Natural World, 68.

66 Wehlau, Riddle of Creation, 131.

67 CE 3.66–​82: “Haec domus interius resplendet luce serena, /​ Quam sol per vitreas illustret forte fenestras /​Limpida quadrato diffundens lumina templo. /​Plurima basilicae sunt ornamenta recentis: /​ Aurea contortis flavescunt pallia filis, /​ Quae sunt altaris sacri velamina pulchra, /​ Aureus atque calix gemmis fulgescit opertus, /​Ut caelum rutilat stellis ardentibus aptum, /​Ac lata argento constat fabricata patena … Hic crucis ex auro splendescit lamina fulvo /​Argentique simul gemmis ornata metalla; /​Hic quoque turibulum capitellis undique cinctum /​Pendit de summo

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Whereas the secular hall is lit from within by the fires glowing from the centre of the floor, Bugga’s church is lit from without by the light that shines through its glazed windows, an impressive and costly feature, since glaziers would most likely have had to be brought in from Francia.68 In Christian interpretations of the hall as an image of the cosmos, the light of the world-​hall is provided by the sun and moon, established by God to provide “lamps as light for land-​dwellers” (“sunnan ond monan /​leoman to leohte landbuendum,” Beowulf, ll. 94b–​95) and by the stars that gleam forth from the heaven-​roof, as in Genesis A, where the poem describes the sky as a “roof adorned with holy stars” (“hyrstedne hrof halgum tunglum,” l. 956).69 The fact that Bugga’s church is lit from without reinforces its image as a “circle of order and light” since its source of illumination is the very light and order of God’s Creation. Order, harmony, and the recurring cycle of the liturgical year are everywhere in second half of Aldhelm’s CE 3, as he leads readers through an exultant, sensory description of the performance of the Divine Office in Bugga’s double monastery: The months revolve with their successive feast-​days, and the cycles of years shall pass with feasts in the fixed order: (on this day each year) may antiphons strike their ear with their pleasing harmonies and the singing of psalms reverberate from twin choirs; may the trained voice of the precentor resound repeatedly and shake the summit of heaven with its sonorous chant! Brothers, let us praise God in harmonious voice, and let the throng of nuns also burst forth in continuous psalmody! On these feast-​days let us all chant hymns and psalms and appropriate responds beneath the roof of the church, intoning their melodies with the continuous accompaniment of the psaltery.70

The emphasis on correctness is striking: the voice of the precentor is “trained,” the responds sung are “appropriate,” and the harmonies are “pleasing,” chanted as the feasts pass “in fixed order,” month after month, year after year. Such sonorous perfection, Aldhelm implies, enables the sounds of their prayers to reach the highest heaven.71 The church is a place of continual song, as God and the saints are praised with the music of the ten-​stringed psaltery. In Beowulf, the “music of the harp, the clear song of the scop” fumosa foramina pandens, /​ De quibus ambrosia spirabunt tura Sabaea, /​ Quando sacerdotes missas offerre iubentur”; trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 49.

68 In chap. 5 of the Historia Abbatum, Bede reports that, in the 670s, Benedict Biscop had to bring in glaziers from Gaul to make the windows for the church at Jarrow because there were no glass makers available in England. 69 Genesis A, ed. George P. Krapp, The Junius Manuscript, Anglo-​Saxon Poetic Records 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 31.

70 CE 3.45–​54: “Menstrua volvuntur alternis tempora festis /​et vicibus certis annorum lustra rotabunt; /​dulcibus antifonae pulsent concentibus aures /​classibus et geminis psalmorum concrepet oda; /​ymnistae crebro vox articulata resultet /​et celsum quatiat clamoso carmine culmen! /​Fratres concordi laudemus voce Tonantem /​cantibus et crebris conclamet turba sororum; /​Ymnos ac psalmos et responsoria festis /​congrua promamus subter testudine templi /​ psalterii melos fantes modulamine crebro”; trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 48–​49. 71 CE 3.63–​65: “Qui nobis iterum restaurat gaudia mentis /​ dum vicibus redeunt solemnia festa Mariae /​et veneranda piis flagrant altaria donis”; trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 49.

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70 Shannon Godlove (“hearpan sweg /​swutol sang scopes,” ll. 90b–​91a) are the “joys heard loudly in the hall” (“dream gehyrde /​hludne in healle,” ll. 88b–​89a) night after night, at least until Grendel strikes. Like Heorot in its idealized, pre-​Grendelian state, Bugga’s church is a place of community, celebration, ritual, song, and treasure. In his poems about churches, including CE 3, Aldhelm juxtaposes imagery of descending and ascending to emphasize the ways these churches bring heaven closer to earth in the form of transcendent experiences and the presence of the saints. Drawing upon formulaic phrasing and architectural metaphors found in both Latin and Old English poetic traditions, Aldhelm depicts the heavens as an architectural construction—​particularly a roof or vaulted, arched structure—​to suggest these churches as the heavens’ earthly counterparts, their lofty roofs mirroring the celestial one.72 Aldhelm first introduces the theme of heavenly ascension in the poem on Bugga’s church when he praises the West Saxon kings Centwine and Cædwalla, who he depicts as trading the “summits of the temporal realm” (“praesentis … culmina regni,” CE 3.4) for “the heights of heaven” (“ad caeli culmina,” CE 3.15). The Latin word culmen (translated here by Lapidge and Rosier as “summits” and “heights”) is defined by The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (hereafter DMLBS) as meaning “1. Roof, b. tree-​top. c. heavenly vault, zenith … 2. height (usu. fig.), summit, eminence,” which suggests that in Latin texts from medieval Britain, including those written by Aldhelm (who is cited several times in this entry), the meanings which imply a structure are primary, although the more figurative meanings of “height(s)” and “summit(s)” also appear to have been widely used.73 Culmen appears several times in the passages regarding Centwine and Caedwalla and elsewhere in the CE: the word was a favourite of Aldhelm’s, and he uses it most often in collocation with caelum/​caeli (heaven, the heavens), or similar words for the heavens, sky, or heights.74 In the over fifty instances of the word culmen in the works of Aldhelm, twenty-​six occur in collocation with caelum/​caeli, most often in alliterating pair caeli culmina or culmina caeli, as seen in CE 3.16, where Centwine is described as being “led by angelic throngs to the heights of heaven” (“Angelicis turmis ad caeli culmina ductus”). The phase culmina caeli is one of Aldhelm’s frequent borrowings from the late antique biblical poets Juvencus and Sedulius,75 an example of the kinds of 72 The idea of the church as a reflection of heaven or the altar as a place from whence one might access heaven is pervasive in early medieval English sources. Michael Shapland further suggests that the stone church might have actually been seen as synonymous with heaven (“The House of Stilled Time,” 127–​41). Aldhelm’s insistence on the paradox of the saint’s earthly remains in the church and their spiritual presence in heaven suggests that he did not share this view.

73 Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. “culmen,” www.dmlbs.ox.ac.uk (accessed June 10, 2021). 74 As noted by Patrick McBrine, Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-​ Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 229n62.

75 McBrine points out that the phrase appears in Juvencus’s Evangeliorum Libri 3.456 (“Sic vobis faciet genitor, qui culmina caeli”) and Sedulius’s Carmen Paschale 4.94 (“Ille nocens anguis, deiectus culmine caeli”); see his Biblical Epics, 236n78.

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metrically measured formulae Aldhelm absorbed from his “remembered reading” and then used repeatedly throughout his works to fill out a hexameter line.76 The ubiquity of Aldhelm’s use of this phrase (and other, similar collocations of culmen and words for the heavens or heights) and its status as a common borrowing from Latin biblical epic could suggest that it is “without special significance,” as Patrick McBrine proposes, employed by Aldhelm simply to complete the metre of the line.77 However, in the case of the Carmina Ecclesiastica, Aldhelm may be attempting something bolder: here he transforms a bland stock phrase into a leitmotif, playing on the potential architectural connotations of culmen to prompt contemplation of the church building as a conduit to heaven. In their translation of the Carmina Ecclesiastica, Lapidge and Rosier most often render Aldhelm’s uses of culmen/​culmina in the more figurative senses of “heights” or “summits,” but if DMLBS is correct, then we might translate some of these instances with more architectural connotations. For example, the editors of DMLBS quote line 32 of CE 3 about the heavenly ascension of King Cædwalla as their first example for meaning 1.c. “heavenly vault”: “clarum stelligeri conscendens culmen Olimpi” (“ascending to the shining [vault] of starry heaven [lit. Olympus]”).78 In his Carmen Rhythmicum, another poem about a church (or rather its destruction), Aldhelm uses the word culmen both in the sense of the figurative but nonetheless more architectural “vaults of heaven”79 and in the sense of the thatched roof of the church building torn off in a violent storm.80 Other wording and imagery used by Aldhelm to describe the heavens reinforces the sense that he envisioned the celestial realm as a constructed edifice or citadel, with a curved and vaulted roof akin to those found in idealized representations of great halls.81 In Carmen 76 Indeed, in his introduction to Poetic Works, 23–​24, Lapidge uses three examples of lines ending with culmina caeli to illustrate this distinctive facet of Aldhelm’s formulaic method of composing hexameter verse. According to McBrine, the utility of this particular phrase was that it could be placed “at the cadence of the line,” creating the coveted “golden line, that is the hallmark of Sedulian style” (Biblical Epics, 236n78). 77 McBrine, Biblical Epics, 229.

78 DMLBS, s.v. “culmen,” www.dmlbs.ox.ac.uk (accessed June 10, 2021), sense 1.c; trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 48, with my own modification in brackets. 79 Carmen Rhythmicum, ll. 55–​56: “necque caelorum culmina /​ carent nocturna nebula” (“nor were the summits of heaven free from these clouds of night,” trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 177–​8); lines 93–​94: “attamen flagrant fulmina /​ late per caeli culmina” (“nevertheless, lightning bolts flash everywhere across the summit of the skies,” trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 178).

80 Carmen Rhythmicum, ll. 177–​78: “Ecce, crates a culmine /​ ruunt sine munimine!” (“Here, look, the roof-​thatches have collapsed, leaving no defence!” trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 179); ll. 185–​86: “forsan quassato culmine /​quateremur et fulmine” (“we might have been struck with lightening once the roof was shattered,” trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 179). 81 In CE 3–​5 Aldhelm repeatedly refers to heaven as a citadel (arce), as when he describes how Centwine “sought the heavenly citadels by virtue of his resplendent merits” (“Inde petit superas meritis splendentibus arces,” CE 3.14; trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 48). Garner has

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72 Shannon Godlove Rhythmicum he refers to the “fiery dome of the vaulted sky” (“quassantur sub aethera /​ convexi celi camara,” l. 16), where convexi means “vaulted, arched, rounded, convex” and camara means “a vault, arched roof, an arch.” The poetic imagery of the heavens as a roof-​structure can be traced back through biblical and classical-​patristic sources on Creation, and is present, as we have seen, in the Latin biblical epics that so inspired Aldhelm. Faith Wallis and Ruth Wehlau have argued that early medieval English vernacular writers found such metaphorical comparisons of divine Creation to human building particularly compelling since they resonated with the concept of a world-​hall made especially to house mankind.82 Jennifer Neville extends this idea further, suggesting that this architectural metaphor served as the primary way Old English poets visualized Creation and the cosmos in their texts: One can look for hints of how the early medieval English visualized the shape of the cosmos, but there is little evidence, in poetry at least, that they visualized it at all. One exception may be the image used to describe the newly constructed world in the Old English poetic Genesis, that of the hyhtlic heofontimber “hope-​filled heavenly building” (146a), the fasten folca hrofes “stronghold of the peoples’ roof” (153). At least one critic has considered this image of the world-​hall in the midst of the ocean, roofed by the heavens, to be a ‘distinctively Germanic’ contribution to the Genesis-​myth, and, given its appearance in Caedmon’s Hymn and Bede’s comparison of the creation of the world to the construction of a building, it is possible that these brief instances do reflect a specifically Anglo-​Saxon image of the universe.83

The beginning of Aldhelm’s own Carmen de Virginitate provides one of the earliest written sources for this concept of Creation as a building and the heavens as a roof: “Almighty Progenitor, guiding the world by Your rule, who are the Creator of the shining heights of the star-​filled heaven” (“Omnipotens genitor, mundum ditione gubernans /​Lucida stelligeri qui condis culmina caeli,” l. 1–​2, emphasis mine).84 pointed out the significance of arched vaulting and lofty height (expressed by the term geap) in descriptions of secular halls in Old English poetry (“Returning to Heorot,” 163–​64). 82 Wallis, “Cædmon’s Created World,” 91n19, traces the image to Isa. 40:22 “God made heaven like an arched roof” (sicut cameram) and notes that Basil of Caesarea and Ambrose of Milan understood camera to mean “vault” or “arched roof” and not merely “room” (as translated by Huppé) in this passage. See also Wehlau, Riddle of Creation, 51–​53.

83 Neville, Representations of the Natural World, 146. The critic Neville refers to here is Alvin A. Lee, The Guest-​Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old English Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 24: “the image of the middangeard as hall or fasten (153, fortress) has a metaphorical significance in Old English poetry and appears to have a distinctively Germanic character. Huppé’s allegorical reading of Cædmon’s Hymn is detailed in its correlating of Old English formulas with explanations of the Creation in commentaries, but he misses the basic metaphor. N. F. Blake has found close parallels between the hymn and the ‘hymns of praise’ toward the end of the Psalter, but also notes that Cædmon’s image of a ‘roof’ over the children of men is not in the Psalms, although the idea may be implied in the establishing of heaven, the home of God, above the earth, the home of men.” 84 Aldhelm, Carmen de Virginitate, ed. Rudolph Ehwald, Aldhelmi Opera Omnia, MGH AA 15 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1919), 353.

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Faith Wallis cites these lines from Aldhelm as evidence that “this metaphorical transformation” of the summit of a roof being used as an image for the heavens “may have been an Anglo-​Saxon innovation.”85 Bede translates the unambiguous line “heofon to hrofe” (heaven as a roof) from Cædmon’s Hymn using wording familiar from Aldhelm’s favourite Latin phrase: “caelum pro culmine tecti.”86 This suggests that the words culmen and caelum could be used by Aldhelm as more than an empty formula to fill out a line. Culmen retains its sense of a vaulted roof structure alongside its secondary and more abstract, figurative meaning of “heights” and when used in collocation with words like caelum, celsum, or even the classicizing aether or Olympus, culmen could evoke an image of the heavens as a roof that was especially relevant for Aldhelm and his original audience.87 In CE 3, Aldhelm uses these words to portray both Centwine and Cædwalla as leaving behind their exalted state as worldly kings for a humbler Christian existence, thereby exchanging the metaphorical heights of their temporal kingdom for “the lofty realms of the celestial kingdom, ascending to the shining [vault] of starry heaven” (“Alta supernorum conquirens regna polorum, /​ Clarum stelligeri conscendens culmen Olimpi,” CE 3.31–​32). Aldhelm makes this clear when he says that Centwine was led by angels ad culmina caeli and that he is now “united with the citizens of heaven … rejoic[ing] in his celestial deserts” (“Caelicolis iunctus laetatur sorte superna,” CE 3.16), and likewise strongly suggests that Cædwalla achieved the “lofty realms” he was seeking. This imagery is usually used to describe the Ascension of Christ,88 or the spiritual reign

85 Wallis explains that Bede’s “phrase culmine tecti (the summit or the ridgepole of the roof) occurs in Aeneid 2.695 and 4.186, but it is not used there as a metaphor for the heavens. This metaphorical transformation may have been an Anglo-​Saxon innovation” (“Cædmon’s Created World,” 92n21).

86 I accept the conventional view that the Old English versions of Cædmon’s Hymn represent the original poem composed by Cædmon that Bede paraphrased in Latin. On the possibility that the Old English text may be based on a backtranslation of Bede’s Latin paraphrase and for arguments in favour of the priority of the vernacular text, see Daniel Paul O’Donnell in Cædmon’s Hymn: A Multimedia Study, Edition, and Archive (Cambridge: Brewer in association with the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET) and the Medieval Academy of America, 2005), 174–​78.

87 Roberts notes how the church poems of Venantius Fortunatus often play with dual meanings of culmen/​culmina as referring to “heights” of a church building and “eminence or greatness” of a church’s benefactor or a saint. Although Fortunatus uses culmen differently from Aldhelm in these instances, his wordplay works precisely because the word culmen always retains some element of its architectural sense: “[t]‌he meaning of the passage derives from the readers’ inevitable hesitation between the senses of culmina. In so hesitating, they become aware of the metonymic relationship [whereby] … the lofty eminence of the building can represent the lofty status of its founder” (The Humblest Sparrow, 64–​65).

88 This imagery is so commonly associated with the Ascension of Christ, that Patrick McBrine mistakenly assumes that ll. 16–​17 of Aldhelm’s CE 3 refer to Jesus, when in fact they state that it is King Centwine’s soul, and not Christ, that is being led by angels to heaven; see Biblical Epics, 231.

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74 Shannon Godlove of the saints in heaven, a point which will be made about the apostles over and over in the epitomes of CE 4–​5.89 Aldhelm invokes the paradoxical language of the “theology of glory” in this way in order to portray Centwine and Cædwalla as saintly West Saxon models for the right orientation of the Christian toward God and eternity.90 By stepping down from their royal thrones, Centwine and Cædwalla point the way up: they direct the reader’s thoughts from earthly glory to the heavenly heights.91 Mary Carruthers has shown how medieval building ekphrasis practised by monastic writers systematically guided readers through real or imaginary churches, using building features as prompts for contemplation that the reader could revisit through memory and visualization.92 Carruthers argues that this was simultaneously a literary and an architectural phenomenon93—​monastic authors (notably, Aldhelm himself in his Prose De Virginitate) used the mental image of a church as a meditational aid or a rhetorical

89 See, e.g., CE 4.1.35–​36 on St. Peter: “Quem Deus aeternis ornatum iure triumphis /​ Arbiter omnipotens ad caeli culmina vexit” (“God, the omnipotent Judge, took Peter, duly adorned with his heavenly triumphs, to the summits of heaven,” trans. Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 50).

90 George Hardin Brown traces the development and dissemination of this motif from its origins in New Testament accounts of the Ascension through the works of several Eastern and Western church fathers, including Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great, and shows how these ideas influenced Bede and Cynewulf (“The Descent-​Ascent Motif in Christ II of Cynewulf,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 73 (1974): 1–​12, reprinted in Cynewulf: Basic Readings, ed. Robert Bjork (New York: Garland, 1996), 133–​46). Brown argues that this “inherited descent-​ascent motif of the theology of glory seems also uniquely apt for the Old English poetic mode, with its heroic vocabulary, contrasting and interlaced themes, and typological allusion” (136), which may account for the prominence of descent-​ascent imagery not only in the works of Bede and Cynewulf but also perhaps here in Aldhelm’s CE.

91 For an excellent and wide-​ranging discussion of the imagery and themes associated with the Ascension and Ascension theology in Old English homilies and art, see Johanna Kramer, Between Earth and Heaven: Liminality and the Ascension of Christ in Anglo-​Saxon Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). Kramer makes the crucial point that Ascension is a “ritual of status elevation of all Christians.” Although technically only Christ undergoes Ascension, “when he introduces his human nature into heaven, he exalts humanity, granting it a status not previously experienced by any human” which enables Christ to “act as a proxy for the human members” of the church/​his body in heaven (7). This helps to explain why Aldhelm can so emphatically insist that Centwine and Cædwalla have ascended to the celestial heights—​ by converting to Christianity and living out their last days in pious works, these two kings have assimilated themselves to Christ’s body, and have thus ascended with him. 92 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 1–​30.

93 Carruthers traces this as a fundamental practice of medieval rhetoric: “the emphasis upon the need for human beings to ‘see’ their thoughts in their minds organized as schemata of images, or ‘pictures,’ and then to use these for further thinking is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric … the monks’ ‘mixed’ use of verbal and visual media, their often synesthetic literature and architecture, is a quality of medieval aesthetic practice that was also given a major impetus by the tools of monastic memory work” (Craft of Thought, 3).

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figure in their texts,94 and churches and monasteries were themselves designed to be used in this way. As Carruthers puts it: [B]‌uildings, especially the church in which the liturgy “took place,” were conceived to be meditational mechanisms, structures that not only housed and abetted, but enabled the opus Dei. Their function is not primarily commemorative or “symbolic”: it is to act as engines channelling and focusing the restless power of the ever-​turning wheel that is the human mind.95

Aldhelm elaborates on Bugga’s church as a sacred place that “enable[s]‌the opus Dei,” repeatedly emphasizing the cycle of the liturgical year, the chanting of hymns and psalms, the reading aloud of scripture, and the altar furnishings and censers employed when the priests perform mass. His descriptions of the church and the rituals performed within it focus the mind and move it between two highly charged sites, each of which connects the reader (or viewer) to heaven: the altars and the roof. Medieval monastic writers used the rhetorical principle of ductus, which Augustine defines as the “orderly movement through places” to enable the reader to link one meaningful image or detail to another through spatial visualization and memory.96 The ductus in the second half of Aldhelm’s poem on Bugga’s church moves readers around and up and down within the envisioned building, provoking reflection on its constituent elements, and their relationship to each other. Aldhelm directs us from the “twelve altars that gleam in twelve-​fold dedication” (“qua fulgent arae bis seno nomine sacrae,” CE 3.40), to the apse dedicated to the Virgin (CE 3.38–​41),97 from the apse to the nave 94 Wallis shows how Aldhelm develops Gregory the Great’s comparison of biblical exegesis to “stages of architectural construction” from the letter to Leander prefacing Moralia in Iob, “transform[ing] the motif by boldly extending Gregory’s trope to literary production in general: its foundations are rhetoric, its walls are prose, and the celestial roof (culmen) is poetry (Prosa de virginitate 60; Ehwald 80)” (“Cædmon’s Created World,” 110). 95 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 258.

96 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 205; quotation at 253. Carruthers’s ideas have been linked to Old English literature by Wallis, “Caedmon’s Created World,” 91, and Joshua M. Goldman, “Structures of Thought: The Role of Architectural Images in Old English Poetry,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-​Madison, 2012, 35–​36.

97 When Aldhelm specifies that the apse is dedicated to the Virgin, he does not necessarily mean that there was an altar dedicated to the Virgin (or any altar) located in the apse, as assumed by Lapidge and Rosier (Poetic Works, 41). Carolyn Twomey, “From Nave to Chancel: The Metamorphic Implications of Anglo-​Saxon Altar Placement,” Quaestio Insularis 9 (2008): 118–​28, gives examples of several early churches where the main altar may have been located in the nave, raising the possibility that main altars were generally not located within the apse in seventh-​to eighth-​century English churches. It is just possible, therefore, that the altars dedicated to the apostles in CE 4–​ 5 could be the same twelve altars mentioned in CE 3. On the provision of multiple altars in late seventh-​ and eighth-​century Insular churches, see Helen Gittos, Liturgy, Architecture, and Sacred Places (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 182. Lapidge and Rosier rightly point out that “the twelve altars need not imply twelve porticus or structural adjuncts; nor indeed a basilican (that is, aisled) structure; the altars could have been recessed in the walls of the church” (Poetic Works, 235–​36n22); it is also possible (though I think it unlikely) that the altars were portable, like the

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76 Shannon Godlove wherein twin choirs of monks and nuns sing out “beneath the roof of the church” (“subter testudine templi,” CE 3.53), their voices rising up to “shake the summit/​roof of heaven” (“celsum quatiat clamoso carmine culmen,” CE 3.49). The poem then leads readers back to the “holy altars redolent of holy gifts of incense” (“veneranda piis flagrant altaria donis,” CE 3.65) and from there up once again to the shining glass windows, then back down to the (high?) altar with its golden covering, jewelled chalice, silver paten, and golden cross.98 Finally, Aldhelm guides our imagined gaze back upward from the altar to the embossed thurible which hangs above it “suspended on high” (“pendit de summo,” CE 3.80), raising us up one last time with the vapours of incense to praise the Trinity in the poem’s final lines (CE 3.82–​86). Drawing upon Carruthers’ work, Helen Gittos has argued that the early medieval English church—​even in the conversion-​era—​was conceived of as a “nexus of potent sites,” constituted and reinforced liturgically, beginning with the rites for the dedication of the church. Gittos’s research into early medieval English ordines shows how dedication rites delineated, blessed, and constructed the various parts of the church building—​ moving upward from the foundations to the altar(s), walls, and roof—​the imbuing each with typological significance.99 Aldhelm’s poem in honour of Bugga’s church may reflect some elements of these early church dedication rituals, especially since it seems to have been occasioned by the dedication itself.100 As Gittos has shown, antiphons and prayers in rites for dedicating churches recorded in early eleventh-​ century English manuscripts represent altars as “focal point[s]‌linking heaven and earth.”101 She explains that, as the site where the eucharistic miracle takes place and “God is made known,” the altar was associated in these texts not only with Christ’s sacrifice, but also typologically with Isaac and Abraham, Jacob’s ladder to heaven, the Tabernacle, the Temple, and, once relics have been placed in the altar, with the heavenly Jerusalem.102 These antiphons are found in later manuscripts, seventh-​century portable altar of St. Cuthbert, on which see E. Coatsworth, “Material Culture of the Anglo-​Saxon Church,” in The Oxford History of Anglo-​Saxon Archaeology, ed. Helena Hamerow, David A. Hinton, and Sally Crawford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 779–​92 at 786.

98 Lapidge and Rosier note that this cross “was not an altar-​cross in the modern sense: modern altar-​crosses did not exist before the eleventh-​century” (Poetic Works, 328n34); while it is true that the cross could have been placed behind the altar or anywhere else in the church, Aldhelm mentions it along with the other altar furnishings, specifying that it is “here” (hic, l. 79) suggesting it was placed near, on, or alongside the altar.

99 Gittos, Liturgy, 277, 244. While the earliest English ordines and rites for church dedication date from the ninth century, Gittos states that “by the time of Augustine’s mission, dedication ceremonies were a common practice in the West” (Liturgy, 215) though they may not have been as elaborate or as typologically developed as those found in later manuscripts.

100 Aldhelm writes, “with her own birth the Virgin Mary consecrated this day, on which the dedication of Bugga’s church gleams brightly” (“istam nempe diem, qua templi festa coruscant, /​ nativitate sua sacravit virgo Maria,” CE 3.59–​60). 101 Gittos, Liturgy, 244.

102 Gittos, Liturgy, 240–​44.

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and so we must be careful about assuming they are representative of the associations Aldhelm would have had with altars. Yet, as Gittos notes, rituals for relic deposition in altars are among the earliest rites for church dedication found in medieval sources, with relic deposition in churches and altars becoming increasingly widespread from the sixth century onward.103 The altars Aldhelm writes about probably contained relics in some form,104 and he certainly seems to conceive of them in ways that are similar to what we see in later sources: as symbolic centres of the church and places where heaven and earth are bound together by the presence of the saint to whom the altar is dedicated. In these ways, Aldhelm portrays altars and roofs as the twin foci of the churches he describes, each serving as a place of protection and a liminal zone of contact where individuals can access the saints and the promise of salvation. Aldhelm expected a community of aristocratic and increasingly monastic individuals to interact with the architectural features and details of the church he described, whether they encountered it in real life or through his poetry, either in the original Latin or, we might imagine, interpreted in Old English on the day of the dedication. The precise nature and meaning of those features represented in Aldhelm’s Carmina Ecclesiastica have been variously interpreted by critics, and sometimes dismissed. Because of the length of the poems, or the presence of literary elements which seem ill-​suited to serve as inscriptions on church walls or altars, Michael Lapidge has suggested that Aldhelm may simply have been using the “framework of the titulus” in CE 3, 4, and 5 as a literary conceit or kind of exercise to enable readers to imaginatively construct an ideal church in their minds.105 David Parsons has cautioned against viewing Aldhelm’s CE 3 as a source for information about seventh-​century English church architecture because he sees the poem as an “allusive and impressionistic, at worst downright fanciful … description of King Centwine’s great ‘palace in the sky’ ” so that it “would be foolish to expect hard architectural facts” from the poem, “even though such flights of fancy must ultimately be based on what the author knew of the buildings of his time.”106 It is true that these 103 Gittos, Liturgy, 215.

104 The use of relics in the dedication of early medieval English churches and altars is surveyed by David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-​Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 23–​59. Rollason does not discuss Aldhelm, but the example of Acca of Hexham may provide insight into the role of relics in the establishment of multiple altars within a church: in Historia Ecclesiastica 5.20, Bede describes Acca as “tak[ing] great trouble … to gather relics of the blessed apostles and martyrs from all parts” and then “put up altars for their veneration, and establishing chapels for this purpose within the walls of the church.” 105 Lapidge and Rosier, Poetic Works, 42 and 242n78. For evidence that the altar poems of CE 4 may in fact have been intended to serve as inscriptions in an architectural setting, see Story, “Old St. Peter’s,” 18.

106 David Parsons, “Books and Buildings: Architectural Description before and after Bede,” 1987 Jarrow Lecture, reprinted in Bede and his World: The Jarrow Lectures 1958–​1993, ed. Michael Lapidge, 2 vols. (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994), 2:729–​74 at 732. It is unclear what Parsons is referring to by “King Centwine’s great ‘palace in the sky,’ ” as this is not mentioned in the poem. It may be that Parsons has confused Aldhelm’s reference to Centwine “having sought the heavenly

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78 Shannon Godlove poems do not provide a straightforward top-​to-​bottom architectural description of any of the churches Aldhelm speaks of—​in fact, there is almost no attention whatsoever to the exterior appearance of these buildings, and it is difficult to ascertain the exact spatial relationships between some of the interior features which are mentioned or to create any kind of layout or plan. Aldhelm’s church poems are certainly not examples of realistic or literal representation of architecture in literature. However, while they cannot be seen as offering a literal or objective description of the churches they commemorate, it would be a mistake to see the Carmina Ecclesiastica merely as literary exercises or prompts for imagining a static, idealized church building, particularly in the case of CE 3. In the poem on Bugga’s church of St. Mary, what matters is not so much what the building looks like, but rather what goes on inside of it among the people it brings together, and what particular architectural aspects of that building (the altars, the roof) or items within it signify in relation to each other for those who interact with them, whether that interaction takes place in person within the physical building, or through reading the poem. What Ruth Wehlau has observed about the depiction of Heorot in Beowulf could be said of Aldhelm’s poem about Bugga’s church as well: “the space is not described as much as it is experienced” because the “sense of place that is so important in Beowulf develops out of the symbolic value of Heorot as a centre … of a community rather than any clear visual image of the hall.”107 Through its detailed, enthusiastic, and ornate descriptions of the sights and sounds of liturgical celebrations that take place within, the poem on Bugga’s church moves the reader through an experience of the building and the ways in which its architectural features—​ especially the altars and the roof, but also the glittering furnishings, glass windows, and copious liturgical vessels—​enable it to serve as a centre of religious community in Wessex. The ductus of the poem leads readers upward from the sacred altars through the high-​roofed, opulent, and performative space of the church. This heaven-​ward movement is reinforced by Aldhelm’s repeated use of the Latin word culmen, playing on its double meaning of heights and roof, in his description of the fates of a succession of Christian kings of Wessex. By recursively circling between the holy altars and lofty roof of Bugga’s church, Aldhelm invites readers to contemplate the building as an image of and conduit to salvation, and to imagine themselves ascending to the summits of heaven with the saints and West Saxon kings whose spirits now reside there.

citadels” (l. 16: “petit superas meritis splendentibus arces,” i.e. going to heaven after his death) as referring to Bugga’s church rather than the idea of heaven as a palace or fortress (Latin arx). 107 Wehlau, Riddle of Creation, 133, 131.

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Chapter 4

“BEATEN DOWN AND BUILT ANEW”: SAINT ERKENWALD AND OLD ST. PAUL’S Brendan O’Connell* 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).1 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.2 After a brief historical prelude, which traces the

* Brendan O’Connell is a lecturer in medieval literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.

1  Saint Erkenwald, ed. Clifford Peterson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977). All quotations from Saint Erkenwald are by line number from this edition. Throughout, I have modernized the runic letters thorn (þ=​th) and yogh (ȝ=​gh).

2 The work is a Middle English alliterative poem of 352 lines, composed in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and surviving in a single fifteenth-​century manuscript: London, British Library, MS Harley 2250, fols. 72v–​75v.

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80 Brendan O’Connell 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 work of the builders—​and, with it, the very progress of conversion—​is halted by the startling discovery of an ancient tomb which contains the wondrously preserved body of what appears to be an ancient king. When no trace of such a ruler can be found in the records, Erkenwald, the Saxon bishop of London, is asked to intervene. He addresses the corpse which begins to speak, revealing that he was not a king, but a pagan judge, whose soul has been damned to hell in spite of his blameless life, as he died before Christ. Deeply moved, the bishop weeps as he wishes he might have water with which to baptize the judge in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; a single tear falls on the body, whose soul leaps from hell to the heavenly banquet hall. Now that the soul has been redeemed, the body crumbles to dust; the remnants of a troubling pagan past thus dissolve and are incorporated into the very foundations of the building. As this brief summary suggests, the Erkenwald-​ poet invites us to read poem and cathedral in conjunction, challenging the boundaries between narrative and architecture, and encouraging us to confront the ways in which past, present, and future come to be inscribed in our textual and architectural records. The following analysis falls into two sections. In the first, I argue that the poem’s setting in St. Paul’s is crucial to its thematic preoccupation with the salvation of the righteous heathen and the sacrament of baptism. Building on the work of Jennifer Summit and Emily Dalton, I suggest that familiarity with the memorials of Old St. Paul’s helps the reader to understand London’s role within a history of conversion that privileges the ascent of Christianity over the rise and fall of secular power. Noting that St. Paul’s was the burial place of two early English kings, I offer an intertextual reading that draws the Latin inscriptions on the tombs of Kings Sebba and Ethelred into dialogue with the Middle English poem’s account of the seemingly royal remains in the pagan tomb; this account challenges “royalist” readings of the poem, and suggests that the poet’s treatment of the secular and ecclesiastical histories of London and Britain serves to subordinate state authority to church authority. In the second section, I build on the work of Emily Dalton and Laura Varnam, who have drawn scholarly attention to the parallels between the sacrament of baptism and the consecration of a church, arguing that the poet’s account of the discovery of the body of a pagan judge, and his subsequent baptism by the titular saint, are brought into dialogue with the initial consecration of the cathedral in ways that transcend time and space. The conclusion will briefly consider the ways in which virtual technologies have made it possible to reimagine the now-​lost cathedral, while also highlighting the ways in which plans for a Covid-​19 memorial in the modern St. Paul’s illustrate the continuing capacity of the cathedral to transcend the limitations of time and space.

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Saint Erkenwald in its Architectural Setting Saint Erkenwald is universally understood to be a poem about history: the relationship between past and present, pagan and Christian, and sacred and secular histories.3 It is also, inescapably, about a very specific sacred and civic space, though not all critics agree on the significance of the setting in St. Paul’s. Indeed, one of the poem’s most brilliant and prolific critics, Frank Grady, has argued that the poem is effectively a coded discussion about the history and privileges of Westminster Abbey, reading it as a royalist response to the challenges experienced by Richard II during the Merciless Parliament.4 Grady’s argument is imaginative, meticulously researched, and certainly lends support to a strain of criticism that identifies the poem as part of a Cheshire school of alliterative poetry that was distinctly royalist.5 Nonetheless, the attempt to read the poem as being about Westminster flies in the face of the very specific details provided in the poem; indeed, the setting in St. Paul’s is essential to the poem’s meaning, and designed to evoke a way of thinking about the history of London that is modelled on the process of conversion. In her analysis of the representation of pre-​Christian Rome in a range of medieval narratives, Jennifer Summit challenges the idea that the Middle Ages lacked a meaningful sense of historical difference, or that it was a period in which “the distinctions of human history were subsumed … under a totalizing Christian schema that exchanged the temporal for the eternal.”6 Through her discussion of medieval encounters with Rome’s classical architecture in a number of texts (including Mirabilia Urbis Romae, Petrarch’s “Letter to Colonna,” and Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale), she demonstrates that these works do not exhibit any desire to recover the past authentically, but rather “represent historical change as a form of conversion that did not so much destroy or supplant the 3 Several interpretations of the poem focus on its treatment of the past, but among the most influential are Monika Otter, “ ‘New Werke’: St. Erkenwald, St. Albans, and the Medieval Sense of the Past,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24, no. 3 (1994): 387–​414; Ruth Nissé, “ ‘A Coroun Ful Riche’: The Rule of History in St. Erkenwald,” ELH 65, no. 2 (Summer, 1998): 277–​95; John Scattergood, “St. Erkenwald and the Custody of the Past,” in The Lost Tradition: Essays on Middle English Alliterative Poetry, ed. J. Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 179–​99.

4 Frank Grady, “St. Erkenwald and the Merciless Parliament,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 179–​211. Grady argues that the poem reflects debates about the right of Westminster to offer sanctuary, which became an issue when Robert Tresilian attempted to claim sanctuary to prevent his arrest after the Merciless Parliament of 1388.

5 John Bowers, in particular, has promoted this reading of poetry produced by Cheshire poets such as the author of Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001) and “Pearl in its Royal Setting: Ricardian Poetry Revisited,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995): 111–​55.

6 Jennifer Summit, “Topography as Historiography: Petrarch, Chaucer, and the Making of Medieval Rome,” in Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate, ed. Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith (London: Routledge, 2004), 304–​20 at 304; originally published in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 211–​46.

