medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
From: Marjorie Greene <[log in to unmask]>
>My....impression of Romanesque Italy is that it's buried under centuries of
"refashioning," unlike Romanesque France, where every village boasts an
"abbatiale 12e siècle."
well, that latter is certainly not quite true, except in a redundant
"Romanesque France" --define a region that way and it is, i suppose.
but the point is well taken : survivals of early monuments depend, in large
part, on the relative "sucess" of a region in subsequent centuries.
the "Renaissance" certainly did in most of the more prominent Italian sites.
certain parts of central Burgundy, otOh, appear to have reverted back to being
rural BackWaters after a reasonably spectacular late 11th - early 12th c.
"essor".
which is why, almost literally, in Burgundy "every village boasts an
'abbatiale 12e siècle'."
otOh, try and reconstruct what 11th-early 12th c. "Romanesque" might have
looked like in, say, the Parisian region. (some scholars have actually opted
for the absurd view that there was none.)
or in the region around Troyes, where the stone (chalk) which was used for the
foundations of buildings had an in-ground life of 3-4 centuries, demanding
that the buildings be periodically reconstructed on that schedule.
or in the Chartrain Beauce, where *hundreds* of village churches were
destroyed in the course of both the Hundred Years' War and the Wars of
Religion in the 16th century.
each of these is a tough job.
what did the 11th c. cathedrals of Orleans, Bourges, Reims, etc. look like in
elevation ?
or the style of their (no doubt extensive) frescoes ?
we've not a clue, apparently.
in my own work, this issue of "survivals" has become, over the last few
decades, increasingly crucial --i am really trying to get some sort of handle
on what percentage of once-extant monuments we have *lost*, and i have about
decided that that number is about 90%, +/-9.99%, depending upon the region and
type of artifact (eg., not much in the way of wax sculpture has survived,
apparently).
the question becomes important because art hysterians typically try and make
some sort of "developmentmental" sense out of the universe of objects which
have survived --perhaps supplemented by those which can be reliably
reconstructed from the "echos" which might exist in the form of "Replications"
of those "Prime Objects" (the vocabularly here is taken from George Kubler's
_The Shape of Time_, highly recommended for thinking about suchlike
problems).
but, obviously, if that universe of survivals is actually a quite *miniscule*
percentage of the once-extant exemplars --or, just as bad, if not worse, if it
is severely skewed by unusual accidents of survival-- then the hapless
hysterian's reConstruction of the earlier Reality is Doomed to Failure and/or
hopelessly dilusional.
an interesting problem --which might even have parallels in other
disciplines.
like Medieval Religion.
whatever that is.
c
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