What is now the town of Lincoln in Lincolnshire, England was settled more than two thousand years ago and, in the first century C.E., it became the capital of the Roman province that covered eastern England. Flourishing during the medieval period as an inland port and a center of wool production, the town was visited by pilgrims and became home to several communities of friars. They were drawn to the region by its cathedral, the third largest in England, consecrated in 1092 and reconstructed one hundred years later in the Gothic style. Today, its looming towers still command the view above a medieval town center making Lincoln a valuable destination for an aspiring art historian particularly interested in the later Middle Ages. During the summer of 2005, I spent eight weeks working in the Lincoln Cathedral Library, which gave me the rare opportunity to live in this region of extraordinary history while assisting with a project that would itself expand my knowledge of medieval culture and art.
The libraries of the Lincoln Cathedral contain manuscripts that date as far back as one thousand years. The Medieval Library was built in the 1420's and is now used for regular exhibitions of books and manuscripts. The Wren Library, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and completed in 1675, houses an important collection of early printed books. My project was to create a computer database classifying the woodcuts from the library's holdings of incunabula and early printed books . It is estimated that around five hundred of the books printed before 1535 contain woodcuts. I compared these images with those catalogued in Edward Hodnett's English Woodcuts, 1480 to 1535 . This involved digital photography of the woodcuts and the creation of subject fields to enable cross-referencing.
The librarians arranged a visit to the Cathedral Works Department where we were shown around the stonemason's workshop and were allowed to see pieces of the Dean's Eye rose window on the light box. I attended cathedral concerts, Shakespeare plays, and a study day in the Wren Library. On the weekends, I traveled to London, York, Nottingham, and Haworth (the home of the lovely Brontë sisters). I took a trip to Cambridge with the library staff and visited King's College Chapel and the Wren Library at Trinity College.
My summer work inspired my choice of thesis topic - I am now writing on a subject involving fifteenth and sixteenth century woodcut images. But, what I learned from my internship that was most lasting came from my experience of the cathedral itself. I remember seeing Lincoln's towering West Front for the first time, not over the rooftops of the town but as a image projected in a darkened Bryn Mawr classroom. Until I spent a summer in Lincoln, I had not truly realized that its Gothic monument was in fact still the center of so many lives. In the morning, choir men walked their dogs around the circling drive and stonemasons walked the roof. Organ music often drifted into the cloister where students from the Minster School took their lunches. Many of my co-workers, as children, had played rowdy games dangerously close to the chapter house windows. In the short time I'd spent working in the cathedral library, I grew to love this town in eastern England and was fortunate to be among those people whose faith and care had sustained this place for more than a thousand years.
My doctoral dissertation explores the interchange between the construction of art history as a discipline and the construction of cultural divisions of the landscape. In so doing, it builds on the important insights into the politics of revival movements in Germany provided by Michael Lewis's study of the Gothic revival, on Barbara Miller Lane's work on the German National Romanticism of the later nineteenth century, and on Celia Applegate's investigations of the German concept of Heimat. Specifically, the project investigates the interplay of scholarship on medieval architecture with efforts to justify and strengthen the political realignment of the Rhineland following the Napoleonic Wars (1800-15). In the fervor of nationalist Romanticism as it developed during these wars, medieval structures became icons of a mythologized era: one in which, as it seemed to many, what it meant to be German was most fully and beautifully expressed. Politicians and scholars used these emotionally-charged monuments to locate German cultural affinities.
Speyer Cathedral, in the Palatinate, provides the focus for my research. The Palatinate (depopulated, largely Protestant, and loyal to reforms instituted when the region was part of Napoleon's France) was transferred to Bavaria in 1816. King Ludwig I (r. 1825-48, d. 1868) lavishly renovated Speyer Cathedral to redefine symbolically the region as Bavaria would have it: thriving, Catholic, and aristocratic. The interior was covered with murals of saints and biblical scenes, and Heinrich Hübsch replaced the Baroque west end with a neo-Romanesque westwork. Ludwig's additions directly competed with Protestant Prussia's patriotic campaign to complete the Gothic cathedral of Cologne. Prussia was, however, misguided, according to Ludwig. He asserted, drawing on contemporary scholarship, that Gothic was a French style whereas only Romanesque was German. Even if this were true, Bavaria faced an ambiguity in using Speyer Cathedral to bolster its territorial claims. Until 1801, the diocese and even the city of Speyer extended across the Rhine into Baden. Baden's leaders were not above celebrating this history to support their own territorial designs on the Palatinate.
The contributions my project makes are methodological, conceptual, and comparative. Methodologically, it asks: how can one evaluate the interchange between shifting notions of cultural geography and early scholarship in medieval art? To answer this, I am investigating the full range of formulations of the meaning of medieval art in the Palatinate of the early nineteenth century. Conceptually, the project asks how fascination with cultural continuities has affected the writing and reception of art history. Even though in 1857 the Bavarian ethnographer Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl identified the Palatinate as the chief example among German lands of "diversity without unity," my research shows that this aspect of the Palatinate was ignored by nineteenth-century art historians, whose conceptualizations of Speyer strengthened the cathedral's usefulness to the Bavarian government. Comparatively, the project contributes to the current art-historical literature on the conception of "place." Formulated in terms of citizenship and identity, "place" is a growing concern of social scientists as well. Through its interpretive approach to historiography, the Speyer project addresses the juncture between these disciplines. For more information see: www.ghi-dc.org/conferences/archsem02.html. |
 |
|