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82 Brendan O’Connell past as conserve its outward forms while assigning them new meanings.”7 Emily Dalton has brilliantly applied this theory to Saint Erkenwald, noting that “the poem addresses the problem of physical remains that persist in the wake of material and cultural change, mirroring the problem of the spiritual ‘remains’ of the past in the unredeemed souls of the forgotten and unnamed dead.”8 In much the same way as Summit identifies for medieval discussions of the architectural remnants of classical Rome, the setting of Saint Erkenwald in St. Paul’s Cathedral serves to confront and assimilate the pagan past, “recuperating its material structures and surviving topographies to form a prehistory of Christianity’s ascent.”9 The setting in St. Paul’s is crucial to the poem’s “historiography of conversion” precisely because of the ways in which the pre-​ Christian history of London is commemorated in the walls of the late medieval cathedral.10 Given that the poem is so intimately concerned with the process of conversion, the fact that it takes place in a sacred space dedicated to the early Christian figure most directly associated with God’s plan for salvation of the Gentiles is far from coincidental, and the poet establishes an intricate network of associations between the sacrament of baptism, the consecration of sacred space, and the larger Christian mission to spread the Gospel throughout the world. Of course, St. Paul was one of two patron saints to whom the cathedral is dedicated, the other being Erkenwald himself. The poet, evidently, has gone to great lengths to challenge the traditional legend of Erkenwald, in which the saint is often violent and hostile to those who fail to observe his feast day.11 This version of Erkenwald is much more compassionate, but also much more insistently imagined as a driving force in the conversion of pagan spaces and souls. The poet positions Erkenwald as a successor to Augustine, who was sent by Pope Gregory to convert the English; moreover, the poet crafts a miracle clearly modelled on the legend of Gregory and Trajan, transposing the sanctity of Rome to London.12 7 Summit, “Topography as Historiography,” 305.

8 Emily Dalton, “ ‘Clansyd hom in Cristes nome’: Translation of Spaces and Bodies in St. Erkenwald,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 117, no. 1 (January 2018): 56–​83 at 59. 9 Summit, “Topography as Historiography,” 316.

10 The phrase “historiography of conversion” is Summit’s, used in reference to Petrarch and Chaucer: “Topography as Historiography,” 316.

11 The legends are set out in Gordon Whatley, “Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in its Legendary Context,” Speculum 61, no. 2 (1986): 330–​63 at 353–​63. See also Eamon Duffy’s account of the “savage little revenge stories” associated with Erkenwald in Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 166–​67. For a fine overview, see Simon Jarrow, “The Cult of Erkenwald at St Paul’s Cathedral,” in Old St. Paul’s and Culture, ed. Shanyn Altman and Jonathan Buckner (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 29–​50. 12 The story of Gregory and Trajan, in which the pope’s intercession for the soul of the pagan emperor leads to his salvation from hell, enjoyed widespread currency in the Middle Ages. On this, see Gordon Whatley, “The Uses of Hagiography: The Legend of Pope Gregory and the Emperor Trajan in the Middle Ages,” Viator 15 (1984): 25–​63; “Heathens and Saints,” 330–​63; Frank Grady, “Piers Plowman, St. Erkenwald, and the Rule of Exceptional Salvations,” Yearbook of Langland

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St. Paul’s is the seat of the bishop of London, then, as now, one of the three great sees of England: York, London, and Canterbury. Unlike the other two, London was not (and never has been) an archdiocese, yet the poem strongly implies that it was in the time of Erkenwald, even referring to the bishop as “primate” (l. 107). At line 31, the poet refers to the existence in pre-​Christian England of a tripartite ecclesiastical division (the “Triapolitanes”), clearly designed to suggest that the Christian church in England simply took over the same structure, installing (arch)bishops in the sees of York, Canterbury, and London.13 The poet arguably goes beyond this in an infamous crux at line 33, which refers to Erkenwald being of “Augustynes art”: while attempts have been made to read this line as referring to Erkenwald as the inheritor of Augustine’s discipline or beliefs, it makes more sense to interpret “art” as a province or district.14 As Peterson notes, Erkenwald is not strictly the successor of Augustine’s bishopric (since Augustine was bishop of Canterbury), but Bede made clear that Augustine had originally intended to establish himself at London.15 The poet exploits all available ambiguity to suggest that the three sees reflect a pre-​Christian triad in which London was the first among equals: it was the “mayster-​toun” (“principal city,” l. 26), and the “maghty devel” (“mighty devil,” l. 27) honored in its temple was the greatest of the false gods worshipped in Saxon lands (ll. 29–​30). As with the pagan body lying in the ground waiting for conversion at the hands of Erkenwald, the ecclesiastical structures of the pagan English, with their clear Trinitarian overtones, were waiting for the Christian mission that would convert them to their true purpose in the divine plan for the conversion of the Gentiles. The long historical view taken by the poet, who refers to the popular myth of London as the “New Troie” (l. 25), consistently subordinates the imperial destiny that led to the foundation of Britain to the spiritual destiny that led to its conversion. Royal and secular authority are repeatedly invoked only to be undermined. The poet achieves this by having the tomb of the pagan judge mistaken for that of an ancient king: the body wears a “coroun ful riche” (“opulent crown,” l. 83) and there is a “septure sett in his honde” (“sceptre set in his hand,” l. 84), leading those who behold the body to assume that he has been “king of this kithe” (“king of this country,” l. 98). When Bishop Erkenwald arrives at the scene, the Dean laments that a seven-​day search through the library records has failed to uncover even “one cronicle of this kinge” (“one chronicle of this king,” l. 156); Ruth Nissé convincingly argues that the poem undermines models of history rooted in Studies 6 (1992): 61–​86; Annemarie Thijms, “The Sacrament of Baptism in St. Erkenwald: The Perfect Transformation of the Trajan Legend,” Neophilologus 89 (2005): 311–​27. 13 Peterson points out that Geoffrey of Monmouth makes a reference to a pagan system of “archflamins,” corresponding to archbishops, with seats at London, York, and Caerusk in Wales (Saint Erkenwald, 88–​89, note to l. 31).

14 Helen Young argues that the word must mean “body of knowledge or learning:” “Line 33 of St Erkenwald,” Notes and Queries 54, no. 2 (June 2007): 124–​25; Andrew Breeze rejects this reading and claims it must refer to a district, however loosely defined: “Art ‘Direction’ in St Erkenwald,” Notes and Queries 55, no. 3 (September 2008): 273. 15 Saint Erkenwald, ed. Peterson, 89, note to l. 33.

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84 Brendan O’Connell genealogical ties and linear descent, including the model of the chronicle itself.16 The mystery of the crown and sceptre are finally revealed, as the judge explains that his reputation as a scrupulously fair judge led the people of New Troy to bury him with the crown and sceptre as the “king” of wise justices (l. 254), a symbolic coronation that surely undermines the authority of the pagan king Belinus (l. 213). The poem suggests at every turn that secular power is worthless compared to the providence of the prince who rules Paradise (l. 161); strikingly, the poet never mentions Erkenwald’s own royal lineage as the third son of King Offa, a fact well known and recorded on the saint’s tomb, as well as in Bede. Eamon Duffy rightly points out that the campaign to secure the canonization of Edward the Confessor made it more pressing for the clergy of St. Paul’s to champion their own saint.17 The poem responds to the cult of the early medieval saint-​king of Westminster with a miracle of a Saxon bishop, which centres on a body from an even earlier period in Britain’s history, that appears to bear the marks of saintly incorruption as well as bearing the crown and sceptre of a king. Throughout, however, the poem subordinates royal authority to the authority of the church. Unlike Westminster, Old St. Paul’s was known in the Middle Ages as the burial place of bishops (none more sacred than its second patron, Erkenwald), rather than of kings. Indeed, it is partly for this reason that the apparent discovery of a royal burial there would have seemed so curious to a medieval audience. And yet, even if it seems undeniable, as T. McAlindon has pointed out, that royalty, both actual and spiritual, is a central issue in the plot, the royalist sympathies that have been detected in the poem have been overstated.18 Certainly, it is likely that the poem is influenced by Richard II’s famous “quarrel” with the city of London, the resolution to which featured a procession to St. Paul’s and an offering to the shrine of St. Erkenwald, which is described powerfully in the “De Concordia” of Richard of Maidstone.19 Nonetheless, a consideration of the evidence of the poem in the light of what we know about the burial of kings and bishops within Old St. Paul’s supports an interpretation of Saint Erkenwald that is more deeply critical of royalty, and more insistent on its subordination to clerical authority, than is usually recognized. The architectural setting of Saint Erkenwald becomes especially significant in this regard. As D. Vance Smith has argued, “[m]‌uch of the poem’s information about Erkenwald himself comes … as much from the signifying machinery of the cathedral as it does from less accessible chronicles and vitae.”20 At the time the poem was written, Smith 16 Nissé, “Rule of History,” 283. 17 Duffy, Royal Books, 166.

18 T. McAlindon, “Hagiography into Art: A Study of St. Erkenwald,” Studies in Philology 67, no. 4 (October, 1970): 472–​94 at 492.

19 Richard de Maidstone, “De Concordia Inter Regem Richard II et Civitatem London,” in Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, ed. T. Wright (London, Rolls Series, 1859), 282–​300. Discussed in Nissé, “Rule of History,” 279–​80. 20 D. Vance Smith, “Crypt and Decryption: Erkenwald Terminable and Interminable,” New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 59–​86 at 64.

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observes, the tomb of Erkenwald was situated behind the high altar, with an inscription that reminded the reader that he was the third bishop of London “post Anglo-​Saxonicum ingressum,” the third son of King Offa, and was converted to Christianity by Melitus, the first bishop of London.21 The inscription also reminded the reader of Erkenwald’s foundation of abbeys at Chertsey and Barking (the latter apparently referred to at line 108 of the poem), while Erkenwald is also mentioned on the tomb of Sebba, king of the East Saxons, which lay a little to the north of Erkenwald’s tomb.22 Building on Smith’s observation, I would like to explore the relevance to the poem of two early English royal tombs in the cathedral: those of Sebba and Ethelred the Unready (Figure 9). The way in which these royal burials were commemorated in the fabric of the cathedral suggests a way of thinking about the Christian mission—​and the role of St. Erkenwald—​ as modelling a “historiography of conversion” that subordinates temporal to spiritual power, and offers a way out of a historical model rooted in the recursive experience of trauma and violence. While the only reminder of the royal burials in St. Paul’s today is the names of Sebba and Ethelred on a plaque in Wren’s cathedral, the royal tombs in Old St. Paul’s occupied a prominent place and literate medieval visitors to the cathedral could read the Latin inscriptions on the tombs. Taken together, these inscriptions offer insight into a very particular attitude to kingship which, while recognizing the authority of kings, insists on the subordination of secular to sacred power, and makes clear that the events of secular history must submit to a plan for divine providence. The inscription on the tomb of Ethelred the Unready is excoriating in its criticism of the king, whose cursed reign is blamed for a host of injuries inflicted on the kingdom. Hic jacet Ethelredus Anglorum Rex, filius Edgari Regis; cui in die consecrationis his, post impositam Coronam, fertur S. Dunstanus Archiepiscopus dira prædixisse his verbis: Quoniam aspirasti ad regnum per mortem fratris tui, in cujus sanguinem conspiraverunt Angli, cum ignominiosa matre tua; non deficiet gladius de domo tua, sæviens in te omnibus diebus vitæ tuæ; interficiens de semine tuo quousque Regnum tuum transferatur in Regnum alienum, cujus ritum et linguam Gens cui præsides non novit; nec expiabitur nisi longa vindicta peccatum tuum, & peccatum matris tuæ, & peccatum virorum qui interfuere consilio illius nequam: Quæ sicut a viro sancto prædicta evenerunt; nam Ethelredus variis præliis per Suanum Danorum Regem filiumque suum Canutum fatigatus et fugatus, ac tandem Londoni arcta obsidione conclusus, misere diem obiit Anno Dominicæ Incarnationis MXVII. postquam annis XXXVI. in magna tribulatione regnasset.23

21 Smith, “Crypt and Decryption,” 64. Smith cites the inscription from Henry Holland, Ecclesia Sancti Pauli illustrata (London, 1663), fol. F. 22 Smith, “Crypt and Decryption,” 64.

23 William Benham, Old St. Paul’s Cathedral (London: Macmillan, 1902), 17. “Here lies Ethelred King of the English, son of King Edgar; to whom on the day of his consecration after the crown was placed on his head St. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, is reported to have predicted terrible things in these words: ‘Because thou hast aspired to the Crown by the death of thy Brother, for whose murder the English have conspired with thine infamous Mother; therefore the sword shall not depart from thine house for ever, but shall cruelly rage against thee all the days of thy life,

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Figure 9. Sebba and Ethelred (monument). Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection, Plate number P2341. Used with permission of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

The inscription reflects an attitude to secular power that also informs the poem. Saint Erkenwald is a poem in which salvation history is presented as the antidote to an endlessly recursive cycle of violence. Thus, the poem opens by referring to Britain’s past, not with an idealized reference to its foundations by the Trojan hero but to the moment of invasion of the Saxons, who “bete oute the Bretons and broght hom into Wales /​And pervertyd alle the pepul that in that place dwellide” (“beat out the Britons and drove them into Wales /​And corrupted all the people who dwelled in that place,” ll. 9–​10). The destroying of thy seed so long till thy Kingdom shall be transferred to a foreign nation, whose customs and language neither thou nor thy people shall understand. Neither shall this thy sin be expiated but by a very long punishment, nor yet the sin of thy mother, nor the sins of all those wicked men who had a hand in that most execrable and pernicious Council.’ The which things as they were ominously predicted by this holy man were exactly verified; for King Ethelred being vanquished, and put to flight in several battles by Sweyn and his son Canute, and being at last closely besieged in the City of London, and brought to great extremity, finally ended his days in much tribulation and trouble in the year of our Lord 1017, after reigning six and thirty years in great perplexity.” Translation from William MacDonald Sinclair, Memorials of St. Paul’s Cathedral (London: Chapman & Hall, 1909), 94.

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temple is thus at the centre of a tumultuous period of history, that only started to see the light when St. Augustine came to convert the people (ll. 7–​14).24 It is only when the pagan judge begins to speak that we are reminded of the foundation of the city by the Trojan Brutus, while the judge becomes increasingly insistent about London’s identity as “New Troy,” referring to it no less than four times in a short speech (ll. 211, 246, 251, 255). The city of London is not ennobled by this, however, but rather diminished: New Troy here is an emblem of violence, whose citizens are “felonse and fals and frowarde to reule” (“felonious and duplicitous and difficult to rule,” l. 231). The parallels seem clear: just as Troy was a sinful city doomed to be conquered and defeated, so too was the new Troy destined to be sacked by the invading Saxons. It is through this focus on a city and state riven by conflict and successive invasion that we can identify the parallels with the inscription on the tomb of Ethelred, which lays the blame for the invasion of the Danes (and ultimately the Normans) squarely on the wicked reign of the king. Even if the parallels do not point to a direct influence on the poem, they do foreground a similar attitude to history. Thus, the inscription on Ethelred’s tomb frames the king’s ill-​fated reign as the result of a poisonous familial breakdown, noting that Ethelred was the heir to his brother, who was executed as the result of a conspiracy engineered by Ethelred’s mother. Similarly, the pagan judge characterizes his time in New Troy as one scarred by the conflict between two warring brothers, Belin and Beryn (l. 213), whose hostility and “wrakeful werre” (“furious war,” l. 215) lasted a long time. Reading the poem and the inscription together, we see an utterly desolate vision of secular history, as an endless cycle of violence, invasion, and loss of power: one that can be traced from Troy to London, and through such events as the Saxon invasion, the overthrow of Ethelred by Sweyn Forkbeard, the conflict with Cnut and the overthrow of Edmund Ironside, and perhaps even the Norman Conquest under the reign of Ethelred’s other son, Edward the Confessor. The other royal tomb in Old St. Paul’s, however, points to a very different model of royal power, one which makes clear that secular power is inferior to a life of holy devotion to God. The inscription on the tomb of Sebba read as follows: Hic jacet Sebba Rex Orientalium Saxonum; qui conversus fuit ad fidem per Erkenwaldum Londonensem Episcopum, anno Christi DCLXXVII. Vir multum Deo devotus, actibus religiosis, crebris precibus & piis elemosynarum fructibus plurimum intentus; vitam privatam & Monasticam cunctis Regni divitiis & honoribus præferens: Qui cum regnasset annos XXX. habitum religiosum accepit per benedictionem Waltheri Londinensis Antistitis, qui præfato Erkenwaldo successit. De quo Venerabilis Beda in historia gentis Anglorum.25

24 Unlike Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the poem does not begin specifically with a reference to Brutus as an illustrious founding father; yet the opening of the poem alludes to this foundation through repeated reference to “Bretons” (9) and “Bretayne” (32), while also referring to London as “New Troie” (25).

25 Benham, Old St. Paul’s, 16–​17. “Here lies Sebba, King of the East Saxons, who was converted to the Faith of Christ by that Holy Man Erkenwald Bishop of London, in the year of our Lord 677. This good King was a person frequent in his daily duty and devotion towards God, and seriously

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88 Brendan O’Connell The relevance of the tomb to the poem seems clear: here is a king who was converted to Christianity by none other than Erkenwald himself, and received the religious habit from Erkenwald’s successor, when he chose to abdicate the throne and commit himself to a monastic life. The inscription describes a good king, whose goodness is clear in his rejection of kingship. In the same way, the poem focuses on Erkenwald’s encounter with a figure dressed in the trappings of kingship and earthly power, whose presence is designed only to undermine them, to show that what truly matters is justice and the salvation of the soul. What the inscription on the tomb of Sebba champions is a model of history that escapes from the recursive cycle by focusing on the act of conversion: the process by which the troublesome pagan past becomes absorbed into a Christian understanding of salvation history. That all this takes place in St. Paul’s is crucial, since the cathedral building functions as an enduring and legible space that helps orient the reader toward the theological truths at the heart of the poem.

Transcending the Cathedral

The conversion of Sebba by Erkenwald, recorded on the king’s tomb in Old St. Paul’s, provides an important context for the miracle at the heart of the poem, which focuses on the baptism and salvation of a righteous heathen, who died before the coming of Christ. The debate over the salvation of the heathen has been explored extensively in the scholarship on Saint Erkenwald, which addresses theological issues that exercised a range of medieval writers and thinkers, including the author of the Whitby Life of Gregory, several major scholastic philosophers, not to mention Dante, Langland, and Wycliffe. The legend raises a number of theological issues, including essential soteriological questions such as the role of faith, works, and baptism in salvation; how and by whom baptism can be effected; whether there is any efficacy in prayers for the dead, and so on. Saint Erkenwald, as Annemarie Thijms has noted, offers a particularly successful resolution of the several thorny issues raised by the Gregory-​Trajan legend.26 The poem is quite unusual, however, in its focus on the discovery of the body of the righteous heathen in a space in which the baptism and salvation then take place.27 This is one of the most memorable features of the poem, and it is striking that a later Irish poem that appears to be heavily influenced by Saint Erkenwald also makes much of this intentive on religious exercises, and continual prayer, with the visible fruits of daily almsdeeds, preferring a private and monastic life to all the riches and honours of the kingdom. Who, after he had reigned thirty years, received the religious habit by the benediction of Walter, Bishop of London, who succeeded Erkenwald. Of whom the Venerable Bede writes many things in his History of the Nation of the English.” Translation from Sinclair, Memorials, 93. 26 Thijms, “Sacrament of Baptism,” 311–​27.

27 Whatley suggests that the unearthing of the judge’s coffin beneath St. Paul’s may have been suggested by the discovery of Hermogenes’s sarcophagus beneath Sancta Sophia, as related in Mandeville’s Travels: “Heathens and Saints,” 349.

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feature, establishing clear connections between sanctification of space and conversion of the righteous heathen.28 At heart, the many complex parallels between the salvation of the righteous heathen and the conversion of the temple rest on a relatively straightforward parallel: that between the sacrament of baptism and the consecration of a church. As Emily Dalton has noted, a key and widely recognized element of church consecration practices was “the ritual asperging of both the internal and external walls of the church with holy water and the anointing of the interior walls with chrism.”29 Laura Varnam has demonstrated the striking and deliberate connections between baptism and consecration, citing William Durandus, bishop of Mende, whose Rationale Divinorum Officiorum states that the church itself is baptized at the moment of its consecration.30 As she puts it: The church can inhabit prelapsarian innocence because at the moment of consecration it is free from sin. The ritual aspersion of the church is, therefore, a form of baptism … The sacrament of baptism brings the individual into the community of believers and cleanses them of original sin. The ritual aspersion similarly inducts the building into that spiritual fellowship and banishes the traces of sin.31

As a number of critics have noted, the poet clearly intends to connect the process of converting pagan temples into Christian churches, begun by Augustine, to the baptism, by Erkenwald, of the pagan judge whose body is discovered during the rebuilding of the cathedral.32 Indeed, this parallel casts new light on one significant critical crux: the fact that the judge is baptized by a bishop. As baptism could have been effected by any priest (or indeed, in extremis, by a lay person), the fact that the poet gives the task to a bishop has been seen by some as a sign that the poet is insisting on the power and importance of the church hierarchy, and that Erkenwald’s particular sanctity is at issue.33 However, while such critics rightly highlight the miraculous intervention that enables the baptism to take place, as well as the ecclesiological significance of the centrality of the bishop, 28 Cathal Ó’Háinle, “ ‘Ab Fíréanda Fada Ó Shin’: A Detached Apologue?,” Ériu 64 (2014): 123–​43. Ó’Háinle discusses the probable influence of Saint Erkenwald on this poem, in which an abbot discovers the body of a judge while performing building work in a monastery. For the argument that Saint Erkenwald is itself influenced by Irish sources, see Rory McTurk, “St Erkenwald and the Legendary History of St Paul’s,” in Old St. Paul’s and Culture, ed. Altman and Buckner, 51–​71. 29 Dalton, “Translation of Spaces and Bodies,” 62.

30 The Rationale Divinorum Officiorum of William Durand of Mende: A New Translation of the Prologue and Book One, trans. Timothy M. Thibodeau (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 63, cited in Laura Varnam, The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University, 2018), 50n90. 31 Varnam, Church as Sacred Space, 50.

32 One scholar has concisely observed that, from its opening lines, the poem “raises questions about the capacity of the church’s rituals to effect essential transformations.” Jennifer Sisk, “The Uneasy Orthodoxy of St. Erkenwald,” ELH 74 (2007): 89–​115 at 90.

33 See, e.g., Sisk, “Uneasy Orthodoxy,” 98–​103, and William Kamowski, “Saint Erkenwald and the Inadvertent Baptism: An Orthodox Response to Heterodox Ecclesiology,” Religion and Literature 27, no. 3 (1995): 5–​27.

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90 Brendan O’Connell Thijms notes that the poet actually diminishes the prelate’s formal role at the pivotal moment, since the baptism takes effect without any active intention on Erkenwald’s part: the bishop’s tear falls as he utters the baptismal formula only wishing that he might have water with which to baptize the judge.34 But, while Erkenwald’s status as a bishop may be irrelevant to the baptism, the poet is trying to keep in balance the parallels between baptism and consecration, and it is the latter, rather than the former, that can only be conducted by a bishop.35 While Saint Erkenwald does not explicitly describe the consecration of the cathedral, there can be little doubt that the poet was familiar with the rituals accompanying the consecration of sacred space. As Dalton points, out, “the poem’s depiction of the construction of sacred space draws on the same analogies between architectural, communal, and textual foundations evoked in rituals of church dedication.”36 These parallels, she shows, are nowhere more evident than in the opening account of Augustine’s conversion of pagan temples: He turnyd temples that tyme that temyd to the deuelle And clansyd hom in Cristes nome and kyrkes hom called; He hurled owt hor ydols and hade hym in sayntes And chaungit cheuely hor nomes and chargit hom better. (ll. 15–​18)37

Varnam, moreover, has demonstrated that the consecration of a church required the casting out of demons, citing Mirk’s Festial, which states that “God scheweth opynly how the fende be hallowing of the chirch was driven oute of the chyrch” (“God shows openly how the devil, by the consecration of the church, was driven out of the church”).38 The mass conversion and consecration of pagan temples is described succinctly by the poet in a scene in which the use of alliteration is designed to evoke both a formal continuity with the structures of the past and a comprehensive rejection of it: That ere was of Appolyn is now of Saynt Petre, Mahoun to Saynt Margrete othir to Maudelayne; The synagogue of the Sonne was sett to oure Lady, Jubiter and Jono to Jhesus othir to James (ll. 19–​22).39

While Sisk has suggested that these acts of reconsecration “may in fact be nothing more than empty acts of nominal substitution,” Dalton has argued persuasively that there is 34 Thijms, “Sacrament of Baptism,” 318–​23.

35 Durandus, Rationale, 61; cited in Varnam, Church as Sacred Space, 35. 36 Dalton, “Translation of Spaces and Bodies,” 62.

37 “He converted temples that at that time belong to the devil, and cleansed them in the name of Christ and called them churches; he flung out their idols, and brought in saints and, most importantly, changed their names and charged them better.” 38 Varnam, Church as Sacred Space, 48.

39 “That which formerly was dedicated to Apollo is now dedicated to Saint Peter, Mohammed to Saint Margaret or Mary Magdalene; the synagogue of the Sun is dedicated to our Lady, Jupiter and Juno to Jesus or to James.”

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nothing empty or arbitrary in these alterations.40 As Dalton explains, by “[e]‌xcising some letters and retaining others, these renamings enact graphically the more violent gesture of hurling out pagan idols from temple interiors, emptying them out and opening them up to new identities even while keeping their walls intact.”41 The greatest temple of all belonged to a “maghty deuel” (“mighty devil,” l. 27), but this devil has also been driven out and the building dedicated to St. Paul. Thus, the building is already a Christian church when Erkenwald becomes bishop of London, and it is during his tenure that the decision is made to tear the building down and build it anew, a process referred to as the New Work, a phrase which was used to describe the much later period of reconstruction begun in the mid-​thirteenth century.42 The poet is deliberately conflating a number of key moments in the building of the cathedral: its prehistory as a pagan temple, the (fictional) demolition and rebuilding of the church under Erkenwald, and the thirteenth-​ century renovation called the New Work. In an important recent study of Saint Erkenwald, Varnam skilfully employs Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia”—​a space that is capable of juxtaposing several spaces or sites that are in themselves incompatible—​to explicate the complex ways the cathedral functions in the poem.43 Applying the concept of heterotopia to Saint Erkenwald enables us to understand how deftly the poem constructs the cathedral as a space in which past, present, and future can merge together, while also functioning as a conduit through which the damned soul of the pagan judge can ascend from hell to heaven. Varnam, moreover, demonstrates how Erkenwald overcomes the “profane challenge” to the sanctity of his cathedral (the discovery of a pagan body bearing the hallmarks of saintly incorruptibility) in a way that reasserts the authority of the church and reconfirms the cathedral as a sacred space for the Christian community.44 Applying this methodology will help us understand the significance of the poem’s frequently overlooked allusion to Jerusalem. As Varnam has demonstrated, the consecration of sacred space involved a deliberate invocation of the events of Christ’s incarnation and their location in Jerusalem, and, moreover, “all churches become Jerusalem in ritual performance.”45 Given that Saint Erkenwald never mentions Jerusalem, it is understandable that Varnam does not explore this in her analysis of that text, but the poem contains a thinly veiled allusion to the city that richly exploits the heterotopic space of the cathedral to support its complex argument about the construction of sacred 40 Sisk, “Uneasy Orthodoxy,” 90.

41 Dalton, “Translation of Spaces and Bodies,” 67.

42 A clear outline of this is provided in Saint Erkenwald, ed. Peterson, 36–​38. A useful discussion, which connects this specific issue to larger questions of historiography, is Otter, “ ‘New Werke’.”

43 Laura Varnam, “Sacred Space, Memory, and Materiality in St Erkenwald,” in Old St. Paul’s and Culture, ed. Altman and Buckner, 73–​95. For a discussion of the concept of heterotopia as it applies to the construction of sacred space more generally, see Varnam, Church as Sacred Space, 48. 44 Varnam, “Sacred Space, Memory, and Materiality,” 74. 45 Varnam, Church as Sacred Space, 44.

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92 Brendan O’Connell space and the work of salvation. At line 37, the poet comments that the original temple on the site of St. Paul’s was “abatyd and beten doun and buggyd efte new” (“demolished and beaten down and built anew”). As Peterson notes, this line contains a striking echo of a passage about Jerusalem from Mandeville’s Travels, in which he says “Jerusalem hathe often tyme ben destroyed, and the Walles abated and beten doun and tombled in to the Vale” (“Jerusalem has often been destroyed, and the walls demolished and beaten down and tumbled in to the valley”).46 This apparent reference to Jerusalem works in tandem with (or perhaps in opposition to) the numerous references to Troy discussed in the first section. At one level, we can see a parallel between the poem’s treatment of Troy and Jerusalem: the destruction of both cities heralds the beginning of a new era. But the allusion to Jerusalem is ultimately designed to point beyond the physical realm. Indeed, the reference to the temple being beaten down and built anew is also an allusion to Christ’s claim, after the cleansing of the temple (John 2:13–​17), that if the Jews destroyed the Temple, he would raise it again in three days (John 2:18–​22). Christ, of course, seeks to create a parallel between the destruction and renewal of the earthly temple and the death and resurrection of his own body, which furnishes an important context for the parallels offered in Saint Erkenwald between the conversion of the temple and the salvation of the judge. In her account of the consecration ritual, Varnam has noted that “[t]‌he bishop’s entry through the door of the church … re-​enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.”47 It is perhaps for this reason that such close attention is paid by the Erkenwald poet to the moment of the bishop’s entry into the cathedral and his procession through the nave (Figure 10) to the high altar where he sings mass: Mynster dores were makyd opon quen maten were songen; The byschop hym shope solemply to synge the heghe masse; The prelate in pontificals was prestly atyride (ll. 128–​30).48

The entry of the bishop into the church is a demonstration of ecclesiastical authority, but also recalls the entry of the bishop into the church at the consecration. Throughout, the poet emphasizes the process of entering closed spaces: from the opening of the judge’s tomb (ll. 69–​72) to the bishop’s entry into the cathedral (l. 128), to the moment Erkenwald approaches the place where the body has been discovered: The prelate passide on the playn, ther plied to hym lordes; As riche reuestid as he was he rayked to the toumbe; Men vnclosid hym the cloyster wyt clustrede keies. (ll. 138–​40)49

46 Saint Erkenwald, ed. Peterson, 89, note to l. 37. 47 Varnam, Church as Sacred Space, 44.

48 “The cathedral doors were flung open when matins were sung, the bishop prepared himself solemnly to sing the high mass; the bishop was dressed in pontificals in priestly fashion.” 49 “The bishop passed over the pavement, where lords yielded to him; richly arrayed as he was he went quickly to the tomb; men unlocked the cloister for him with clustered keys.”

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Figure 10. St. Paul’s, the nave. Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection, Plate number P1025. Used with permission of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

The clear reference here is to the power of the keys, the power to remove the obstacle of sin and to unlock the doors of hell and heaven, a power Christ passes to his ministers who in turn exercise it in the sacraments of baptism and penance.50 The power of the keys is invoked to show that the ministers of Christ have power in heaven, hell, and earth; this is deeply relevant not only to the salvation of the pagan judge, but to understanding the poem’s evocation of the Harrowing of Hell. 50 See Peterson’s notes to these lines, as well as Thijms, “Sacrament of Baptism,” 321–​22.

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94 Brendan O’Connell In addition to Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, the moment of the bishop’s entry into the church during the consecration rite also evokes Christ’s breaking down the infernal gates at the Harrowing of Hell.51 In Saint Erkenwald, the Harrowing of Hell is, for the pagan judge, a defining moment not only in salvation history but in his own salvation. For him, it is a moment of unspeakable trauma, since Christ has come to hell to redeem the Old Testament Jews, but has not redeemed him: I was non of the nommbre that thou wyt noy boghtes, Wyt the blode of thi body vpon the blo rode; Quen thou herghedes helle-​hole and hentes hom theroute, Thi loffynge oute of limbo, thou laftes me ther. (ll. 289–​92)52

Though he experiences it as a moment of utter desolation, the harrowing is one of the events that contributes to his salvation: having witnessed it, he believes utterly in the salvation purchased by Christ on the cross. It is through this that the poet creates the theological ambiguity necessary to effect the salvation of the righteous pagan: he has demonstrated that he does believe in Christ’s salvation of mankind, meaning all that remains is for him to be baptized. The fact that the cathedral acts as a heterotopia—​capable of drawing together spaces as incommensurate as Jerusalem and London, heaven and hell—​is crucial to our understanding of the poet’s parallel between consecration, baptism, and the conversion of the pagan. The body of the judge was laid to rest in the foundations of the pagan temple in which he was buried and remains there through its conversion to a Christian cathedral. His soul is damned, and remains in limbo from the moment of death, through the Harrowing of Hell, to the moment of baptism. Immediately before the baptism, the judge describes how his soul is in hell, exiled from the solemn feast of heaven, and “Hungrie in-​wyt helle-​hole” (“hungry within the pit of hell,” l. 307). Immediately after the tears and words of the bishop have effected his baptism, however, the judge’s soul flies to heaven, from where his final words to the bishop are spoken: For wyt the wordes and the water that weshe vs of payne Lightly lasshit ther a leme, loghe in the abyme, That spakly sprent my spyrit wyt unsparid murthe Into the cenacle solemply ther soupen alle trew. (ll. 333–​36)53

In this sacred space, sanctified and made holy by the bishop at the time of consecration, the soul of the judge is redeemed and passes instantaneously from hell to heaven. As Varnam has demonstrated, the cathedral’s status as heterotopia enables it to evoke both 51 Varnam, Church as Sacred Space, 48.

52 “I was not of the number that you redeemed by suffering, with the blood of your body upon the bleak cross; when you harrowed the pit of hell and released them, praising you, out of limbo, you left me there.”

53 “For with the words and the water that cleanse us of punishment (damnation), a ray of light flashed brightly, deep in the abyss, that my spirit sprang quickly with unstinting joy, into the upper room where all the faithful dine.”

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hell and heaven, but the profane is kept at arm’s length from the sacred as Erkenwald baptizes the judge.54 Of particular importance in the judge’s speech is the word “cenacle” (l. 336), which he uses to describe the heavenly banqueting hall. This word seems deliberately chosen to remind readers of the cenacle in which the Last Supper (the first mass) took place, and where the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles at Pentecost. This feast, almost certainly, is the feast on which the miraculous baptism of the judge takes place, as suggested when Erkenwald celebrates the high mass of “Spiritus Domini” before visiting the tomb.55 No fourteenth-​century reader familiar with the cathedral could fail to notice that Erkenwald sings this high mass standing at the site of the altar at which his own relics would one day be venerated (Figure 11). Yet again, the heterotopia of the cathedral collapses distinctions between heaven and earth, Jerusalem and London, and even past, present, and future; the poet reveals himself to be remarkably sensitive to the place and time in which the action is situated, even as he emphasizes the transcendence of temporal and spatial limitations. Saint Erkenwald culminates with the image of the judge’s soul joining a banquet hall of heavenly celebration as his body crumbles to dust and can ultimately be assimilated into the body of the temple. The poem is, without question, about the sacred space of the cathedral, but above all else it is about the communities that occupy it, and which, to a large extent, are shaped by it. Throughout the poem, we have seen throngs of Londoners gather in the cathedral (ll. 61–​64, 140–​41, 217–​20), and the poet reminds us that the building is a civic space as well as a sacred one. The cathedral rings out with the sounds of many hundreds of citizens: so many people from every class—​clerics, noblemen, burgesses, guildsmen, and labourers—​that it seems to the narrator that “alle the worlde” (“the whole world,” l. 64) were gathered within the walls. As they walk through the cathedral, the diverse inhabitants of London confront their own history, commune with long-​dead ancestors, and celebrate their community, as they look forward to joining the communion of saints in heaven.

Conclusion

Considering the account of Rome in Petrarch and in the Mirabilia, Summit argues that one effect of this focus on spaces being converted from pagan to Christian is “the emergence of a kind of history without people; if Petrarch’s Rome has become a ghost town populated only by deserted structures and sites, the pagan Rome that the Mirabilia describes contains no actual pagans, but only buildings whose reconsecration and renaming under Christianity stands in for the conversion of populations.”56 By contrast, the world of Erkenwald makes it clear that these places, buildings, and histories are 54 Varnam, “Sacred Space, Memory, and Materiality,” 82.

55 While it is not precisely stated, most critics infer that the miracle takes place on the feast of Pentecost, which seems the most likely of the three masses in the Sarum Missal which have offices beginning with “Spiritus Domini.” See Saint Erkenwald, ed. Peterson, 45–​50. 56 Summit, “Topography as Historiography,” 316.

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Figure 11. St. Erkenwald (monument). Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection, Plate number P2286. Used with permission of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

very much about people: the pagan judge, the people he ruled, the bishop Erkenwald, and the citizens of London who gather to wonder at the tomb and the body it contains. Of course, the destruction of the cathedral in 1666 has made it hard to imagine what it would be like to walk through the cathedral in the time of the Erkenwald-​poet; indeed, he himself could not have known what the church looked like at the time of Erkenwald. But imagining what the space looked or sounded like is ultimately not the central concern of the poem: the cathedral, above all, is about telling the story of the people of London, something which must be imagined anew in each generation. In an ambitious, multi-​disciplinary plan, the Virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral Project aims, among other goals, to enable people “to experience worship and preaching at St. Paul’s Cathedral as events that unfold over time and on particular occasions in London in the early seventeenth century.”57 The first phase to be completed, the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project, combines digital visualization and auditory reconstruction to enable viewers to imagine the experience of listening to John Donne’s Gunpowder Day sermon at Paul’s Cross in 1624, overcoming the loss of the building to recreate “the visual and acoustic 57 The Virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral Project: https://​vpca​thed​ral.chass.ncsu.edu/​.

