Integrated Pasts: Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle JENNIFER BORLAND Oklahoma State University F MARTHA EASTON The Material Collective Abstract grouped in their new environments, the objects in these eclectic collections span centuries but work together to create richly evoc- In this article we investigate two medievalist enterprises built ative meanings that free them from the constraints of prove- in the 1920s and 1930s: Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, nance. Glencairn and Hammond Castle provide experiences of Pennsylvania, and Hammond Castle in Gloucester, Massa- the medieval world, ultimately reminding us that all interpreta- chusetts. Both buildings were created as homes for wealthy in- tions of a period, whether scholarly or popular, are, in the end, dustrialists—Raymond Pitcairn and John Hays Hammond Jr., reconstructions. respectively—and both are structures built in a medieval style that also incorporate actual medieval objects, including archi- tectural fragments, stained glass, and sculpture. Although they lencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania do it somewhat differently, the two buildings resituate the art (Fig. 1), and Hammond Castle in Gloucester, Mas- of the past in the present, reinterpreting the past but also re- sachusetts (Fig. 2), are two early twentieth-century inventing the medieval objects through recontextualization. We American homes that were built in a medieval re- examine these revivalist buildings as products of the trend of me- gvival style. “Medievalism”—“the ongoing process of recreat- dievalism prevalent among collectors in the late nineteenth and ing, reinventing, and reenacting medieval culture in post- early twentieth centuries, who conflated original and reproduc- medieval times”1—has garnered increasing attention in the tion elements to create a pastiche of medieval and modern. In- broader field of medieval studies over the past thirty years.2 stead of searching for origins and privileging the “authentic,” One reason for this may be the scholarly acknowledgment however, we interrogate the very meaning of authenticity. The spoliated fragments of architectural salvage, sculpture, and glass that all investigations of the medieval, both traditional his- function as relics of the Middle Ages, but they also transcend their torical studies and instances of what we would call medieval- identity as historical markers of the past. Resituated and re- ism, are inevitably informed by the contexts in which we live We express our sincere gratitude to the staff members at both Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle for sharing their rich archives and collections. We thank archivist Gregory Jackson and curator Ed Gyllenhaal at Glencairn Museum for their generous help. At Hammond Castle, we would like to thank John Pettibone, Jay Craveiro, and Linda Rose for their assistance and support. Martha Easton also wishes to express her appreciation to the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Art Reference Library and The Frick Collection, for the support and assistance of the Center and Library staff when she was a Senior Research Fellow there in the fall of 2015. We are also grateful to Linda Safran and Adam S. Cohen for their productive comments and careful editing, as well as for the feedback of Gesta’s anonymous readers. 1. Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz, “Making Medievalism: A Critical Review,” in Medievalism: Key Critical Terms, ed. Emery and Utz (Cambridge: Brewer, 2014), 1–10, at 2. The authors attribute this notion of medievalism to Leslie J. Workman (see note 2 below). 2. Key works in the field include the journal Studies in Medievalism, begun by Leslie J. Workman in 1979; the conference series The Year’s Work in Medievalism, begun by Workman and Kathleen Verduin in 1986 (https://sites.google.com/site/theyearsworkinmedievalism/home); Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow, 1991); Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Carolyn Dinshaw, Get- ting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); eadem, “Temporalities,” in Twenty-First Century Approaches: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 108–23; the journal Post- medieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, begun in 2010; Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2012); and William J. Diebold, “Medievalism,” in “Medieval Art History Today—Critical Terms,” ed. Nina Rowe, special issue, Studies in Iconography 33 (2012): 247–56. Gesta v57n1 (Spring 2018). 