Medieval and Modern perspectives on the Sculpture In Situ study day

event reportsJames Alexander Cameron View all 2 comments

A co-authored post by Levi Prombaum and James Cameron, respectively a modernist and a medievalist and both PhD students at the Courtauld Institute, about experiences of the Sculpture in Situ day.

St Helen Bishopgate

Dr. Kim Woods introduces the group to St. Helen Bishopgate

Dr Kim Woods began the Sculpture in Situ day under the shadow of the Gherkin at St. Helen’s Bishopgate by introducing the group to the funerary monument of Sir John Crosby (d.1476) and his wife. It looked, to modernist eyes, completely impenetrable, whereas for medievalists, it was par for the course: man and wife, alabaster, side-by-side, tomb-chest, polished limestone, mid-C15, surely. Beyond style, medievalists immediately begin to think of the patron’s wishes to place himself by the altar, and to invite prayers for their souls within the ritual and devotional space of the parish church. This is not totally unlike museums where modernist sculpture is presented according to the artist’s wishes, so that viewers participate in the objects’ careful explorations of space, tying together the artist’s engagement with history, medium and meaning. But here spatial relations are distorted with the removal of the things which conditioned the original context: unusually for an Anglican church there is not a single altar remaining at St. Helens, and the floor has been raised, hiding the base of the once more elevated tomb, making these associations with place more difficult to unravel.

St Helen Bishopgate

Hunting for traces of polychrome on the Crosby tomb

Yet the two figures of the Crosby tomb were from a different historical context from the institution of the gallery and the emancipated artist, springing out of a vastly different relationship between craftsman, patron and space and composed of possibly unfamiliar materials. Dr Woods made clear, however, that the key ingredient to studying sculpture in situ successfully was not necessarily immediately spotting clear answers to all of your questions. Instead, a good investigation starts by giving yourself enough time to look. One must attend to the quality of the sculptural material and its current condition, including registering traces of past sculptural elements and carefully considering its setting. Whether one starts from a small iconographic detail and works outward, or begins with a general condition report that unearths specific details later on, the act of looking cannot be rushed, and like the sculptural object itself, good sculptural research, demands that we inhabit multiple perspectives.

St Helen Bishopgate

The tomb from St Martin Outwich

We also investigated the monument that was moved to St Helen’s in the late nineteenth century from the demolished parish church St. Martin Outwich. The identity of the figures as John de Oteswich and wife is often taken for granted on antiquarian evidence, yet deserves questioning. What engages most are some exceedingly high-quality virtuoso flourishes on the hilt of his sword, the sign of a highly skilled sculptor. But what altered the discussion most of all was when his hefty and copiously proportioned money-bag was pointed out. It is often questioned why accurate portraiture is generally untypical in medieval effigies, but we can see with something like this, it was because the patrons were more concerned about what they were, not how they looked. It is hard when interrogating a monument so intensely as to not think of Philip Larkin, who obsessed over the detail of a sculpted lord and lady holding hands in his poem An Arundel Tomb, dismissing it as a thrown-off detail which only assumed sentimental value after the end of the Middle Ages. Certainly our London monument had the standard little dogs beneath the feet as absurd as they get, but this purse was clearly a detail very carefully chosen, with which to manifest this unknown man’s self-image, and our little group’s discussion allowed this image to briefly resonate once more.

St Helen's BishopgateSt Helen's BishopgateSt Helen's Bishopgate

 

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Mercer's hall London

The Mercer’s Hall Chapel

The need for multiple perspectives became clearer as we moved to Mercer’s Hall, where, in place of covered nobility, was a suffering Christ from the long-destroyed medieval Mercer’s Chapel, with an arched back and writhing body whose vulnerability was echoed in deep folds of fabric cut into the stone on which he lay. Though it was made less than half a century later than the Crosby tomb, the dramatically different carving style was a good reminder of what a hodgepodge of techniques that economic and cultural centres like London have been for centuries. Taking on the object from all angles was not only an important part of solving the mystery of this sculpture’s destruction, but also allowed us to see that this single object played multiple roles for viewers within the church throughout the calendar year.