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properties of spaces that have not existed for hundreds of years.”58 The concept of the cathedral as a virtual space seems entirely removed from anything that could have been imagined in the fourteenth century, but it is oddly faithful to the central idea of the poem: that a sacred building should serve to connect those who contemplate it to those who have worshipped there in the past, and to establish a wider sense of community even as it transcends the physical space. Saint Erkenwald challenges the relationship between narrative and architecture, and imagines St. Paul’s as a space that shapes communities through acts of worship and commemoration that rely simultaneously on the survival of the built cathedral, and faith that the physical realm can and must be transcended. As I write, plans are in place for a memorial in St. Paul’s that demonstrates the cathedral’s enduring capacity to reimagine the relationship between the living and the dead, time and eternity, and even physical and virtual realms. The “Remember Me” monument will be a permanent physical memorial to UK residents, of all faiths and none, whose lives have been lost during the Covid-​19 pandemic.59 Approaching the cathedral via a newly accessible entrance to the North Transept, visitors will enter a quiet space for reflection and prayer, where they can view a virtual book of remembrance commemorating those who have passed away. Launching the online book of condolence, the current Dean of St. Paul’s cited his distant predecessor, John Donne, reminding us that “[a]‌ny man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.” Whatever the Erkenwald-​poet might have made of the changes the last six hundred years have wrought on the history and fabric of the cathedral, St. Paul’s itself has remained in many ways like the one he knew: a sacred space that draws people together and establishes communities in spite of the obstacles of time, place, and even faith.

58 The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: https://​vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/​quick-​guide/​.

59 The monument has been designed by Caroe Architects, who are also responsible for the installation of a fully accessible entrance to the cathedral, in the biggest structural changes to the cathedral in hundreds of years. “Covid-​19: Campaign for St Paul’s Memorial to Virus Victims,” BBC News, May 1, 2021, www.bbc.com/​news/​uk-​56951​552.

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Chapter 5

CASTLE VIEWSCAPES IN LITERATURE AND LANDSCAPES Scott Stull,* Michael Twomey,* and Michael Rogers*

Introduction Castles have a long tradition of being studied either as military centres or as symbolic constructions of power.1 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.2 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 * Scott Stull is a medieval archaeologist at the State University of New York at Cortland, with a particular focus on the built environment. He is also an experimental archaeologist, reconstructing medieval ceramics and cuisine. Michael Twomey is a specialist in medieval literature focused on ecocriticism and the Charles A. Dana Professor of Humanities and Arts, Emeritus, at Ithaca College. Michael Rogers is a physicist and archaeologist at University of Colorado Denver with a specialty in geophysical archaeology and terrestrial LiDAR studies. 1 See Oliver Chreighton and Robert Liddiard, “Fighting Yesterday’s Battle: Beyond War or Status in Castle Studies,” Medieval Archaeology 52 (2008): 161–​69. 2 Chreighton and Liddiard, “Fighting Yesterday’s Battle,” 161.

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100 S. Stull, M. Twomey, and M. Rogers 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. Thus, digital reconstruction offers a glimpse both into the medieval spatial environment and the medieval imagination. The main site for examination in this chapter is Trim Castle, an important element of the Anglo-​Norman conquest of Ireland. Anglo-​Norman castles in Ireland demonstrate the use of castles as vehicles of political control. The conquest of Ireland required creating a new structure of authority, both politically and materially. Shaping the landscapes and viewscapes of castles was a conscious part of that campaign, building on existing patterns of symbolic landscape use. The multiple purposes of castles, together with the landscape around them, are dramatized in medieval literature, particularly in romances, for which the medieval castle was often a major setting. Numerous medieval texts depict sieges, emphasizing the military significance of the fortified walls and the vast fields of view unique to castles; but some medieval texts apply castle viewscapes to social situations, making them settings for hierarchical imbalances between a viewer high above in a castle and the object of the viewer’s gaze below. The medieval literary conventions found in French romances, representing the literary tastes of the Anglo-​ Norman lords of Trim, recurringly portray an observer gazing at another person below a castle tower. Within the cultural landscape of authority projected by castle architecture, the social dominance represented by castles such as Trim was so basic to medieval thinking that castles were also used as figures of divine authority in social and religious allegories. Displays of authority in castle life presented in medieval literature can be inferred from analyses of the material remains in the landscape of Trim. Accordingly, we will also illustrate the allegorical use of castles to represent cultural power in several later medieval texts from England and France, countries which exerted political and cultural influence on medieval Ireland through seats of power such as Trim. Trim Castle is a particularly good example to study due to the landscape around it which has many surviving medieval elements, including its town plan and walls, roadways, and agricultural fields. These surviving features allow the landscape to be studied intact rather than as a reconstruction. In our study, ground-​based 3D laser scanning, or LiDAR, was used to create a detailed record of the castle structure and the surrounding context. With LiDAR, architectural components can be recorded at the millimeter level, and close to that level of precision with more distant landscape elements. This digital record of the castle and its surrounding gives us a record of the cultural landscape of Trim Castle from which we can observe the medieval landscape through digital reconstruction. This study begins by outlining a cultural landscape approach to the study of medieval castles. Following an outline of the historical context of Trim Castle, a series of images are presented that together illustrate the process and results of laser scanning undertaken

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at Trim. From those scans, we reconstructed some of the lost portions of Trim Castle and the views that would have been visible from those lost portions. While the modern context of Trim is different from the medieval experience, the viewscapes have enough historic integrity that some aspects of the medieval experience can be perceived. The chapter concludes with an examination of a range of textual sources which provides access to a medieval understanding of those viewscapes, putting the spatial and visual context into an experiential context.

Cultural Landscape Approach to the Study of Castles

The concept of the cultural landscape has its origins in cultural geography in the 1940s and is centred on the combination of natural features and human transformation of those features in the creation of places for human activity.3 In anthropological studies, the cultural and societal aspects of landscape creation are central, and the concept has been widely applied.4 Cultural landscapes are created by putting meaning onto a physical landscape to shape human understanding and perception, and to create expectations of behavior and patterns of social practice as people use and interact with that environment and the other people who inhabit it. Meaning can be tied to practical necessities, such as the land used for the acquisition or production of food, or to symbolic or spiritual elements, such as a sacred site. The rules and expectations of behavior will vary depending on the meaning applied to the landscape and the many components of which it is comprised. Because cultural landscapes are defined by a group of people, social identity can be tied to landscapes, creating explicit associations between places and people. These social constructions of landscape mean that different groups will have different meanings and attachments in a single society, and that those meanings and attachments will change through time as those varying social groups change.5 Landscapes are a social construct and carry meaning related to the full complexity of human society. Landscapes “naturalize” customs, practices, or beliefs into spatial form, allowing access to these customs, practices, or beliefs by both living populations and archaeologists.6 The myriad dimensions of socio-​spatial expression overlap with each other and are present simultaneously, allowing landscapes to be studied from any social 3 D. Hayden, “Power of Place,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2001), 11451–​55.

4 See Michelle Langley, “Storied Landscapes Makes Us (Modern) Human: Landscape Socialisation in the Palaeolithic and Consequences for the Archaeological Record,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 32, no. 4 (2013): 614–​29 (Neanderthals); Wendy Ashmore, “Social Archaeologies of Landscape,” in A Companion to Social Archaeology, ed. Lynn Meskell and Robert Preucel (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 255–​71 (ancient Maya); and Luis Álvarez Munárriz, “The Cultural Landscape Concept/​La categoria del paisaje cultural,” AIBR, Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red 6, no. 1 (2011): 57–​80 (modern societies). 5 Ashmore, “Social Archaeologies,” 259. 6 Ashmore, “Social Archaeologies,” 256.

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102 S. Stull, M. Twomey, and M. Rogers perspective, whether ecological, economic, ritual, aesthetic, feminist, or symbolic, as all these elements of social life are among the influences which are imbued into landscapes. Social inequality is present in landscapes, and these intensely political constructions shape patterns of perception. People experience the world through these structures of power.7 The long-​term survival of landscapes makes these elements of cultural beliefs accessible, at least in part, to a modern individual. The landscape can be considered a parallel to a manuscript palimpsest, in which new texts are written over the older components, but portions of those older components are still visible. Unlike palimpsests, though, landscapes often consciously incorporate existing elements as they are created by later groups. Meanings do change, but preserved landscapes allow a modern scholar, traveler, or visitor to directly experience historic landscapes. Landscape approaches have been used by a variety of authors in their examination of medieval European castles.8 Two examples will be discussed here: the use of symbolic landscapes of kingship in Ireland, and McManama-​Kearin’s use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems, which is essentially a digitally annotated map that can contain a significant amount of information) while discussing landscapes of Anglo-​Norman castles in Ireland.9 Viewscapes and the construction of social and political identity have a long history in Ireland. The early medieval use of symbolic landscapes in Ireland was a central part of political authority. Space and landscapes structured and reproduced royal authority, with Tara and Cashel paramount for ceremony and inauguration and nearby sites for public and political assembly. The full range of the Irish royal hierarchy exercised power through these landscapes of governance.10 The places of public assembly were often burial sites where ancestors were venerated as part of the assembly. Linking social and political identity with burial sites shows the vital role of places in creating, maintaining, and reinforcing continuity and legitimacy in the Irish cultural landscape.11 7 Ashmore, “Social Archaeologies,” 260.

8 For example, Matthew Johnson, Behind the Castle Gate (New York: Routledge, 2002); Robert Liddiard, Castles in Context: Power, Symbolism and Landscape, 1066 to 1500 (Oxford: Windgather, 2005); Shaun Richardson, “A Room with a View? Looking Outwards from Late Medieval Harewood,” Archaeological Journal 167, no.1 (2010): 14–​54.

9 James G. Schryver, “Medieval Kings and Symbolic Landscapes in Western Ireland,” in From West to East: Current Approaches to Medieval Archaeology, ed. Scott D. Stull (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), 72–​90; Patrick Gleeson, “Kingdoms, Communities, and Óenaig: Irish Assembly Practices in their Northwest European Context,” Journal of the North Atlantic 8 (2015): 33–​51; Lisa Karen McManama-​Kearin, The Use of GIS in Determining the Role of Visibility in the Siting of Early Anglo-​Norman Castles in Ireland, BAR British Series 575 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2013). 10 Gleeson, “Kingdoms, Communities, and Óenaig,” 34.

11 Gleeson, “Kingdoms, Communities, and Óenaig,” 35–​36; Patrick Gleeson, “Gathering Communities: Locality, Governance and Rulership in Early Medieval Ireland,” World Archaeology 50, no. 1 (2018): 100–​20 at 102–​3ff.

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These practices were continued in the later medieval period. For example, the O’Conor kings used the existing landscapes of authority in Co. Roscommon such as Tulsk and Rathcroghan for their royal sites. These landscapes of power, though changed from their earlier meanings and communities, retained a memory of authority.12 McManama-​Kearin examined twenty Anglo-​Norman stone castles in Ireland with regard to visibility of and from the surrounding landscapes. Creating maps using GIS techniques to tie information to locations around these castles, McManama-​Kearin determined that visibility, notably through the aspect of “prominence,” was a significant factor in siting these Anglo-​Norman castles. Of the twenty castles, thirteen were either topographically or architecturally prominent in the landscape. Of the remaining seven, two were short-​lived royal castles and four functioned as estate centres. Eleven of the castles also were built on sites associated with a predecessor kingdom or estate, continuing the role of landscapes in political construction in early medieval Ireland.13 McManama-​Kearin’s survey of the Anglo-​Norman castles of Ireland included Trim.14 Castles are thus centres of political, military, social, and cultural power and activity. They are projections of military power as well as instruments used to establish patterns of authority. Castles have the dual purpose of establishing and maintaining social and political inequality over the local population and establishing nobles in their respective territories. In part, Anglo-​Norman castles in Ireland used appropriation of existing places of authority as a component in the landscape of power they created.15 Functional and utilitarian elements of a lordship were part of the constructed landscape around a castle, as the castle’s lord controlled those everyday economic places. The castle reinforced the lord’s role in the area’s day-​to-​day life, and was not just an expression of military strength or martial domination. Different people would have different perspectives on the constructed landscapes: Trim Castle may have projected power and authority to some while others saw it as an instrument of intimidation and fear.16

Trim Historical Overview

Trim was the site of the early medieval Kingship of Lóegaire, ruled by the Uí Chaindelbáin family during the twelfth century. This kingship was a lesser kingdom within the Kingdom of Mide or Meath. Trim was attacked and burned in 1128, 1143, and 1155 by neighbouring rivals, and Cú Ulad Ua Caindelbáin, King of Lóegaire, was murdered in 1157 by an unnamed person. His successor, Lorcán, was murdered in 1160 in Trim by Cú

12 Schryver, “Medieval Kings and Symbolic Landscapes.” 13 McManama-​Kearin, Use of GIS, 132–​38. 14 McManama-​Kearin, Use of GIS, 119–​27. 15 McManama-​Kearin, Use of GIS, 138.

16 Tadhg O’Keeffe, “Concepts of ‘Castle’ and the Construction of Identity in Medieval and Post-​ Medieval Ireland,” Irish Geography 34, no. 1 (2001): 69–​88 at 76.

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104 S. Stull, M. Twomey, and M. Rogers Ulad’s son Áed, who reclaimed the kingship for his branch of the family.17 Irish law codes indicated there were three ranks of king during the early medieval period, and Lóegaire was one of the lower ranks.18 Kingship in Ireland was rooted in specific places, making Trim a socially and politically significant location.19 During the Anglo-​Norman conquest, Hugh de Lacy was granted the lands of the Kingdom of Meath, in addition to being Constable of Dublin. De Lacy conducted a campaign to conquer his new lands, and the 1172 construction of a fortress in the former royal territory of Trim began on lands owned by the church. The earliest fortification was a ring fortress, destroyed in the winter of 1172 and rebuilt in 1173.20 It is believed that the stone castle at Trim was begun between 1174 and 1182 and construction was probably completed before Hugh de Lacy’s death in 1186.21 This construction would have included the stone keep, the most prominent portion of Trim Castle (Figure 12). Walter de Lacy, Hugh’s son, had intermittent control over the castle beginning in 1189, with royal control at various points until 1215. In 1224, Trim Castle was held in rebellion by Walter’s brother Hugh, and the castle was besieged for seven weeks. Walter retained control of Trim Castle from 1224 until his death in 1241.22 After a period of royal control, Trim Castle came under the control of Matilda de Lacy, Walter’s granddaughter, and her husband, Geoffrey de Geneville, in 1254. The castle is likely to have been renovated at this time, with work going on into the mid-​1260s. After a period of inattention, the castle was the main residence for de Geneville from 1284 to 1294. When Matilda died in 1304, the castle passed to her granddaughter Joan and Joan’s husband Roger Mortimer. Trim was attacked in 1309 by a neighbouring noble, then again in 1315 by Edward Bruce, brother of the King of Scotland. Trim was repaired and refortified after both events. A constable was appointed in 1322 to oversee the castle in Mortimer’s absence. In 1327, Roger Mortimer overthrew Edward II and took control of Trim again; Roger was executed in 1330 by Edward III. Joan was granted the castle again in 1337, but control changed hands between her and a royal deputy until 1347; Joan passed it to her grandson, also named Roger Mortimer, in 1348. Joan apparently lived in Trim until her death in 1356. The younger Roger paid a steward to oversee the castle for the next several years, and a series of constables oversaw the castle until 1372. In 1366 and 1367, while under royal control, the castle was refurbished and repaired; 17 Seán Duffy, “ ‘The Key to the Pale’: A History of Trim Castle,” in Alan R. Hayden, Trim Castle, Co. Meath: Excavations 1995–​8, Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Archaeological Monograph Series 6 (Dublin:Stationery Office, 2011), 6–​28 at 6–​7. 18 Aidan O’Sullivan et al., Early Medieval Ireland, AD 400–​1100: The Evidence from Archaeological Investigations (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2014), 80. 19 Gleeson, “Kingdoms, Communities, and Óenaig,” 34.

20 Alan R. Hayden, Trim Castle, Co. Meath: Excavations 1995–​8, Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Archaeological Monograph Series 6 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2011), 71, 81–​82, 94–​104. 21 Duffy, “ ‘Key to the Pale,’ ” 7–​10.

22 Duffy, “ ‘Key to the Pale,’ ” 10–​13.

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Figure 12. Trim Castle Keep, Co. Meath, Ireland. Photo by Scott Stull.

in 1368 the castle was given to Edmund Mortimer, son of Roger and husband to Phillipa, granddaughter of King Edward III. When Edmund Mortimer arrived in Ireland in 1372, not only was he master of Trim Castle but earl of Ulster and lord of Connacht. These lands were not under English control, making Trim a focal location in Edmund’s rule. Edmund did not remain in Ireland but engaged in a variety of royal expeditions in France and served in Parliament, not returning until 1380, then dying in 1381.23 Edmund’s son Roger was 7 years old at his father’s death, so the castle was again under royal control until 1393. Roger Mortimer was lieutenant of Ireland, actively campaigned to recapture territory which had been captured by Irish nobles, and used Trim as his residence from 1394 until his death in battle in 1398. Edmund Mortimer was 6 years old when his father died but had been named heir to the throne of England by followers of Richard II. A significant portion of Richard’s treasury was kept at Trim Castle, the future Henry V was held as a hostage there, and the duke of Surrey in his office as lieutenant of Ireland resided at the castle. Edmund Mortimer did not gain control of Trim Castle until 1424, shortly before his death of the plague in 1425. Richard of York became the next lord of Trim, but again was a minor so the castle remained in royal control. He came to Ireland as lieutenant in 1449, and Trim was one of his residences. It served as an administrative centre of the Yorkist faction in Ireland during the War of 23 Duffy, “ ‘Key to the Pale,’ ” 14–​19.

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106 S. Stull, M. Twomey, and M. Rogers the Roses. On Richard’s death, his son became lord of Trim and was proclaimed King of England in 1461; Trim was in use as a royal castle from that point. One of Edward IV’s actions was to establish a mint at Trim. Trim had a meeting of Parliament in 1485, and the castle was overseen by constables for the crown into the sixteenth century.24 As a royal castle, Trim was attacked in 1534 during an Irish rebellion and held for several months before it was retaken by royal forces and a larger garrison installed. By 1540 the castle was described as “totally in decay,” full of cattle and dung in 1576, and in ruins in 1601.25 The role of Trim Castle as an active part of the social and political landscape had come to an end.

Projective Views from Trim Castle

Projective views are what is seen from the castle and were a means to maintain visual control of the surroundings. These viewscapes were actively constructed, with windows, towers, turrets, and wall walks placed to ensure that the important sites of a lordship were visible from the castle.26 Trim Castle was built to establish control over the lands near Trim. One of the main ways to establish control was to have direct oversight of specific areas of the landscape through constructed vantage points. Landscape areas of particular interest are transportation networks, religious institutions, economic centres, and aesthetic and status markers. The oversight vantage points in castles were nearly always controlled by the elite rather than the military garrison or other residents, marking the castle as a structure designed to literally and figuratively elevate the castle lords. The significance of the projective views offered by castles in the medieval mindset is evident, as we discuss below, in medieval romances and allegories, empowering individuals and expressing moral and religious hierarchies. Transportation was centred on the system of roadways and on the River Boyne (Figures 13–​14). The Boyne had been a means of travel into the Irish interior from ancient times. Trim seems to get its name from the ford, Áth Truim (ford of the elder tree), revealing the long history of road transportation as well.27 The ford was replaced with a bridge, and the fourteenth-​century bridge is still standing (Figure 15). The castle had a landing on the river for direct access for river travel. These significant transportation paths were in direct view of the castle: the river, the road from Dublin, the city gate from Dublin, and the gates between Trim and the agricultural fields. The religious institutions of Trim are the cathedral and the monastic communities: the Augustinian Abbey of St. Mary’s, most notable for the ruined tower known today as the Yellow Steeple; the Franciscan Friary, adjacent to Market Street and 24 Duffy, “ ‘Key to the Pale,’ ” 19–​23. 25 Duffy, “ ‘Key to the Pale,’ ” 24–​25.

26 Richardson, “A Room with a View?”

27 Michael Potterton, “Introduction,” in Uncovering Medieval Trim: Archaeological Excavations in and around Trim, Co. Meath, ed. Michael Potterton and Matthew Seaver (Dublin: Four Courts, 2009), 25–​56 at 25.

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Figure 13. Trim Castle and the River Boyne. Photo by Scott Stull.

Figure 14. View of Porchfields from Trim Castle. Photo by Scott Stull.

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Figure 15. Fourteenth-​century bridge in Trim. Photo by Scott Stull.

the River Boyne, directly below the castle; and the Black Friary, outside the northern walls of medieval Trim. St. Patrick’s Cathedral dates to perhaps as early as the fifth century and served as the nucleus for the early medieval community at Trim.28 St. Mary’s was either founded by Hugh de Lacy or restored by him in 1183 or 1186.29 The location of the abbey directly across the River Boyne and on a similar elevation to Trim Castle marks it as one of the dominant components of the medieval landscape and it was strongly associated with the de Lacy family. The Franciscan (or Grey) Friary was located where Market Street turned to cross the River Boyne, at the location of the modern courthouse. This friary was under direct view of the castle and its cemetery was located very close to the gatehouse of Trim Castle. The date the friary was founded is unclear but it was in place by 1260. The date and position of the friary show a strong connection to the inhabitants of both the town and the castle.30 The Dominican (or 28 Eoghan Kieran, “Burials at St Patrick’s Cathedral: New Evidence for the Early Medieval Ecclesiastical Site at Trim,” in Uncovering Medieval Trim, ed. Potterton and Seaver, 72–​81.

29 Tadhg O’Keeffe, “Trim before 1224: New Thoughts on the Caput of de Lacy Lordship in Ireland,” in From Carickfergus to Carcassonne: The Epic Deeds of Hugh de Lacy during the Albigensian Crusade, ed. Paul Duffy, Tadhg O’Keeffe, and Jean-​Michel Picard, Outremer: Studies in the Crusades and the Latin East 5 (Brussels: Brepols, 2017), 31–​56 at 36.

30 Finola O’Carroll, “What Lies Beneath: The Development of Castle Street, Trim,” in Uncovering Medieval Trim, ed. Potterton and Seaver, 271–​92 at 273, 285–​86.

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Black) Friary was founded by Geoffrey de Geneville in 1263 and, while outside the direct viewscape of the castle, was a significant component in establishing the social landscape of medieval Trim.31 There are two main economic centres visible from Trim Castle: the town of Trim with its market and production areas, and the farmland known as the “Porchfields” (Figure 14). The Porchfields were lands used for agricultural production under the control of the castle lords, and the medieval ridge and furrow field patterns are still evident. There were several mills along the river’s edge in the Porchfields, another source of revenue for the lords of Trim Castle. O’Keeffe suggests the original market area for Trim was on High Street and moved to the current Market Street by the de Lacy family between 1186 and 1224.32 If this is the case, the new Market Street would have been under more direct oversight from the castle. Both areas were a significant part of the economic life of Trim and the castle, and both were overseen by the castle lords.33 Much of the parkland of Trim has been developed in more recent times, but a deer park was associated with Trim Castle by the late fourteenth century. Documentary sources refer to an orchard, a dovecote, and a park.34 Trim is one of the castle sites in Ireland where fallow deer bones have been recovered.35 Parks are a means to display status but were also a dedicated place for hunting. Hunting deer was reserved for the nobility and in addition to providing venison, an integral part of the noble diet, it was means to create status, identity, and reinforce social power over the landscape, making parks a fundamental part of noble life.36

31 Matthew Seaver, Mark Kelly, and Clara Travers, “Burials at the Well: Excavations at the Black Friary, Trim,” in Uncovering Medieval Trim, ed. Potterton and Seaver, 293–​301 at 293–​94. 32 O’Keeffe, “Trim before 1224,” 38.

33 See Donal Fallon, “Excavations at 18 Market Street, Trim,” in Uncovering Medieval Trim, ed. Potterton and Seaver, 209–​24; Alan R. Hayden, “Excavation of a Small Site at Market Street, Trim,” in Uncovering Medieval Trim, ed. Potterton and Seaver, 2009), 238–​43; Alan R. Hayden, “Excavation of a Site at High Street, Trim,” in Uncovering Medieval Trim, ed. Potterton and Seaver, 257–​70; Carmel Duffy, “A Medieval Stone Building and Other Deposits at 27 High Street, Trim,” in Uncovering Medieval Trim, ed. Potterton and Seaver, 244–​56. 34 McManama-​Kearin, Use of GIS, 120.

35 F. Beglane, “Deer and Identity in Medieval Ireland,” in Bestial Mirrors: Using Animals to Construct Human Identities in Medieval Europe, ed. Aleksander Pluskowski et al., Animals as Material Culture in the Middle Ages 3 (Vienna: Vienna Institute for Archaeological Science, 2010), 77–​84; M. Murphy and K. O’Connor, “Castles and Deer Parks in Anglo-​Norman Ireland,” Eolas: The Journal of the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies 1 (2006): 53–​70 at 63–​64.

36 S. A. Mileson, “The Sociology of Park Creation in Medieval England,” in The Medieval Park: New Perspectives, ed. Robert Liddiard (Oxford: Windgather, 2007), 11–​26 at 13–​18; Robin S. Oggins, “Game in the Medieval English Diet,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd ser., 5 (2018): 201–​17.

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Digital Record of Trim McManama-​Kearin recorded the landscape around the castle through a digital elevation model (DEM) as a spatial model distinct from the GIS model mentioned above. The DEM, combined with photographs from and of the castle, was used to reconstruct the viewscape for each castle. She observed that, in many cases, the surviving elements of a castle were ruinous, dangerous, or inaccessible. Our approach was to make a laser scan of the castle and its surroundings. Any spot in that digital scan could be used as a viewing point, reconstructing the view from inaccessible or destroyed locations. The advantage of a laser scan over a DEM model is that the DEM is an averaged surface model of the landscape, which does not have much precision at a specific site but is useful for broad comparisons. Laser scans are time-​consuming and not available for most castle sites but allow for the precise construction of a medieval viewscape such as the surviving elements around Trim Castle.37 A digital version of Trim Castle was created using Leica C10 and P40 3D laser scanners (Figure 16). These scanners use pulses of lasers and time-​of-​flight calculations to record the distance between the scanner and the object being recorded. The instruments spin the laser 360 degrees in the vertical and then the entire housing rotates 360 degrees horizontally. This allows the scanners to capture a sphere of data with only the spot below the scanner missing due to the instrument and tripod upon which it sits. The scanners are capable of recording distances out to 270m based on the reflective nature of the surface being recorded. At Trim Castle positional readings were taken every 5mm inside and outside of all accessible architecture. Scanning begins by setting up the scanner on an initial location: at Trim Castle a metal access cover was used. The scanner is leveled, the height is measured, and the coordinates of the location are programmed into the instrument. The first location was assigned the arbitrary coordinate values of 10,000m × 50,000m × 500m. To facilitate moving the scanners throughout the site a local grid system is established by identifying a second point to create the cardinal directions for the grid system. The second point is identified based on the preferred orientation of the grid and by finding a second non-​ movable point such as a second metal access cover. A target designed to work with the scanner is placed over the point and the location of that point is recorded by the scanner. The time-​of-​flight distance technique uses the time it takes a pulse of laser light to travel from the scanner, bounce off the surface being recorded, and return to the scanner. Because the speed of the laser light in air is known, the time and speed can be used to calculate the distance between the scanner and the object. The Leica scanners have very precise horizontal and vertical angular measurements that combined with the distance and geometric calculations result in an X, Y, and Z coordinate for the point where the pulse of laser light hits the surface.

37 McManama-​Kearin, Use of GIS, 4–​5.

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Figure 16. 3D scanning team at Trim Castle, 2016. Photo by Scott Stull.

The Leica C10 scanner can pulse the laser light 50,000 times per second, and the P40 scanner up to 1,000,000 times per second. This allows millions of data points to be gathered in just minutes. The scanners also take a dome of photographs that post-​ acquisition software can use to assign Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) color coding to the X, Y, and Z data. After scanning from the first location the scanner is moved to the second location. After setting up and leveling the scanner, a distance check to the first location is used to orient the scanner at the new location. A scan is conducted from the second location, along with the dome of photographs. From the second location a third point is established in the next area to be scanned, the scanner is moved to this third location, and the process is repeated. For architecture, the scanner is set to 5mm, but for the area around the architecture, 0.200m (20cm) provides sufficient detail. To achieve this detailed scan and the context scan (trees, topography, modern signage, etc.) the scanner is first set to 0.200m × 0.200m × 100.000m distance and a full spherical scan is conducted. Because the scanner uses spherical coordinates, objects closer to the scanner will be recorded in higher resolution than objects further away. The architecture of interest is then scanned at 0.005m × 0.005m at maximum distance from the feature while only selecting the area of interest to scan (instead of a full sphere). This method reduces scanning time to obtain both a context scan and a detail scan. By using the grid system, the individual location scans can be “copy and pasted” together and the scans fall in the right spot with relation to each other. This eliminates

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Figure 17. Point cloud record of Trim Castle and landscape. Image by Michael “Bodhi” Rogers.

the need to do post-​acquisition alignment of the individual scans. At Trim Castle, seventy-​six scan locations were needed to record the inside and outside of the curtain wall and the local context such as the Porchfields and Sheep’s Gate, a surviving section of the medieval town wall. The inside of the keep took an additional eighty-​four scan locations. After gathering the digital positional data there are additional steps for preparing the resulting point cloud for display. Because Trim Castle is a busy tourist site, it was difficult to complete the project without catching tourists in some of the scans. The scanners also record birds flying through the area while scanning, and the sensor that records the returning laser pulse also reacts when pointed directly at the Sun. All of these extraneous data are manually deleted from each scan to create a “cleaned” digital version of Trim Castle (Figure 17). The photographs are also adjusted for exposure, brightness, and white balance before applying the color to the point cloud. The original ~230 Gigabytes of data are stored in a Leica proprietary format on a research computer in a university research laboratory and a copy was given to the Irish Office of Public Works. Data can be converted from the Leica format to several more common file types when needed, with the most common being a comma-​separated file type or Autodesk Revit file type. The point cloud is a truly three-​dimensional photograph that one can rotate, move up and down, and zoom in and out. Using the computer mouse as a controller one can walk through the castle ground and even “fly” through walls. Because the point cloud is based on X, Y, and Z positional data, one can take measurements of building heights and window width and create cutaways to examine wall thicknesses and see the relationship between architectural features otherwise difficult to observe.38 This technology is 38 Michael Rogers et al., “Laser-​Scanning Trim Castle,” Archaeology Ireland 32, no. 2 (2018): 34–​39.

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Figure 18. Digital reconstruction of missing north tower, Trim Castle. Image by Michael “Bodhi” Rogers.

excellent for conservation purposes, for engaging the public with heritage sites, and providing detailed information for scholarly research. The point cloud can also be used for digital reconstructions. For Trim Castle, the data obtained through these techniques allowed for a reconstruction of the missing north tower of the keep by copying the south tower and digitally pasting it into the proper location of the former north tower (Figure 18). This is based upon an assumption that the two towers are similar, but once pasted in one can use the computer mouse to now walk around those missing rooms and look out on the viewscape formerly seen from their windows (Figure 19). The reconstructed view is directly focused on the Yellow Steeple at St. Mary’s, the religious institution either founded or refounded by Hugh de Lacy, the castle builder. This focal view reinforces the association between St. Mary’s and the lords of the castle and most likely Hugh de Lacy.

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Figure 19. Reconstructed view from missing north tower, Trim Castle. Image by Michael “Bodhi” Rogers.

Castle Viewscapes in Medieval Literature Throughout their evolution as residential and defensive structures, medieval castles such as Trim were designed for observation. They featured excellent vantage points for keeping watch on their surroundings—​their viewscapes—​both near and far. Easily seen from a distance and impossible to ignore close-​up, castles were targets for attack, stations of defence, and centres of political, military, social, and cultural power and activity. The defensive role of castles is well illustrated in medieval literature, which features many episodes in which a castle’s guards or residents spot an attacking army and mobilize the defence. Such scenes tend toward realism, and they occur in historical, pseudo-​historical, and fictional narratives alike.39 Some medieval romances subvert the strategic military purposes of castle viewscapes by allowing challengers to slip into a castle unseen in order to issue a challenge to a king and his court, but this convention is most prominent in Arthurian romances about the exploits of the Round Table knights, 39 Malcolm Hebron, The Medieval Siege: Theme and Image in Middle English Romance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).

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in which Arthur plays the role of hospitable, if somewhat passive, host.40 As noted above, castles often maintained their own private deer parks as hunting preserves. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (last half of the fourteenth century), well-​known to modern readers, there are three major scenes of hunting in the environs of an emparked castle, and the hunting is realistically described as a deer drive.41 Our focus, however, is on how the literary conventions regarding castles in romances and religious allegories apply other social and cultural uses of castle viewscapes. These conventions are strikingly devoid of architectural details except those that are directly involved in the action being narrated. This scarcity of architectural detail makes us dependent on the physical evidence provided by studies at castles such as Trim for an understanding of castle viewscapes. What medieval audiences would have known from everyday experience must be reconstructed for us living in the modern world. A common convention that often initiates the plots of medieval romances involves a lady gazing from a castle tower down at a knight in combat on the field below, a behavior recognized by contemporaries as a display of erotic attraction.42 In contrast, by adapting the realism of siege narratives to psychological ends, moral and religious allegories imagine castle viewscapes as symbolic landscapes of the human soul. Although our archeological investigation focuses on Trim Castle in Ireland, our examples will come from English and French medieval literature. Trim was, in its fullest expression, an Anglo-​Norman castle, which means that castles like Trim post-​date most medieval Irish literature, whose temporal setting is the mythic past.43 Trim’s construction and 40 This convention is found as early as Chrétien de Troyes’s late twelfth-​century French Le chevalier de la charrete (Lancelot), ed. Mario Roques, Les Classiques Français du Moyen Âge 86 (Paris: Champion, 1972) and as late as the anonymous late fourteenth-​century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes, The Works of the Gawain Poet (London: Penguin, 2014). In Charrete, the challenger Maleagant suddenly enters and announces that he has seized part of Arthur’s kingdom, demanding Guinevere as ransom, to which Arthur accedes. Lancelot eventually wins her release by defeating Maleagant in judicial combat. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the challenger is the enchanted Green Knight, who demands an exchange of blows with his axe as a “Christmas game.” 41 See Michael W. Twomey, “How Green was the Green Knight? Forest Ecology at Hautdesert,” Arthurian Literature 30 (2013): 27–​53 at 32–​50, and sources cited therein.

42 See Aldo Scaglione, Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 68–​86. On the supposed erotic power of chivalry over women, modern studies of chivalry typically cite the Livre de chevalerie (Book of Chivalry) of Geoffroi de Charny (ca. 1306–​56). Cf. Geoffroi de Charny, A Knight’s own Book, trans. Elspeth Kennedy with an introduction by Richard W. Kaeuper (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), chaps. 12, 20, 43. A medieval collection of illustrations depicting women looking on adoringly from up in a castle while knights do battle is the Codex Manesse, made in Zürich ca. 1305–​40, now Heidelberg University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 848. A digital copy of the manuscript is on the University of Heidelberg webpage: https://​doi.org/​10.11588/​dig​lit.2222. Relevant illustrations are on fols 17r, 42r, 43v, 52r, 190v, 192v, 197v, 204r, and 321v. 43 In sagas such as the Táin Bó Cúailnge (the Cattle Raid of Cooley), forts are residences and battle takes place at distance from them, not in siege form. In tales such as Acallam na Senórach

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116 S. Stull, M. Twomey, and M. Rogers its occupation during the Anglo-​Norman period in Ireland make it an ideal example of the castles that were familiar to writers and readers of medieval English and French literature. The literary forms that we discuss in this section would have been familiar either as entertainment or as moral instruction for the English lords of Trim. The mere presence of castle viewscapes in literature would have been a reminder to all occupants of Trim that castles were both instruments and symbols of political conquest and authority. Castles in Romances

A common convention in medieval romances depicts a knight in chivalric action below the walls of a castle while being observed admiringly by a woman in a castle window high above. In this convention, the physical setting represents the emotionally felt distance of erotic desire, while at the same time it alludes to the observation points in the castle. However, in doing so, this convention reverses the normal social order by placing the woman in a position occupied by men in war. The social superiority implied by the woman’s physically higher stationing in the tower suggests the status of women in courtly-​love relationships, in which on the one hand the lady is masculinized by virtue of her power over the men who desire her, while on the other hand she is rigidly constrained by the cultural assumption that a man’s worthiness as a lover is proved by his prowess in battle. An early, paradigmatic occurrence of this convention is in the French Roman d’Eneas (ca. 1160), an adaptation of Virgil’s Aeneid that medievalizes the Roman original by extensively dramatizing the psychological effects of love on both Eneas and Lavine. Whereas Virgil portrays Lavinia as the unwilling trophy awarded to the victor, in contrast, the medieval Eneas fully exploits the idea that war and love are complementary forms of conquest. From a tower overlooking the field, Lavine glimpses Eneas (ll. 8047–​72) and instantly is struck by the arrow of Love, an image that both evokes events in actual warfare and affirms the equation of martial superiority—​here implied by Love’s archery as parallel to Eneas’s skill in battle—​with desirability in love. The lovestruck Lavine describes her helplessness against love in terms of the failure of her metaphorical castle architecture: “What defence have I against Love? Neither castle nor tower avails at all against him, nor high wall, nor deep moat” (ll. 8633–​35). To attract his attention, she writes Eneas a letter that she wraps around an arrow and has an archer shoot near him—​in effect returning the arrow of Love that pierced her, but also re-​enacting the defence of a castle in war—​and this succeeds at winning his love

(Tales of the Elders of Ireland), hills, the favoured sites for castles such as Trim, serve as launching pads for warrior hordes or as meeting points for lovers, but their viewscapes have no military or cultural role. The Táin exists in twelfth-​century manuscripts, but its language dates to the seventh and eighth centuries. Cf. The Táin, trans. Ciaran Carson (London: Penguin, 2008). Acallam exists in fifteenth-​century manuscripts, but its language dates to about 1200. Cf. Tales of the Elders of Ireland, trans. Anne Dooley and Harry Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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for her. Eneas’s eventual victory over Turnus takes place while Lavine watches from her tower (ll. 9275–​9814).44 After the Roman d’Eneas, romances needed only slight reference to the convention of the lady watching from a castle tower in order to invoke it fully. The literature of King Arthur offers many examples. In Chrétien de Troyes’ Charrete, Guinevere, held hostage by Maleagant, watches her rescuer Lancelot from a tower when he crosses into Maleagant’s kingdom via the treacherous Sword Bridge (Figure 20) and she watches Lancelot’s subsequent duels with Maleagant from a castle tower.45 Chrétien’s story was taken up into the so-​called Vulgate (or Lancelot-​Grail) Cycle of prose Arthurian romances written in the early thirteenth century, which gave it even wider circulation in Europe at a time when French culture was the European standard.46 From the Vulgate Cycle, Sir Thomas Malory adapted the story into English for Le Morte Darthur (1470), which became the canonical English version of the legend of King Arthur. Elsewhere in the Morte, Malory made his own contribution to this convention in his “Tale of Gareth,” where the lady Lyones and her sister Lynet watch Gareth battle the Red Knight, who is besieging their castle. Combat is joined in a “lytyll vale undir the castell,” where “all that were in the castell at the sege myght beholde the batayle.”47 Just before the duel, Gareth looks up to the window and is immediately inspired to fight harder by the sight of Lyones. Malory adds a note of comedy to this convention by having Lyones’s sister Lynet shout out rebukes to Gareth, rather than encouragement, whenever the Red Knight gets the upper hand.48 The foregoing examples transfer the military function of castle viewscapes to a social dynamic that affirms the ethical norms of courtly love by placing women in the dominant physical and social position, thus reversing the usual social hierarchy by which men controlled women. However, in two other examples of the same convention, the erotic gaze is illicit: Marie de France’s Lanval (late twelfth century) and Chrétien de 44 Le roman d’Eneas: Édition critique d’apres le manuscrit B.N. fr. 60, ed. Aimé Petit (Paris: Livres de Poche, 1997; reprinted 2014). The text is cited from Eneas, A Twelfth-​Century French Romance, trans. John A. Yunck (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). See also Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 168–​219.

