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Materiality and cultural formation

2020; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/emed.12407

1468-0254

Paul Fouracre,

The medieval world is often characterized as an entity bound together by shared theological certainties. With one eye fixed on salvation, medieval persons supposedly privileged the spiritual over the material and perceived their ecology and landscape but dimly, through ‘the idealized lens of doctrine and ritual’ according to Benjamin Graham, one of the authors in this themed issue of Early Medieval Europe. The five papers and one review article published here, take issue with the idea that the evolution of medieval culture was simply driven by a need to conform to norms within a spiritual landscape. It can be shown in various ways that it was material conditions that might shape a cultural response, rather than vice versa, for it was not possible to unify the material experience of religion across the varied climates and physiography of the European landmass. Thomas Pickles picks out the essential point in relation to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ farming in his review of Allen Frantzen’s work: ‘English and England did not make an English landscape, the landscape of farming in early medieval Britain had a crucial role in making the English.’ Pickles points out that scholars are still driven by the problem of English exceptionalism, and bothered by the question of whether there was a continuity or break in farming and settlement patterns in the post-Roman period. There is still no basic agreement as to what constituted a farm or a nucleated settlement in lowland Britain. The other papers in this issue of Early Medieval Europe start not from the global, as in the case of farming, but from the local and from the material immediately to hand. Benjamin Graham elucidates the ecology of olive oil, the preferred material for the provision of lighting in churches. Material conditions here determined that oil was best suited for keeping a light burning day and night in the church. It was the quality of oil and, initially, its availability, that allowed early Christians to take up the Mosaic injunction to keep a light burning before the altar at all times, and it was the ability to do just this that powered Carolingian notions of the priesthood. In my paper on ‘Lights and the Moral Economy’, I take this point further by setting out the way in which control over the materials needed to provide for these eternal lights gave those in power the added legitimacy that came from facilitating religious activity. Society was increasingly organized around that activity, but the organization had a material driver. A society based on taxation and bureaucratic direction may have been transformed into one that, by the Carolingian period, more resembled a theocracy, but there remained an urge to commodify the various elements of religion, including salvation itself. Widening participation in this moral economy would enable a new political order to evolve. In her turn, Julia Smith draws on the evidence of relic labels to tackle the issue of religious commodification. Demonstrating the materiality of early medieval devotion to the saints, she shows how these sometimes-tiny labels gave concrete form to the saints of different centuries. They provided the essential link between saint and substance, and both label and relics could be tweaked to bring them in line with the contemporary imagination of what a given saint should have been like. Again, material prompts were needed to show the direction of eternity. Jamie Kreiner, in contrast to Julia Smith’s micro study of the labels, sets a discussion about the importance of pigs in the early medieval economy against the wider formation of cultures, social status, justice and metaphysics. ‘Pigs’, Kreiner argues, ‘convert organisms and spaces into commodities.’ Pigs converted fodder into flesh and acted as an excellent model of resource management. The augmentation of material through fattening made pigs essential to the establishment of lordship. Giving and receiving pigs was instrumental in the determination of property rights and obligations between owners and tenants. There are links here to the moral economy described by myself: a degree of social consensus and social responsibility could be built around the pig’s ability to grow large, but also around its capacity to do harm. In the last paper in this issue, Lukas Werther and Jinty Nelson (with Franz Herzig, Johannes Schmidt, Stefanie Berg, Peter Ettel, Sven Linzen, and Christoph Zielhofer) show the convergence of evidence from written sources and from archaeological excavation which together shed light on Charlemagne’s attempt to dig a canal that would link the Rhine and Danube river systems, with the former draining into the North Sea and the latter into the Black Sea. The attempt took place in the year 793. The project failed, as the written sources explain, and the dendrochronology of the planks that were to line the canal shows that work stopped on the site at exactly the moment that the Carolingian Annals said it did. The episode of the fossatum magnum, or the ‘big ditch’, demonstrates how an idea, almost certainly taken from the Roman author Vitruvius, was put into practice. Carolingian rulers were big on ideas of salvation and empire, but they were acutely aware of the logistics of reform and progress. As with the plan for the perfect monastery at St Gall, they wished to see ideas expressed in material form. All the papers in this themed issue converge on this point: material form was essential to the definition of early medieval culture. It created the space in which ideas could develop, and ideas had to be seen to have a practical purpose before they could be put into material form.