Mercer's hall London

The Mercer Christ, c.1500-20s

The Mercer Christ is a harrowing object, a true masterpiece of late medieval pathos. Not just because of its subject, but because of the way it seems to have been destroyed. There are four main areas of damage: firstly, all four extremities have been bashed off, the Crown of Thorns sliced off along with a good portion of His skull, and most perplexingly of all, there is an X-shaped incision over the heart. This seems to have been a methodical way of de-sanctifying the image. If someone who was unfamiliar with the old religion had been called upon to destroy it, they surely would have ground it into rubble. But someone who formerly venerated this image went about it a different way – with the five wounds of Christ cancelled out, this was now a mere object with aesthetic qualities, but ruined for devotion. Fitting, then, that now we could gather round it, investigating it forensically like an empty shell of a body in a morgue, and only speculate about His original context within medieval piety and sacred space.

In her later work, art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss has characterized all media as having origins that are multiple, and conventions that depend on this multiplicity to generate meaning. This study day with Material Witness made us more critical about some of the limiting assumptions that we make while looking at sculpture in museum settings, for every installation is a complex negotiation between different parties and changing materials. It also encouraged us to centre the search for this multiplicity of function and meaning in the act of looking itself, and indeed, since we were around one single sculpture continuously for nearly two hours, how much we can get out of the act of looking if we simply slow down.

Levi Prombaum

James Alexander Cameron

Sourcing Stone: Visit to the Albion Quarries at Portland, 3 June

event previewsAlixe Bovey Leave a comment
Shelter4

On 3 June, Material Witness will be visiting the Albion Quarries in Portland, Dorset. Quarried for the best part of a millennium, Portland’s creamy white oolitic limestone is integral to countless iconic buildings, especially in London and the south of England. We will see how the stone is cut from the quarry face, see how blocks are processed, and learn how masons evaluate and work with this stone in building conservation. The trip is facilitated by Mark Goldman, a founding partner of the stone consultancy Harrison Goldman, and we will be shown around the quarry by its manager, Mark Godden.

Microdetail of Portland stone in the north face of the BM’s Great Court
Detail of Portland stone in the north face of the BM’s Great Court
The BM’s great court (arrow points to the photo site)

We’ll set off from London Waterloo at 8:35, arriving at Weymouth at 11:14. There, we will have taxis ferry us to the quarry. The return time will be confirmed ASAP, but we will probably aim for the 17:03, which gets us back to Waterloo for 19:52. If you are a research student or early career researcher in a CHASE institution, and would like to join us, drop us a line as we may have a couple of spaces.

Alixe Bovey

 

  • Kim Woods talking through the Crosby monument in St Helen's Bishopsgate
  • Light usually disperses through alabaster - so the 'torch test' can help to distinguish this stone from marble
  • Sir John Crosby, St Helen's Bishopsgate
  • Detail of the griffin at John Crosby's feet
  • Detail of the griffin at John Crosby's feet
  • Kim Woods talking through the Crosby monument in St Helen's Bishopsgate
  • Light usually disperses through alabaster - so the 'torch test' can help to distinguish this stone from marble
  • Sir John Crosby, St Helen's Bishopsgate
  • Detail of the griffin at John Crosby's feet
  • Detail of the griffin at John Crosby's feet
  • Sir John Crosby, St Helen's Bishopsgate
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  • Sir John de Oteswick and his wife (?), early 15th century, until the 19th century in the church of St Martin Outwich
  • The Mercer's Christ, carved by a Netherlandish sculptor using English stone, c. 1500x1515
  • The Mercer's Christ, carved by a Netherlandish sculptor using English stone, c. 1500x1515
  • The Mercer's Christ, carved by a Netherlandish sculptor using English stone, c. 1500x1515
  • From the inscription on the cloth under Christ
  • Christ's extraordinarily believable knees
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Studying Sculpture in Situ

event reportsAlixe BoveyGallery Leave a comment

Yesterday was such a fascinating day in the life of Material Witness that I can’t resist a heavily-illustrated post about it, in advance of a more reflective post by two of the doctoral students on the programme. We met Dr Kim Woods, a specialist in late medieval Netherlandish and English sculpture, at St Helens Bishopsgate in the City of London, founded in the 13th century as a Benedictine nunnery and now at the foot of the ‘gherkin’ and in the shadow of a dozen other gleaming new buildings. There, we spent the morning examining two alabaster monuments. Kim began with the monument of Sir John Crosby (d. 1476) and his wife, carved in the 1470s, challenging us to work from first principles to understand as much as we could about the sculpture: how it was made, its materials, and how it changed over time. She showed us the ‘torch test’, which helps to determine whether a stone is alabaster (as opposed to, say, marble), and offered guidance on where to look for traces of medieval polychromy. We spent about an hour poring over the Crosbys: the more we looked, the more complex and interesting their monument became.