45 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS fr. 115, fol. 367v (ca. 1475), from the Vulgate Cycle’s Prose Lancelot, which includes a prose version of Chrétien’s Charrete. Artist: Atelier of Evrard d’Espinques; manuscript made for Jacques d’Armagnac, duke of Nemours. Downloaded on December 8, 2020 from: https://​fr.wikipe​dia.org/​wiki/​Lance​lot-​Gra​al_​(BNF,_​Fr.113-​116)#/​ media/​Fich​ier:Lancel​ot_​p​assa​nt_​l​e_​po​nt_​d​e_​l’Épée.jpg. The entire MS may be viewed at the BnF’s Gallica website: http://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​btv1b6​0000​92x.image. 46 Lancelot: Roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, ed. Alexandre Micha, 9 vols., Textes Littéraires Français 247, 249, 262, 278, 283, 286, 288, 307, 315 (Geneva: Droz, 1978–​1983), vol. 2, chaps. 36–​42; Lancelot-​Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-​Vulgate in Translation, ed. Norris J. Lacey, trans. Norris J. Lacey et al., 5 vols. (New York: Garland, 1993–​96), 3:3–​31. 47 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. P. J. C. Field, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Brewer, 2013), 1:250. 48 Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 1:252.

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Figure 20. Lancelot crossing the sword bridge while Guinevere looks on from the tower, ca. 1475. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS fr. 115, fol. 367v. Image in the public domain.

Troyes’s Le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the Lion; ca. 1170–​1180), both of which are among the earliest Arthurian narratives. In Lanval, in which a fairy queen grants both her love and her wealth to a poor, socially outcast, but worthy knight, the castle viewscape comes into play when Arthur’s queen (unnamed, but presumably Guinevere) secretly looks out of her tower window one day and fixes a predatory gaze on the now-​fashionable Lanval, below in the garden (ll. 222–​24). Here a tower, the most typical vantage point for oversight in a castle, is the location of the queen’s bedroom, and its window becomes an instrument abetting her sexual predation.49 Descending from her chamber to the garden, she offers herself to Lanval (ll. 263–​68), but Lanval, loyal both to his fairy queen and King Arthur, refuses her, whereupon the spurned queen flies into a rage and accuses him of sexual harassment, a charge from which Lanval is saved by his fairy queen only at the last minute before 49 Marie de France, Lanval, ed. A. Ewart, Lais (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965); English translation: The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby (London: Penguin, 1986). As a noblewoman living in Anglo-​Norman England, Marie would have been familiar with the architectural features and rules governing the social spaces of Norman castles.

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being executed. In Lanval the castle viewscape’s facing inward toward the castle thus indicates the reversal of morality involved when the observer’s gaze is turned on an object within the castle’s protection. In Le chevalier au lion, the sex roles are reversed, and the knight’s sexual attraction to the lady Laudine, whom he watches from above is complicated by his having killed her husband, Esclados, in a duel off-​site. As in Lanval, the castle viewscape is within the castle, and again this reversal represents the immorality of sexual predation. Yvain is here trapped between the portcullises of Esclados’s castle gate, from which he sees Laudine, Esclados’s widow, tear her hair and clothing in grief, and he instantly, transgressively, falls in love. Underlying the story of Yvain’s sinful attraction to the wife of a man he has killed is the biblical story of David and Bathsheba, medieval illustrations of which anachronistically depict David in a castle window, gazing on Bathsheba (Figure 21).50 Like David, the sinful Yvain, guilty of murder, undergoes a protracted atonement that transforms his sin into an example of the theological idea of felix culpa (fortunate fall)—​sin that leads to redemption. Although Yvain’s transgression seems to validate the association of chivalric prowess and desirability in love, a basic ethos of chivalric romances, Chrétien de Troyes calls that value system into question by making Yvain’s atonement take the form of rescuing women from predators whose various offences imitate his own sin, and many of these offences take place on the grounds of castles.51 The romance convention of the watcher in the window was susceptible to alterations that became memes recognizable to a literary audience accustomed to an aesthetic of repetition and variation.52 For example, the literal sight of the beloved from on high in a castle is changed to an imaginary sight of the beloved in the late twelfth-​century La prise d’Orange (The Conquest of Orange), a chanson de geste from the cycle of Guillaume d’Orange (William of Orange). In it, watching his own castle viewscape one morning in May stimulates Guillaume’s desire to win the distant castle of Orange and marry Orable, the Saracen queen residing there, even though he has only heard about them from his friend Gilbert of Lenu (ll. 39–​395), but never seen them.53 After a number of 50 Besançon, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 156: Horae Virginis Mariae ad usum trecensis ecclesiae (Hours of the Virgin Mary according to the use of the church of Troyes), fol. 189 (late fifteenth century). Image from Christiane Raynaud, “Les relations de l’homme et du jardin au xve siècle dans les livres religieux, derniers échos du langage iconographique médiéval,” in Vergers et jardins dans l’univers médiéval, Senefiance 28 (Aix-​en-​Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 1990); available online, 2014; downloaded April 27, 2018 from: http://​books.open​edit​ion.org/​pup/​2986.

51 Text: Le chevalier au lion (Yvain), ed. Mario Roques, Les Classiques Français du Moyen Âge 89 (Paris: Champion, 1971); translation: Arthurian Romances, trans. William W. Kibler and Carleton W. Carroll (London: Penguin, 1991). 52 The term “meme” is used by Helen Cooper to emphasize the importance of convention in romance in The English Romance in Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3.

53 La prise d’Orange, ed. Claude Régnier, 4th ed. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972). Cited from Guillaume d’Orange: Four Twelfth-​Century Epics, trans. Joan M. Ferrante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, reprinted 2001). Guillaume d’Orange is the legendary version of Guillaume de Gellone (ca. 755–​ca. 812), a cousin of Charlemagne whose triumphant military career against Muslims in

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Figure 21. David gazes at Bathsheba from a tower, late fifteenth century. Besançon, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 156, fol. 189. Image in the public domain.

trials, Guillaume wins both the castle and the lady, who is baptized, renamed Guiborc, and married to Guillaume (ll. 1861–​84). Comic and tragic variants of this convention exist, as well. A comic variant occurs in Aliscans, the sequel to La prise d’Orange, in which a bloodied Guillaume, fleeing a losing battle at Aliscans, returns to Orange and seeks admittance at the gate, only to be unrecognized by his own warden and his wife Guiborc. Guillaume has no recourse but to return to battle, and when the combat comes to the field outside Orange, Guiborc again looks out of a tower, but, seeing Guillaume in action, she recognizes him (ll. 1597–​ 1720).54 Another comic example occurs in Chrétien’s Charrete, when Lancelot begins his pursuit of Maleagant and is lodged at a castle from which he glimpses Maleagant leading Spain was followed by retirement to the monastery of Gellone (St. Guilhem-​le-​Désert), much of whose cloister is now part of the Cloisters, New York City. He was canonized in 1066.

54 Aliscans, ed. Claude Régnier, Jean Subrenat, and Andrée Subrenat (Paris: Champion, 2007). Cited from Guillaume d’Orange, trans. Ferrante. We are grateful to Alice Colby-​Hall, Professor of Romance Studies, Emerita, Cornell University, for calling our attention to La Prise d’Orange and Aliscans.

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Guinevere away in the distance. Mesmerized by the sight of his lady, Lancelot leans so far out of the window that Gawain has to pull him back in lest he fall to his death.55 The tragic possibilities of this convention are exploited in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida (ca. 1340), which Geoffrey Chaucer adapted into “The Knight’s Tale” in his Canterbury Tales (ca. 1390). Both Boccaccio and Chaucer depict Palemone/​Palamon and Arcita/​ Arcite, the Theban captives of Teseo/​Theseus, imprisoned in a tower whose viewscape looks down not on approaching enemies—​for Theseus has conquered them all—​but on a garden, in which they see the beautiful maiden Emilia/​Emelye and fall into a deadly rivalry for her that is resolved by a joust in which Arcita/​Arcite dies by accident.56 Castles in Moral and Religious Allegory

Medieval English literature’s most ambitious and profound allegorical work, William Langland’s (ca. 1325–​ca. 1390) Piers Plowman, has a castle viewscape as its initial setting: the “fair field full of folk” (C19) lying between the tower of Truth and the dale of Death (C15, 17).57 The fair field contains all manner of people pursuing their desires and occupations, and it is in this space where, through a series of dream-​visions within an overarching vision, Langland investigates questions about the morality and spirituality by which humanity ought to live. Although it is plainly a medieval castle, Truth’s residence in a tower, and therefore its divine authority, derives from biblical imagery in passages such as Proverbs 18:10, “turris fortissima nomen Domini ad ipsum currit iustus et exaltabitur” (“The name of the Lord is a strong tower: the just runneth to it, and shall be exalted”), and Psalm 60:4, “fuisti spes mea turris munitissima a facie inimici” (“For thou hast been my hope; a tower of strength against the face of the enemy”).58 Imagery such as this might seem to have helped legitimate the medieval nobility’s position of social authority by projecting an association with God onto medieval castles, but there is little 55 Text: Le chevalier de la charrete, ed. Roques, ll. 535–​70; translation: Arthurian Romances, trans. Kibler and Carroll, 214.

56 For a manuscript illustration of the two captives watching Emilia from their prison, see Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2617 Han, fol. 53r (France, ca. 1460); artist: Master of the Hours of the Duke of Burgundy; image available at University of Iowa Libraries, Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index, URL: https://​inpr​ess.lib.uiowa.edu/​femi​nae/​Deta​ilsP​age.aspx?Fem​inae​ _​ID=​30995.

57 Piers survives in three or possibly four versions (labelled A, B, C, and Z). An accessible scholarly introduction to Langland and Piers Plowman is the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, ed. Hoyt N. Duggan et al., http://​piers.chass.ncsu.edu/​. See also Helen Barr, “Major Episodes and Moments in Piers Plowman B,” in The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 15–​32; Jill Mann, “Allegory and Piers Plowman,” in The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. Cole and Galloway, 65–​82. Citation will be to the C-​text, understood to be Langland’s final version: William Langland, Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-​Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

58 Text of the Vulgate (the Bible of the medieval church): Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem; English translation: Douay-​Rheims.

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122 S. Stull, M. Twomey, and M. Rogers in Piers’s relentless critique of the clergy and laity alike that would have given comfort to the Anglo-​Norman lords of Trim. Similarly, a castle viewscape is the setting of The Castle of Perseverance, the earliest-​ known morality play in English drama. In it, Humanum Genus (Mankind) succumbs to the temptations of Mundus, Caro, and Belyal (the World, the Flesh, and the Devil) before being rescued from damnation by Confessio and Penitencia (Confession and Penance), who protect him in the Castle of Perseverance. The castle viewscape comes into the action as the staging area for an attack by Humanum Genus’s tempters, who try to win him back but who are repulsed by the Seven Virtues defending the castle. This psychomachia (psychological battle between virtues and vices) is not only acted out, it is also mapped out in the manuscript’s drawing of the set, which plainly shows the use of a central tower—​the Castle of Perseverance itself—​encircled either by a moat or by a fence (depending on the materials available to the players), beyond which are stationed God (east), Mundus (west), Caro (south), and Belyal (north) on scaffolds. A marginal note specifies that Belyal shall “have gunnepowdyr brennynge in pypys in hys handys and in hys erys and in hys ars whanne he gothe to batayl” (“have gunpowder burning in pipes in his hands and in his ears and in his arse when he goes to battle”).59 In the script, it is Malus Angelus (Evil Angel) who rallies Belyal’s troops to the attack, and after a good deal of boasting, trumpeting, and slapstick antics, they launch their attack on the Castle and its defenders, the Virtues. While the Vices physically occupy the viewscape surrounding the Castle with what must have been a vastly entertaining simulation of military assault, the Virtues within the Castle thwart them merely by speaking out against them and calling on Christ and Mary, to which is added a death threat and the intervention of the Four Daughters of God—​Misericordia, Pax, Veritas, and Justicia (Mercy, Peace, Truth, and Righteousness)—​who deliver Humanum Genus finally to God.60 Thus, as in Piers Plowman, the castle viewscape represents the ultimate authority that superseded that of the Anglo-​Norman rulers of Trim. The allegorical castle viewscape is employed in its most original fashion by Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–​1430) in Le livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies), which like Piers Plowman is an allegorical dream-​vision.61 For Christine, the City of Ladies is European civilization itself, remade out of proto-​feminist ideology and revisionist 59 An image of the stage plan and a transcription of its text is in Castle of Perseverance, ed. David N. Klausner (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2010), which is also available in the University of Rochester’s Robbins Library Digital Projects, https://​d.lib.roches​ter.edu/​teams/​text/​klaus​ner-​cas​ tle-​of-​perse​vera​nce. Citation is to this edition.

60 The psychomachia was a popular theme in illustrated medieval manuscripts and in ecclesiastical sculpture: see Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art from Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 24 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).

61 Christine de Pisan, Le Livre de la cité des dames, ed. Eric Hicks and Thérèse Moreau (Paris: Stock, 1986). Cited from The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-​Grant (London: Penguin, 1999).

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interpretations of canonical literary texts such as the Bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which were often cited as proof-​texts in antifeminist treatises. When completed, the City looks out on a “Field of Letters” (i.e., literature) as its viewscape, with Christine’s female readers recruited as its guardians, assigned with resisting antifeminist literary attacks by men.62 As the examples of Piers Plowman, The Castle of Perseverance, and Le livre de la cité des dames suggest, moral and religious allegories employing the castle viewscape as a setting challenged the comfortable social hierarchy by which powerful secular lords like those in Trim maintained themselves. Romances, in contrast, left the social hierarchy intact. Even when romances placed women in towers watching their lovers in the viewscape below, they were not challenging male authority but affirming the culture of courtly love to which both men and women at least officially subscribed. By either thwarting or reforming illegitimate erotic attraction, texts such as Lanval and Le chevalier au lion also leave the social hierarchy in place as a locus of moral authority. It is only in allegory that the various levels of this social hierarchy are critiqued; but to do that, literature’s perspective has to shift from within society to a metaphysical level above it that was unattainable by any earthly lord. And yet, in taking a metaphysical perspective, allegory remained dependent on the architectural symbolism of the castle, which in the real world was always controlled by the nobility. It is for this reason that the castle viewscape is perhaps the most representative and all-​inclusive medieval social space.

Conclusion

Trim Castle and the well-​preserved landscape around it demonstrate the vital position of castles in medieval European society. The specific role of the Anglo-​Norman castle in Ireland shaped the distribution and location of these castles of conquest, which built upon existing models of landscape use in early medieval Ireland. Documenting the castle and its landscape allows us to reconstruct spatial and experiential aspects of medieval life, both for those within the castle and those outside of it. The military role of the castle is readily apparent from its physical features, while the social role is understood best by examining the context and setting of the castle, or its landscape. This landscape is a cultural creation, with institutions and industries tied to physical elements of the landscape as well as to patterns of power and authority controlled by the elites who control the castles. The place of a castle is centred on social and economic 62 Christine received an extraordinary multilingual education in Paris from her father, who was the royal librarian for French King Charles VI. After losing her husband and father to bubonic plague in 1389, she went on to become the first woman known to support herself financially from patronage for her writing. The Book of the City of Ladies and Livre des trois vertus (Book of the Three Virtues), in English also called Treasure of the City of Ladies, both written in 1405, constitute Christine’s major polemical statements against antifeminism. For a brief introduction to Christine and her work, see Liliane Dulac, “Christine de Pizan,” in Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Katharina Wilson and Nadia Margolis (Westport: Greenwood, 2004), 187–​92.

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124 S. Stull, M. Twomey, and M. Rogers components of the landscape such as religious centres, markets, and transportation paths. Overseeing the cultural landscape is one of the functions that shaped castles and their components; understanding the construction of the castle helps us understand how castles embodied the patterns of authority in the broader medieval world. The physical setting of the castle, including views of and views from the castle, shows us the patterns present in medieval life, including economic patterns, religious activities and affiliations, and power relations. Bringing together the physical context and the medieval mindset afforded by literary texts allows us to gain a more complete understanding of the medieval world view, and thus provides a better understanding of medieval life. Literary settings are fictionalized and abstracted to meet the needs of the author but are rooted in medieval lived experience. Their ideas resonate with their medieval readers because that is a shared lived experience that is distinctly different from a modern lived experience. Even visiting standing castles today is not a full representation of that medieval experience due to the changes in the castles that have taken place over the last five hundred or more years. The reconstructed building and landscape, even a digital reconstruction, brings the modern scholar, student, or visitor closer to understanding what that shared medieval experience may have been. Castles were positioned to create a viewscape of control and oversight, supporting the social and political role of the elites who reside in that castle. At Trim, we see it manifested in the views overlooking the social and economic centres of the community: the market, the roads and gates, the river, the productive farming fields, and the religious institutions founded by the De Lacy family. Reconstructing lost aspects of the castle and establishing the visible aspects of the surviving medieval landscape in relation to social and political role of the castle and its residents reinforces this understanding of dominance and constructed authority. The De Lacy family and subsequent owners of Trim Castle were in a place that was constructed to support their literal and ideological view of the landscape, and the texts they would have read, such as the romances, reinforced their perspective. Texts which challenged elite social control still used the allegory of the castle as the foundation of their narratives because the castle played such a dominant role in the physical and social landscape. The cultural landscapes and viewscapes of castles are integral to their position in medieval society. The physical role of the castle has a parallel aspect in medieval thought and culture, where the centrality of the castle in a material setting is also present as a central theme in medieval literature. Castles play a role in entertainment and in instruction, such as the morality stories, that is parallel to their role in the physical landscape. The cultural landscape of castles in medieval Europe extends to both the physical construction of space, which can be measured, documented, and reconstructed, and to the conceptual world of medieval literature. In neither case is the castle in isolation. Castles were built to be visually and socially prominent, to oversee and overlook significant parts of the medieval landscape and the activities that took place there, and accordingly they were a visible part of the everyday life of medieval Europe. That same prominence was used in literature as a familiar setting for romance narratives,

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but it was also used to shape religious beliefs, social critique, and commentary. Use of the castle in literature provided an embodiment of authority that was easily recognized, as that authority was also an everyday part of life in medieval Europe. This duality emphasizes the significance of the castle as a central part of medieval life and the role the castle played in creating medieval cultural beliefs and patterns, particularly those tied to patterns of authority. The medieval experiential world, though complex and highly varied, has castles and the elites who control them at its core, physically, socially, and in the medieval imagination.

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Chapter 6

ARCHITECTURAL ALIGNMENT IN EARLY MEDIEVAL ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS: ZONING, MEANING, AND FUNCTION Anastasia Moskvina* The architecture 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.1 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 * Anastasia Moskvina has recently completed a PhD at the University of East Anglia, conducting research into spatial arrangements of structures at high-​status secular and ecclesiastical settlements in early medieval England. She has also worked on church groups in the Mediterranean basin. 1 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Berber House or the World Reversed,” Social Science Information 9, no. 2 (April 1970): 151–​70.

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128 Anastasia Moskvina 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. A number of scholars, most notably John Blair and Helen Gittos, have discussed the subject of alignment in the context of its possible meanings, associating it with elite status of the settlements of this period.2 Zoning, on the other hand, is a tendency to unite buildings into articulated groups even though together these buildings comprise the core of a single settlement.3 Zoning as a practical planning tool is used today to separate different functions, especially where one can have a harmful effect on the other. In the most basic sense, a school would not be built next to a factory and a composting area would not be located outside the front door of a house. The presence of zoning in the early medieval English settlements undoubtedly served a practical purpose, although, as I will suggest, with a greater emphasis on making the complexities of relationships between the buildings, as well as their functions, deliberately articulate and visible. As we shall see below, the notions of alignment and zoning in architecture both seem to reflect a direct connection between the disposition of buildings within a settlement and their specific function and character, including zones dedicated to religious use or having a spiritual meaning. In the context of early medieval English settlements, architecture can be understood as a representation of a functional order and possibly even worldview mapped onto a carefully thought-​ out plan. I propose looking at six settlement sites that have well-​recorded plans and seem quite representative of the phenomena under discussion: Yeavering, Cowdery’s Down, Cowage Farm, Drayton, Chalton, and Sprouston. The geographical spread of the sites, which are located in Northumbria and Wessex, indicates that the proposed combination of alignment and zoning is a well-​established settlement development practice not confined to a specific region. I will assess the use of alignment within the settlements and analyze the ways the buildings are grouped into possible zones. The key evidence used in this research is archaeological reports and published plans of excavated settlements. Since there is no written evidence to throw direct light on the status and function of the component structures in these sites, we ought to look at the plans to identify any 2 John Blair, “Anglo-​Saxon Minsters: A Topographical Review,” in Pastoral Care before the Parish, ed. John Blair and Richard Sharpe (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 226–​84 at 246–​ 58; Helen Gittos, Liturgy, Architecture, and Sacred Places in Anglo-​Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 55–​102.

3 Zoning of settlements has been touched on by Helena Hamerow, Early Medieval Settlements: The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-​West Europe 400–​900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 94–​98, and John Blair Building Anglo-​Saxon England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 141, but not studied in detail and never in connection with alignment. For discussion of contemporary zoning practices in early medieval cemeteries, see Duncan Sayer, Early Anglo-​Saxon Cemeteries: Kinship, Community and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

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aspects that may speak of specific uses and social contexts. In the vast majority of cases, some idea of status can be deduced from the size of the building, but the evidence for the function of the buildings at sites in question derives from the positioning of entrances and occasionally from specific features, such as posts or deposits.4 In hall-​type buildings, for example, there seems to have been a general preference for doorways in the middle of long walls, regardless of how a building sits in relation to its surroundings. This might be taken to imply that the distribution of entrances had more to do with resorting to standardized building types rather than a response to planning needs.5 At the same time, there are a few instances in which entrances do seem to play a role in connecting buildings and point toward a certain type of use and grouping. This chapter will consider the distribution of recorded entrances, particularly in aligned buildings: I will discuss what they can reveal about the functionality of these sites, briefly touch on other aspects of the settlements, and then conclude by proposing a model of a settlement planning where function is expressed through a dialogue between axial alignment and grouping of structures.

Yeavering: A Royal Vill in Northumbria (Present-​Day Northumberland)

Yeavering is an extraordinary site that to date has attracted particular attention. Since the hefty excavation report was published in 1977, a lot has been written on aspects of both prehistoric and early medieval phases of occupation at this site. Although my focus here is on the early medieval history of Yeavering, the site had an earlier history, which materially affected subsequent planning. The first prehistoric settlement is likely to have been established here at the end of the first millennium BC and its features remained visible during the early medieval period. At the height of its development in the early seventh century, Yeavering consisted of two groups of buildings. These have been designated A and D, each of the groups being marked by a linear arrangement of rectangular buildings, with a theatre-​like structure E in between (Figure 22). Yeavering has been interpreted as a Northumbrian royal vill and is most famous for the east–​ west alignment of buildings and associated features across multiple construction phases identified in the excavation report. The construction phase denoted 3c in the report has been dated to the reign of King Edwin (r. 616–​33) and saw a precise and apparently deliberate alignment of settlement features orientated toward a prehistoric barrow to the east. These included a post (marked BX) located at the centre of the barrow with a grave (BX1) immediately to the west, another post (AX) with an 4 On correlations between size and status, see Anastasia Moskvina, “Alignment and Axiality in Anglo-​Saxon Architecture: 6th–​11th centuries,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of East Anglia, 2021, 385–​90.

5 Helena Hamerow, “The Archaeology of Early Anglo-​Saxon Settlements: Past, Present and Future,” in Landscape of Change. Rural Evolutions in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Neil Christie (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 301–​16 at 309 and Early Medieval Settlements, 38, 41.

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Figure 22. Yeavering. Drawing by Anastasia Moskvina.

associated grave (AX), and two substantial halls (A4 and A1) joined together by an enclosure. In the middle of the site, a further post (E) on the same alignment connected the extremely unusual triangular assembly-​building to the structures in area A, and, to the west, the axial alignment took in building D2, interpreted as a temple due to the presence of special deposits, with its associated post (D) and cemetery.6 Building D2 was also precisely axially aligned, on a north–​south axis, with the structure D1 to the north. The plan of Yeavering demonstrates an evident tendency toward zoning across the site, involving on its main axis areas A and D, joined together by the small zone E. Area A, which includes the structures convincingly interpreted as halls, is perhaps the most imposing and prominent area at Yeavering.7 Halls A1 and A4 are only a snapshot of a developing sequence of large-​scale buildings on this site, all built in one line and with astonishing precision.8 Importantly, the halls at Yeavering have entrances at the short ends of the halls, as well as on the long sides—​as has been mentioned above, long-​side doors were a standardized feature for the “type” of the hall. By breaking the rule, these short-​side entrances allow for an uninterrupted passage through the 6 For interpretation of the functions of individual buildings, see Brian Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering: An Anglo-​British Centre of Early Northumbria (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1977), 102, 158–​59; for D2 see also John Blair, “Anglo-​Saxon Pagan Shrines and their Prototypes,” Anglo-​Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 8 (1995): 1–​28 at 16–​20. 7 For interpretation, particularly the Continental context for the halls, see Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering, 137–​40, 213–​32. 8 Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering, 129, 131, 163.

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halls.9 It is possible that one of the halls was used for ritual processions, which would have rendered entrances at the east and west ends more than just functional, possibly responding to ceremonial needs and concepts of worldview.10 The halls in area A were spatially transparent, allowing for direct lines of sight, as well as a direct processional route, in the earlier stages of use. The presence of a coherent system of entry points into the buildings highlights the unified character of the complex and the importance of mutual access between buildings.11 It seems that movement through these halls could have been important, and this together with their royal status suggests ceremonial and processional use revolving around the king and his power. Structure E, which sits in the centre of the excavated area, is unique in an early medieval context in England. It is said to have been modelled on a section of a Roman amphitheatre to accommodate large gatherings and assemblies.12 To the west of structure E, the group of buildings D is associated with a cemetery. The cemetery was characterized by a general east–​west orientation of the bodies, head to the west. The burials, however, were external to the enclosure to the south of D2. This enclosure has been interpreted as a possible space for ritual.13 Such a function may also be indicated by the presence of a peculiar crouched burial associated with a single ox tooth in a grave close to the south-​west corner of D2. This stands out among other contemporary east–​west burials.14 Although the alignment of the main halls is more prominent and has been more widely discussed than the arrangement of the surrounding buildings, the aligned group of D1 and D2 appeared on the site earlier than the main halls.15 It was after the 9 Clifford Sofield has discussed the role of alignment of doorways in facilitation of ritualized or formal processions, which in turn were instrumental in shaping emerging royal identities. See Clifford M. Sofield, “Shaping Buildings and Identities in Fifth-​ to Ninth-​Century England,” Leeds Studies in English 48 (2017): 105–​23 at 110–​13, 123. See also Hamerow, “The Archaeology of Early Anglo-​Saxon Settlements,” 38, 40; Andrew Reynolds, “Boundaries and Settlements in Late Sixth to Eleventh Century England,” Anglo-​Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 12 (2003), 98–​136 at 104–​6. 10 Jenny Walker, “In the Hall,” in Signals of Belief in Early England: Anglo-​Saxon Paganism Revisited, ed. Martin Carver, Alexandra Sanmark, and Sarah Semple (Oxford: Oxbow, 2010), 83–​102 at 88–​89.

11 Carolyn Ware, “Social Use of Space at Gefrin,” in Yeavering: People, Power and Place, ed. Paul Frodsham and Colm O’Brien (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), 153–​60 at 157–​59, fig. 53. 12 Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering, 161, 169, 241.

13 Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering, 244–​45.

14 Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering, 249. East–​west burials are not necessarily indicators of Christian practices. There have been discussions around the presence of Christianity and paganism at Yeavering and their visual manifestations, particularly around the function of building B: Sam Lucy, “Early Medieval Burial at Yeavering: A Retrospective,” in Yeavering: People, Power and Place, ed. Paul Frodsham and Colm O’Brien (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), 127–​45 at 139; J. T. Smith, “Yeavering Reconsidered,” Experimental Archaeology 2 (2015): https://​exarc.net/​issue-​2015-​2/​ea/​yeaver​ing-​ recon​side​red. This is not the subject I will be touching on here.

15 Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering, 97. For discussions of the halls at Yeavering, see, e.g., Ware, “Social Use”; Walker, “In the Hall,” 88–​89; Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 114–​25.

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132 Anastasia Moskvina construction of these buildings that the hall complex was introduced, and that the enigmatic posts E, BX, and possibly D were erected.16 There evidently are reasons to think that areas A and D were different from a functional point of view, to judge from the excavator’s detailed interpretation and from the way in which the zones are distinguished. At the same time, these zones appear to be parts of a coherent single settlement. The unity of the site is emphasized by the line of posts that pierces the three groups of buildings. The posts include not only those already mentioned above but also those inside the halls on the same line, which have been highlighted as integral to the significance of alignment at Yeavering.17 It is also notable that Yeavering includes axial burials in architectural alignment. Burial AX, which contains a goat’s skull at the feet of the deceased and a cross-​staff and is located just on the doorstep of hall A4, has been tentatively identified as that of a pagan priest who could have served in the temple D2.18 There are also parallels between this grave and descriptions of burials of sorceresses by doorways found in the Viking-​ age poems Baldrs Draumar (Baldr’s Dreams) and Groagaldr 1 (The Spell of Groa, first poem).19 In one instance of such a burial, the door is described as leading to Niflhel—​ one of the regions of Hell—​and in the other it is “the door of the dead.”20 In both cases, these burials may indicate some form of protective function and control over a crucially significant liminal space between the realm of the living and the Otherworld. It would seem that the axial burials AX and BX, a little further east, were associated with the eastern entrance into hall A4, which perhaps had some symbolic importance, in addition to its functional role and statement of status.21 The metaphor of the sparrow flying through the hall—​a well-​known passage from Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, in the account of Edwin’s conversion—​is relevant here.22 The sparrow evokes a soul capable 16 Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering, 161.

17 Michael Bintley, Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), 37–​38, 40. 18 Audrey Meaney, “Bede and Anglo-​Saxon Paganism,” Parergon 3 (1985): 1–​29 at 19–​21; David Wilson, Anglo-​Saxon Paganism (London: Routledge, 1992), 176. Hope-​Taylor (Yeavering, 200–​203) suggests the staff is a surveyor’s groma (measuring rod). This interpretation is supported by John Blair, “Grid–​Planning in Anglo-​Saxon Settlements: The Short Perch and the Four-​Perch Module,” Anglo-​Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 28 (2013): 18–​61 at 23 and Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 79, 122. 19 Helena Hamerow, “ ‘Special Deposits’ in Anglo-​Saxon Settlements,” Medieval Archaeology 50 (2006): 1–​30 at 11. 20 Neil Price, The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2002), 113.

21 Walker has proposed the possibility of ritual processions in hall A2 focusing on the east–​west axis (“In the Hall,” 88–​89). By analogy, a similar use could be proposed for A4.

22 Alexandra Sanmark, “Living on: Ancestors and the Soul,” in Signals of Belief, ed. Carver, Sanmark, and Semple, 158–​80 at 163; for the passage see Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 2.13. On an explicitly Christian context of the episode of Edwin’s conversion, see Julia Barrow, “How Coifi Pierced Christ’s

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of going between different worlds. It flies into the warm, lively hall from the outside, stormy world and out through the other door; its flight parallels human life, preceded and succeeded by the external, the alien, the unknown. The hall thus is a space signifying life, a microcosm appearing both in opposition to and in connection with the unknown “outside.”23 Its space is framed and defined and yet its open opposed doors allow the sparrow to fly between the two contrasting worlds. The juxtaposition between the hall as a place of order and security and the chaotic world outside the hall is further illustrated in Old English poetry, where order has been understood in terms of positive categories of gift-​giving, loyalty, and friendship. The hall can be seen as a positive existential metaphor, representing life and world order, as well as authority and ritual, as has been argued elsewhere, the ideas extending beyond the simply architectural forms.24 The hall being such an important space charged with meaning, it is possible that axial burial at the entrance could have been understood as a form of protection and have been conceived as part of an ideological image of a hall as a cosmological nexus, comprising social, political, and cultic aspects. The unprecedented precision of architectural alignment at Yeavering, punctuated by precisely aligned posts, invites the observer to understand the halls A4 and A1/​A2, and the theatre E, as one powerful composition and a spatial unit revolving around the figure of the king. The posts, as masts, could be Side: A Re-​Examination of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, II, chap. 13,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 62, no. 4 (October 2011): 693–​706.

23 Such a juxtaposition would be valid in a Christian context too, where the halls take on another meaning, as metaphors for heaven and hell and the God-​created world. See Alvin A. Lee, The Guest-​ Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old English Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 24, 178–​81.

24 Kathryn Hume, “The Concept of the Hall in Old English Poetry,” Anglo-​Saxon England 3 (1974): 63–​74 at 66, 68–​69. In addition, Jennie Walker has argued that royal authority, seen as a part of world order, would have been expressed in some form of ritual, not necessarily religious (Walker, “In the Hall,” 85–​86). Walker’s argument is set out in terms of a combination of domestic and cultic functions in the Anglo-​Saxon hall, similar to those that Charlotte Fabech has proposed for Scandinavian halls. See Charlotte Fabech, “Reading Society from the Cultural Landscape. South Scandinavia between Sacral and Political Power,” in The Archaeology of Gudme and Lundeborg, ed. Poul-​Otto Nielsen, Klavs Randsborg, and Henrik Thrane (Copenhagen: Institute of Prehistoric and Classical Archaeology, 1994), 169–​83 at 174 and “Centrality in Sites and Landscapes,” in Settlement and Landscape. Proceedings of a Conference in Århus, Denmark, May 4–​7, 1998, ed. Charlotte Fabech and Jytte Ringtved (Moesgård: Jutland Archaeological Society, 1999), 455–​73 at 459. On the sacral role of the king, see Yurii M. Kobishchanow, “The Phenomenon of Gafol and its Transformation,” in Early State Dynamics, ed. Henri J. M. Claessen and Pieter van de Velde (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 108–​28 at 108. The importance of a distinction between ritual and religion has been emphasized: ritual does not have to be religious. Timothy Insoll, Archaeology, Ritual, Religion (London: Routledge, 2004) 11–​12; Helena Hamerow, Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-​Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 120; Mary Chester-​Kadwell, Early Anglo-​Saxon Communities in the Landscape of Norfolk, BAR British Series 481 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2009), 29; Richard Bradley, Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe (London: Routledge, 2005). The positive categories associated with the hall and the role of the hall in embodying power and ritual are touched on by Shannon Godlove in chap. 3.

