Studies in Medievalism Founded by Leslie J. Workman Medievalism and Modernity Recently published volumes are listed at the back of this book Edited by Karl Fugelso with Joshua Davies and Sarah Salih Studies in Medievalism XXV 2016 Cambridge D. S. Brewer © Smdies in Medievalism 2016 • All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation Studies lll no pan of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner Medievalism Founding Editor Leslie J. Workman First published 2016 Editor Karl Fugelso D. S. Brewer, Cambridge Advisory Board Marrin Arnold (Hull) ISBN 978-1-84384-437-2 Geraldine Barnes (Sydney) Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Leiden) ISSN 0738-7164 William Calin (Florida) A. E. 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Box 9, Woodbridge, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK; Boydell & Brewer, Inc., 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA. Orders and inquiries about back issues should be addressed to Boydell & Brewer at che appropriate office. This publication is primed on acid-free paper For a copy of the sryle sheet and for inquiries about Studics fü Medievalism, please contact che editor, Karl Fugelso, at che Dept. of An+Design, Art History, and Are Education, Towson Typeset by www.thewordservice.com Universiry, 3103 Center for che Ares, 8000 York Rd, Towson, MD 21252-0001, USA, tel. 410-704-2805, fax 410-704-2810 ATTN: Fugelso, e-mail d<[email protected]>. Ali submissions should be sent to him as e-mail attachments in Word. In/visible Medieval/isms1 Sarah Salih The objects of the past stand before us, but the worlds from which they come are long gone. What should we do with these visual orphans?2 Late medieval London was, like contemporary London, the greatest city of the realm, a center of power, finance, trade, and culture. lt mythologized itself as Troynovant, "pe firste citie of Brettayne," built by Brutus.3 And yet the depredations of time - or, specifically, of fire, bombing, and redevel­ opment - ensure that medieval London is barely visible today. There are, of course, two world heritage sites, the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, bookending the city to east and west. But most of medieval London is hidden, or glimpsed in passing, or a trace of something lost, or virtual. The City's street plan is still substantially medieval: the stone or glass palaces of the financia! institutions cluster on streets named for medieval parishes and commodities. Medieval material survives underground, in crypts and cellars; lost buildings such as Baynard's Casde are commemorated with blue plaques. Or one might see, momentarily, a medieval illusion: from the comer of an eye misrecognize Renzo Piano's ultra-modero Shard (completed in 2013) as a scaled-up church spire. Seeing medieval London takes effort, imagination, luck, or knowledge. The city offers chance, routine, and quotidian encoun­ ters with the Middle Ages, of which its inhabitants and visitors might not even be conscious. Bruno Latour writes of the packaging of time into mate- 1 Thanks to Karl Fugelso, an anonymous reader for SiM, and Josh Davies for commencs on drafts of this essay. 2 Michael Ann Holly, 7he MelancholyArt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), xix. 3 Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis: Together with the English Translations of john Trevisa and ofan Unknown Writer ofthe Fifteenth Century, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby (London: Longman, 1865-86), 2.57. Studies in Medievalism XXV, 2016 54 Studies in Medievalism In/visible Medieval/isms 55 rial culture, "Time is always folded. [ ... ] Action has always been carried on tion, circumstances are ali transient. There is an infinite number of medieval thanks to shifting the burden of connection to longer- or shorter-lasting Londons, their frames of visibility continually shifting. am excluding for this purpose the charismatic heritage-sites such as the entities."4 The past acts on the present through material things: in London, 1 Tower, Westminster Abbey, and Southwark Cathedral, significant though the medieval past acts upon the present even in the absence of those mate­ they are. These are marked rial things, operating through the spaces where they were. If 1 walk from off as heterotopiae, which people visit in arder to encounter the past, while also being partially functioning continuities London Bridge to the Strand, for example, 1 follow much the same route as of 1 would have 600 years ago, though what 1 see is almost entirely different. thei~ m~dieval iterations. The Tower is no longer a royal residence or prison, The medieval city thus acts on me, through me, as it determines my steps, but 1t snll houses the Crown Jewels; Southwark Cathedral and Westminster Abbey are no longer monastic sites, but they remain churches and mauso­ whether 1 remember to think so, or not. Meanwhile, the city is ful! of structures that allude to the medieval, but leums. There is much that might be said about the kinds of medievalism these great sites generate in the process are not medieval, thanks to the adoption of neo-Gothic as the house style of framing their medieval mate­ rial. The medieval-ness of the British state in the nineteenth century: one of these, the dock tower of the Tower, for example, contributed to the 2014 of the Houses of Parliament, is perhaps the city's most famous icon. Hence installation, "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red," which poured a tide of looking at medieval London is always a complex and mediated business, ceramic poppies into the moat to commemorate the First World War, an more so than in other British cities with more substantial survivals of medi­ event significantly related to the Middle Ages as the imagined endpoint of 6 eval fabric. The city is inescapably the accumulated sum of ali its pasts. chivalry. The location reanimated the Tower's medieval history as the seat of Michael Camille's account of the medievalist gargoyles of Notre Dame in monarchical and state power by placing it as the source of violence, which París describes the multi-temporality of such palimpsestic sites: could thereby be relegated to the premodern and disavowed. However, I am interested here not so much in event destinations such as these, but in sites What these insistent monsters have taught me is the impossibility of where the Middle Ages are on the verge of visibility. viewing the art of the Middle Ages without looking past and through A post-medieval, post-Roman city such as London is a conglomeration the nineteenth century, without appreciating our own and the cathe­ of long-lasting material entities, ali trailing their own specific histories. Few dral's substantial modernity. This should not preclude our wanting to things are longer-lasting than the London Stone. The Stone currently occu­ understand the Middle Ages as a distinct historical period; we find, pies a niche, guarded by an elaborate ironwork grill, built into the wall of however, that it is hardly ever as distinct or as separare as we might a shop currently occupied by the newsagent and stationery chain W. H. want to think, but always flowing into other periods, haunting other Smiths, in Cannon Street, opposite a busy commuter station serving the City. In the latest available figures, the station has an annual footfall of over epochs, emerging when we least expect it.5 20 million, many of which will be regular commuter journeys, so encounters London, too, offers medieval things that are not purely medieval, and a with the Stone, whether or not people pay it anrattention or even know present day that incorporares medieval survivals, sometimes visibly, some­ what it is, mark for many the moment of transition between sites and selves, times not. This essay aims to sketch out those variations in visibility, the work and home.7 The Stone is a site of memory, remarkable for the disparity material and discursive frames that mark or conceal the intrusion of the between the utter mundanity of the material object and the grandeur of its Middle Ages into the present day. The visibility of medieval London is thor­ accumulated meanings. lts very ordinariness generares narratives to account oughly fragmented. No two individuals have the same medieval London for its otherwise perplexing prominence. Of course London is ful! of stones, (mine, for example, focuses more clearly on the late than the early Middle is indeed made of them: this one is marked out as an individual actant, not Ages, centers on the areas where 1 live and work and the transport networks just a stone but the Stone, by material and discursive frames of medievalism.