Kim Woods talking through the Crosby monument in St Helen’s Bishopsgate
Light usually disperses through alabaster – so the ‘torch test’ can help to distinguish this stone from marble
Sir John Crosby, St Helen’s Bishopsgate
Detail of the griffin at John Crosby’s feet
Detail of the griffin at John Crosby’s feet
Sir John Crosby, St Helen’s Bishopsgate

We then examined a somewhat more problematic 15th c monument, originally located in the church of St Martin Outwich, the parish church at the corner of Threadneedle Street and Bishshopsgate until its demolition in 1874. Identified by a later inscription as John de Oteswick and his wife, close examination revealed the complexity of this much-restored, richly carved pair of figures. We started looking with one list of questions, and ended with another.

Sir John de Oteswick and his wife (?), early 15th century, until the 19th century in the church of St Martin Outwich

After displacing a dozen well-shod city workers from the Pret near St Helen’s, we went to the Mercer’s Hall to examine the extraordinary ‘Mercer’s Christ’, astonishing despite its damaged condition. Discovered under the floor of the Mercer’s chapel after the Blitz, it is hypothesised that the image was attacked by early modern iconoclasts before it was concealed in the floor. Kim published an important article about this sculpture in 2007. It was a privilege to revisit this monument with her and Susie Nash: I had seen it recently (at Tate Britain’s Art Under Attack show), but to my shame it was abundantly clear that I had not looked at it carefully at all.

The Mercer’s Christ, carved by a Netherlandish sculptor using English stone, c. 1500×1515
The Mercer’s Christ, carved by a Netherlandish sculptor using English stone, c. 1500×1515
The Mercer’s Christ, carved by a Netherlandish sculptor using English stone, c. 1500×1515
From the inscription on the cloth under Christ
Christ’s extraordinarily believable knees

The day was memorable on several counts – for the works of art that we examined, for the insights and techniques that Kim shared with us, and for the focused, convivial culture that is growing amongst the Material Witness participants. So, thank you Kim, thank you to St Helen’s and the Mercer’s Company, and thank you to a fabulous group who were still standing after six hours of close looking.

Alixe Bovey
Convenor, Material Witness

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Listening to the Sound Archive

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Elinor Carmi, who is writing a PhD on iSpam at Goldsmiths, blogs about the recent ‘Sound as Artefact’ workshop.

What are we looking for when we take sound as an artefact? In the introductory session of the workshop Sound as an Artefact at the British Library on the 25th of April, we were confronted with this question immediately. As researchers who take sound as our research field or method, we face many challenges: How do we find descriptions about sound of old periods? How do we make sense of them? How does the library decide which sounds are important to catalogue and which are not? Which kinds of technical, aesthetical and legal constraints might influence these decisions? But before we go into these important questions, perhaps it is good to take a step back and ask a very cardinal question – What do we mean when we say Sound as Artefact?

A quick glance at the blog post made by Dr Helen Coffey (Open University), who conducted the workshop along with British Library music curator Dr Nicholas Bell, indicates an inherent assumption about sound that was later discussed and complicated during the workshop itself – Does sound equal music? The answer is no, but the two are often confused. This clarification then opened a quick glance at the wonderful archive that the British Library has of various sounds (accents and dialects, environment and nature, oral history, sound maps etc.), which is very similar to Murray Schafer’s project of the World Soundscape Project.

Shafer is considered to be one of the pioneers of Sound studies, which has proliferated in the last decade and brings together scholars from different disciplines such as musicology, history, media and communications, arts and culture studies in order to evaluate and give greater emphasis to this highly neglected sense, that is, the sound sense. As Jonathan Sterne argues in the introduction to the Sound Studies Reader (2012): ”Sound studies is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival. By analysing both sonic practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them, it redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world… It reaches across registers, moments and spaces, and it thinks across disciplines and traditions, some that have long considered sound, and some that have not done so until more recently” (Sterne, 2012; 2).