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134 Anastasia Moskvina understood as facilitating the transition of the protective function of the burial and the open axial doorways as helping to channel it throughout. In this respect, it is notable that the easternmost feature of the complex—​post BX—​is positioned at the centre of a mound, which was still discernible at the beginning of occupation in the early medieval period.25 In the same period, prehistoric landscape features, especially mounds, are likely to have been perceived as liminal places associated with the Otherworld, as well as a range of negative categories, including fear and evil.26 The decision to align the whole complex on the mound and to place the two protective elements—​axial burials—​in the zone between the mound and the entrance into A4 could be read as an intentional gesture. Such a composition renders the mound simultaneously included and dominated by the imposing royal complex and cautiously removed from it by the introduction of a protective device. The idea that it is only necessary to place a form of ritual “filter” at one end of the string of buildings, facing the mound, perhaps is an indication of the linear, directional, nature of metaphysical forces contained in the mound, as perceived by the builders of this settlement. Linearity, and also its spiritual and symbolic components play a prominent role in constructing a strong coherent composition, which is zone A. Despite this emphasis on alignment in group A, the buildings in group D are arranged on a different axis, constituting a second relatively independent core. In between these groups, structure E, with its post E aligned with the halls but with its own axis pointing 25 Hope-​Taylor, Yeavering, 85. An instance of alignment between an early medieval building and a prehistoric mound in a Christian context is discussed in chap. 2 by Conor O’Brien.

26 The evidence gathered largely from poetry and place-​names indicates that barrows and mounds were associated predominantly with terror, death, and darkness and often seen as haunted spaces, dwellings of supernatural spirits one ought to fear, abodes of the dead and even of dragons. On this subject, see Sarah Semple, “A Fear of the Past: The Place of the Prehistoric Burial Mound in the Ideology of Middle and Later Anglo-​Saxon England,” World Archaeology 30 (1998): 109–​26; “In the Open Air,” in Signals of Belief, ed. Carver, Sanmark, and Semple, 21–​48; and Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-​Saxon England: Religion, Ritual, and Rulership in the Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also: Vicky Crewe, Living with the Past: The Reuse of Prehistoric Monuments in Anglo-​Saxon Settlements, BAR British Series 573 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2012); Howard Williams, “Ancient Landscapes and the Dead: The Reuse of Prehistoric and Roman Monuments as Early Anglo-​Saxon Burial Sites,” Medieval Archaeology 41 (1997): 1–​31 and “Monuments and the Past in Early Anglo-​Saxon England,” World Archaeology 30 (June 1998): 90–​108; Nicola Whyte, “The After-​Life of Barrows: Prehistoric Monuments in the Norfolk Landscape,” Landscape History 25 (2003): 5–​16; Hilda R. Ellis Davidson, “The Hill of the Dragon: Anglo-​Saxon Burial Mounds in Literature and Archaeology,” Folklore 61 (December 1950): 169–​85. It is interesting that, in Scandinavian context, a similar kind of liminality associated with prehistoric monuments has been interpreted as positive, sacred, and revered rather than feared (Luke John Murphy, “Continuity and Change: Forms of Liminality in the Sacred Social Spaces of the Pre-​Christian Nordic World,” Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 12 (2016): 137–​72). However, where Murphy emphasizes continuity in such perceptions (139–​41), Whyte suggests that fear can be associated with the lack of continuity in the case of the monuments in early medieval England (Whyte, “After-​Life of Barrows,” 6). A gap in occupation meant that the origins of these monuments were unknown and thus understandably feared, and new interpretations, which embodied this fear, emerged in the process of inventing a new past for the mounds.

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west–​southwest, only marginally belongs to either zone. It seems to occupy a transitional space and to play a connecting role between the eastern and western groups, uniting the area of the temple and burials with the area of secular power. It is useful here to turn again to Bede’s description of the encounter at Yeavering between King Edwin and the missionaries from Rome, prior to conversion. Putting aside questions of the reliability or otherwise of Bede’s narrative, his account indicates the considerable influence enjoyed by Edwin’s pagan priest, Coifi, as the king is recorded as having asked his opinion and advice.27 This implies that the priest’s religious authority was substantial, if not equal to that of the king.28 The layout of the settlement, essentially divided into two zones—​the realms of the priest and the king, with a place for assembly in the middle—​could be seen as reflecting these two poles of power. It would seem that Yeavering demonstrates a fairly clear relationship between the presence of ritual associated with certain buildings, the position of these buildings within the settlement and, importantly, their zoning and axial alignment. Using Yeavering as a starting point, I will consider the evidence for the possible presence of zoning, defined by axial alignment and associated with specific functions, elsewhere. The three following sites—​Cowdery’s Down, Cowage Farm, and Chalton—​show more complex relationships between buildings and display a feature already noted by Andrew Reynolds: a close relationship between a hall and an enclosure containing smaller, possibly auxiliary, buildings.29

Cowdery’s Down: A High-​Status Settlement in Wessex (Present-​Day Hampshire)

Cowdery’s Down, excavated and published by Martin Millet and Simon James in the 1980s, is one of the very few early medieval sites in England that have been carbon 14-​ dated, placing the main phase of occupation in the sixth–​seventh centuries. The phase denoted “C” in the excavation report and dated to 609+​/​–​57 is of particular interest, a prominent feature being an enclosure containing buildings C7, C8, C9, C10, and C11 to the east (Figure 23). To the west of this enclosure were two further buildings. Structure C13, standing very much on its own among the otherwise grouped buildings, had three entrances and a remarkable burial of a cow in a pit (pit 6) immediately beside the entrance in its short western end. It has been suggested that this burial had a sacred 27 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica 2.13.

28 For example, Tacitus discusses the considerable—​not just religious—​power of a priest alongside that of a king, in the context of first-​century Germanic paganism: Germania, ed. J. G. Anderson (Bristol: Bristol Classical, 1998). Ronald Hutton has suggested that Germanic and Scandinavian paganism was introduced to England in the course of the fifth century: Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 293. On Coifi’s role, see also Marilyn Dunn, The Christianization of the Anglo-​Saxons c. 598–​c. 700: Discourses of Life, Death and Afterlife (London: Continuum, 2010), 82–​83, and Barrow, “How Coifi Pierced Christ’s Side.” 29 Reynolds, “Boundaries and Settlements.”

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Figure 23. Cowdery’s Down. Drawing by Anastasia Moskvina.

role and a protective function, perhaps that of a foundation sacrifice.30 This building is unusual and we will return to its possible function below. The only other building with three entrances on this site is C12, where one of the entrances was directly on axis with a gap in the enclosure wall and the cross-​axis of C9 to the northeast, allowing for uninterrupted passage between these points. Based on the evidence of entrances and visual grouping, structures C12 and C9, together with C10 and C11 symmetrically flanking the C12–​C9 axis, constitute a functional group. Finally, the alignment of C14 and B/​C15 in the northwestern area of the settlement is very pronounced—​the two buildings were definitely spatially associated and their internal layouts mirrored each other.31 Both had doors conventionally set in the middle of long walls. Buildings C14 and B/​C15 have been interpreted as agricultural, although their substantial size and imposing character, together with a high status of the whole settlement, speak of their prominent status. Alignment in this case can also be seen as a conveyor of this status and authority associated with it.32 Although clearly expressed, their alignment does not allow for direct access or procession, as is the case at Yeavering. At Cowdery’s Down, as at Yeavering, and, as we shall see, at Chalton and Cowage Farm, there appears to be a subdivision of structures into three groups or zones: the axially aligned hall-​like C14 and B/​C15 to the west, the group of C12 and its associated group to the east, also united by a common axis, and the structure C13 sitting in between. What remains now is to establish the possible uses of these zones. 30 Martin Millett and Simon James, “Excavations at Cowdery’s Down, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1978–​81,” Archaeological Journal 140, no. 1 (1983): 151–​279 at 221. 31 Millett and James, “Excavations at Cowdery’s Down,” 221–​22, 243.

32 On correlations between alignment and high status, see Blair, “Anglo-​Saxon Minsters,” 246–​58; Gittos, Liturgy, Architecture, and Sacred Places, 55–​102.

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While the cultic function of zone D and the ceremonial aspect of zone A at Yeavering are difficult to argue with, the identification of the function of building C13 at Cowdery’s Down, which may have been a temple, has been controversial. The excavators suggested that it served as a place of communal ritual, although in view of the absence of related cultural material this has been questioned by Walker.33 The association between this building and a deposit by its entrance, however, asks for an explanation. This deposit—​the burial of a cow with a boar skull below it, not on axis but close to the western entrance into building C13—​is contemporary with the building and has been interpreted as a foundation sacrifice.34 The practice of foundation deposits is well attested in Northwestern Europe, where such deposits are associated with dwellings. This interpretation would hold for Cowdery’s Down, although Continental sites show a clearer trend in association between special deposits and entrances or boundaries; fewer comparative contexts exist in early medieval England.35 In early medieval England, considering the variety both in the types of deposits and their relationships with settlements, it is difficult to draw any systematic conclusions about their functions. This is further problematized by the very small number of deposits actually associated with timber buildings. For example, 50 percent of all special deposits studied by Hamerow have been found in association with SFBs (sunken-​featured buildings), and most, if not all, of them are associated with the abandonment of buildings—​very different in character from the deposit at Cowdery’s Down.36 This means that it is quite difficult to find close parallels for the role and meaning of the cow burial at Cowdery’s Down. At the same time, by analogy with the proposed cultic functions of buildings marked with special deposits at Yeavering, it is possible that the cow burial associated with C13 at Cowdery’s Down is not simply a foundation deposit but a “guardian” of a building, providing some element of protection. On this note, it is perhaps of importance that D2 at Yeavering and C13 could have been contemporary and therefore potentially constructed in similar ideological contexts. Another aspect to assess is the position of C13 in relation to other buildings within the settlement. Considering the strongly pronounced alignment of C14 and B/​C15 and the evident spatial relationship between C12 and the enclosed area containing C9, C10, and C11 to the northeast, building C13 stands out as a single structure, not directly associated with the other groups. While C13 and C12 are the only two structures on the site with three entrances, their doorways in the middle of one of the short walls face in opposite directions. This means they are unlikely to have been functionally related and 33 Millett and James, “Excavations at Cowdery’s Down,” 197, 247; Walker, “In the Hall,” 96. 34 Millett and James, “Excavations at Cowdery’s Down,” 221. 35 Hamerow, “Special Deposits,” 22–​26.

36 Hamerow, “Special Deposits,” 8–​9, 2, figs. 1, 2. On SFBs, or Grübenhäuser (pit houses: rectangular buildings that consist of a pit, which serves as a floor, posts around the perimeter, and a roof), see Hamerow, Rural Settlements and Society, 7–​8, 53–​66, and “Anglo-​Saxon Timber Buildings and their Social Context,” in The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-​Saxon Archaeology, ed. Helena Hamerow, David A. Hinton, and Sally Crawford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 128–​55 at 146–​52.

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138 Anastasia Moskvina that C13 would have served an independent purpose. This suggests that C13, being the only building in the settlement associated with a special deposit and clearly singled out spatially, could have had a special function, perhaps of a cultic kind. This suggestion is of course speculative, but such a function is possible. The probability of this interpretation can be strengthened if Blair’s identification of building A1, which belonged to an earlier phase at Cowdery’s Down, as a pagan temple is taken into account.37 The likely presence of some form of religious provision at an earlier stage of development makes the presence of a temple at a subsequent stage, when the settlement had grown and evolved, more likely. It looks as though some functions associated with the three zones can be identified at Cowdery’s Down: one of prominent status and, as proposed by the excavators, possibly associated with agricultural activities, another, to the east, perhaps connected with a dwelling together with its subordinate structures within the enclosure, and the last one represented by the single building C13, performing if not a cultic function then at least being a home to a highly important activity. Two of these zones are defined by the axial alignment of buildings.

Cowage Farm: A High-​Status Settlement In Wessex (Present-​Day Wiltshire)

The site at Cowage Farm, tentatively dated to the sixth–​seventh centuries, is known mostly from cropmarks, and although the presence of over twenty buildings has been indicated it is difficult to tell which ones were in use at the same time. The spatial relationships between the structures, however, indicate that, regardless of whether they were used simultaneously, they were laid out in relation to each other. The most striking of these are building B, aligned with two satellite structures roughly on a north–​south axis, and the apsed building A, isolated within an enclosure and orientated roughly east–​west (Figure 24). The construction of A and B is similar to halls at Yeavering and Cowdery’s Down.38 Building B is flanked at either end by smaller structures precisely axially aligned with it. This group is also aligned with another building to the southeast, of the same size and proportions as the satellite structures. The central location, size, and prominence of structure B could indicate that it was a hall. Northwest of building B, two buildings in area D are accurately aligned and seem simultaneously to be a part of a further alignment, continuing west and picked up by two other aligned buildings a little off the same axis. The structures in area D also appear to form a courtyard, limited by building B to the northeast and another string of buildings on a rough north–​south alignment, to the southwest. Group C, located slightly further to the north of the settlement, is much less prominent but also seems to consist of aligned buildings. The settlement appears 37 Blair, “Anglo-​Saxon Pagan Shrines,” 16–​17.

38 John Hinchliffe, “An Early Medieval Settlement at Cowage Farm, Foxley, near Malmesbury,” Archaeological Journal 143, no. 1 (1986): 240–​59 at 251.

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Figure 24. Cowage Farm. Drawing by Anastasia Moskvina.

to be arranged more or less accurately on a grid, in line with Blair’s discovery of grid planning from the seventh century onwards.39 There is no clear evidence for the location of entrances in individual structures, as the site has not been excavated. However, the site demonstrates fairly clear indications of the zoning and grouping of buildings, suggesting attention to planning and showing direct spatial associations between units. The buildings are evidently arranged into three groups defined by their axes: the range associated with building B, which could have been of significant status and associated with authority, those related to building D, and the group of structures to the west. Building A, located well to the east and enclosed, seems relatively independent from the rest of the settlement and has been interpreted as a possible church—​with the acknowledgment that an early church may be indistinguishable from a secular structure.40 If building A did have some religious significance, it is interesting that, like building C13 at Cowdery’s Down, it stands out as a single somewhat isolated structure. The relationships between other buildings found at Cowage Farm seem close and the zoning implies their interconnection and a systematic approach to their arrangement. While the buildings appear to be constructed around a big courtyard, the tight spatial grouping of the structures in each of the three identified zones marked by alignments suggests their relatively separate identity. It would be interesting, if this site is ever excavated, to see whether there is any material evidence for the specific functions of individual zones, particularly a cultic one. At this stage, any ideas around the use of these buildings would be purely speculative. 39 Blair, “Grid-​Planning in Anglo-​Saxon Settlements,” 27; Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, esp. 156–​63. 40 Hinchliffe, “An Early Medieval Settlement at Cowage Farm,” 251.

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Chalton: A Village in Wessex (Present-​Day Hampshire) The excavated area at Chalton includes twenty-​eight rectangular buildings from at least four phases, spanning a period across the sixth–​seventh centuries. Two of the phases are characterized by instances of alignment of substantial buildings: the earlier period (B) includes a large building B1 and a smaller one B3, aligned roughly east–​west, although with a considerable distance between them. Building B2 is of a comparable size to B1 but is situated off-​axis, although on the same alignment. In the subsequent period (A), these buildings were replaced by structures A1 and A3 on the same axis—​ this alignment is roughly picked up further west by structure A8 (Figure 25). The buildings are not as precisely geometrically aligned as those at Yeavering, but their spatial association is evident. Notably, unlike the period-​B group, the post-​in-​trench buildings A1 and A2 have entrances on each of the four sides (the eastern doorway in A1 is not certain but likely), two of them evidently facing each other. There is a gap in the partition between the aligned buildings, which indicates their mutual accessibility and a close functional association. It is not clear whether the space between the two buildings was roofed. These buildings could have been domestic, and internal partitions suggest possible subdivision into hall and retiring-​room areas. Building A3, on the same axis as A1 and A2 and with a door in the east wall immediately facing A2, has been interpreted by the excavators as a bower. A fenced enclosure to the east seems to have been associated first with B1 and then with A1. Further, it has been suggested that smaller post-​built structures within the enclosure—​A9 and B6 and B7, which could have continued in use in period A—​could be a farm-​group related to the house A1.41 We are not only seeing evidence of zoning expressed through both the grouping of buildings and axial alignment but also some continuity of zoning between phases B and A. Phase A, however, was marked by an increased emphasis on communication between the structures. The buildings are clearly arranged on a geometric grid and seem to be united into tighter functional groups than in phase B. This is especially evident in the group of A12, A13, and A14, which form a courtyard. Just to the north, building A10 clearly occupies the central place in the settlement; the excavators suggest it could have been made for communal use, but who it would be used by is a good question. The settlement has been interpreted by the excavators as a “village of large houses, for the normal dwelling of the freeman.”42 The buildings are much smaller than those at Yeavering; their type, however, possibly indicates the prominent status of the owner. In particular, the post-​in-​trench construction and plan with doors in the middle of long walls, used in buildings A1 and A2, are comparable with the high-​status halls at Yeavering. Although the buildings A1, A2, and B1 have been interpreted as dwelling houses, considering the limited nature of the evidence, distinguishing between a 41 P. V. Addyman and D. Leigh, “Anglo-​Saxon Village in Chalton, Hampshire: Second Interim Report,” Medieval Archaeology 17, no. 1 (1973): 1–​25 at 6; P. V. Addyman, D. Leigh, and M. J. Hughes, “Anglo-​ Saxon Houses at Chalton, Hampshire,” Medieval Archaeology 16, no. 1 (1972): 13–​31 at 19, 22. 42 Addyman, Leigh, and Hughes, “Anglo-​Saxon Houses at Chalton,” 24.

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Figure 25. Chalton. Drawing by Anastasia Moskvina.

dwelling house and an elite hall remains problematic.43 Either way, here we see another instance of alignment in conjunction with a group of high-​status dwellings united into a separate zone. Overall, Chalton demonstrates a particular attention to the grouping of buildings and seems to have consisted of three main groups. The group of A1, A2, and A3 appears to be connected by axial alignment and axial entrances, allowing the possibility of uninterrupted procession through these structures. This is particularly emphasized by the opening in the middle of the screen between buildings A1 and A2 and the doorway in the middle of the partition at the east end of structure A2. Even if this group had a domestic use, the processional aspect suggests it could have had a ceremonial use too, as at Yeavering. The group to the east, which includes buildings in an enclosure with A10 just outside it, and is defined by another axis—​that of A10 and A9—​could have been a utilitarian area subordinate to the largest buildings A1 and A2. The approach to the east entrance into A10 seems to be lined up with the entrance into the enclosure directly to the north and indicates a functional association between A10 and the enclosed 43 For the excavators’ interpretation, see Addyman, Leigh, and Hughes, “Anglo-​Saxon Houses at Chalton,” 22.

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142 Anastasia Moskvina structures. Further south, A12, A13, and A14 are not aligned but carefully laid out and tightly grouped and have entrances facing the courtyard formed by the arrangement of the buildings; however, it is difficult to tell what role this group would have played in the settlement. There are no ritual-​related finds at Chalton, which leaves open the question of ritual activity there. At the same time, at Friars Oak, for instance, even in the absence of associated deposits, Chris Butler has interpreted the building at site C as a shrine, due to its unusual structure and its similarity with other possible shrines at, for example, Spong Hill and Morning Thorpe.44 Finally, despite the presence of distinctive zones, as at the sites above, the grid-​like arrangement of the settlement indicates that these separate groups belong to one scheme.

Drayton/​Sutton Courtenay: A Possible Royal Centre in Wessex (Present-​Day Oxfordshire)

The plan of Drayton, which is known from cropmarks and very limited excavations and has been tentatively dated to mid-​sixth–​seventh centuries, is much simpler than those considered above. The two defined groups of buildings here are articulated by two axes of alignment, suggesting a direct relationship between zoning and alignment. Two of the structures—​A and B—​are arranged in a line and orientated east–​west, whereas the second sequence of three buildings, C, D, and E, is perpendicular to the first (Figure 26). Building A, presumably a hall (30.9 × 10.8m), is the largest of its kind found to date in Britain—​closely followed in dimensions by Hall A4 at Yeavering (25.3 × 11.6m), C12 at Cowdery’s Down (22.1 × 8.8m), and the great hall at Lyminge (21 × 8.5m). This hall was built with posts in foundation trenches and shows evidence of external raking timbers, similar to those found at Cowdery’s Down and Yeavering. Both the size and the type of construction point toward a significant status of the building and possibly the whole settlement. There is an axial entrance at the east end of building A. It faces away from the group but its presence suggests that an identical doorway could have existed at the west end, facing building B. There also could have been entrances in the middle of the long walls, but these parts of the building have not been excavated.45 The rest of the settlement is known from cropmarks, which only allows a general layout to be seen, although E shows evidence of an entrance on the east side.46 The overall arrangement of buildings resembles that at Chalton, although the buildings at Sutton Courtenay are

44 Chris Butler, Saxon Settlement and Earlier Remains at Friars Oak, Hassocks, West Sussex, BAR British Series 295 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2000). 45 Naomi Brennan and Helena Hamerow, “An Anglo-​Saxon Great Hall Complex at Sutton Courtenay/​Drayton, Oxfordshire: A Royal Centre of Early Wessex?” Archaeological Journal 172, no. 2 (2015): 325–​50 at 333–​39.

46 See Don Benson and David Miles, “Cropmarks near the Sutton Courtenay Saxon Site,” Antiquity 48 (1974): 223–​26.

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Figure 26. Drayton-​Sutton Courtenay. Drawing by Anastasia Moskvina.

much larger. The presence of two zones suggests two distinct functions, but these are difficult—​if not impossible—​to assess owing to the lack of evidence.47 In the context of the cases already considered above, both in relation to the presence of ritual and zoning, the sites at Cowage Farm and Drayton/​Sutton Courtenay, neither of which has been fully excavated, are of great interest. By analogy with other sites of similar dates—​Yeavering and Cowdery’s Down—​it should be possible to analyse the grouping and distribution of specific functions within these settlements. At Cowage Farm, the buildings are evidently arranged into three groups: the ranges associated with buildings B and D and the group to the west. Given the presence of zoning there, it would not be surprising if one of the ranges was associated with ritual activity, following the spatial patterns discussed above. In the same way, the grouping at Drayton may not be accidental; the unknown functions of the unexcavated buildings B, D, and E leave room for debate.

Sprouston: A Royal Vill in Northumbria (Present-​Day Scottish Borders)

Following the discovery of a cropmarks palimpsest at Sprouston in 1970, this area was carefully studied, and three phases of occupation, the latest one being early medieval, 47 Brennan and Hamerow, “An Anglo-​Saxon Great Hall Complex,” 333–​35.

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Figure 27. Sprouston. Drawing by Anastasia Moskvina.

were tentatively identified.48 During the early medieval, possibly early seventh-​century, phase of occupation this high-​status site included a number of structures, including major halls with annexes and opposed entrances, E and F, occupying the central area of the settlement, with a pair of possibly aligned halls, A and B, to the northwest, structures D1 and D2 arranged in an echelon to the southwest, and a cemetery associated with a possible rectangular structure to the southeast, as well as a number of possible sunken-​ featured buildings (Figure 27). Although alignment at this site involves structures A and B, it is the central structures that are interesting in the context of zoning and are paralleled at Yeavering and other sites. The aligned structures A and B are not well preserved and are difficult to assess; 48 Ian M. Smith, “Sprouston, Roxburghshire: An Early Anglian Centre of the Eastern Tweed Basin,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 121 (1991): 261–​94. The site was previously known from cropmarks and briefly published in 1980 and 1981. Cf. Nicholas Reynolds, “Dark Age Timber Halls and the Background to Excavation at Balbridie,” Scottish Archaeological Forum 10 (1980): 52–​53; and J. K. St. Joseph, “Sprouston, Roxburghshire: An Anglo-​Saxon Settlement Discovered by Air Reconnaissance,” Anglo-​Saxon England 10 (1981): 191–​99.

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however, it was consideration of this alignment that led me to look at the grouping of the structures to the southeast. The available evidence derives entirely from cropmarks, which means the positions of visible entrances are likely but not certain. The pair of D1 and D2 seem to have generic opposed entrances in their long walls, as does building E. This building, interpreted as a possible hall, however, sits in between two zones: the first of these zones is defined by the pair D, the second by the building F, on an entirely different alignment, to the north. The opposed long-​wall entrances of E make it in some way a transitional, connecting point between the two zones. Building F, to judge from the cropmarks, apart from a conventional entrance at the end of an annexe, has one entrance from the south side, facing the central area of the settlement and hall E, indicating an important line of access to this building and a relationship with other structures. Overall, the buildings considered here are evenly spaced out, arranged on three different axes, and seem to constitute three separate zones. I would like to suggest that the east–​west orientation of structure F could be meaningful and relate to the function of this zone, possibly a religious one. A Christian presence has already been proposed at this site: the small (7 × 4m) post-​built structure associated with a cemetery has been interpreted as a Christian church or oratory on the basis of its location and footprint.49 The cemetery and the associated building at Sprouston do not seem to be spatially related to the settlement, and so do not fit with the model of cultic zones occupying a specific intermediate position in a settlement. At the same time, Sprouston stands out as a site where careful attention was paid to alignment and grid-​like arrangement. Thus, the aligned halls A and B seem to have defined a northeast–​southwest axis of alignment, first supported by other minor structures and then by building E, built on the same alignment, with the pair of D1 and D2 arranged in an echelon on a perpendicular axis. The substantial trench-​built structure F is the only one that not only ignores the existing grid but is built on an east–​west axis, aligned with great precision. Building F is a central and integral part of the settlement core, and yet its unusual orientation possibly points toward a special status or function. Its orientation, the presence of western and southern entrances but no openings to the east, judging by the cropmarks, together with the likelihood of Sprouston being a site serving a Christian king in the seventh century, suggest that building F could have been a church.50 In this scenario, the small structure associated with the cemetery could have been a secondary

49 Smith, “Sprouston, Roxburghshire,” 281.

50 Ian Smith presents an argument for the royal status of Sprouston based on similarities with Yeavering and its status as a royal manor in the later medieval period. He also proposes a possibility of it being one of a network of sites serving the Northumbrian king in the middle decades of the seventh century (Smith, “Sprouston, Roxburghshire,” 285–​88). If we follow this argument, we should assume that, following the royal conversion to Christianity in 627 (Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica 2.13), this site also would have had a Christian presence.

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146 Anastasia Moskvina chapel, as was possibly the case at Hamwick, or a later addition.51 The fact that building F is not included in a group or an alignment is somewhat similar to Cowdery’s Down, where C13, which also could have been a place of religious ritual, albeit probably non-​ Christian, is similarly singled out.

Conclusions

The case-​studies discussed above demonstrate a tendency to group buildings into zones, most likely associated with different uses. Certain components are regularly present: halls/​space for public ritual or a space associated with authority, space for religious ritual, communal space, and a service area. In many cases these areas or zones are defined by distinct axes on which the buildings within individual zones are arranged. Thus, careful visual analysis of the plans of settlements and the identification of distinct spatial groups within them may point to a corresponding functional zoning, with axial alignment often performing the role of a visibly pronounced “binding” component, which links particular buildings into groups. Frequently, alignment is associated with the buildings that embody authority, whether they can be interpreted specifically as halls or high-​status dwellings. The existing evidence is far from conclusive, and our knowledge of the use and function of the great hall is also still very limited. Much of our understanding of what happened in the hall comes from the Old English poetry.52 The description of Heorot, the mead-​hall in the poem Beowulf, has been compared with existing archaeological records of excavated halls.53 How accurately the Old English poetry described what happened in the hall, considering it often did so retrospectively, particularly in the case of Beowulf, is an open question.54 However, assessment of the positions of entrances can shed some light on some aspects of function of the hall and other possibly lower status but prominent buildings. Entrances in the middle of long walls appear to be an ubiquitous and generic feature, possibly inherited from Continental architecture, as has 51 Annia Cherryson, “Such a Resting-​Place as is Necessary for us in God’s Sight and Fitting in the Eyes of the World: Saxon Southampton and the Development of Churchyard Burial,” in Burial in Later Anglo-​Saxon England, c. 650–​1100 AD, ed. Jo Buckberry and Annia Cherryson (Oxford: Oxbow, 2010), 54–​72 at 62. 52 Hume, “Concept of the Hall.” Stephen Pollington has also attempted to reconstruct a hall in detail on the basis of literary evidence, although this attempt suffers from a lack of substantive supporting data. See Stephen Pollington, The Mead-​Hall: The Feasting Tradition in Anglo-​Saxon England (Ely: Anglo-​Saxon, 2003), 65–​98.

53 Rosemary Cramp, “The Hall in Beowulf and in Archaeology,” in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-​ Saxon Period: Studies in Honour of Jess B. Bessinges, Jr., ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1993), 331–​46. 54 Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 138. Patrick Wormald has argued that Beowulf was written in the later seventh century. See Patrick Wormald, “Bede, ‘Beowulf’, and the Conversion of the Anglo-​Saxon Aristocracy,” in Bede and Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. R. T. Farrell, BAR British Series 46 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1978), 32–​90.

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been illustrated already by James, Marshall, and Millett.55 Generally, evidence of axial entrances is not common in fifth-​ to seventh-​century buildings and is mostly confined to larger structures.56 They do, however, appear at sites with alignment. It seems that entrances in the ends of buildings feature where opposed lateral doorways, which were sufficient in other cases, failed to respond to particular spatial arrangements, most notably, to facilitate direct communication between axially aligned halls. At Yeavering, it is halls A4 and A1. At Chalton the link seems to be between structures A3, A2, A1, and possibly the enclosure to the east, and also between the group A12, A13, and A14, where A12 also has an axial entrance. At Cowdery’s Down, the arrangement of C12, open on each side, facilitates direct progress through the building and into the enclosure to the east. At three of these sites, there are contrasting examples of aligned buildings with entrances only in the long sides. In these cases, it seems that arrangement in one line was important but direct access was not. These include the pair of D1 and D2 at Yeavering (which, in particular, contrasts with the group of halls A, in which the buildings did have axial entrances), C14 and B/​C15 at Cowdery’s Down, and A10 aligned with A9 inside the enclosure to the north at Chalton. The presence of these two different approaches—​ functional connection between aligned buildings and evident lack of connection, despite axial alignment—​especially when they occur at a single site at the same time, suggests that by contrast with the generic long-​side doorways, openings at the short ends were a matter of choice and were made in response to surrounding structures. This, in turn, could suggest that the groups with facing doorways could have been for ceremonial use, where passage from one hall into another was deemed important, whereas those with generic mid-​long-​wall doorways served a different function and did not constitute stations on a processional route, despite the axial alignment of buildings. It is possible, even likely, that some of the zones—​for example, D at Yeavering and C13 at Cowdery’s Down—​fulfilled a cultic or religious function. A somewhat radical alternative to this would be a complete absence of architectural spaces for pagan rituals in pre-​Christian English society, in line with Sarah Semple’s observation that pagan worship may have taken pace in the open air.57 Some structures in Scandinavia have been identified as temples or “ceremonial buildings,” at Uppåkra, Uppsala, Gudme, 55 Simon James, Anne Marshall, and Martin Millett, “An Early Medieval Building Tradition,” The Archaeological Journal 141, no. 1 (1984): 182–​215 at 184, 203. 56 Hamerow, Rural Settlements and Society, 38, 41. Examples of buildings with axial entrances at sites lacking alignment can be found at Buckden, Waltham Abbey, and West Stow. Philip Rahtz, “Buildings and Rural Settlement,” in The Archaeology of Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. David M. Wilson (London: Methuen, 1976), 49–​98, figs. 2.15 and 2.16.

57 Semple, “In the Open Air” and “Sacred Spaces and Places in Pre-​Christian and Conversion Period Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Oxford Handbook of Anglo-​Saxon Archaeology, ed. Hamerow, Hinton, and Crawford, 742–​63. See also Audrey Meaney, “Pagan English Sanctuaries, Place-​Names and Hundred Meeting-​Places,” Anglo-​Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 8 (1995): 29–​42 at 37.

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148 Anastasia Moskvina Sanda, Helgö, Hov, and Lunda.58 Although they differ dramatically in their construction, the outstanding finds related to these buildings point toward their cultic use with a lot more certainty than anything found in Britain.59 In England, no early medieval structure has been firmly identified as a pagan shrine and our overall knowledge of ritualistic behavior in what was perhaps a rather culturally and ethnically mixed society is too limited to expect definitive conclusions on how the liturgy of pre-​Christian religion might have been expressed in the landscape or in built structures.60 At the same time, in the light of the ongoing search for evidence of temples and churches in early medieval English settlements, this argument broadens the area of search and proposes that attention should be paid not only to the plans and other physical characteristics of possible temples, as has been done until now, but also to their positions within the patterns of settlements. What is important at this stage is the correlation between alignment, zoning, and function: different axes on which lines of buildings were arranged often comprise functional groups and indicate spatial and functional coherence within the groups, while simultaneously providing a distinction from other groups. The use of alignment also takes the approach to zoning in seventh-​century England outside the realm of the exclusively practical and functional. Alignment is a visual language that speaks not only of the function of specific groups of buildings, but also of their status and even ceremonial significance. It is worth noting here that every site considered above, apart from Chalton, has been interpreted as at least a high-​status one if not royal. The 58 Lars Larsson, “A Ceremonial Building as a ‘Home of the Gods’? Central Buildings in the Central Place of Uppåkra,” and Lars Jørgensen, “Gudme-​Lundeborg on Funen as a Model for Northern Europe?,” both in The Gudme/​Gudhem Phenomenon: Papers Presented at a Workshop Organised by the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology (ZBSA), Schleswig, April 26th and 27th, 2010, ed. Oliver Grimm and Alexanda Pesch (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 2011), 189–​206 and 77–​89 at 83. 59 Larsson, “A Ceremonial Building,” 200–​201; John Ljungkvist personal communication, 2016.

60 It is worth mentioning that, architecturally, church buildings often seem to have derived from halls, hence the frequent confusion in the identification of early churches. For instance, building 7098 at Staunch Meadow has been interpreted as a church only on the basis of its association with a cemetery. Andrew Tester et al., Staunch Meadow, Brandon, Suffolk: A High Status Middle Saxon Settlement on the Fen Edge, East Anglian Archaeology 151 (Bury St. Edmunds: Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service, 2014), 48, 362. In addition, the general identification of sites as religious or monastic can be difficult, as is illustrated by Brandon and Flixborough. Helen Gittos, “Christian Sacred Spaces and Places,” in Oxford Handbook of Anglo-​Saxon Archaeology, ed. Hamerow, Hinton, and Crawford, 824–​44 at 827–​28. On the possible origins of some church buildings, see Letha Smenton, “The Heritage of Timber Architecture in Anglo-​Saxon Stone Churches,” Gesta pre-​ serial issue (1963): 8–​11; also, Sam Turner and Chris Fowler, “The Bones of the Northumbrian Landscape: Technologies of Social Change in the Conversion Period,” in Making Christian Landscapes in Atlantic Europe. Conversion and Consolidation in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Tomás Ó Carragáin and Sam Turner (Cork: Cork University Press, 2016), 249–​63 at 252. On confusion in the identification of sites, see Rosemary Cramp, “Monastic Sites,” in Archaeology of Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. Wilson, 201–​52 at 249; Sam Turner, Making a Christian Landscape. The Countryside in Early Medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006), 63–​66.

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excavated sites also display similarities in construction of the central buildings, which points toward a consistency in their status. This observation both suggests that there is a link between high status and zoning and alignment and also invites reconsideration of the status of Chalton. A combination of alignment and zoning can be seen as a product of a broader attention to planning. This is consistent with Blair’s argument that planning of buildings on a grid, which has also been observed above, at both high-​status and low-​status settlements, occurs after ca. 600, with Andrew Reynolds’s analysis of the development of enclosures and the ordered layout of settlements, and with Helena Hamerow’s argument that precision in settlement planning in early medieval England did not develop until the late sixth century.61 Furthermore, the first large halls, often enclosed, an indication of increased attention to planning and status, appear around the same date.62 Taken together with the fact that the phenomenon of alignment in high-​status sites also begins to develop around 600, this seems to indicate a fairly consistent tendency to regularity in the settlements of this period.63 Different aspects of regularity, however, seem to manifest themselves in different contexts, ranging from grids, as noted by John Blair, to straight lines, as we have seen here. Interestingly, these patterns in planning seem to have been contemporary with other phenomena, which indicate cultural shifts in a broader context, such as changes in landholding practices, writing, mortuary practice, and possible changes in pagan priesthood and attitudes to witchcraft.64 Needless to say, the period after 600 is the time when the English kingdoms were becoming firmly established and Christianized, at least in the east, south, and north of modern England, and when lords were exercising a growing control over their estates.65 Thus, a shift in 61 Blair, “Grid-​Planning in Anglo-​Saxon Settlements,” 49, 54; Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 148–​56; Hamerow, Rural Settlements and Society, 70–​71; Reynolds, “Boundaries and Settlements.” 62 Hamerow, Early Medieval Settlements, 94; Hamerow, “Archaeology of Early Settlements,” 302; Turner and Fowler, “Bones of Northumbrian Landscape,” 251–​52. 63 The dating of the sites is mostly approximate and based on types of structures, more closely dated analogies elsewhere, and historical narratives. C14 dating and more precise material evidence is only occasionally available. Due care needs to be exercised when putting any site in a chronological context. At the same time, such a picture of order and precision evolving in settlements from around 600 seems consistent in numerous aspects of settlement planning and therefore seems a reasonable model.

64 Turner and Fowler, “Bones of Northumbrian Landscape”; Clifford M. Sofield, “Living with the Dead: Human Burials in Anglo-​Saxon Settlement Contexts,” Archaeological Journal 172 (2015): 351–​88 at 353–​54; John Blair, “Overview: The Archaeology of Religion,” in Oxford Handbook of Anglo-​Saxon Archaeology, ed. Hamerow, Hinton, and Crawford, 727–​41 at 729–​31; for “cunning women” and their grave goods after 600, see Audrey Meaney, “Women, Witchcraft and Magic in Anglo-​Saxon England,” in Superstition and Popular Medicine in Anglo-​Saxon England, ed. D. G. Scragg (Manchester: Manchester Centre for Anglo-​Saxon Studies, 1989), 9–​40. On the significance of changes in the seventh century in general, see Blair, Building Anglo-​Saxon England, 174–​76.

