Representing History, 900–1300: Art, Music, History (review)

This ambitious collection emerged from a two-day conference held at the University of Philadelphia in 2006. The conference brought together an impressive group of scholars from North America and Britain, including Patrick Geary, Susan Reynolds, and Lawrence Nees, and a wide range of materials were examined. As the editor Robert Maxwell points out, chronicles were not the only medieval source that reflected on the past: ‘Cultural production in its many forms, including rites, sounds, and objects, responded to history – and the past’s distance from the present – in myriad ways’.

One insight to be gained from this collection, and one that Gabrielle Spiegel points out in her provocative Introduction, is that medieval thinking about the past is not contained solely in medieval histories. While this might seem obvious, medieval people no more restricted their ideas to neat genre categories than we do. Historical, religious, political, and aesthetic concerns overlap in the works discussed, demonstrating, for example, how the past can be used to consolidate the present, indeed sometimes being rewritten to reflect some later agenda. Such manipulations occur in a variety of venues, including chartularies, hagiographies, and genealogies. Lindy Grant, for example, looks at the choir and transept clerestory windows at Chartres cathedral associated with Blanche of Castile. The windows contain donor portraits and heraldic devices together with scriptural history and genealogy. Grant argues that the visual linking of the kings of France with the kings of Judah probably had a political agenda that may have been very clear at the time of the windows’ commissioning, but is harder for us to decode today.

The book consists of fifteen essays, including the Introduction. For the latter, Maxwell has taken the unusual step of inviting Spiegel to write this rather than doing it himself. Maxwell, who has written on illustrated chartularies, amongst other things, is not represented, which I find disappointing. Spiegel, who presented the closing remarks at the original conference, acts independently of the editor and interrogates the articles as much as she provides a summary, challenging the writers’ arguments, albeit gently. Her essay also discusses how historiography has moved away from measuring the trustworthiness of medieval histories as sources to embracing a wider range of questions, reflecting the impact of the ‘linguistic turn’. She identifies the variety of materials drawn upon in this collection as inheriting this expanded discourse, embracing the changing approaches to studying medieval understandings of the past.

While there are several articles on charters and chronicles, probably the most striking feature of this book is the space given to music and liturgy, often overlooked in such general collections. Essays by Margot Fassler and Susan Boynton focus on liturgy, while Ardis Butterfield in ‘Music, Memory and Authenticity: Representing Sound in History’ raises some important questions about music history. She points out that music historians generally write histories about music, but not of music. The very transient nature of sound as opposed to that of writing, defies its capture as historical artefact, particularly for those pieces that have no notation and where re-created performance is generally speculative. Cynthia Hahn also writes about performance as part of her larger discussion of the relic collection and treasury at Quedlinburg. Here, she examines the role played by ceremonies, together with the foundation’s collections and their setting, to evoke an imperial past and a contemporary relevance in the medieval period.

There are several excellent art historical pieces that demonstrate how art historians have been making such interdisciplinary connections for many years. Joan Holladay writes on English royal genealogical rolls, much discussed in the last ten years. She make a useful point about the role such charts play in inscribing time on to space, and reiterates how genealogies too are liable to manipulation.

For me, the most thought-provoking is Christine Verzar’s essay which examines history and myth in the texts and images about Matilda of Canossa, pointing out the...