As we discussed in the workshop, there are several constraints to the process of cataloguing and conserving artefacts that might be considered as sound:

  • What has managed to survive? There are many factors that influence the survival and conservation probability of manuscripts and other artefacts: aesthetic, accident, material deterioration, political turbulences, religious practices etc.
  • What can be preserved? Different periods bring different formats and technologies that allow recording sounds in different ways and qualities, some are obsolete such as the DAT (Digital Audio Tape), or the Cylinder (which preceded the vinyl), and the devices they can be played with are also extinct. These are important to keep in the original form, as they might sound different when they are converted to one format or the other. Especially when more sophisticated technologies are being invented which might extract more fine frequencies from the original artefact.
  • What should be preserved? Here we enter the political domain of the archive that is, after the artefacts have managed to survive in one way or another: what is important enough to be kept and/or displayed/heard (in the case of a sound artefact)? What might seem marginal these days could be quite significant in 20 years times. In addition, different people and cultures give different priorities to what is valuable enough to be preserved and shown. This is, at least for me, the most interesting aspect of archives and the artefacts, which become even more complicated when we look at sound as an artefact. This is mainly because as I mentioned above, sound and music have been treated as an interchangeable concept, and therefore music has received a higher significance as an artefact for preservation whereas other sounds, were neglected. It will be interesting to see how the BL sound archive looks in 20 years from now, and if the sound hierarchy will change.

I particularly liked the part where we discussed Beethoven and saw some of the correspondence between him and the British Royal Philharmonic Society during early 19th century. Through an examination of their letters and account book we could extract a lot of information, not only about music production at that time, but on the music industry as a whole. I found a lot of similarities in the ways that music labels and event organisers operate today and the story of Beethoven and The Royal Philharmonic society. For example: the Royal Philharmonic Society explicitly ordered a piece from Beethoven and wanted exclusivity to play the piece first, however, Beethoven had another thought as he wanted the piece to be played elsewhere. In addition, Beethoven wrote a piece that had a specific bass player part which he knew would fit perfectly to his friend, the Italian Domenico Dragonetti – an interesting way of promoting your friends and helping them get more gigs! Another interesting feature of the manuscript evidence was that Beethoven sometimes actually wrote the letters of the notes above each syllable in particular words to ensure that they would be sung precisely as he wished. He wanted his music to be performed precisely as he intended, and not to receive any other interpretation.

We also looked at one of the Royal Philharmonic Society events programme. An artefact such as this can actually provide a lot of interesting anecdotes – the hours of leisure time of the higher class at that time (For example, in the programme we were looking at the concert ended at around 23:00), the amount of time that a musical piece lasted, the kind of food and beverages that were offered (if at all), whether there was a reception or some kind of ‘after party’. An interesting note that was written, for example was a mentioning to take the horses a bit further along the road so they would not make noise and interfere with the concert and then to the neighbours. This is already a very useful piece of material to sound researchers as they have another glimpse of what it might have been like to participate in such an activity and what were the sound considerations that structured it.

This shows the amount of useful information that a sound studies researcher can extract from such artefacts but also points out to the difficulties – How do you know where to look? How do you know what is relevant and what is not? And how do you make sense of the artefacts you are looking at (considering most of them are taken outside their original context)? If anything was to be taken away from this workshop is that as a sound researcher you have to be original, to look for creative ways to search for your desired artefacts, and most importantly – Listen!

References

Schafer, R. M. (1977). The soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world

Sterne, J. (Ed.). (2012). Sound Studies Reader. Routledge.

 

Elinor Carmi

Department of Media & Communications

Goldsmiths College, University of London

blog: http://www.pinkeee.com

twitter: @pinkeee_

size matters

Size Matters: Programme

For those of you coming to the Size Matters workshop in Norwich on 24-25 May, here is the programme. Material Witness participants who would like to come are encouraged to email Jayne Wackett as there are a couple of spaces still available.

Saturday 24 May 2014 (Norwich City Centre and the UEA)

12:00 – Registration and Lunch (SISJAC) – bag drop

13:00 – Introductions (SISJAC)

13:30 – Sessions at Norwich Cathedral and St Peter Mancroft (2 x 2 session leaders)

15:30 – Discussion session (SISJAC)

16:30 – Transfer to UEA (accommodation at Broadview Lodge)

18:00 – Plenary Lecture (Julian Study Centre 3.02 Lecture Theatre)

19:30 – Dinner at Vista

Sunday 25 May 2014 (UEA)

09:30 – Lectures from session leaders (30 mins + 10 mins Q&A) (SCVA LT)

10:10 – Lecture (SCVA LT)

10:50 – Coffee (Foyer)

11:20 – Lecture (SCVA LT)

12:00 – Lecture (SCVA LT)

12:40 – Lunch (Foyer)

14:00 – Plenary session (SCVA LT)

15:30 – Departure/Coffee

Session Information

Saturday Afternoon – Practical Sessions: data gathering and analysis.