65 Ken Dark, “The Late Antique Landscape of Britain, AD 300–​700,” in Landscape of Change. Rural Evolutions in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Neil Christie (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 279–​99 at 296; Hamerow, “Archaeology of Early Settlements,” 309.

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150 Anastasia Moskvina architectural paradigm would appear to be consistent and contemporary with other social and cultural changes, including ones concerning beliefs. Zoning, together with axial alignment, expressed through architecture, can be seen as a mirror of evolving social patterns. As to the practical application of this argument, I have proposed a new way of looking at the archaeology of early medieval English settlements. Instead of looking first at individual structures to understand their roles, there should be a focus on the overall layouts of settlements, with buildings as their components, in conjunction with evidence of communication between the buildings, such as entrances. I would suggest that careful spatial analysis—​hitherto underexploited—​together with a consideration of historical and archaeological evidence, can allow us to reveal and unpack multiple functions and practices, relating to political, cultic, social, and cosmological significance, embedded in and represented through the architecture and layouts of the settlements in early medieval England.

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Chapter 7

UNDERNEATH THE ARCHES: PETER OF EBOLI AND THE ORDERLY ARCHITECTURE OF NORMAN SICILY Philippa Byrne*

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.1 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.2 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

* Philippa Byrne is a Departmental Lecturer in Medieval History at Somerville College, University of Oxford. Her research examines the intellectual culture of Sicily in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

1  For example, William Tronzo, “The Royal Gardens of Medieval Palermo: Landscape Experienced, Landscape as Metaphor,” in Le vie del Medioevo: atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, 28 settembre–​1 ottobre 1998, ed. Arturo Carlo Quintavalle (Milan: Electa, 2000), 362–​73; Giuseppe Mandalà, “The Sicilian Questions,” Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 3, nos. 1–​2 (2016): 3–​31; Jo’anne Van Ooijen, “Resilient Matters: The Cathedral of Syracuse as an Architectural Palimpsest,” Architectural Histories 7, no. 1 (2019) [non-​paginated]. 2 For some recent examples, see Charles E. Nicklies, “Builders, Patrons, and Identity: The Domed Basilicas of Sicily and Calabria,” Gesta 43, no. 2 (2004): 99–​114; Theresa Jäckh, “Water and Wealth in Medieval Sicily: The Case of the Admiral’s Bridge and Arab-​Norman Palermo (10th–​13th Centuries),” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 6, no. 5 (2019) [non-​paginated].

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152 Philippa Byrne 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.”3 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. That is the first claim of this chapter: to suggest that the urban architecture of medieval Sicily was being reimagined for a Staufen emperor, and that we can see that process of reimaging taking place in the Liber ad Honorem Augusti of Peter of Eboli, a work probably written between 1195 and 1196.4 The second is that the way in which the palace in Palermo was depicted is particularly important in this process. Palermo had been the centre of the Norman “performance” of rulership. That idea of performance was not abandoned, but a new play was staged.5 Peter of Eboli, a native of the Norman Sicilian kingdom and an aspiring imperial panegyricist, makes specific use of the architectural features of the palace to argue the case for Staufen order in Sicily, Staufen order in the empire, and a Staufen order ordained by the cosmos. There is nothing new in the observation that Peter of Eboli was a panegyricist, adopting an effusive style that praised Henry VI and sought to deny any other claims to political authority in Sicily. But here I hope to highlight the architectural dimensions of the argument.6 The third book of the Liber ad Honorem Augusti executes an interesting intellectual move. This is a move not without parallel in other representations of medieval architecture, but significant in Sicily because of its timing, import, and the assumed audience of the work. The Norman—​now Staufen—​palace becomes a place which encompasses both time and space. The rooms of the palace represent, in turn, 3 For Frederick II’s architectural ambitions, see most recently Jane-​Heloise Nancarrow, “Normanitas and Memorial Traditions in the Apulian Architecture of Emperor Frederick II,” Mediterranean Studies 27, no. 1 (2019): 36–​62.

4 Peter of Eboli, Liber ad Honorem Augusti, ed. and trans. Gwenyth Hood, Book in Honor of Augustus (Liber ad Honorem Augusti) (Tempe: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012). All quotations from the Liber are cited by line number from this edition.

5 This metaphor is not my own—​see Laura Sciascia, “Palermo as a Stage for, and a Mirror of, Political Developments,” in A Companion to Medieval Palermo: The History of a Mediterranean City from 600 to 1500, ed. Anneliese Nef and Martin Thom (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 299–​323. 6 I regret that in what follows I have been unable to consult Francesco Zecchino, L’architettura disegnata nel Liber ad honorem Augusti di Pietro da Eboli (Rome: Il cigno GG, 2018).

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the entirety of scriptural history, and then the empire itself. With Henry VI (and his administrators) taking up residence in the palace, Peter was able to emphasize the world-​historical possibilities of Panormitan architecture, tying Norman buildings to a theology which praised the Staufen ruler, in which Sicily emerges as central to the unfolding of an imperial and providential history. This makes the Liber ad Honorem Augusti a text through which we can access a particular way of thinking about medieval building and buildings: a way of thinking which is not unique to Sicily. Thus, the poem tells us something about political culture in the medieval Mediterranean in the late twelfth century, but just as much about the interaction between architecture and cosmological thinking.7

The Poet and his Work

The Liber ad Honorem Augusti is an odd piece, and historians have not always known in exactly which category or categories it is best placed and best understood. The Liber itself is often noted for the distinction of providing the only known depiction of twelfth-​ century Palermo.8 It survives today in a single copy, possibly the only copy ever made, now in the Burgerbibliothek Bern (Cod. 120.II).9 This may be the presentation copy intended for the Staufen court, although there are some errors and corrections which may suggest it was a “final draft” which was being revised for presentation, perhaps at the moment when Henry VI died in September 1197.10 Each “verse” of the Liber (the term used by Peter is particula) is accompanied by a colour drawing in pen (fifty-​three in total). As the manuscript is organized in codex form, a reader is confronted by the text of the poem on the left, and a full-​page miniature illustrating the scene on the right. The images pay relatively little attention to the distinguishing features of landscapes or buildings. They often depict several scenes of action in a single page, giving an overview rather than treating any one event in detail. While the text of the poem does not refer to the images, there is close correspondence between the two, and, generally speaking, each image depicts an action or set of events described in the adjacent particula. The miniatures are often briefly annotated, with Latin captions explaining the action of the scene or identifying the participants: for example, the scene set in Salerno at fol. 111r 7 On the interaction between architecture and cosmological thinking, see now chap. 6 by Moskvina and chap. 3 by Godlove. 8 This is fol. 98r; see Sciascia, “Palermo as a Stage.” I discuss the significance of this image further below.

9 I am grateful to the librarians of the Burgerbibliothek Bern for their assistance with the images reproduced in this chapter.

10 Here and in the following sentences, I summarize a much more complex set of arguments about the manuscript and its state and status, and rely on the insights of other scholars. For more detailed discussion, see Petrus de Ebulo, Liber Ad Honorem Augusti Sive De Rebus Siculis: Codex 120 II Der Burgerbibliothek Bern. Eine Bilderchronik Der Stauferzeit, ed. Theo Kölzer, Marlis Stähli, and Gereon Becht-​Jördens (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1994).

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154 Philippa Byrne labels “the empress” (imperatrix), the “citizens of Salerno” (cives Salerni), a group of “noble women” (nobiles mulieres), as well as the local features of the landscape, a hill, and a great tower. Given their size and their labelling, it seems likely that these miniatures may have been intended as an additional means of representing the story, perhaps for those for whom Peter’s ornate Latin was too complex to unpack easily. Close study of the manuscript has revealed that the miniatures were completed in two stages: in the first stage, books 1 and 2 were illustrated; in the second stage, the miniatures for the third book were completed, in a rather more “deluxe” fashion, and with more expensive paints. On the whole, the images are not lavish, though the artist of the third book seems to have been instructed to create a more “sophisticated” impression.11 Given the nature of the manuscript, it seems likely that this work was supervised by Peter himself.12 Rather less can be said about the biography of Peter of Eboli than about the biography of the manuscript. Active in the later twelfth century, he was dead by ca. 1220. Peter was almost certainly a monk, and he had himself depicted in the Liber with a tonsure; it seems most likely that he belonged to the Benedictine monastery of Eboli, near Salerno.13 Peter also describes himself as “magister,” a title which (as it was often used in the twelfth century) most likely denotes some level of advancement in learning, though not a formal degree. What I should like to underscore in this brief biography is that theological learning must have made up a significant part of Peter’s education. This is a point sometimes overlooked, given that his two surviving works address “secular” (so to speak) subjects. But even an epic with an ostensibly “secular” subject matter could be fitted into a wider Christian cosmology; it remained possible to invoke fortuna within a framework of divine providence.14 Alongside the Liber, Peter records that he was the author of two other works. One, De Balneis Puteolanis, on the baths of Pozzuoli, near Naples (at that time within the wider kingdom of Sicily), describes the natural thermal waters which had been developed as an attraction in the ancient world and which continued to attract medieval visitors through their health-​giving properties.15 This text 11 For the detail of this argument, see Robert Fuchs, Ralf Mrusek, and Doris Oltrogge, “Die Entstehung der Handschrift: Materialen und Maltechnik,” in Petrus de Ebulo, ed. Kölzer, Stähli, and Becht-​Jördens, 275–​85. 12 For a discussion of the illustrations to Peter’s other surviving work, and what this might reveal about artistic workshops in Sicily in this period, see Raymond J. Clark, “Peter of Eboli, ‘De Balneis Puteolanis’ and Manuscripts from the Aragonese Scriptorium in Naples,” Traditio 45 (1990): 380–​89.

13 This is, e.g., the working assumption in Dana Katz, “From Norman to Hohenstaufen Rule of Sicily: The Representation of Matthew of Ajello in the Liber ad honorem Augusti and the Church of La Magione in Palermo,” Convivium 5, no. 1 (2018): 66–​79. 14 One might see a parallel here in the Alexandreis of Walter of Chatillon, ed. Marvin L. Colker (Padua: in aedibus Antenoris, 1978).

15 This work has been referred to by several different names. The recent critical edition by Teofilo De Angelis uses the title De Euboicis Aquis (Florence: Sismel, 2019). See Teofilo De Angelis, “Towards a Critical Edition of Petrus de Ebulo’s De balneis puteolanis: New Hypotheses,” in People, Texts and Artefacts: Cultural Transmission in the Medieval Norman Worlds, ed. David Bates, Eduoardo

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was strikingly popular and was translated into several European vernaculars. Its textual history and stemmata are yet to be unpicked fully. The other work, in praise of the deeds of Frederick I Barbarossa, father of Henry VI, has been lost. Peter, as the Liber makes clear, believed that Henry VI was the rightful inheritor of the Sicilian throne. Indeed, part of the purpose of the poem was to demonstrate the justice of Henry’s claim and the illegitimacy of the claim of Tancred of Lecce, another aspirant to the crown. Peter must also have enjoyed a degree of connection to the Staufen court in Sicily: he achieved some reputation as a poet, and chose Conrad of Querfurt, Henry’s chancellor, as the dedicatee of the Liber. Conrad himself is depicted in that manuscript, set alongside Peter, both kneeling before Henry in the final book (fol. 139r). While a dedication is no secure guide to a work’s reception or the status of the author, it is evident that Peter hoped to advance his position through the work. The Liber ad Honorem Augusti is a poem in three books, which, broadly speaking, corresponds in many significant ways to the genre of medieval epic. It is filled with classical and classicizing references, and the towns of the Sicilian kingdom are typically referred to by their ancient rather than contemporary names. In this epic, Henry VI, eldest surviving son of Frederick I Barbarossa, is the hero, and the material of the story recounts how he achieved the conquest of Sicily. The first two books describe the death of the last “legitimate” (at least in Peter’s eyes) Norman king of Sicily, William II, and the subsequent struggle between Henry and Tancred. Henry’s plans suffer many significant setbacks, including the capture of his wife Constance by Tancredine forces. Despite Tancred’s personal vices (as Peter saw them), he enjoyed significant support in certain Sicilian cities.16 The much shorter final book changes key, and describes the administration, and the glories, of Henry VI, as he establishes his rule in Sicily, draws the kingdom into the empire, and looks to make wider conquests.

Representing Sicilian Cities

The category of “architecture” is not one that is easily applied to the Liber. I have already noted that that the illustrations are relatively lacking in detail. Without the labels that accompany the images, and the cues from the text, one would face an extremely difficult task in distinguishing one castle as represented in the Liber from another. This lack of detail and distinction is less the case for the scenes set in Palermo (at the start of the first book, and most of the third book), where certain features of the city can be identified. The most famous illustration is that at fol. 98r. It has become a standard image for d’Angelo, and Elisabeth van Houts (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2017), 65–​76; Jean-​ Marie D’Amato, Prolegomena to a Critical Edition of the Illustrated Medieval Poem “De Balneis Terre Laboris” by Peter of Eboli, unpublished PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1975. D’Amato’s research remains essential for understanding the work. 16 On Peter’s presentation of Tancred, see Ivo Wolsing, “ ‘Look, there Comes the Half-​Man!’ Delegitimising Tancred of Lecce in Peter of Eboli’s Liber ad honorem Augusti,” Al-​Masāq 31, no. 3 (2019): 323–​37.

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156 Philippa Byrne many books and articles on Norman Sicily. It shows the city of Palermo at the moment of William II’s death in 1189: it represents the royal garden, the royal chapel (i.e., the Cappella Palatina), the harbour of the city, and the chain that encloses and protects it (Figure 28).17 At fol. 105r, the poem takes a rare excursion from Sicily to depict the coronation of Henry VI at Rome at Easter 1191. The city is denoted by the label ROMA, and a series of castle-​like towers along the top of the page and down the left-​hand side acts like a frame. But it is individual actors who are the focus of the narrative, and persons are depicted with greater attention to detail than great Roman buildings. The figures of Henry VI and Pope Celestine are represented at various stages of the imperial coronation process. One might fairly say that this is true of most of the illustrations in the Liber, where attention is focused on the actors rather than the setting. However, this point about the ambiguous nature of “architecture” applies to the way in which the text of the poem presents the buildings of Sicily and southern Italy too, albeit for a different reason. Any simple category of “architecture” is complicated by the fact that Peter blurs the line between the natural world and man-​made constructions. Take, for example, his description of the castle of Rocca D’Arce (Lazio), which Henry succeeds in claiming during his conquest. Peter presents this as a triumph both over nature and over human fortifications: “Nature made it from a tightly compressed mound; /​it receives no enemies, and fears neither stones nor weapons.”18 The same lack of distinction between features of the landscape and features of the built environment is evident in his depiction of Capua. Here Peter provides (or, better, imagines and embellishes) the speech made by Conrad of Lutzelhard, one of Henry’s captains, as he addresses his men before the city. Capua is “the ancient city, rich indeed in its fields,” blessed by its wealth, its choice of archbishop, its abundance of men, the fertility of its soil.19 The features created by nature and those developed by human hands are run together; in Capua the river is an example of both those processes, given by nature, but used by humans to develop the prosperity of the city. Indeed, for a partisan of Henry VI, Peter exhibits what seems an almost perverse admiration for the Sicilian landscape and its resources, given that the same landscape makes Henry’s political objectives more difficult to achieve. For example, during the campaign, the empress Constance was captured by Tancred’s supporters and sent to a castle at Naples.20 That castle, San Salvatore, was surrounded on all sides by the sea, fortified by rocks at the bases of the cliffs: it was a prison but so inaccessible it was also a preserver of whatever treasure it was given to keep. Its status as the ultimate prison 17 D. Booms and P. Higgs, Sicily: Culture and Conquest (London: British Museum, 2016), 223.

18 Peter of Eboli, Liber ad Honorem Augusti, ll. 342–​43: “Quam castigato natura creavit acervo, /​ Hostes non recipit, saxa nec arma timet.” 19 Peter of Eboli, Liber ad Honorem Augusti, ll. 777–​80: “Urbs antiqua, suis uberrima denique campis.” 20 The following narrative can be found only in Peter’s poem and is not in any other contemporary sources. This may reflect dramatic license on Peter’s part, or simply the fact of his superior access to information about the conflict, to which he was closer than any other reporters.

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Figure 28. Palermo at the death of William II, with the different areas of the city depicted in mourning. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 102.II, fol. 98r (Codices Electronici AG, www.e-codices.ch).

becomes (in a strange sense) tribute to the importance of Constance: “the rocks and the waves keep away hostile feet. /​It has the name Preserver, since it preserves what is committed to it /​such a place is fit to hold such booty.”21 (ll. 956–​58). In short, our modern categories of “architecture” and “ecology” (and the strict separation between them) are not always helpful in understanding Peter of Eboli’s argument. Perhaps one ought not to be surprised by this: his works on the baths of Pozzuoli, after all, represent an account of how the natural health-​giving features of the southern Italian coastline had been enhanced by human ingenuity for enjoyment and treatment. This elision of urban landscape and nature does not mark out Peter as particularly unusual amongst writers of the central Middle Ages. The Liber has much in common with the classical and medieval laus urbium tradition of writing in praise of cities, a subject of renewed interest in twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Works in that genre also reflect on the setting of cities within the wider landscape, the location of their 21 Peter of Eboli, Liber ad Honorem Augusti, ll. 956–​58: “Hinc lapis hostiles, hinc vetat unda pedes; /​Qui nomen Salvator habet, quia credita salvat; /​Tantaque sit tanto preda tenenda loco.”

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Figure 29. Constance’s arrival in Messina, with some geographical and architectural features of the city shown and labelled. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 102.II, fol. 120r (Codices Electronici AG, www.e-codices.ch).

rivers, the fertility of their land, and how all such qualities shape the nature of their inhabitants.22 Peter is not writing in praise of a single city, but he does provide vignettes of the different Sicilian cities involved on either side of the conflict between Henry VI and Tancred. The action begins and ends in Palermo, first in her mourning for William, and then finally as the prize that both Henry and Tancred wish to seize. Not all the cities are to be praised: Capua may be beautiful and prosperous, but others—​Salerno, for example—​ are treacherous and vile.23 Indeed, for some of the cities condemned by Peter, what we read is almost an anti-​laudatio, a harangue excoriating the most wicked qualities of the city and its inhabitants. 22 For the most recent work on this genre, see Paul Oldfield, Urban Panegyric and the Transformation of the Medieval City, 1100–​1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For late antique precedents, see Megan Welton, “The City Speaks: Cities, Citizens, and Civic Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages,” Traditio 75 (2020): 1–​37, and, more generally, John Kenneth Hyde, “Medieval Descriptions of Cities,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 48 (1965): 308–​40. 23 For Salerno, see Particula XX.

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These features make it all the stranger that, to my knowledge, no one has seriously engaged with the Liber ad Honorem Augusti as sharing much in common with urban panegyrics. Panegyric, certainly, is a term that has entered the fray in describing the book, but only in conceiving of it as a praise poem for Henry VI. Perhaps that is on the strength of the final book, which, though shorter, had such a marked ideological argument about the nature of Staufen power that it may have made more of an impression on readers than the discussion of civic rivalries and politics in the preceding two books.24 All in all, we understand the Liber better when we recognize that it reflects (and refracts), especially in its first two books, a complex picture of urban life in Sicily, and an urban-​centred vision of the world. This is evident on considering one of the illustrations from the start of the final book, at fol. 140r. Here Peter addresses Wisdom (Sapientia), which has given to humans in the created world certain skills, some in speech, some in power, and whom Peter asks to grant him the ability to finish the work. The accompanying illustration shows Peter (tonsured) addressing the figure of wisdom, who holds a map of the world (labelled mappa mundi in the manuscript). The world itself is represented not by division into land masses or recognizable nations, but as several rows of buildings, divided by three rivers. This reinforces the perspective on Sicily which Peter has presented in the previous two books: as a place dominated by political action in its cities. Paul Oldfield’s recent work on southern Italy has amply demonstrated the continuing vitality and importance of civic culture in southern Italy into the Norman period.25 We can (tentatively, for the evidence is rather sparser beyond Palermo) make the same case for Sicily too. Such an approach—​emphasizing the urban variety and dynamism of Sicily—​would also accord with Peter’s own ambitions for his work, such as we can infer them. The book was written “ad honorem” of Henry VI, but it also has a didactic edge to it: through the book, Henry may appreciate some of the dimensions of his newly acquired kingdom, both in terms of its geography and its politics. Peter is inviting the emperor’s understanding; and Sicily is to be understood through its cities, and even (for Palermo at least) its civic quarters and divisions. Henry VI had, of course, been present for many of the events that Peter describes in the Liber, though not all of them, as he had been forced to withdraw from the initial attempt at conquest due to illness. The poem is an act of praise of the emperor, but it also offers reminder that at least some of the Sicilian population had remained loyal to him during the difficult and extended business of conquest. Peter inserts just such a reminder into Constance’s speech to her Salernitan captors, where she praises the loyalty and goodwill she has been shown by the people of Eboli, and promises, should she survive, to reward them for it: 24 It is quite striking that Peter’s Liber receives no mention in Paul Oldfield’s recent work on the laudes urbium genre, especially because one of Oldfield’s key arguments is the numerous possible forms such writing can take, and the relative flexibility of the framework.

25 Paul Oldfield, City and Community in Norman Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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160 Philippa Byrne Citizens, go in haste /​and learn about the faith that is in the people of Eboli. Eboli, unless I perish, I will pay back the same to you /​ memory measuring in heartfelt love the good things which you have deserved.26

One might go as far as reading into this a reminder of the “good things” (boni) still owed to Eboli for its loyalty during the protracted process of conquest. Peter offers vignettes which, as well as placing cities and their conquest and submission in a classical mould, exhibit their most notable features and helps explain the connection between different locations. This point is reinforced by the labels attached to the manuscript illustrations, often believed to have been added by Peter himself.27 The illustrations support the Latin text, but the illustrations themselves can also help tell the story on their own, detaching it from the long epic narrative. This is especially important in the parts of the poem which depict action without Henry, such as the narrative in which Constance is captured and imprisoned. When Constance is first captured, the label accompanying the image notes she is imprisoned in “Terracina,” the palace at Salerno (fol. 118r; depicted again as Constance leaves the same castle under guard, fol. 119r, for the journey to Messina). When Constance arrives in Messina, some features of the city are labelled, including the Faro (Farum) the narrow straight separating Messina from the mainland, as is the portus Messane (fol. 120r; Figure 29). Her final place of captivity, “Castrum Salvatoris ad mare” is also named (fol. 126r). This labelling of urban settings is all the more important for understanding the action in the poem when scenes quite often leap from a focus on “imperial” action (Henry or Constance) to the activities of Tancred and his supporters.

Time and Space, Order and Architecture

The centre point of Palermo—​arguably the centre point of the twelfth-​century Norman kingdom, both politically and culturally—​was the royal palace. A description of the palace as it was in the late twelfth century, at the end of the reign of William II, survives in a text known as the Letter to Peter, likely written in early 1190. The Letter calls upon the inhabitants of Sicily to resist the impending Staufen invasion. The author (whose identity is not firmly established) exhorts the cities of Sicily to band together and make common cause against the barbarity and beastliness of German rule.28 The Letter thus laments the distinctive glories of the cities of Sicily in anticipation of their coming 26 Peter of Eboli, Liber ad Honorem Augusti, ll. 615–​18: “Cives, concurrite gentis, /​ Que sit in Ebolea discite gente fides. /​Ebole, ni peream, memori tibi lance rependam /​Pectoris affectus que meruere boni.” 27 See the discussion and notes in Book in Honor of Augustus, trans. Hood, 17.

28 The terms “barbarity” and “beastliness” are taken from the translation in The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by ‘Hugo Falcandus’ 1154–​69, trans. G. A. Loud and Thomas Wiedemann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). While the identity of the recipient, another Peter can be established, a series of different candidates have been put forward for authorship. Evelyn Jamison argued that the author was to be identified with Admiral Eugenius of Sicily, a suggestion which has found little support: Admiral Eugenius of Sicily: His Life and Work, and the Authorship of the Epistola Ad Petrum, and the Historia Hugonis Falcandi Siculi (London: Oxford University Press,

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destruction. In that sense, it, by design, offers an idealized picture of the kingdom. Nonetheless, it is both a valuable source for this late period, and a useful articulation of the particularities of different Sicilian cities, at least as one contemporary saw them. Like most of our written evidence for twelfth-​century Sicily, it offers a much more detailed account of Palermo than the other cities of Sicily, and a far more detailed account of the royal palace and courtly architecture than the other features of the city: The New Palace … [was] built with amazing effort and astonishing skill out of squared stones; the outer side has walls which wind far and wide, while the inner side is remarkable for its great splendour of gems and gold. On one side it has the Pisan Tower, assigned to the protection of the treasury, on the other the Greek Tower overlooks that part of the city which is called Kemonia. That part of the palace called Joharia glorifies the middle section; it is particularly beautiful, sparkling with the glory of many kinds of adornment, and the king used to spend his time there intimately when he wanted to enjoy peace and quiet.29

What the author of the Letter feared most came to pass within four years. The same palace in Palermo forms the centre of Peter of Eboli’s third book, though it is now occupied by a Staufen ruler and Staufen administrators. One should note here the intellectual (even ideological) problem facing Peter: how could one impose a Staufen imperial style on the urban world of southern Italy—​a world with its own distinct traditions? The third book attempts to fashion a place for Sicily in the Staufen world through a description of the royal palace and the activities that take place within it. This may also account for the fact that book 3 of the Liber does not always sit comfortably with the first and second books, which are much more enmeshed in the urban politics of Sicily and its cities. This question of how to put a Staufen “stamp” on Sicily was not one which occupied Peter alone; it was also a discussion being played out in ceremony and politics. Henry VI and his associates were actively considering how to display their authority within Sicily and within Palermo. Sciascia, for example, has recently suggested that Henry VI adopted the form of the traditional royal adventus when entering the capital city.30 If we can trust these reports of a Staufen adventus into the capital, then Henry was deliberately 1957). For a more recent discussion of the question of authorship, see History, trans. Loud and Wiedemann, 28–​42.

29 “[P]‌alatium Novum … mira ex quadris lapidibus diligentia, miro labore constructum, exterius quidem spatiosis murorum anfractibus circonclusum, interius vero multo gemmarum aurique splendore conspicuum; hinc habens turrim Pisanam, thesaurorum custodie deputatam, illinc turrim Grecam, ei civitatis parti que Kemonia dicitur imminentem. Medium vero locum pars illa palatii, que Ioharia nuncupatur, plurimum habens decoris, illustrat, quam multiformis ornatus gloria prefulgentem, rex ubi otio quietique indulgere voluerit, familiarius frequentare consuevit.” History, trans. Loud and Wiedemann, 258–​59. The Letter to Peter is discussed in Oldfield, Urban Paneygric, 105–​6. Oldfield argues that the Letter performs a typical function of urban panegyrics: by looking back on past urban glories, its author is able to construct an argument about politics in the present, imbuing the urban sites of Sicily with immediate and politicized meaning and potential.

30 Sciascia, “Palermo as a Stage.” As Sciascia notes, this adventus is described (albeit in markedly different tones) by Otto of St. Blasien’s chronicle, as well as in Peter’s Liber.

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162 Philippa Byrne tapping into local monarchical traditions, just as his rival Tancred had done before him. Such an adventus relied on an audience: a moment of ceremony that would make an immediate impression on the people of the newly conquered city. But the third book of the Liber advances this agenda much further, and aspires to a more permanent form, not simply binding Henry VI to local monarchical traditions, but binding the architecture of Norman Sicily to the Staufen dynasty. Book 3 begins with Peter praising God who, through the muses, has equipped Peter with the ability to please and laud his augustus through art. He then locates his writing in a particular chronological scheme: he inhabits the “happy times after the times” (felix post tempora tempus, l. 1504) when rule is now held by “the sixth master in the sixth age” (sextum sexto tempore, l. 1506). Peter’s remark on the “sixth age” anticipates a later illustration of the inner decorations of the royal palace. It suggests, of course, an Augustinian model of the ages of the world, fundamentally theological and providential in its framework, albeit one modified for Peter’s own panegyrical purposes.31 However, the allusions in this passage also move between the classicizing and the biblical. Henry’s reign is the culmination of the sixth age, but is also the return of the age of Saturn, and a time as bright as the age of Solomon. Thus, the temporal location of Henry’s reign (and also of the palace itself) is ambiguous, to say the least. Both Staufen dynasty and newly Staufenized palace are being framed so as to suggest they transcend ordinary human time and limited human conceptions of political change. Peter’s claim for the centrality of the royal palace to the empire is, in part, based upon its ability to store and hold all the tribute that is offered to Henry VI: “here they come from all corners of the world /​ the rulers, giving plentiful tribute to Augustus. /​ When the treasure is deposited, payment is acknowledged by a small receipt.”32 Gold from Arabia (Arabs) is brought to Conrad, gold coins from India (Indus), gems from Persia, and gifts from Egypt. Henry has all that the world holds; and those gifts are contained within the royal palace in Palermo. Indeed, that is where they are weighed, and an account is made of them. There is some ambiguity here: in one respect, the role of the palace in Palermo (and by extension, Sicily) within the Staufen territories is that of a counting house. Peter does not describe it as a capital in its own right. Compared to the status Palermo occupied under the Norman kings, this is a definite demotion. However, in terms of the imperial ambitions that Peter sketches out for the Staufen, Sicily (and its palace) is privileged in a certain sense—​it is not relegated to the position of merely offering tribute as other lands. However, Peter moves beyond this, assigning Staufen significance to the architectural features of the royal palace. This is underscored by two illustrations. As I have already suggested, the royal palace is held to encompass the empire, and represent a vital node of Staufen power, linking Sicily to an imperial framework: 31 For an elaboration on this scheme, see Augustine, De Civitate Dei 16.

32 Peter of Eboli, Liber ad Honorem Augusti, ll. 1563–​66: “Illuc conveniunt ex omni cardine mundi /​Dantes Augusto plena tributa duces, /​Quos brevis absolvit positis apodixa tributis.”

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There is a house where heavenly springtime is at play /​the walls of that house are mighty with adamant /​Before the house, a theatre rehearses in the open sun /​and your fountain leaps in the midst of it, Arethusa /​The hall shines with four columns times ten /​in which all the land of the Empire has rest.33

The last two lines here are the most significant for our purposes—​Peter’s reference to the columned halls of the aula. Peter may here be referring to the aula verde (or sala verde), the part of the palace which, under Norman kings, had functioned as a reception hall—​in which Norman kings received their administrators, dispensed justice, and were seen to take counsel.34 The accompanying image (Figure 30), however, does not quite match up to the text, though both work to very similar effect. The image depicts the inside of the palace. Instead of “four columns times ten,” it shows two rows of twelve colonnades, one at the top and one at the bottom of the page. In the centre space between the two rows of columns, the chancellor Conrad is depicted, receiving tribute from kneeling figures labelled as Arabia and India, as well as a fountain and a figure who has sometimes been identified as Markward of Anweiler, Henry’s seneschal and a leading figure in his administration. In each colonnade is written the name of one territory which is claimed to fall under imperial authority. In the top row: Frisia, Bavaria, Austria, Turingia, Saxonia, Boemia, Olsatia, Scavia, Pomerania, Polonia, Westfalia, Brabancia; in the lower row: Tuscia, Lombardia, Marchia, Burgundia, Liguria, Suevia, Francia, Lotharingia, Alsatia, Belgia, Anglia, Flandria. As should be noted, this list of territories “under” the empire was more ideological stretch than precise depiction—​ambition here far outstripping reality. The inclusion of England and France is an appeal to the theoretical superiority of imperial authority over merely kingly power. What is immediately striking, however, is the “orderliness” of this image, especially in contrast to the images of civil war in Sicily depicted in the preceding two books. Every part of the empire can be fitted into an orderly, symmetrical, and balanced architectural scheme. Different territories are here perfectly arranged. Strikingly, Sicily itself is not represented by those names in the colonnades: it is the territory from which order extends. A second set of verses and images knits the palace in Palermo (and then the wider kingdom of Sicily) into the scheme of imperial history, which becomes a continuation of scriptural, providential history. Peter sees here the opportunity to compress that long historical narrative into the halls of a single building: One house is divided into six chambers, of these /​the first records the royal work of the creator … /​the next depicts (pingit) the depths of the fate-​bearing flood /​the third takes

33 Peter of Eboli, Liber ad Honorem Augusti, ll. 1545–​50: “Est domus, etherei qua ludunt tempora veris; /​Ipse domus paries ex adamante riget. /​Ante domum patulo preludit sole teatrum /​Quo salit in medio fons, Arethusa, tuus; /​Ipsa quarter denis innititur aula columpnis, /​In quibus imperii tota quiescit humus.” Arethusa is an allusion to the Greek myth, contained in Ovid, of a nymph transformed into a spring to escape her pursuers; often located near Syracuse in Sicily. 34 I discuss the role and purpose of the aula further in “ ‘Reddimus urbem’: Civic Order and Public Politics at the End of Norman Sicily,” Al-​Masāq 32, no. 2 (2018): 125–​39.

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Figure 30. The colonnades within the royal palace, labelled by region. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 102.II, fol. 142r (144r) (Codices Electronici AG, www.e-codices.ch).

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the road of Abraham’s belief /​the fourth, drowning Pharoah, leaves Egypt bare /​the fifth house has the times of King David /​the sixth depicts (depingit) Frederick in divine array /​his aged side defended by Caesarian offspring.35

Here the description of the royal palace picks up on a theme Peter introduced at the start of the third book: the progression of the ages of the world, and the Staufen place in the sixth age. Naturally, Henry VI is one of the “Caesarian offspring” of Frederick I Barbarossa. Given the use of the verb (de)pingere, it seems likely that what Peter is describing here is an iconographical scheme painted on the walls the palace; perhaps occupying six different rooms. But whether this is a scheme that Peter knew and had seen, or one he imagined, must remain unknown. We cannot say whether we are viewing Peter’s own, idiosyncratic ambitions for the Staufen, or a wider model of iconography, endorsed by Henry VI, and expressed in the decorative scheme of the royal palace. My instincts incline to the latter view. Regardless, all six ages are present within the royal palace in Palermo. The palace is thus transformed into a centre from which all human history can be viewed, comprehended, and interpreted. This is reinforced by the accompanying image (fol. 143r; Figure 31), which shows six chambers within the palace, each labelled. The first five are arranged in line at the top of the page: the first shows God’s act of creation (a divine artifex, with dogs and fish beneath him; the second shows the ark of Noah; in the third, angels appear to Abraham; the fourth depicts Moses, flanked by followers, with the Red Sea beneath him; in the fifth, David sits upon his throne, wearing a crown and carrying a sceptre. The final arched chamber, which takes up the entire middle section of the page (and thus occupies that the previous five ages have taken up together). Here Frederick I Barbarossa sits on a throne with two of his sons beside him: Henry on the left, wearing a crown, and Philip of Swabia on the right. The final third of the page shows Frederick, on horseback, commanding knights to cut down trees, labelled as “the forest of Hungary” (nemus Ungarie). In short, within the palace of Palermo, all the empire can be fitted. This lower illustration is somewhat ambiguous in its framing; should we read the forest of Hungary as contained “within” the royal palace of Palermo or not? There is, to my knowledge, no other source which permits us a view of the interior of the palace at Palermo under the rule of Henry VI. Indeed, the only other detailed description of the palace is that found in the Letter to Peter, a text which praises the beauty of the palace buildings but offers no description of the interior features. Just as Staufen authority is the culmination of a world-​historical narrative, so the imposition of Staufen authority is the natural culmination of Sicilian history. Moreover, the ideas of representation offer something of a connection to earlier parts of the Liber. 35 Peter of Eboli, Liber ad Honorem Augusti, ll. 1573–​82: “In talamos sex una domus partitur, et horum /​Prima Creatoris regia scribit opus … /​Altera fatiferum cataclismi pingit abyssum; /​Tercia fert Habrahe credulitas iter; /​Quarta Faraonem submergens nudat Egyptum; /​Quinta domus David tempora regis habet; /​Sexta Fredericum divo depingit amictu, /​Cesarea septum prole senile latus.”

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Figure 31. The scheme of the six ages within the chambers of the royal palace. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 102.II, fol. 143r (145r) (Codices Electronici AG, www.e-codices.ch).

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In the first book, Peter’s representation of Palermo at the death of William II attempted to show all the constituent parts of the city (and different groups within the populus) within in a single image, each group assigned to a particular neighbourhood, and thus a place on the page: all of Palermo being encompassed and carefully delineated within a given set of bounds (fol. 98r, Figure 28). The same assumptions underlie Peter’s presentation of the iconography of the royal palace: each age of history has a clearly defined role and purpose, fitting within a schema, and the unveiling of the historical narrative unfurls in an orderly procession as one moves through the interior chambers. In order to appreciate the significance of this particular kind of architectural representation, and the folding up of both space and time within the royal palace, we should turn to models of twelfth-​century theological writing. If we accept the reasonable supposition that Peter was a monk, then, regardless of his magisterial status, we can make some assumptions about his reading, his training, and his intellectual world. The “theological” aspects of the Liber have been insufficiently discussed. Given the title and frequent references to “Augustus” it is easy to overstate the classicizing notes. However, it is forging a Christian imperial model, and it is a theological scheme of history which is unfolded within the Norman palace. The architecture and decoration of the royal palace of Palermo, in Peter’s representations, encompass and fold up both time and space. To some extent such an observation could also be made of the artistic schemes of many twelfth-​century churches. For the sake of convenience, I take here as my example the cathedral of Monreale, the cathedral begun by William II in 1174.36 The iconography of Monreale is a familiar subject for historians of Norman Sicily. The church contained within it several mosaic schemes which compress ideas of time and space. Those mosaics represented and abridged the most significant events of Old and New Testament history. The nave depicts scenes from Genesis, the side aisles the miracles of Christ, the crossing scenes from the life of Christ. At the very simplest level, any visitor to the cathedral at Monreale could understand that here many centuries of scriptural history had been ordered, compressed, and juxtaposed, in order that one might more clearly trace the history, development, and purpose of the church. Indeed, that representation of the most significant moments of Christian history was its purpose. The other parallel one might discern in Peter’s treatment of theological and providential history presented through architecture is with twelfth-​century religious writing. The same “compression” of time and space within a single building can be found there too. One parallel can be found in the treatment of Noah’s Ark by Hugh of St. Victor (1096–​1141). We know so little about Peter’s education and training that one cannot know whether he had any acquaintance at all with the writings of Hugh. Rather, one might suggest a common 36 For Monreale, see Sulamith Brodbeck, “Monreale from its Origin to the End of the Middle Ages,” in Companion to Medieval Palermo, ed. Nef and Thom, 383–​412; Mika Takiguchi, “The Imagery of Noah’s Ark in the Mosaic Decoration of Monreale Cathedral,” in Illuminating the Middle Ages, ed. Lucy Donkin, Laura Cleaver, and Alixe Bovey (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 125–​38.