0031-8248/2018/7703-0004 $10.00. Copyright 2018 by the International Center of Medieval Art. All rights reserved. v57n1, Spring 2018 Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle D 95 Figure 1. Glencairn Museum, former home of Mildred and Ray- Figure 2. Aerial view, Hammond Castle, 1926–29, Gloucester, mond Pitcairn, 1928–39, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania (photo: Massachusetts (photo: Philip Greenspun, 2006; http://philip Jennifer Borland). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color .greenspun.com/copyright/). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a version of this image. color version of this image. and are equally distant from the “real” Middle Ages.3 A vast discussed in terms of nostalgia.8 That nostalgia may be charac- range of cultural products created over several centuries are terized as noble and earnest, or naïve and hopeless, but either described as participating in medievalism, leading to the de- way, such critiques are imbued with implications of desire and velopment of descriptions for subfields or categories of the loss.9 This interpretation of medievalism, in which America phenomenon. The two homes on which we focus here are es- yearns for a past it does not have, for the Middle Ages that sentially examples of what some scholars have termed “tradi- once were, often makes sense.10 It is difficult to disagree with tional medievalism,” characterized in part by its desire for the argument that American industrialists who became inter- re-creation of the medieval.4 This type of medievalism has ested in the medieval, expressed through public commissions been contrasted with postmodern medievalism or “neomedie- or private collecting, were enacting an aspect of the country’s valism,” which “comments directly on the process of that re- creation, playing with the entire idea of accessing the past,”5 terns of Collecting, 1800–1940 (University Park: Palmer Museum of and is often characterized by a “gleeful embrace of the absurd” Art, Pennsylvania State University, 1996); Virginia Brilliant, Gothic 6 and “denial of reality.” The kinds of medievalism prevalent Art in the Gilded Age: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America in- Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection (Sarasota, FL: John and Mable clude the popularity of Arthuriana; anti-industrialization and Ringling Museum of Art, 2009); and the essays in “Gothic Art in the craftsmanship ethics of the Arts and Crafts movement; America,” ed. Virginia Brilliant, special issue, Journal of the History building of medieval-style cathedrals such as St. John the Di- of Collections 27, no. 3 (2015). 8. Michael Camille, “‘How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque vine in New York and the Washington National Cathedral; Art’: Medieval, Modern and Postmodern in Meyer Schapiro,” Oxford 7 and the collecting and display of medieval art. They are often Art Journal 17, no. 1 (1994): 65–75, at 71; Janet T. Marquardt and Al- yce A. Jordan, eds., Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages 3. This is brought up in several essays in Emery and Utz, Medi- (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009); “The Medievalism evalism: Key Critical Terms, including Emery and Utz, “Making Me- of Nostalgia,” ed. Helen Dell, Louise D’Arcens, and Andrew Lynch, dievalism”; Pam Clements, “Authenticity,” 19–26; Louise D’Arcens, special issue, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2, “Presentism,” 181–88; Kevin Moberly and Brent Moberly, “Play,” no. 2 (2011); and Maggie M. Williams, Icons of Irishness from the Mid- 173–80; and Lauryn S. Mayer, “Simulacrum,” 223–30. dle Ages to the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 4. Clements, “Authenticity”; Mayer, “Simulacrum”; and Moberly 9. Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and Moberly, “Play.” The latter (“Play,” 174) use the phrase “tradi- and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago tional medievalisms.” Press, 2009), 335: “America, lacking a ‘real’ Middle Ages, re-created 5. Mayer, “Simulacrum,” 224. its own bigger, better, and whiter cathedrals in the vast simulacral 6. Carol L. Robinson, “Some Basic Definitions to Consider,” in sets of Hollywood or their analogues, like the Cathedral of St. John “A Little History,” http://medievalelectronicmultimedia.org/?page the Divine in New York.” _id=39, quoted in Mayer, “Simulacrum,” 229. 10. For more on medievalism and the imperialism of American ap- 7. For more on the collecting of medieval art in the United States, propriation, see Dale Kinney, “Introduction,” 1–11, and Annabel J. see esp. Elizabeth Bradford Smith, ed., Medieval Art in America: Pat- Wharton, “The Tribune Tower: Spolia as Despoliation,” 179–97, both 96 E Gesta