Group 1 St Peter Mancroft (led by Helen Lunnon and Nick Trend)

St Peter Mancroft is the largest of Norwich’s thirty-one surviving medieval parish churches. The aim of the data gathering is to analyse and interpret consistencies and variations in the dimensions and construction of the main arcades with a view to seeing what we might deduce about the order in which they were built.

Group 2 Norwich Cathedral Cloister (led by Agata Gomolka and Lloyd de Beer)

The cathedral cloister contains nearly 400 carved vault bosses of varying sizes, the majority with figural subject matter, much of it narrative. How is the material arranged and how and why do such things as orientation, composition, perspective, and figure proportions and poses vary so widely?

Saturday Evening

‘Sizing up and figuring out St Anselm’s Choir at Canterbury Cathedral’.

 Sandy Heslop

This paper explores three aspects of Canterbury Cathedral c.1100: its overall dimensions and proportions, the sizes and locations of the windows and the disposition of stained glass in them. The design is assessed in relation to Norwich Cathedral and Abbot Suger’s St-Denis as an early example of ‘glass house’ architecture.

Sunday Morning – Presentations and Discussion

‘Corporeal codes: on scale and proportion in medieval sculpture’. – Agata Gomolka

Twelfth-century building campaigns created a fertile ground for experimentation in the depiction of the sculpted human body. Flexible attitudes to proportion and scale in Romanesque artistic practice were ultimately ‘rationalised’ in the early thirteenth century. Focusing on a small number of case studies, the paper will suggest likely incentives for these developments.

‘Made to Measure? English alabaster sculpture and some aspects of its production’. – Lloyd de Beer

This paper addresses the sizes, proportion, and arrangement of imagery in late medieval English sculpture. The primary questions will be what types of images were desirable, how many examples of each type of images were produced and why size might matter in the analysis of these sculptures.

‘A measured account of porches, perches and perks’. – Helen Lunnon

Porches and screens are structures that demarcate entrances to spaces, respectively buildings or special areas within them. Where such objects begin and end, and how their visual and physical permeability changes over time, is revealed by measuring them and analysing their vital statistics.

‘The long-lost secrets of medieval masons: what a tape measure and simple arithmetic can reveal’. – Nick Trend

A detailed study of masons’ marks and cut stone blocks in the parish church of Wighton (north Norfolk) suggests when the nave of the church was built, in what order, and how the masons organised their work. 

Venue Information

SISJAC – Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures

http://sainsbury-institute.org/contacts/

SCVA – Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

http://www.scva.ac.uk/planyourvisit/gettingtous/

Campus Map

http://www.uea.ac.uk/about/visiting-staying/campus-map#display=&fullscreen=false&lat=52.6214&lng=1.2394&zoom=16

Please note that the Julian Study Centre is a new building located adjacent to the Chancellor’s Drive Annexe

Reflections on The Digital Archive

material reflectionsAlixe Bovey Leave a comment

Classics PhD student Alistair Donaldson reports on the ‘Digital Archive’ study day, held at the University of Kent on 8 April.

In an age when information and images can be shared and accessed by millions of people across the globe, most notably for the purposes of learning and research, the creation of digital archives is an activity of considerable importance and interest. For this workshop we were lucky enough to be led by Professor Shane Weller of the University of Kent: he is a member of the editorial board of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, which served as our case study. Cue a day of discussions, doodles and French Fancies…

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Participants struggled to decipher Beckett’s scrawl.

The first session of the day, entitled “Deciphering Becket” (a challenge set by Shane to transcribe a facsimile of a draft page of Beckett’s The Unnamable), was reminiscent of a crash-course in palaeography! Beckett’s cramped, cursive notes presented a challenge to the whole group, inviting a new appreciation for the trials facing Shane and his colleagues. Yet, just being able to freely handle a facsimile of the work, with no concern for its preservation, immediately revealed the advantages of having a copy which could be reproduced with ease. Access to a digital copy of this material and the accompanying doodles would undoubtedly enhance the potential for engaging with the text as an object (rather than a polished published version) for the purposes of research, and appreciating the creative process of the author.