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168 Philippa Byrne theological understanding that, through architecture and the unpacking of architectural schema, one could represent greater truths about both the extent of the created world and its history and future.37 Hugh of St. Victor’s theological works revisit the theme of the Ark and its significance as a built structure several times. In one didactic moral work, for example, Hugh imagines how the Ark may be treated as a spiritual metaphor: by walking through the Ark, and moving through its rooms, one could review the whole of history, moving through different periods of time.38 To imagine the architectural features and layout of the Ark was to imagine movement through history—​both scriptural history and the history of “secular” kingdoms and empires—​to the final endpoint of God’s kingdom. To walk through the Ark would be to comprehend a path “through the middle of the ages” (per medium saeculi). On that walk, one might look out through the windows (per fenestram) of the Ark and view different scenes from human history. In another work, Hugh took a different building but described a similar process: how a consideration of the architecture features of the Temple might help one comprehend the unfolding of time and of scriptural history. Buildings created by human hands could come to represent the passing of time, the “circle of time and the cycle of the ages.”39 Each “age” might be conceived of as building up part of the enclosure of the Temple. Set in this kind of context, one can understand the background to Peter’s positioning of the palace in Palermo, as a building through which the unfolding of history could be understood. That was no innovation. However, the fact Peter chooses to apply this model to a piece of palatial architecture (and not an ecclesiastical building or a building described in scripture) was somewhat unusual both in twelfth-​century Sicilian political terms and in terms of medieval intellectual traditions.40 We should not be surprised by the approach Peter adopted in the third book of the Liber. There were plentiful precedents for thinking about how architecture could unite the spiritual purpose and potential of past and present. The palace in Palermo embodied the providential mission of the Staufen dynasty, a mission which pointed toward the crusade which Henry VI was expected to undertake.41 This idea of the “folding up” of history also benefited Peter in another way: in the grand scheme of the ages, the Tancredine interregnum was a mere blip, an interruption, and nothing more.

37 See Brian Fitzgerald, “Time, History, and Mutability in Hugh of St. Victor’s Homilies on Ecclesiastes and De vanitate mundi,” Viator 43 (2012): 215–​40. 38 Hugh of St. Victor, De Vanitate Mundi 2, Patrologia Latina 176 col. 720.

39 Hugh of St. Victor, De Arca Noe Morali 1.2, Patrologia Latina 176 col. 629B.

40 There is no precedent for such a framework in any of the surviving texts that describe the politics of Norman Sicily, although one must recognize that our perspective is restricted by the limited number of narrative texts to survive from this period.

41 On the significance of the crusade and Jerusalem, see Katz, “From Norman to Hohenstaufen Rule of Sicily.”

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An analogy is sometimes drawn between Peter of Eboli and Godfrey of Viterbo, in which Peter is set as a southern Italian counterpart to the northern Italian Godfrey.42 Godfrey is a far better-​known praise poet of the Staufen emperors, one who offered legitimation of the dynasty and its ambitions in a new key.43 Limitations of space prevent much expansion on this comparison, but the point I should like to make here is the different intellectual frameworks selected by two poets who sought to praise the same imperial dynasty. While Peter reached for the classical history of imperial Rome, Godfrey assigned the Staufen an eschatological purpose. Godfrey’s writing speaks of a cycle of four world empires, with the Staufen’s renewed Roman empire closing out the pattern of the ages.44 There are obvious concordances between the works of Peter and Godfrey. Both authors agreed on the ambitious historical role Staufen had played, and would play, in the unfolding of the saeculum. Yet, for all Peter and Godfrey may have held in common, we should recognize that there is a strain of Sicilian particularity here. Peter was constrained by certain political and cultural features of the Kingdom of Sicily; its local styles and the traditions forged in the earlier twelfth-​century were part of his own intellectual formation. Ironically, given the “universal” ambitions of the Staufen emperors, there could not be a single model of political legitimation applied across all the territories they claimed. Instead, the argument had to be adapted to local circumstances. This is most evident in the play that Peter makes with the architecture of the royal palace, but it is also pronounced in his labelling and packaging of the cities of Sicily and their features in his first and second books. Peter, as a southern Italian, must have been well aware of the place the palace at Palermo had occupied in Norman royal ceremony and political decision-​making. It could be connected to an empire, ordered to an imperial purpose. It became a palace that both encompassed the world and represented it. By throwing open the doors of the palace of Palermo and describing its interior, Peter was aligning Sicily with a new political and intellectual world.

42 See, e.g., the discussion in Loud and Wiedermann’s introduction to The History of the Tyrants of Sicily.

43 For example, Godfrey of Viterbo, Gesta Friderici I et Heinrici VI Imperatorum, ed. Georg Heinrich Pertz (Hanover: Hahn, 1870).

44 This idea is summarized in Michele Campopiano, “Cosmology, Theology of History and Ideology in Godfrey of Viterbo’s Pantheon,” in Universal Chronicles in the High Middle Ages ed. Michele Campopiano and Henry Bainton (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017), 121–​40 at 138. On the significance of Godfrey and his position, see L. J. Weber, “The Historical Importance of Godfrey of Viterbo,” Viator 25 (1994): 153–​96.

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Chapter 8

READING THE SAINT’S CHURCH: A NORTHERN PERSPECTIVE Christiania Whitehead* 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.1 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).2 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 * Christiania Whitehead is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Lausanne, and Honorary Professor of Middle English Literature at the University of Warwick, specializing in religious literature. Her recent books include (co-​ edited with Margaret Coombe and Anne Mouron) Saints of North-​East England, 600–​1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017); (co-​edited with Julia Boffey) Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2018); The Afterlife of St Cuthbert: Place, Texts and Ascetic Tradition, 690–​1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); (co-edited with Hazel Blair and Denis Renevey) Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022). 1  Christiania Whitehead, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), chaps. 1 and 3.

2 Whitehead, Castles of the Mind, chap. 4. The treatises and manuals in question are Honorius’s De Gemma Animae, Beleth’s Summa de Ecclesiasticis Officiis, Sicardus’s Mitrale sue de Officiis Ecclesiasticis Summa, Pope Innocent’s De Sacro Altaris Mysterio, and Durandus’s Rationale Divinorum Officiorum.

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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. One of the bodies of religious writing excluded from that exploration was the corpus of hagiographical literature, comprising saints’ vitae and miracula in Latin and the European vernaculars. As a gesture toward filling that gap, in this chapter, I would like to address the question of how hagiographical writing represents religious architecture, and to examine how that representation intersects with or departs from the institutional allegorical traditions detailed above. My discussion will utilize a series of examples taken from northern English saints’ vitae. However, it is important to state at the outset that these saints’ interactions with architecture could probably be replicated in many saints’ vitae from around Britain and Europe; it is not my intention to claim a distinct or singular mode of interaction for this particular northern cohort. Before initiating this new exploration, some preliminary remarks about the theoretical implications of the change in textual genre may be in order. We have left the shadow world of allegory, where the three-​dimensional architectural diagram or narrative is held in a place of separation from the material world, and where meaning is always circumscribed and explicit: the length of the temple equals the entirety of salvation history; the roof of the church equals the aristocracy who protect Christian ideology from storms of persecution. In its place, we are turning to an embodied mode of writing where narrative predominates, and where meaning is practically always conveyed via an exemplum or a miracle story. In this embodied mode, those moments where an object or a building accrues supplementary meaning are caught within time, rather than containing the dimension of time within themselves in the manner of patristic and scholastic allegories of sacred architecture. As a consequence, they fail to work at quite the same immutable register as systematic allegory, and are more susceptible to process and change. In addition, within this embodied mode of writing, we will never be told that something equates with something else. Supplementary meaning is left mute and implicit as opposed to prescribed and explicit. This leaves greater room for the reader or recipient to work to generate meaning, it enables a larger penumbra of possible meanings, and it doesn’t leave the physical world systematically devalued: one of the less benign side-​effects of exegetical and scholastic allegory. By contrast, the physical world remains present and viable.

Continuities with the Institutional Allegorical Tradition

I begin with some moments of intersection: instances where the architectural meanings of institutional allegorical exegesis are transposed into saints’ vitae, but re-​emerge there at a wholly implicit and embodied register. Two examples suffice to

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give a picture. First, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum includes a series of chapters recounting the life and miracles of Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne (ca. 590–​651), the Irish evangelist of Northumbria noted for his preaching, toward the end of book 3.3 These chapters are detached from the Historia and pieced together selectively to create a Latin Vita Sancti Aidani Lindisfarnensis at Durham in the late eleventh century, which is subsequently carried through into the mainstream fourteenth-​century Latin legendaries.4 Saints’ deaths are never run of the mill, but Aidan’s is more unusual than most. Bede tells us that he falls ill in his church in Bamburgh, and that a kind of tent is erected for him there attached to the west wall of the church: “Tetenderunt ergo ei aegrotanti tentorium ad occidentalem ecclesiae partem, ita ut ipsum tentorium parieti haereret ecclesiae.”5 When he dies, he is leaning against a beam which buttresses the wall of the church on the outside. This beam consequently transpires to be miraculously fire resistant, surviving two fires which destroy every other part of the church. Indeed, after the first fire, ignited by pagans, the church is rebuilt around this beam. Eventually, the beam is removed from its position within the supporting structure, and brought into the church to function as a memorial to the miracle. In this position, it starts healing people by the standard thaumaturgical method: that is, small chips of wood from the beam are submerged in water that is then given to the sick.6 Several of the elements in this description are suggestive. We should recall that in exegetical and scholastic allegory the columns of the temple or church often signify as the prelates and bishops who hold up the allegorical superstructure. We should also recall that Bede wrote De Templo and De Tabernaculo: the first line-​by-​line allegorical exegeses of the Old Testament temple and tabernacle, and that many of his significations were carried over into influential medieval Bible commentaries such as the Glossa Ordinaria, effectively becoming standards.7 Interpreting 1 Kings 6:6, Bede writes: “Qui itaque per

3 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum [hereafter HE], ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 3.3, 3.5–​6, 3.14–​17.

4 This Vita S. Aidani is extant in approximately twelve manuscripts, mostly from Durham Benedictine scriptorium, and mostly produced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By this period, Aidan’s relics were housed in Durham Cathedral under the custodianship of its community of Benedictine monks. The Vita is later copied into British Library, MS Lansdowne 436, an early fourteenth-​century legendary of English saints from Hampshire, and into John of Tynemouth’s mid-​fourteenth-​century Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae, which continued to be recopied and reorganized through the fifteenth century. 5 Bede, HE 3.17. “When he fell ill, a tent was erected for him on the west side of the church, so that the tent was actually attached to the church wall.” 6 Bede, HE 3.17.

7 Bede, De Tabernaculo, De Templo, ed. David Hurst, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 119A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969). For a recent book-​length study, see Conor O’Brien, Bede’s Temple: An Image and its Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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trabes domus quae tabulata portabant nisi praedicatores sunt typice designati?,”8 while later, reacting to the two bronze pillars situated at the entrance of the temple (1 Kings 7:15), he notes: “Quisquis ergo seruat ac docet omnia quaecumque mandauit apostolis dominus neque alia superadiciens neque horum quippiam praeteriens ipse profecto columna in domo Dei quae est ecclesia et firmamentum est ueritatis qualem fore Timotheum monuit apostolus Paulus.”9 It seems clear here that Bede intends the church beam to denote St. Aidan’s episcopal strength, preaching zeal, and orthodoxy, in some fashion, and that he probably has scriptural architectural exegesis in mind as he makes this suggestion.10 But the beam does not equal Aidan. Rather, Aidan dies leaning against the beam, and the beam subsequently manifests Aidan’s saintly qualities of immutability and imperviousness to elemental destruction. The beam retains its material integrity in a way that would never be possible in an allegorical setting. Nonetheless, it is synthesized in some way with Aidan’s saintly body: it acquires his virtus. The fact that it then goes on to survive various fires and that the church is rebuilt around it also suggests that it signifies Aidan’s Christian mission which is never snuffed out, despite pagan fires and apostasies. But all these meanings are implicit, they are not explicit. It is left up to us, if we are exegetically literate readers, to make these supplementary connections if we wish to. They do not impose or prescribe. Let’s follow this up by seeing how the narrative then begins to diverge from exegetical allegory. The beam is eventually brought into the church becoming, to some degree, an object of veneration in its own right. Essentially, it rereads as an architectural contact relic, carrying out acts of healing. In exegetical architectural allegory, the episcopal or predicatory column is wholly indivisible from the Christian church superstructure it participates in. It remains inert within that superstructure. However, in this hagiographic narrative about Aidan, it individuates, moves away from its function of support, becomes a focus in its own right, and begins to heal. An architectural element becomes agentive, and disarmingly labile. As it metamorphoses, perhaps it begins to lose its duty of supportive subordination to a larger whole. My second example also comes from a northern saint’s life, but a much later one. In the 1170s, Reginald, a Benedictine monk from Durham priory wrote a Libellus de Vita et Miraculis about St. Godric of Finchale (d. 1170), a hermit located just north of Durham. Godric was a comparatively uneducated figure who never professed as a Benedictine; nonetheless, he was drawn very much into their sphere of influence in his later years, 8 Bede, De Templo, 164. “Who then except preachers are typified by the beams of the house which supported the floors?” Bede: On the Temple, trans. Seán Connolly (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 27.

9 Bede, De Templo, 200. “Whoever … observes and teaches everything the Lord commanded the apostles, without either adding anything further or omitting any of them, such a one is indeed a pillar in God’s house which is the Church and a bulwark of truth such as the apostle Paul admonished Timothy to be.” Bede: On the Temple, trans. Connolly, 76. Cf. 1 Tim. 3:15.

10 The emphasis on orthodoxy is all the more intriguing given that, later in the same chapter, Bede is deeply critical of Aidan’s adherence to Irish calendrical methods of observing Easter: HE 3.17.

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and the Durham Benedictines were quick to claim his hermitage and promote his tomb cult in the years following his death. In the course of a very long vita, Reginald writes that Godric experiences various visions in his oratory in which the wooden image of the crucified Christ on the rood beam above his altar comes to life. In the first vision, the image animates, alights on the altar, descends to the pavement, prostrates itself for a time on the steps leading to the altar, and then returns: “deinde super Altare inferius descendit … Post haec omnia ad australem Ecclesiae parietem se adegit, et ibi aliquandiu cohaerens, super pavimentum Ecclesiae lapideum coram Altari se deposuit, et illic moram aliquam peregit; dehinc ad gradus inferiores descendit, et super illos se extendit.”11 In the second, a living child emerges from the heart-​wound of the image, sits on the altar, skips around the church pacing from wall to wall several times, blesses Godric sweetly, and then reascends into the wound which closes around him.12 Clearly, Godric’s visions convey the mystical potential of statues and images, showing that they are suffused with inner significance and Christological life. Not only are they alive, they also move. They linger on the altar and steps leading up to it, and measure out the church from side to side: a wonderfully physically choreographed way of demonstrating that the altar and sanctuary steps bear a divine impress, and that the chancel is filled from wall to wall by the presence of Christ. This movement accords each of those areas within the church a greater mystical depth of resonance. It is illuminating to relate these visions to the twelfth-​and thirteenth-​century liturgical manuals allegorizing the church detailed at the beginning of this chapter. In these manuals, typically, the altar is interpreted as a signification for the sacraments, Christ’s body, our own mortification, and the spiritual church extending to the four quarters of the world; the steps up to the altar are allegorized as apostles and martyrs of Christ; and the chancel is taken to mean both the humility of the clergy, and the separation of the spiritual mind from earthly things.13 Bringing these explications to bear upon this hagiography, it is possible to argue that Godric’s experiences mediated by Reginald simply constitute a peculiarly dynamic and visionary way of making the same points as the liturgical handbooks, namely, that the statues, altar, and altar steps are replete with hidden meaning, and that the internal dimensions of the church signify the arena of Christ’s working. These visions make similar points about the inner significance of the church interior to the liturgical handbooks; however, it is also necessary to attend 11 Reginald of Durham, Libellus de Vita et Miraculis S Godrici, Heremitae de Finchale, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Surtees Society 20 (London: Nichols, 1847), 155, chap. 69. “Then he came down onto the altar lower down … After all this he compelled himself to go to the south wall of the church, and clinging there for some time, he laid himself down on the stone pavement of the church in front of the altar, and paused there for a while; from there he came down to the step below, and prostrated himself upon them.” My trans. 12 Reginald, Vita S. Godrici, chap. 70.

13 Durandus of Mende, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum I–​IV, ed. Anselm Davril and Timothy M. Thibodeau, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 140 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), 1.2.3–​4, 1.2.13, 1.1.31.

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to the differences. This is not a dispassionate allegory designed for clerical education but a witnessed performance which incorporates affect. Godric is moved by the gaze and sweet blessing he receives from the ruddy-​faced Christ child: “At ille orare et proclamare non desiit, dicendo constanter et suppressis labiis adorando suaviter, ‘Jesu pie, Jesu dulciflue, Jesu misericors et benignissime, Tui nunc miselli miserere.’ ”14 Through hagiography, the cerebral world of scholastic allegory is infused with feeling, movement, and personal exchange. And the way in which authority works changes as well. The mystical meanings of the church interior are guaranteed here because they stem from divine vision, rather than because they participate in a closed system of signification expounded in an impersonal voice. We can conclude from both these examples that when the signifying systems of patristic exegesis and scholastic allegory impinge on hagiographical narration they are significantly transformed. In the first example, the episcopal column individuates before our eyes to become an architectural relic, its supporting function annulled. In the second, the witnessed visionary performance brings affect into the church interior. We will turn now to explore some modes of architectural representation found only in hagiographical writing. And in the final section of the essay, we shall reintegrate the two back together via a singular fifteenth-​century manuscript.

Differences from the Institutional Allegorical Tradition

Very different from the atemporal architectural structures of the Latin scholastic tradition, in hagiographical literature the constructional process of raising a church or hermitage is often brought to the fore. The building being made within and over time becomes a focus of attention, and we are frequently party to it being put together stone by stone. When an ambitious large-​scale cult church such as Durham Cathedral is being erected (1090s–​1130s), and attention is drawn to this process of making, it would appear that the process is intended to rehearse the healing function of the cult it will shortly contain.15 In other words, the constructional process is rendered visible upon the page in so far as it participates in a dialectic of injury and healing. Miracle narratives composed by the Durham Benedictine community in the early twelfth century tell us how massive logs are dragged up toward the cathedral on a cart. One falls and crushes a child, but he is miraculously made whole again through the intercession of St. Cuthbert—​the saint whose shrine the Cathedral is being built to house. A great bell has been ordered for the tower by the prior; again, the wagon transporting it into Durham runs over a youth,

14 Reginald, Vita S. Godrici, 158, chap. 70. “But he never ceased to pray and cry out, by saying constantly and adoring sweetly through closed lips: ‘Pious Jesus, sweet Jesus, merciful and most generous Jesus, now have pity on your poor little ones.’ ” My trans.

15 For an exhaustive recent study of the cathedral, see Durham Cathedral: History, Fabric, and Culture, ed. David Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

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yet he miraculously leaps up unmarked.16 After the cathedral has been completed, its bells and clappers fall down and strike bellringers standing below on two occasions, but Cuthbert protects all those who labour in his precincts, and the young men are none the worse.17 There are many more miracles of this type throughout England in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, the great age of cathedral construction. The proliferation of miracles of this kind suggests that the construction of cult architecture confers a kind of supernatural immunity from the normal injuries and accidents that mark the building process. The saint confers this immunity so that his new home can be finished without tragedy or litigation, showing himself to be actively invested in this completion. Further, the fact that the process of constructing the cathedral is punctuated by narratives of injury and healing, bodily brokenness and restoration, suggests that these narratives may be intended to anticipate the healings that will take place in the feretory once the cathedral is fully functional. In effect, there is a temporary transposition of bodily injury and restoration onto the outer fabric of the saint’s housing in the course of its construction, which acts as a kind of billboard or advertisement for the miraculous benefits that will be made available to supplicants, in due course, within the completed building. As well as revealing the construction process of large-​scale cult centres, hagiographic writing also displays an interest in the process of making small-​ scale devotional spaces—​the hermitage and the oratory—​and uses that process to comment on the cults and practices that they house. Both the Anonymous Vita S. Cuthberti, and Bede’s Prose Vita S. Cuthberti describe how St. Cuthbert constructs his hermitage on Farne Island off the coast of northern Northumbria by lifting enormous boulders far beyond the capacity of any normal man.18 The point is plainly to show his contemplative life as a heroic and monumental enterprise requiring exceptional spiritual strength. Building the hermitage is used as a way of expressing the magnitude of building up a regime of contemplative asceticism in solitude. The physical building does not dematerialize in the face of the concept it signifies, as with allegory, but remains in play, simply invested with supplementary meaning. Another slightly different example comes from the twelfth-​ century Vita of St. Aebbe of Coldingham, once again, a Durham monastic production.19 St. Aebbe was the seventh-​century founding abbess of the double monastery of Coldingham, 16 Capitula de Miraculis et Translationibus Sancti Cuthbert, chaps. 16, 21, ed. John Hodgson-​Hinde, Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera et Collectanea, vol. 1, Surtees Society 51 (Durham: Andrews, 1868), chaps. 16, 21.

17 Reginald of Durham, Libellus de Admirandis Beati Cuthberti Virtutibus, ed. James Raine, Surtees Society 1 (London: Nichols, 1835), chaps. 89, 92. 18 Anon., Vita S. Cuthberti, 3.1–​2; Bede, Prose Vita S. Cuthberti, chap. 17. Both texts are cited from: Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940).

19 The Miracles of St Aebbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland, ed. and trans. Robert Bartlett (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003). Coldingham was given to the Durham Benedictines and developed as a dependency early in the twelfth century. The author of Aebbe’s Vita, composed in the late twelfth

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discussed briefly in Bede’s Historia, whose cult seems to have disappeared completely for a number of centuries before being revitalized in the twelfth century. The Vita S. Ebbe details how, after her coffin has been rediscovered and taken to the church at Coldingham, a simple local layman named Henry receives a vision from Aebbe commanding him to build an oratory in her honour upon what is now St. Aebbe’s Head in Berwickshire. Henry initially shelves the command and does nothing, whereupon Aebbe takes umbrage, and the land on the promontory loses its fertility. He then sets about building: Oratorium construxit uili quidem materia conditum sed celesti uirtute, sicut postea signorum frequencia claruit, preditum. Rudis enim artifex pro scemento lutum habebat et pro lapidibus sectis saxa dura et aspera, que solo uetustas obruerat et destruentium olim manus relinquerat … tanteque magnitudinis lapides muro qui iam humeris alcior imminebat solus leuabat quod, licet uerbis eius credendum non esset, ex hoc incredulus et irrisor quilibet dictis fidem etiam nolens habere potuisset.20

Many mock his enterprise, others revere it. Of course, once it is completed, the mass is initiated there and it becomes a site of miracles attributed to Aebbe. Once again, it is interesting to note how the materials of architectural construction are brought into relief: humble materials, mud and rough rocks. It also seems to be the case that Henry is behaving rather like Cuthbert here, heroically lifting stones of prodigious size even though he has no pretensions to eremitic sanctity. The method is very similar, but the point being made is a rather different one. In this instance, I would argue, the raising of the oratory in response to a divine command is designed to tell us something about the character of the revival of the cult. It is built by a lay devotee—​that is, it emerges from the simple faith of the local populace rather than being a northern English “landgrab” by imported monks. And it is raised from primitive, unsophisticated materials—​mud and unhewn rock—​so that in some ways it seems practically to be an extension of the landmass. That sense of the natural growth of the oratory and of the cult is accentuated by the fact that the land approves the building project and becomes barren when it is delayed. The growth of the construction coincides with a return to natural fertility. Finally, notice how this oratory is constructed by reutilizing stones pulled down in the past by the “hands of destroyers,” presumably a reference to the destruction of the monastery by the Danes in the late ninth century. An older temporality enters in a way it does not in the construction of Cuthbert’s hermitage. The building of the oratory then is configured as the reconstruction of a monastic edifice through a heroic act of simple faith. This is a profoundly selective, disingenuous account of the re-​emergence of an obsolete cult, manufacturing an arbitrary link between the first religious structure and the second, and occluding the religio-​political factors that actually underpin the new foundation—​Coldingham is an English monastic colony imposed within century, seems to be a Durham monk posted to Coldingham, very possibly Reginald of Durham. The Vita is extant in one late fourteenth-​century manuscript: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 6.

20 Miracles of St Aebbe, ed. and trans. Bartlett, 28–​31: “(Henry) built an oratory using humble materials … endowed with heavenly power. For the unskilled craftsman had mud for mortar and, instead of shaped stones, hard, rough rocks that antiquity had covered with soil and the hand of destroyers had left behind long ago … All alone he raised a wall which now loomed higher than his shoulders, using stones of such great size that it had to be seen to be believed.”

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southern Scotland.21 Once again, we should take note how central the act of construction is here. It is the means by which the manner of the revival of the cult is communicated to its devotional audience. Second, by contrast with the scholastic tradition of exegesis where the primary referent of the church, ark, or temple always remains Christ’s body (sometimes his doctrinal or social body), in hagiographical writing, the church is recalibrated significantly to refer principally to the saintly body. This is a very different sort of body: much more materially present within the church, albeit with some special marks of eternity, than Christ’s eucharistic or abstracted body. We shall explore how the saint displaces Christ, and the different kinds of physicality that are involved, by turning again to some examples from northern England. After years of being carried around the north of England by his followers to avoid Danish violation, St. Cuthbert’s coffin suddenly becomes enormously heavy and quite impossible to shift upon the wooded peninsula in Durham where he wishes his church to be built.22 His church (first a simple wooden structure, then a stone church, then Durham Cathedral) is consequently raised from that site, effectively situating Cuthbert’s body as its de facto foundation. The same kind of story is told about many other saints. Christ, the allegorical foundation or cornerstone of the Christian church, is displaced and replaced by a much more specific, corporeal foundation. That corporeal emphasis continues in some of the ways in which the saint’s church is subsequently depicted. We will turn here to the very late Old English poem Durham, and use it to channel our exploration for a little while: De situ Dunelmi et de sanctorum reliquiis quae ibidum continentur carmen compositum Is ðeos burch breome   geond Breotenrice,          1 steppa gestaðolad,    stanas ymbutan

wundrum gewæxen.    Weor ymbeornad, ea yðum stronge …

Is in ðere byri eac   bearnum gecyðed

ðe arfesta   eadig Cudberch               10 and ðes clene   cyninges heafud,

Osuualdes, Engle leo,    and Aidan biscop, Eadberch and Eadfrið,    æðele geferes.

Is ðer inne midd heom   Æðelwold biscop

21 For further information regarding the political dimensions of the cult at Coldingham, see my article, “A Scottish or an English Saint? The Shifting Sanctity of St Aebbe of Coldingham,” New Medieval Literatures 19 (2019): 1–​42.

22 Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu Istius, Hoc est Dunhelmensis, Ecclesie, ed. and trans. David W. Rollason (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 3.1–​2.

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Christiania Whitehead and breoma bocera Beda,    and Boisil abbot,       15 ðe clene Cudberte   on gecheðe

lerde lustum,    and he his lara wel genom.

Eardiæð æt ðem eadige   in in ðem minstre unarimeda   reliquia,

ðær monia wundrum gewurðað,    ðes ðe writ seggeð,    20 midd ðene drihnes wer   domes bideð.23

This poem was very probably composed to celebrate Cuthbert’s translation into the new Anglo-​Norman cathedral at Durham in 1104. It commends its fortification and the wonders associated with it, but reserves the bulk of its attention for those who dwell inside: blessed Cuthbert; the head of King Oswald of Northumbria; Aidan, Eadberch, Eadfrith, and Aethelwold, the early bishops of Lindisfarne; the Venerable Bede; and “abbot” Boisil of Melrose Abbey, Cuthbert’s monastic mentor. In other words, most of the main saints linked to the cult of Cuthbert in the seventh and eighth centuries. Reading the poem, were it not for the head of King Oswald, one might mistakenly think these saints were still alive; the vignette about the pleasure taken in teaching Cuthbert certainly gives that impression. However, of course the poem is an alliterative enumeration of the major relics of the cathedral, and indeed, the word reliquia is finally used in the nineteenth line. This cathedral is not rendered as a figure for the body of Christian believers or the body of Christian belief; rather, it is rendered as a repository of marvellous bones, effectively, a giant reliquary. There is nothing unfamiliar about this practice. Major shrine churches and basilicas, at Tours, Cologne, Padua, and elsewhere, give pride of place to their relics in a very similar fashion. However, it is possible to move this discussion in a more uncharted direction by enquiring about what this does to the axes of time and place which govern scholastic commentary upon the church. In scholastic commentary, the course of salvation history is traced along a longitudinal axis, from the west end of the church to the east. Place, generally equated with architectural breadth, is similarly expansive: the sum of Christian believers throughout the world. In the Old English Durham, the cluster of northern saints who give Durham Cathedral its conceptual form, express time from the seventh to the twelfth centuries, and in terms of geographical reach, they map a terrain stretching from Melrose on the Borders down to Bede’s Jarrow. This is a very different conceptualization of the church—​not universal at all, but strongly regional. Durham Cathedral is conceived as an architectural resumé of regional sacred history, stretched along limited indices of times and place as epitomized by the roll-​call of local saints convened inside the building. This is an entirely distinct way of writing the church, and we should see it as a deliberate option for difference, since the Durham monk who surely composed the 23 The Anglo-​ Saxon Minor Poems, ed. E. V. K. Dobbie, Anglo-​Saxon Poetic Records 6 (London: Routledge, 1942), 27 (my emphasis). “A poem composed about the situation of Durham, and about the relics of saints, contained in the same place. This fortress is celebrated throughout all Britain, founded on high, stones around it, wondrously grown. The Wear encompasses it,

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poem would also have had access to allegorical scriptural commentary, not least, the Old Testament commentaries of Bede. The saint’s body is envisaged as the foundation. Other local saints’ bodies pack the interior, radiant with eternal life, diminishing salvation history to a selective time period from a single region. In addition to this allegorical reading, we might expect the tropological interpretation of the church—​its correlation with the Christian virtues—​to be alluded to somewhere within hagiographical discourse. It does appear, but when it does, rather than providing a balanced spatial diagram of the seven virtues, it turns out to be overwhelmingly biased toward the monastic virtue of chastity. Again, this is usefully illustrated through a northern example. In Bede’s Prose Vita S. Cuthberti, Cuthbert prevents the house of his old wet nurse from being destroyed by a village fire by praying and lying full length along the threshold: “Statimque egressus, ante hostium sternitur in terram. Quo adhuc orante mutatur flatus uentorum …”24 The wind changes direction, and the house is preserved. Bede links this to similar miracles carried out by earlier saints, and gives the episode a moral application by remarking that it corresponds to the way in which saints exercise control over the fires of their own flesh, that is, over lust: “Nec mirandum perfectos et fideliter Deo seruientes uiros tantam contra uim flammarum accipere potestatem, qui cotidiana uirtutum industria et incentiua suae carnis edomare …”25 Again, we are in a world of embodied meaning which emerges through narration. In this instance, the imposition of his body along the threshold of the house suggests that Cuthbert is imparting his own flame-​resistant chastity to an architectural body endangered by lust. Is this architectural body a signifier for his nurse, for the village, or for the saint’s lay flock more generally? Or, if we attend closely to Bede’s moralization, ought we to read it as an alternative signification for his own body, so that the chaste fleshly body on the threshold, and the fire-​threatened architectural body begin to disperse into one another and to blur. This tropological reading of architecture as a protected, fire-​resistant space of chastity is pushed to an unexpected extreme so far as the cult of Cuthbert is concerned. From the beginning of the twelfth century, very shortly after the controversial a river strong with waves … There is also in that fortification, well known to men, honourable, blessed Cuthbert, and the head of the pure king, Oswald, Lion of the English, and Bishops Aidan, Eadberch and Eadfrith, noble companions. Inside with them are Bishop Aethelwold, and the illustrious scholar Bede, and Abbot Boisil, who delightedly taught the pure Cuthbert in his youth—​ and he took his teaching well. Within the minster countless relics dwell by the blessed one, where many things happen by miracles, as writing says, with the man of God, they await judgement.” Translation taken from Helen Appleton, “The Old English Durham and the Cult of Cuthbert,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 115 (2016): 346–​69 at 351; see also her important essay, “ ‘Æðele geferes’: Northern Saints in a Durham Manuscript,” in Saints of North-​East England, 600–​1500, ed. Margaret Coombe, Anne Mouron, and Christiania Whitehead (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 153–​76. The poem is extant in Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.i.27, p. 202 (ca. 1188). 24 Bede, Prose Vita, chap. 14. “Immediately he went out and cast himself upon the ground in front of the door; and while he was still praying, the winds changed …”

25 Bede, Prose Vita, chap. 14. “Nor is it to be wondered at that such perfect men who served God faithfully, received great power against the strength of flames, when, by daily practice of virtue, they learned both to overcome the lusts of the flesh …”

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replacement of Cuthbert’s community of secular clergy with Benedictine monks, a unique tradition arises in the north of England debarring Cuthbert’s cathedral, and his churches and churchyards, from women, allegedly to protect his monks from carnal temptation. This prohibition is enacted in the most graphic and aggressive of ways: any woman who strays into Cuthbert’s churches, whether Durham Cathedral, Lindisfarne, or further afield, is cursed with immediate illness or insanity, generally terminating in a swift death.26 Moreover, this seems to have continued to be enforced in the north up until the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.27 Approaching this bizarre ruling from an tropological perspective, it is apparent that Cuthbert’s chaste body, along with the chastity of the monastic body which serves him, is made coterminous with his cathedral and churches. Any attempt by women to invade these highly symbolic interiors (even by those who are very devout and simply want to see Cuthbert’s tomb), is repulsed and ends catastrophically. Cuthbert’s church architecture signifies as his chaste male body. Around a century later, the trope of female virginity as a stronghold or inviolate building will begin to gain traction, quickly becoming normative,28 but here in the 1100s, the shoe is on the other foot, and it is male and monastic chastity that is displaced onto architecture and set in stone. The female fortress of the thirteenth century has frequently been subjected to analysis from a feminist and psychoanalytical perspective, and Lefebvre writes of this kind of metaphorical structure as a “space of castration … whereby [the female] body is fragmented, desire shattered, and life explodes …”29 Little remains for sexual desire when the female body has metamorphosed into a closed building. But here, by contrast, it is a male virgin who is figured as an inviolate building, the male body which is displaced in its entirety onto architecture, leaving no trace of corporeality, and female desire which is shattered, “castrated,” and rebuked.

26 Symeon, Libellus de Exordio 2.7, 2.8, 3.11. These stories of female transgression and punishment are repeated in the twelfth-​century Brevis Relatio (an abbreviated amalgamation of Symeon’s Libellus and other chronicles), and in the Vita S. Cuthberti contained in John of Tynemouth’s Sanctilogium Angliae, a fourteenth-​century Latin legendary of British saints. See also Victoria Tudor, “The Misogyny of St Cuthbert,” Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., 12 (1984): 157–​67. 27 It is mentioned as a current, fifteenth-​century, ecclesiastical practice, in The Life of St Cuthbert in English Verse [henceforth Metrical Life], ed. Joseph Fowler, Surtees Society 87 (Durham: Andrews, 1891), 4.7286–​7322, and remembered as an early sixteenth-​century practice, in Rites of Durham, ed. Joseph T. Fowler, Surtees Society 107 (Durham: Andrews, 1903), 35.

28 The trope appears in the Ancrene Wisse, Robert Grosseteste’s Château d’Amour, and many other religious poems and treatises of the thirteenth century. See my Castles of the Mind, chap. 6.

29 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-​Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 309; quoted in Vincent Gillespie, “Cooking the Books in The Doctrine of the Hert,” in A Companion to the Doctrine of the Hert, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010), 131–​58 at 142.

