1st Edition
New Approaches to the Archive in the Middle Ages Collecting, Curating, Assembling
This volume brings together scholars of history, manuscript studies, and art and architectural history to examine in conversation the varieties of medieval archival acts, the heterogeneity of collections, and the motivations of collectors. It is united by the historically flexible concept of the archive, and contributors examine material from Seville to Prague, from the early Christian period through the Reformation.
Premodern collections and archival practices are increasingly becoming the subject of academic inquiry. Chapter authors investigate how institutional, communal, and familial identity accrued to material culture, including illuminated manuscripts, ecclesiastic vestments, ancient sarcophagi, and reliquaries. Others examine the social impulses behind the documentation of such collections, namely through the creation of inventories, but also in the production, management, and use of parchment records, including cartularies, estate records, and legal documents. Finally, contributors question how medieval people evaluated historical age and outmoded artistic styles; shaped and promoted collective memory through preservation, display, and ritual; and attached value, both monetary and symbolic, to their collections.
The volume is cross-disciplinary and will appeal to a variety of readers, both in and out of academia. Curators, librarians, and archivists working with medieval collections will find it valuable, as will heritage professionals and charities involved in the care of properties which presently or formerly contained medieval treasuries, libraries, and archives.
Introduction
Emily N. Savage
Part I
Historical Inquiry
Chapter 1
History in the Making: Categories, Techniques and Chronology in Church Collections, c. 800–1400
Erik Inglis
Chapter 2
Reflecting a Golden Age: The Material Composition of History in Mosan Treasuries c. 1500
Elizabeth Rice Mattison
Chapter 3
Collecting, Curating, and Remembering in the Cathedral of Seville: A Portable Written Archive from the Fifteenth Century
Diego Belmonte Fernández
Part II
Use, Management, and Intervention
Chapter 4
The “B-side” of the Parchment: Two Mediaeval Religious Archives from the Kingdom of Leon in Spain
Rafael Ceballos-Roa and María del Carmen Rodríguez-López
Chapter 5
The Locus Credibilis and the Making of Urban Authority: Preserving the Written Word in Metz (Fourteenth to Fifteenth Centuries)
Amélie Marineau-Pelletier
Chapter 6
Almost Sacred? How Bolognese Notaries Shaped the Meaning of Archives, 1289–1294
Sarina Kuersteiner
Chapter 7
Appropriating the Archive: Promoting Legitimacy and Shaping Historical Memory through the Library of John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford
Orly Amit
Part III
Building the Archive
Chapter 8
The Records of Medieval St Andrews in the University of St Andrews Library
Rachel Hart
Chapter 9
The Ties That Bind: Alliance, Remembrance, and Resilience Gathered in a Flemish Widow’s Psalter
Kathleen Wilson Ruffo
Chapter 10
The Afterlives of Funeral Palls: Notes from the Sacristy of St. Thomas, Prague, c. 1410
Juliette Calvarin
Chapter 11
A Late Medieval Inventory from St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich (BL Stowe MS 871): Register, Record, Teaching Resource
Zachary Stewart
Biography
Emily N. Savage is an Associate Lecturer in the School of Art History, University of St Andrews. She received her PhD from the same institution in 2017 and also holds degrees from the University of York and New York University. Her research and teaching encompasses, broadly, the material culture of late medieval devotion, and she has previously published on the object lives of devotional manuscripts. She is currently leading the development of a new postgraduate program at the intersection of digital humanities and art history for St Andrews.