After a working lunch, we transferred to an IT lab for the second session, “Digitising Beckett: The Samuel Becket Digital Manuscript Project” [paywall], for a hands-on experience of a functioning (if unfinished) digital archive. We were all thoroughly impressed with the range of tools available for viewing the items in the archive (such as modular divisions, full e-facsimiles, transcriptions, translations, search functions, zoom capabilities, a chronology of the documents and doodle descriptions). Editorial principles and practice were stressed: the archive did not contain any authoritative, critical commentaries, in the hope that the presentation and subsequent interpretation of the texts would not be influenced too much by the archivists. This did not prevent a member of the workshop noting that any decision on what to include or not include in a digital archive, as well how to present items or how to allow users to interact with them, should be considered a manipulation of the texts and their legacy. Historical examples of other archives compiled with questionable motives were raised, and the role of archives as testaments to history is still worth considering.

The final session of the day, “Digital Archiving in Theory and Practice”, began with a selection of the much anticipated French Fancies and a summary of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) with regards to an object’s authenticity, authority and “aura”. The dependence of these attributes on the physicality and presence of an object (and how these are affected by digitizing the object) was explored in a very vibrant and energetic way, blending discussions from the traditions of philosophy, art, politics and archaeology with a surprising and stimulating disregard for traditional boundaries. We were unable to reach an overall agreement on how digitizing an object might affect or detract from its “aura”, but the existence of various hermeneutic and ontological ramifications of digital archives could not be denied.

The day concluded by considering the future of digital archives: the beginnings of larger digital archives, and even networked digital archives, composed of projects focusing on different authors, periods or genres of work, is an exciting concept. Accompanying this is the wider issue of accessibility, or lack thereof for the general public, which unsurprisingly inspired some very impassioned comments. There is still much left to be said for the advantages, and disadvantages of digital archives, which must be explored with just as much vigour and attention to detail as the construction of the digital archives themselves.

 

Alistair Donaldson

Department of Classics

University of Kent

 

Picturing Canterbury Cathedral’s Books

research projectsAlixe Bovey Leave a comment
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Jayne Wackett, known to Material Witness participants as the programme’s tireless ‘chief of practicalities’, blogs about the ‘Picture This…’ initiative

Striking an appropriate balance between access to and conservation of artifacts is a knotty issue that troubles curators, scholars and all kinds of would-be viewers. The Material Witness programme allowsPhD students privileged access to places and objects in order to redress the balance of a purely digital experience of sources, however, such access is not the norm and it sometimes seems inequitable that so many artifacts should be kept safe either through almost prohibitive restrictions or storeroom obscurity; where is the value in something that is never seen? On the other hand, wouldn’t it be just plain irresponsible to let precious and/or historical objects be irreversibly degraded simply for the interest or research of a relatively few people? Obviously this is an over-simplification of the various permutations of a problem which continues to vex, but it is a part of the thinking process that was behind the setting up of ‘Picture this…’: a collaborative venture between the University of Kent’s postgraduate Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) and Canterbury Cathedral Library.

Launched in August 2012, ‘Picture this…’ is a monthly online feature which takes a digital image from Canterbury Cathedral Library’s store of manuscripts and early printed books and shares the content and context of the picture with a world-wide-web audience through an accompanying article, usually written by a MEMS student. Putting aside just for the moment the problem of the homogenising effect of the ‘internet viewing experience’, the medium of the internet is undoubtedly a wonderful way of opening out the library’s collection which, due to both financial and conservation issues, is simply not possible.

To my great joy and relief, the venture has been greeted positively by historians from all disciplines, archivists, scholars and an interested general public; I love the fact that the receiving audience is so broad in background. The subject matter of articles is also wide and reflective of the library’s wealth of books: deeds of derring-do in a medieval romance, the wickedness of witches from in a Nuremberg Chronicle, the reflections of St John on Patmos from a manuscript books of hours and an explanation on how to create pyrotechnic dragons to light the C17th night sky, to name just four. In August 2013 an exhibition and accompanying conference (‘A Year in Pictures’) was held at the cathedral to celebrate the first year anniversary of the project. Vitally, the exhibition provided the opportunity for people to experience for real the books they had seen digitally over the previous twelve months; this seemed a workable balance against compromising an object’s condition and the flat-screen experience of online images. Exhibitions are now a ‘Picture this…’ policy.