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Vernacular Saints’ Lives and Church Allegory in London, British Library, Additional MS 35298 In the previous section, we examined a series of moments in northern hagiography where the church was recalibrated as the saint’s body, in particular, the saint’s chaste body, and all kinds of partialities, regional, temporal, and gender-​specific, began to gain purchase on allegories of the church. In the final section of this essay, I will draw together many of the threads of the preceding discussions in the course of focusing upon the intriguing series of texts that make up the mid-​fifteenth-​century manuscript, British Library, Additional MS 35298.30 Additional 35298 is one of a fairly large number of manuscripts containing the early fifteenth-​century translation of the Legenda Aurea known as the Gilte Legende. It is also one of a much smaller cohort containing what is known as “the Supplementary Lives”: translations and adaptations of lives of a number of early English saints mixed in with the main European corpus.31 This cohort demonstrates the universal legendary beginning to take on a more nationalist edge. However, in addition to these supplementary lives, Additional 35298 is unique in interpolating two further texts into its version of the Gilte Legende. The first of these, beginning on folio 65, forms a kind of appendix to the Life of St. Peter the Apostle, and is called The Pardon of All the Churches of Rome. The second, following on from the Gilte Legende “Holy Advent” at folio 168b, is called What the Church Betokenth, and is a translation and abridgement of Durandus of Mende’s Rationale Diuinorum Officiorum, the most encyclopedic and widely circulated of the liturgical handbooks referred to at the opening of this chapter. This would seem to be the only translation of Durandus’s Rationale into Middle English. We will examine each text in turn, and then consider the effect of interpolating them into a nationalistically slanted saints’ legendary. The Pardon of All the Churches of Rome is a translation of a Liber Indulgentiarum, a religious guidebook intended for use by pilgrims to Rome in the Middle Ages. It names around thirty Roman churches, explaining that the act of entering each church confers a certain number of years’ pardon from purgatory, with more years of pardon on offer for entry during ecclesiastical festivals. It then lists the relics contained within each church. It is illuminating to consider these inventories in relation to the Old English Durham and its early twelfth-​century depiction of Durham Cathedral inhabited by radiant local saints. Two passages from Pardon should suffice to give a representative flavour of them: In the church of Seint Iohn Latran is euery day xlviii yere of pardon … and in the same churche is a chambre that is saide sacristia, and þere is the auter of Seint Iohn that he had in wyldernesse. And þer is the table that oure lorde sopid at with his disciplis on Shere Thursdaye when he gaue them þe sacrament. And þer is the archa of the Olde Testament … and the ii tablis wherin is wryten þe x commaundementis … and the goldyn candelstyk and þe ornamentis of Aaron … And alle these reliquys brought Tytus and

30 British Library online catalogue. http://​sea​rcha​rchi​ves.bl.uk/​IAMS_​VU2:IAMS​040-​002088​773.

31 Supplementary Lives in Some Manuscripts of the Gilte Legende, ed. Richard Hamer and Vida Russell, Early English Text Society 315 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The Life of Seint Cuthbert is one of the supplementary English saints’ lives included in Additional 35298.

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Vaspacyen fro Ierusalem … and þer is the sudarye [cloth of St. Veronica] and the clothe þat our lorde wyped his discyplis fete with after the soper, and there is parte of the v lovis of barlye þat oure lorde fed with v þousand people … And þer is the vayle of oure ladye, and Zakaryes hed, and of the asshis and of the blode of Seint Iohn the Baptist … and the camels skyn þat he weryd, and of the angels mete þat was founde in the grave of Seint Iohn the Evaungelist … and þer is þe hedis of Peter and of Powle.32

Slightly later, Pardon offers an inventory of the contents of the church of St. Lawrence outside the walls: [Here] restyn the holy bodyes of Seint Lawrence and of Seint Stephyn … the blode of Seint Thomas of Canterbury vpon a vestement, and þer is one of the stoonys that Seint Stephyn was martyred with, and þer is of the bowels of Seynte Andrewe … and þer ben of the rybbes of Seint Iulyan, and of the knee of Seint Andrewe … and þer ben of the stonys þat Seint Iohn saide masse in, and of the stonys where oure ladye dyed in … And þer is the hed of Seynt Concorde … and … the stone that [St. Laurence] laye on when he was rostid.33

The church of the Holy Cross has two cups, one full of the blood of Christ, the other of the milk of Our Lady. It also contains the sponge which was soaked in vinegar for Christ to drink, and the nails with which he was attached to the cross. One can obtain 1,580 years of pardon from purgatory there every Tuesday and Sunday.34 In the Old English Durham, the saints felt almost alive. The cathedral was associated with wonders and irradiated from within by the virtutes of the saints. Here, over three hundred years later, these Roman saints’ churches feel unutterably dead in these lists of their contents. Body parts mingle with furnishings, liquids, stones, and domestic items and ornaments from the Old Testament and the Gospels. There is a sense of indiscrimination, unchecked accumulation: something of the feel of spiritual bricolage. The resplendent furnishings of the Old Testament: the Ark of the Covenant, the golden candelabras of the temple, which were provided with such powerful allegorical meanings in scholastic exegesis, have lost their symbolic significance and simply become further items within this inert relic list. Alongside this, the narrative of Christ’s life has been reduced to a collage of material landmarks, and it is noteworthy how gravitational and earthbound this collage has become—​quite literally tied to the earth by stones from the places where various events took place. The matrix of time has also undergone a fundamental change. Instead of alluding to the magnificent sweep of salvation history, these Roman churches refer primarily to hebdomadal time, the high and low cycles of the church year, and the finely calculated futures of purgatorial time. Christian historical time only retains a presence within the church building as a mêlée of material objects—​the table of the Last Supper, the brass pillars of the temple, the camel skin of John the Baptist—​which have lost their linear order of cause and effect, and become indiscriminate, capable of being listed or visited, or stacked up for viewing, in any order. 32 Supplementary Lives, ed. Hamer and Russell, 76–​77. 33 Supplementary Lives, ed. Hamer and Russell, 77–​78. 34 Supplementary Lives, ed. Hamer and Russell, 78.

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What is the effect of interpolating this treatise into the middle of a legendary of universal and English saints’ lives in Additional 35298? How does it modify our reception of the saints’ lives that surround it? At one level, it would seem to suggest that these Roman churches are effectively architectural legendaries, bringing together the lives of the saints in their material rather than textual forms. At the same time, we should note how uncompromisingly these architectural legendaries focus not on life but on death, and on a communion of saints enacted by bringing together innumerable inert body parts and allied scraps of matter. We have moved a very long way from that twelfth-​ century depiction of Durham Cathedral as the radiant habitation of quasi-​living saints. The saints’ church has become a mausoleum. The other treatise interpolated into the Gilte Legende, What the Church Betokenth, is an abridged translation of Durandus’s Rationale followed seamlessly by a series of extracts from Edmund of Abingdon’s late thirteenth-​century Speculum Ecclesiae, expounding catechetical commonplaces such as the seven gifts of Holy Ghost, the twelve articles of faith, and so on.35 Here we see two slightly different kinds of clerical handbook melded into a single whole: the first, devoted to an allegorical exposition of the church fabric and liturgy; the second, a much more pastorally oriented explanation of the basic tenets of Christian belief. Stitched together, the two manuals offer a diptych perfectly suited to the English church’s fifteenth-​century reform agenda, emphasizing the fundamentals of the faith within a context of regular liturgical participation. Let us take a moment to remind ourselves of Durandus’s mode of symbolic architectural exposition referring to the Middle English translation. The glass windows of the church betoken holy scripture which enlightens our minds; they also betoken our five senses. The pavement of the church represents the foundation of the faith; also, the affections; also, the common people who sustain the church. The roof of the church signifies preachers who raise our thoughts toward heaven. The candles and lamps within the church signify Christ, the apostles, and church doctors; also, the gifts of the Holy Ghost which illuminate our hearts.36 After commenting on the church fabric, Durandus moves on to expound the meaning of the clerical vestments, the parts of the mass, and the ritual gestures intended to accompany its celebration.37 What is the effect of interpolating this allegorical exposition of the church into the Lives of the Gilte Legende in Additional 35298? First, on the face of it, in spatial terms, it seems rather as though What the Church Betokenth is intended to correct a tendency toward bias. Alongside the evocation of the church as a mausoleum of bones and material scraps in The Pardon of All the Churches of Rome, and the legendary of saints’ lives, with their implicit recalibration of the church in favour of the saint, 35 For a detailed analysis of What the Church Betokenth, see Laura Varnam, The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 179–​232. 36 Supplementary Lives, ed. Hamer and Russell, 87–​89.

37 Supplementary Lives, ed. Hamer and Russell, 91–​101.

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this translation reasserts mainstream ecclesial orthodoxies. It draws on an ancient tradition of scriptural architectural exegesis; it incorporates the three orders of the Christian community: bishops, priests, and laity; and it places Christ, the priest, and the celebration of the mass squarely back at the centre of the church’s operation. What the Church Betokenth acts to qualify the other texts in this manuscript, connecting their content to an emphatically sacramental and hierarchic image of the ecclesial institution. Nonetheless, this is not quite the whole picture, and things are not necessarily quite so clearcut as they initially appear. As a consequence, my second point concerns the way in which one representation of the church bleeds into the other. We have already noted that this fifteenth-​century translation of the Rationale selectively abridges the original thirteenth-​century manual. To demonstrate how this works, we will focus on the section interpreting the priestly vestments. In What the Church Betokenth, around two-​thirds of Durandus’s significations for each vestment are omitted, and we are simply given the first signification and the last. For example, the amice that the priest places round his neck to celebrate the mass symbolizes chastity of mind and body, Durandus’s first signification. Three or four allegorizations are then omitted before we are told, finally, that it also signifies the cloth that the Jews blindfolded Christ with when they were abusing him. The priest’s girdle that encircles his aube signifies sexual continence; then follow various omissions. Finally, we learn that it also signifies the scourge that Pilate struck Christ with. The stole signifies the yoke of Christ’s commandments; then follow various omissions. Finally, we hear that it also signifies the cord that bound Christ to the pillar. The chasuble signifies charity. A number of other significations are omitted before we discover that it also symbolizes the purple garment that the Jews dressed Christ in scornfully prior to the crucifixion.38 The interpretive process continues in accordance with this pattern of omission and inclusion. What I think can be seen here is the material relic culture of the high Middle Ages—​its fascination with the instruments of Christ’s torture: the scourge, the blindfold, and the rope—​being deliberately retained at the expense of much else, and granted much more prominence within Durandus’s mystical discourse upon the church. Mystical signification becomes more material, more object-​oriented. Nonetheless, while the relics of the passion suddenly acquire much more emphasis in this translation of Durandus, we should never forget that they are not intended to be read as literally present within the church, but as an additional layer of allegorical meaning. This creates an unexpected paradox. Relics: cloths, cords, and scourges, the most material of items, are reappraised as a supplementary level of allegorical signification. They are effectively dematerialized. What is the effect of foregrounding the passion relics and then dematerializing them in this manner, with regard to the wider manuscript context of Additional 35298? To answer this it may help to suggest a hypothetical trajectory of reading. The manuscript offers an initial encounter with the saints’ lives of the Gilte Legende, incorporating all the 38 Supplementary Lives, ed. Hamer and Russell, 91–​93.

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normal hagiographical paradigms including posthumous miracles at ecclesial shrines. These lives are then qualified by the interpolation of the Pardon, demonstrating one end toward which these saints’ lives might point, in which hundreds of their material accessories and body parts are compressed alongside one another to form a kind of inspirited museum of Christian history within the storehouse of the church. The church performs as a hagiographical museum. This is qualified in turn by the closing encounter with What the Church Betokenth, in which several of the key items from this heap of museum objects are reassessed as allegorical significations harnessed to the celebration of the mass, within an allegorical superstructure emphasizing the institutional hierarchy and sacramental practice of the church. In this context, the relic object dematerializes entirely to become a secondary hermeneutic effect of eucharistic vestments.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this chapter, we explored some of the ways in which symbolic readings of the church fabric might be implicitly embedded within a hagiographical narrative, utilizing examples such as St. Aidan’s beam and St. Godric’s visions of an animate crucifix. These symbolic resonances have the theoretical potential to remain in play within the saints’ lives that make up the Gilte Legende; however, in practice these lives are often abridged so radically and rendered so simply in translation that they lose the narrative building-​blocks that facilitate this kind of resonance. The Life of St. Aidan is not represented in the “Supplementary Lives” appended to the Gilte Legende, but it is included in the Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande, an early sixteenth-​ century vernacular legendary of British saints’ lives translated and abridged from John of Tynemouth’s Sanctilogium Angliae.39 Here, all specific reference to the supporting beam disappears and the translator simply comments, “And twyse the house wherein he [Aidan] dyed which was adioynynge to the churche was saued when the churche & all þe strete were burned.”40 It is impossible to access Bede’s original allusion to Aidan as an evangelical pillar of the church in this abbreviated rendition. At the same time that the symbolic resonances encased in the earlier Latin vitae are depleted or erased in their vernacular rendition, in Additional 35298 we find these lives co-​joined with two more distinctively late medieval ways of reacting to saints’ bodies and churches. The additions of The Pardon of All the Churches of Rome and What the Church Betokenth encourage us to think, on the one hand, of the church as a storehouse of inanimate material, crammed with stone-​like relic-​objects, while also giving us the opposite option of reinterpreting those relics as an ethereal supplement to a more traditional, sacramentally oriented reading of the church as the body of Christ. I would contend that these two readings

39 Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande, ed. Manfred Görlach (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1994), 52–​53. 40 Kalendre, ed. Görlach, 53, ll. 22–​24.

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gain in cultural prominence in fifteenth-​century England as ways of negotiating local ecclesial-​political circumstances encouraging institutional participation and promoting the profundity and centrality of the mass.41 By the same token, the threads of subtle architectural meaning embedded within earlier hagiographical narration, insinuating the church as a sign for the saint or cult, lose traction, sidelined in favour of more prescriptive, sacramentally oriented master narratives of the church.

41 For important essays on fifteenth-​century ecclesiastic reform in England, see After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-​Century England, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). See also Varnam, Church as Sacred Space.

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INDEX

abbeys and friaries, 79, 81, 85, 106, 108–​109, 113, 176, 177–​78, 180 See also Durham Benedictine monastery; Westminster Abbey Abraham, 76, 165 Acca of Haxham, bishop, 50, 77n104 Aebbe of Coldingham, Saint, 177–​79 Vita S. Ebbe, 177–​79 Æthelbald, King of Mercia, 53 agriculture, 100, 106, 109 Aidan of Lindisfarne, bishop, 173–​74, 179–​80, 187 Vita Sancti Aidani Lindisfarnensis, 173–​74, 187 Alcuin of York, 5 Aldhelm of Malmesbury, 10, 49, 57–​78 Carmen de Virginitate, 72 Carmen Rhythmicum, 65, 71–​72 Carmina Ecclesiastica, 10, 57–​60, 62–​78 Prosa de Virginitate, 74–​75 Aliscans, 120 allegory, 7–​8, 9–​10, 12, 13, 72n83, 100, 115, 121–​23, 124, 171–​88 architectural, 8, 171–​72, 174, 180, 185–​86 exegetical, 172, 173–​74 moral and religious, 121–​23 scholastic, 12, 171–​72, 173, 176, 179–​80, 184 Alsatia, 163 Anglia, 163 Anglo-​Norman. See Norman antiphons, 69, 76 apostles, 57, 59, 74, 95, 175, 185 archaeology, 11, 44, 47, 99, 101, 127–​50, 151 deposits, 44, 47, 77, 129–​30, 132, 137–​38, 142 See also buildings; burial; zoning

architecture, 3–​4, 5–​13, 15–​40, 41–​49, 51, 54, 58–​60, 62–​82, 85–​94, 99–​125, 100, 116, 122, 128, 131–​35, 150, 151–​69, 171–​72, 176, 185–​86 architectural representation, 4, 5–​13, 37n37, 40, 41, 43, 54, 58, 60, 64n37, 68, 71, 77–​78, 100, 116, 122, 128, 133, 150, 151–​53, 155–​60, 162–​63, 165–​69, 171–​72, 176, 185–​86 architectural drawing, 5–​7, 8–​9, 15–​40 architecture and power, 11–​12, 51, 62–​63, 67, 80, 85–​89, 93, 99–​125, 131–​35, 151–​69 ecclesiastical architecture, 3–​4, 8–​13, 15–​40, 42–​44, 46–​48, 49, 58–​59, 64, 66–​78, 79–​80, 81–​82, 89–​94, 168, 171–​72 in vernacular poetry, 60, 62, 64–​65, 67–​70, 72, 78 modern experience of, 2–​4, 41, 99–​101, 102, 115, 124, 157 See also buildings; castles; cathedrals; churches; gothic, architectural style ark of Noah, 165, 167–​68, 171, 179 Ark of the Covenant, 171, 184 assembly, 102 Augustine of Canterbury, saint, 79–​80, 82–​83, 87, 89–​90 Austria, 163 Baldrs Draumar, 132

Bamburgh, 173 church beam, 173–​74, 187 Banbury, Oxfordshire, 1, 3 baptism, 47, 60, 63, 80, 82, 88–​90, 93–​95, 120 Bavaria, 163

196

196

Index

Bede, 44n13, 45, 47–​48, 49, 52–​53, 61–​62, 68, 72–​73, 83, 84, 132–​34, 171, 173–​74, 177, 178, 180–​81, 187 De Templo, 171, 173–​74 De Temporum Ratione, 48 De Tabernaculo, 171, 173 Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, 44n13, 45, 47, 61–​62, 68, 132–​34, 173, 178 Prose Vita S. Cuthberti, 52, 177, 181 Beleth, John, 171 Belgia, 163 Beowulf, 44–​45, 62–​65, 67–​69, 78, 146 Berber society, 127 Bern, Burgerbibliothek, 153 bible, the, 2, 9, 42–​43, 46, 50, 51, 55, 64n37, 72, 119, 121, 123, 162, 165, 167, 171, 173 See also biblical Latin epic; David, biblical king; Moses, patriarch; Solomon, biblical king; Tabernacle; biblical; Temple, biblical biblical epic poetry, Latin, 70–​73 Birinus, bishop, 60 Boccacio, 121 Teseida, 121 Boemia, 163 Böker, Hans, 16, 18, 21, 31, 32, 35, 37 Boniface, saint, 53 Bourdieu, Pierre, 127 Boyne, River, 106–​109, 124 Brabancia, 163 Bracciolini, Poggio, 5 branchwork, 31, 48–​49 Bugga, Abbess, 10, 57–​60, 62–​64, 66–​70, 75–​76, 78 buildings, 1–​4, 9–​12, 15–​40, 41–​56, 60, 64–​69, 72–​73, 79–​80, 81–​82, 89–​94, 95, 97, 100, 103–​104, 109, 110–​14, 124, 127–​50, 162, 169, 171–​74, 176–​79, 182, 184 alignment of, 127–​28, 129–​50 as metaphor for creation, 60, 69, 72–​73

conversion of, 46–​48, 79–​80, 81–​82, 89–​94, 95 cultic functions, 43, 46–​47, 49, 51, 133, 137–​38, 139, 145, 147–​48, 150 digital reconstruction of, 100, 110–​14, 124 doorways and entrances, 3, 68, 92–​93, 97, 128–​29, 130–​34, 135–​37, 139, 140–​42, 144–​47, 150, 169, 171, 174 elite/​high-​status, 51, 109, 128, 135–​38, 140–​41, 142, 144, 146, 148–​49 geometrical analysis of, 15–​40 grouping of, 127, 129, 135–​36, 141–​41, 143, 144–​46, 148 life-​cycle of, 9, 44, 50–​51 low-​status, 149 permanence of, 9–​12, 41–​56, 97, 162 restoration/​rebuilding, 9, 10, 11, 12, 41–​44, 45, 50, 55, 79–​80, 89, 91, 104, 108, 173–​74, 176–​77 royal, 131 stone construction, 45–​46, 50–​51, 54, 65–​66, 70n72, 103–​104, 176, 178–​79, 182, 184 sunken-​featured building, 137, 144 timber construction, 44–​45, 50–​51, 60, 64–​67, 137, 142, 179 See also architecture; castles; cathedrals; churches; grid planning; halls; zoning Burgundia, 163 burial, 47, 80, 84–​85, 102–​103, 130, 131–​35, 144–​45

Cædmon’s Hymn, 60–​64, 72–​73

Cædwalla, King of Wessex, 58, 63, 70, 71, 73–​74 Capua, 156, 158 carbon 14-​dating, 135 Carruthers, Mary, 7n20, 60, 74–​76 Castle of Perseverance, The, 122–​23 castles, 11, 18, 99–​125, 155–​56, 160 moats, 116, 122

197



towers, 100, 106, 113–​18, 120–​23, 156 walls, 100, 106, 112, 116 windows, 106, 112–​13, 116–​21 See also architecture; buildings; Harburg Castle, Trim Castle cathedrals, 10, 13, 16, 19, 21, 23–​31, 40, 43, 50, 79–​97, 106, 108, 167, 173n4, 176–​77, 179–​80, 182, 183–​85 See also buildings; churches; names of specific cathedrals Celestine, Pope, 156 Centwine, King of Wessex, 58, 59n14, 60, 63, 70, 71n81, 73–​74, 77 Ceolred, King of Mercia, 53 charters, 9, 53–​55 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 81, 121 Knight’s Tale, 121 Second Nun’s Tale, 81 Chrétien de Troyes, 117–​19, 120–​21, 123 Charrete, 117, 120–​21 Le chevalier au lion, 118–​19, 123 Christ, 31, 36, 42–​43, 63–​64, 73, 76, 80, 88, 91–​94, 122, 167, 171, 175–​76, 179, 184–​86, 187 as allegorical foundation, 179 body of, 171, 175, 179 cleansing the Temple, 42–​44, 92 Christ child, 176 entry into Jerusalem, 92–​94 image of crucifixion, 175, 186 Christine de Pizan, 122–​23 Le livre de la cité des dames, 122–​23 churches; 1–​4, 9–​10, 41–​56, 57–​78, 80, 89–​95, 138, 145, 148, 148n60, 167, 171–​88 altar, 9–​10, 43, 45, 57, 60, 75–​77, 78, 85, 92, 95, 172, 175–​76 apse, 25, 65, 67, 75–​76, 138 columns, 171–​72, 174, 176 consecration of, 43, 46–​49, 56, 80, 82, 89–​96 furnishings, 9–​10, 57–​58, 75, 76n98, 78, 172, 184

Index

197

nave, 21, 24, 67, 75, 92–​93, 167 pavement, 171, 175, 185 sanctuary, 172, 175 roof, 9, 42, 60, 68, 70–​73, 75–​78, 171, 172, 185 windows, 1, 3, 4, 21, 24, 27–​28, 30, 42, 54, 68–​69, 76, 78, 185 See also abbeys and friaries; buildings; cathedrals; names of specific churches clerical vestments, 172, 185, 186–​87 Clifton, Nan, 3 Coldingham, 177–​79 Cologne Cathedral, tabernacle, 31, 40 Cologne, Schnütgen Museum, 31 Connacht, 105 Conrad of Lutzelhard, 156 Conrad of Querfort, 155 Constance, daughter of Roger II of Sicily, 152, 155–​57, 159–​60 conversion, 42–​43, 44–​50, 59n14, 63–​64, 67, 74n91, 79–​80, 81–​88, 89–​95, 132–​33, 135, 145n50 Covid-​19 memorial, 80, 97 cropmarks, 138, 142, 143, 145 cultural landscape, 99–​102, 123–​24 Cuthbert, Saint, 52, 176–​82 architectural signification, 177, 179, 181 chastity of, 181–​82 coffin of, 179 prohibition of women, 182 shrine of, 176 Cynegils, King of Wessex, 60 Dalton, Emily, 80, 81–​82, 89–​91

Damasus, Pope, 58–​59 David, biblical king, 43, 64, 119, 165 De Lacy family of Trim Castle, 104, 108, 113, 124 Hugh de Lacy, 104, 108, 113 See also Mortimer family of Trim Castle Trim Castle deposits. See archaeology: deposites

198

198

Index

depth cues, 32, 35 design, 4, 5–​6, 8–​9, 11, 15–​40, 51, 74–​75, 106, 114–​15, 128 digital reconstruction. See buildings: digital reconstruction of Donne, John, 96–​97 Dublin, 104, 106 ductus, 75–​76, 78 Durham, 179–​84 Durham Benedictine monastery, 176, 177–​78 Durham Cathedral, 173n4, 176–​77, 179–​80, 182, 183–​85 Eboli, 154, 159–​60

Eco, Umberto, 6 ecology, 11, 151, 157 Edmund of Abingdon, 185 Speculum Ecclesiae, 185 Edward II, King of England, 104 Edward III, King of England, 104–​105 Edward IV, King of England, 106 Edward Bruce, 104 Edward the Confessor, King of England, 84, 87 Edwin, King of Northumbria, 42–​44, 45, 47, 129, 132, 135 Egypt, 162, 165 Einhard, 5 ekphrasis, 10, 13, 59n15, 64, 74 Engelberg, Burkhard, 18, 24 Erkenwald, bishop and saint, 10, 79–​97 Escomb, Northumbrian Church, 41, 66 Esslingen, S. Dionys, tabernacle, 18, 31, 37, 38 Ethelred the Unready, King of England, 80, 85–​87 Farne Island, 177

See also Lindisfarne Flandria, 163 Foucault, Michel, 91 Francia, 45, 69, 163

Frankish influence, 45–​47, 69 Frederick I, Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, 155, 165 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, 152 Frisia, 163 Geoffrey de Geneville, 104, 109

Gilte Legende, The 183, 185–​86, 187 GIS (Geographic Information Systems), 102–​103 Godfrey of Viterbo, 169 Godric of Finchale, Saint, 174–​76 gothic, architectural style, 3–​4, 5, 8–​9, 15–​16, 18–​19, 30–​35, 39–​40, 79 Grady, Frank, 81 grass-​strewing, 1 Great Fire of London (1666), 79 Gregory the Great, Pope, 46–​48, 75n94, 82, 171 Trajan legend, 82, 88 Letter to Mellitus, 46–​48 grid planning, 138–​40, 142, 145, 149 See also buildings: alignment of; buildings: grouping of; zoning Groagaldr 1, 132 Grosseteste, Robert, 171 hagiography, 8, 9, 10, 41, 54, 56, 57, 63, 172–​76, 176–​81, 183, 187–​88

halls, 45, 49–​50, 51, 60–​62, 64–​70, 71–​72, 78, 129, 130–​35, 136, 138, 140–​41, 142, 144–​45, 146–​47, 149 Hampshire, 135–​38, 140–​42, 173n4 Harburg Castle, 18 Harburg tabernacle drawing, 30–​35, 37, 39–​40 harrowing of hell, 93–​94 Henry V, King of England, 105 Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, 152–​53, 155–​56, 158–​59, 161–​62, 165, 168 Henry, layman, 178 heritage sites, 99, 113

199



hermitage, 175–​78 heterotopia, 91, 94–​95 hexameter, 58, 71 Hild, abbess, 62 Holy Trinity, Shenington, 1–​4 See also Shenington man Honorius Augustodunensis, 171 Hrabanus Maurus, 5 Hugh of St. Victor, 167–​68, 171 Hungary, 165 India, 162, 163

Ine, King of Wessex, 63–​64 Innocent III, pope, 171 invasion, 86–​87, 160 Ironstone Benefice, 1, 3 Jerusalem, 91–​95, 168n41

John of Tynemouth, 173n4, 187 Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae, 173n4, 187 Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande, 187

Kent, 45–​47 Kraft, Adam, 31

La prise d’Orange, 119–​20

Langland, 121 Piers Plowman, 121–​23 Last Supper, 31, 32, 36–​38, 95, 184 Lechler, Lorenz, 18, 31, 37 Lefebvre, Henri, 182 Leica laser scanners, 110–​12 See also buildings: digital reconstruction of; LiDAR Letter to Peter, 160, 165 LiDAR, 11, 110–​19 See also buildings: digital reconstruction of; Leica laser scanners Liguria, 163 liminality, 77, 132, 134 Lindisfarne, 9, 41–​44, 180, 182 See also Farne Island

Index

199

line of sight, 39, 131 See also oversight; viewscape liturgy, 58–​59, 64, 68–​69, 75–​78, 171–​72, 175–​76, 183, 185 liturgical manuals, 171–​72, 175, 185–​86 lived experience, 6, 99–​100, 124 Lóegaire, Kingship of, 103–​104 Lombardia, 163 London, 10, 79–​88, 91, 94–​97 See also “New Troy” Lotharingia, 163 Malory, Sir Thomas, 117

Le Morte Darthur, 117 Mandeville, Sir John, 88n27, 92 manuscripts, 5, 11, 58, 76, 102, 118, 120, 122, 153–​55, 157, 158, 159–​60, 164, 166, 176, 183–​87 Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 102.II, 153, 157, 158, 164, 166 Besançon, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 156, 119n50, 120 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.i.27, 180–​81n23 Heidelberg University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 848, 115n42 London, British Library, MS Additional 35298, 183–​87 London, British Library, MS Harley 2250, 79n2 London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 436, 173n4 London, Sam Fogg Gallery, stock number 19733, 18n6 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 6, 178n19 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS fr. 115, 117n45, 118; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Fr 19093, 5n14 Regensburg, Diözesanarchiv, D/​1974 124, 16n5

200

200

Index

St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex Sangallensis 1092, 5n13 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2617 Han, 121n56 See also palimpsest mappa mundi, 159 Marchia, 163 Marie de France, 117–​19, 123 Lanval, 117–​19, 123 Markward of Anweiler, 163 Mediterranean, 127, 153 memory, 7n20, 47, 74–​76 Mercia, 53 Messina, 158, 160 micro-​architecture, 15 Mide/​Meath, Kingdom of, 103 Mirk, John, 90 Monreal, 167 Mortimer family of Trim Castle, 104–​105 See also De Lacy family of Trim Castle; Trim Castle Moses, patriarch, 165 Naples, 154, 156

“New Troy,” 84, 87 See also London Norman, 1, 11, 87, 100, 102–​104, 115–​16, 122–​23, 151–​53, 155–​56, 159, 160, 162–​63, 167, 169 Northumberland, 129–​35 Northumbria, 9, 41–​44, 45–​47, 50, 51–​56, 61, 66, 128, 129, 143, 172, 177, 180 Nuremberg, Lorenzkirche, tabernacle, 31 Nuremberg, Schöner Brunnen, 21 octature, 19, 38–​39

Olsatia, 163 oratory, 145, 175–​78 Osred, King of Northumbria, 53 oversight, 106, 109, 118–​19, 121, 124 See also line of sight; viewscape Ovid, 123 Metamorphoses, 123 Oxfordshire, 1, 142–​43

Palermo, 11, 151–​53, 155–​56, 158–​63, 165, 167–​69

Cappella Palatina, 151, 156 Cuba Palace, 151 Harbour, 156 Zisa, 151 palimpsest, 102, 143, 151 Pardon of All the Churches of Rome, The, 183–​85, 187 parks and parkland, 109, 115 Parler, Heinrich the Younger, 21, 24, 27 patron saints, 57, 59, 77, 82, 84 patronage, 4, 6, 9, 15, 31, 40, 50, 52, 123n62 Pentecost, 95 Persia, 162 Peter of Eboli, 12, 152–​63, 165, 167–​69 De Balneis Puteolanis, 154 Liber ad Honorem Augusti, 11, 152–​53, 155, 157, 159, 162 Petrarch, Francesco, 81–​82, 95 Philip of Swabia, 165 Polonia, 163 Pomerania, 163 Porchfields, 107, 112 Pozzuoli, 154, 157 prehistoric, 129, 134 pseudo-​perspective, 32, 35, 37 quadrature, 19–​20, 30, 32, 35, 37–​39 Red Sea, 165

Regensburg, masonic conference of (1459), 30 Regensburg spire drawing, 17, 19, 21, 23–​30 Regensburg Cathedral, 16, 19, 21, 23, 25–​28, 30, 40 Reginald of Durham, 174–​78 Libellus de Vita et Miraculis S Godrici, 174–​76 relics, 76–​77, 95, 173n4, 174, 176, 180–​81, 183–​87

201



Richard II, King of England, 81, 84, 105 Richard of Maidstone, 84 Richard of Saint-​Victor, 171 Richard of York, 105–​106 Ripon, church at, 41, 44n11, 45, 48, 52, 54–​55, 56 ritual, 44, 47, 50, 54, 62, 64–​66, 70, 75–​77, 89–​92, 101–​102, 127, 131–​35, 137, 142, 143, 146–​48, 185 Rocca D’Arce, 156 Roger II, King of Sicily, 152 Roman d’Eneas, 116–​17 romanitas, 9–​10, 60–​61, 66 Rome, 9, 45–​46, 47, 50, 58, 63, 81–​82, 95, 135, 156, 169, 183 Roriczer, Konrad, 30 Roriczer, Matthäus, 18–​20, 30

sacred space, 4, 9, 41, 43, 44–​50, 55–​56, 75, 78, 79, 81–​88, 90–​97, 101, 135–​36

saints, bodies of, 174, 179, 187, 181–​82, 183–​85 Saint Erkenwald, 10, 79–​97 Salerno, 153–​154, 158, 160 Sam Fogg Gallery, London, 17–​18 San Salvatore, 156 Saturn, Age of, 162 Saxonia, 163 Scavia, 163 Scottish Borders, 143–​46 Sebba, King of the East Saxons, 80, 85–​88 settlement sites, 127–​50 Chalton, 128, 135, 136, 140–​42, 147–​49 Cowage Farm, 65–​66, 128, 135, 136, 138–​40, 143 Cowdery’s Down, 11, 66–​67, 128, 135–​38, 139, 142, 143, 146, 147 Drayton, 128, 142–​43 Sprouston, 128, 143–​46 Yeavering, 11, 44n13, 47–​49, 66–​67, 128, 129–​35, 136–​37, 138, 140–​41, 142, 143, 144, 147 Shenington man, 1–​4, 13

Index

201

See also Holy Trinity, Shenington; Shenington Sherwood, Jennifer, 3 Sicardus of Cremona, 171 Sicily, 11–​12, 151–​56, 159–​63, 167, 169 siege, 100, 104, 115 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 115 Sisk, Jennifer, 90–​91 Solomon, biblical king, 64, 162 Summit, Jennifer, 80, 81–​82, 95 spires, 9, 15–​17, 19, 21, 24, 28, 30, 40 See also Strasbourg Cathedral, spire spoliation, 2, 66 Staufen Rulers, 151–​53, 155, 159–​62, 165, 168–​69 St. Aebbe’s Head, Berwickshire, 178 St. Mary’s, Augustinian Abbey at Trim, 106, 108, 113 St. Mary, West Saxon Church dedicated to, 57, 59 St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Trim, 106, 108 St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 10, 79–​80, 85, 96–​97 St. Paul’s, Old, 10, 13, 79–​80, 81–​88, 90–​92, 95–​97 St. Peter and St. Paul, West Saxon Church dedicated to, 57, 59 Stephen of Ripon, 9, 12, 41–​44, 46, 49, 50, 51–​56 Vita sancti Wilfridi, 42–​44, 46, 50, 53–​56 Strasbourg Cathedral, spire, 30 Stuttgart, tabernacle drawing, 31, 32, 35, 37 Suevia, 163 Tabernacle, biblical, 76, 171, 173

tabernacle, 9, 15–​19, 30–​40 See also Cologne Cathedral, tabernacle; Esslingen, S. Dionys, tabernacle; Harburg tabernacle drawing; Nuremberg, Lorenzkirche, tabernacle; Stuttgart, tabernacle drawing

202

202

Index

Tancred of Lecce, King of Sicily, 155–​56, 158, 160, 162 Tatberht of Ripon, abbot, 50 Temple, biblical, 42, 43–​44, 51, 54, 76, 92, 168, 171–​74, 179, 184 See also Christ: cleansing the Temple temple, 46–​47, 79–​80, 83, 87, 89–​95, 130, 132, 135, 137–​38, 147–​48 Theodore of Canterbury, archbishop, 46, 51 tituli, 10, 57–​60 tombs, 58–​59, 80, 83–​85, 92, 95, 96 of King Ethelred, 80, 85, 87 of King Sebba, 80, 85, 87–​88 of St. Cuthbert, 182 of St. Godric, 174–​75 transportation networks, 106, 124 Trajan, emperor, 82–​83, 88 Trim Castle, 11, 100–​101, 103–​16, 123 See also De Lacy family of Trim Castle; Mortimer family of Trim Castle Troy, 87, 92 Turingia, 163 Tuscia, 163 Uí Chaindelbáin family, 103–​104

Ulm Minster, 15, 21, 23–​24, 27 Ulm Minster, tabernacle, 15 Ulrich von Ensingen, 24 Ulster, 105 Varnam, Laura, 3n8, 80, 89–​92, 94–​95, 185n35

verse epigraphy, 10, 58–​59 Vienna, Stephansdom, spire, 24 viewscape, 100–​102, 106, 109–​10, 113–​19, 121–​24

See also line of sight; oversight Villard de Honnecourt, 5–​6n14, 35n31 Virgil, 116 Aeneid, 116 Virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral Project, 96–​97 Virtual Paul’s Cross Project, 96–​97 Vita Gregorii, anon., 49–​50, 88 Vita S. Cuthberti, anon., 177 Vitruvius, 5 Vulgate (Lancelot-​Grail) Cycle, 117 Warwickshire, 1

Wessex, 58, 60, 64, 78, 128, 135, 138, 140, 142 Westfalia, 163 Westminster Abbey, 79, 81, 84 What the Church Betokenth, 183, 185–​87 Whitby, Synod of, 41–​43, 49–​50 Wilfred, Bishop, 9–​10, 12, 41–​56, 68n64 William II, King of Sicily, 152, 155–​57, 160, 167 Willliam Durandus, bishop of Mende, 89–​90, 171, 175, 183, 185–​86 Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, 89–​90, 183, 185 William of Malmsbury, 57n2, 61, 65 Wiltshire, 138–​39 Wisdom, figure, 159 worldview, 4, 99–​100, 128, 131 York, church at, 42–​44, 45–​46, 49–​51

zoning, 127–​28, 130, 132, 134–​35, 136–​38, 139, 140, 142–​43, 144–​45, 146–​50

See also buildings: alignment of; buildings: grouping of; grid planning