IMG_20140318_123838Another strong motive behind ‘Picture this…’ was to provide MEMS students with firsthand experience of working with the cathedral library’s resources: to materially witness sources that may fall outside of their usual research. This opportunity has since been extended to some MEMS Friends (membership open to all with an interest in medieval and early modern matters), who received training on manuscript and book handling in a workshop this March. There have been two ‘Picture this…’ writing workshops at the cathedral library where MEMS students have browsed through a selection of the library’s usually hidden treasures and chosen a work to write about. As editor and workshop leader, I have found it endlessly fascinating to witness just exactly what draws people to particular images and books and also how varied people’s interests are…to date, we have never had students fighting over the same book!

A final reason for initiating ‘Picture this…’ was a matter of reciprocal benefit. It is infamously difficult for postgraduates and early career researchers to make their debut in the publishing world and online articles on a credible website seemed a perfect way of allowing voices to be heard whilst making the most of contributors’ expertise.

The good news is that from August 2014 (the venture’s second birthday)’Picture this…’ will be a collaborative venture between MEMS, the Cathedral Library and the Cathedral Archives. We were already fortunate in the resources generously made available to us from the library and access to the archives means that we will be truly spoilt for choice. My thanks, as ever, go in particular to Cathedral Librarian, Karen Brayshaw, for her support and time and without whom this collaboration would not have been possible. Grateful thanks also to Canon Librarian Christopher Irvine and all the contributors who make ‘Picture this…’ a rich and varied reading and viewing experience.

Jayne Wackett

Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

University of Kent

Sound as Artefact

event previewsAlixe BoveyGallery Leave a comment

The OU’s Dr Helen Coffey guest blogs about a workshop taking place this Friday at the British Library

As an intangible art form, music poses a number of challenges for the researcher, especially when studying repertoire and practices which pre-date the advent of electronic recording. While we are incredibly lucky that such diverse and numerous sources (both musical and non-musical) have been passed down to us, these can also pose questions about the extent to which we can learn about past musical outputs from tangible media.

Opening from a Netherlandish manuscript containing 28 motets, 1513-c. 1525 (British Library, Royal 8 G VII, ff. 23v-24)

Opening from a Netherlandish manuscript containing 28 motets, 1513-c. 1525 (British Library, Royal 8 G VII, ff. 23v-24)

Our workshop ‘Sound as Artefact’, to be held at the British Library on 25th April, will consider some of the sources – and questions – musicologists deal with in their study of musical repertoire, practices and performances. After an introduction to the music collections of the British Library, we will take a closer look at several of the numerous valuable items in the Library, including both manuscripts and prints, composer’s autograph scores and later editions, as well as other non-musical items which reveal further information about musical events. By looking at this variety of documents we will consider what their appearance and content can tell us about the circumstances within which they were created, and about musical developments at the time of their creation.

During the workshop we will address a number of questions central to musicological research: to what extent can notation represent musical sounds? What can scores reveal about their function and meaning to their users? How can other non-notated musical sources contribute to our knowledge of musical repertoire and its broader context? Through this exploration of items in the collections of the British Library, we will see how answers to these questions differ considerably from source to source, how musicological research can enhance our knowledge of social and cultural developments in general, and how musicological methodologies and sources can contribute to research in other disciplines.

Helen Coffey

Open University

 

Material Witness continues: Studying the Literary Archive and Stone Sculpture in-situ

event previewsAlixe Bovey Leave a comment

Originally posted on Medieval Art Research:

C15 King at Westminster Hall ready for inspection

C15 King at Westminster Hall ready for inspection

As well as the blog, the study days for Material Witness, a CHASE consortium-led initiative to engage emerging researchers with the physical artefact continue.

On the 8th of April, Shane Weller will be leading an investigation into the literary archive at the University of Kent, using the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett as a case study.

On the 9th May Kim Woods will head the Studying Stone Sculpture in-situ workshop at the Mercer’s Hall and St Helen’s, London.

There may be a few places left on these workshops so please contact if you have any questions about the programme.

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Turning the ‘Material’ on Its Head

material reflectionsanthropology, archaeology, art history, curation, material culture, materiality, museologymsillence Leave a comment

The Material Turn on 1 March 2014 at UEA London was an extremely thought-provoking event that brought together the Material Witness cohort and research staff to consider the shifting sands of cultural studies over the last two decades, in particular the assemblage of disciplinary approaches and discourse labelled the ‘Material Turn’.

Alixe Bovey‘s introductory paper provided a view on the constellation of ‘turns’ that have had a bearing on disciplines such as art history through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A timely reminder of how the many pursuits of art historians testify to the various ‘moments’ of a single discipline.

This event, however, was not simply concerned with how art historians have been addressing materiality. The programme represented several disciplinary perspectives, from literature through to museology and archaeology. My own paper focused on agency, which I take to be a fundamental part of the rethinking of material culture; a shift away from ‘rational’ distinctions between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘person’ and ‘thing’. Alfred Gell’s influential Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998) encapsulates a uncomfortable proposition that such dichotomies are illusory, and that humans make, think about, and respond to material culture as if it were capable of acting. Gell’s point here is not that objects can ‘do’ anything in particular, merely that there is a perception (or ‘abduction’) of agency by humans.

Seal matrices and their impressions in the Middle Ages provide an interesting body of material with which to test out Gell’s ideas. For Gell, the agency of objects emanates from something or someone else. Seal impressions, and the discourse and metaphors surrounding sealing practices and identity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as Brigitte Bedos-Rezak has recently shown, provide a useful way into rethinking material culture ‘in action’. Gell’s expressions of agent-patient relations, I argue, provide a way of articulating the various interactions with objects, not simply what they ‘mean’. A very productive question from the audience raised the matter of function – and this in itself is circumvented in Gell’s discussion of agency. Would it be more useful to bracket out the functionality of an object and see if this is where agency lies? The remainder being ‘meaning’? Or is it difficult to sustain such distinctions? In my view, agency does a better job of dealing with form, function and meaning in material culture because all three involve the interactions of agents and patients (people making, doing and recognising) in various permutations.

Catherine Richardson‘s perspectives on early modern inventories demonstrated a very dynamic connection between words and things, and the search for patterns of significance in domestic space. How an object is described in an inventory and where it was located reveal a wealth of information about how early modern middling classes may have viewed their material worlds and, ultimately, their material selves. Embodiment is certainly a key strand of the Material Turn, having found a home in anthropology and archaeology. The embodiment of authors and readers also emerges from literary studies: the textual as prompt to visual in the mind’s eye.

Fiona Savage‘s case study addressed the biographies of objects from the perspective of museum professionals. Her recounting of the quest to track down the conditions in which objects enter a museum’s collections, the terms on which those items are held, how they are then treated and understood by later generations of curators, researchers, visitors and source communities was fascinating, not only because of the meticulous nature of such an enquiry, but also for our almost total reliance on the paper-based archive. Elsewhere I have explored the problem of the ‘dead interface’ with regards to archive creation – and in the context of museology, the digital cocoon of documentation (in the form of email correspondence, databases and web content) seems ever more fragile when compared to its paper-based predecessors.

Dan Hicks was our keynote speaker of the day. In his paper ‘Three Types of Material Witnessing’, he illustrated our engagement with the ‘material’ with three models – ‘objectivity’, ‘subjectivity’ and ‘something else’. These roughly conform to a chronology of scholarship ranging from the Enlightenment, antiquarianism, through modern archaeology to interdisciplinarity and reflexivity. In short, understandings of material culture can be singular (that there is one ‘true’ sequence of events, or meaning to those events) or multiple (that there are many interpretations of material culture, with often different but plausible sequences of events and meanings). The problem is, is it enough for scholars to pinball between these two views on material culture? Hicks demonstrated, using several key moments in archaeology, that objects were multiplied and distributed through writing, drawings, photography and models. At each moment of their reproduction new contexts and discourses emerge so that our view that a single object (e.g. a knapped flint) is unchanged as time moves on could be altered by appreciating that each reproduction of that same flint generates a new and different ‘object’. Frequently, scholars do not base their projects and endeavours on these ‘unchanging’, ‘unique’ artefacts – they instead base them on other objects that are related only by virtue of resemblance. To pick up again on society’s digital migration, is our drift away from the material object allowing for the creation of new ‘worlds’ of objects?

Matthew Sillence

University of East Anglia