Materiality and Anachronism in the Medieval Church

Ideology, Society and Medieval Religion seminar series

The past looks very much like the present to medieval audiences, filled with recognisable buildings, objects and the things of everyday life. This chronological mash-up has little to do with medieval ignorance of the past; instead, it expresses a flexible approach to authenticity and the very real material links between past and present within objects. Over a decade ago Christopher S. Wood and Alexander Nagel proposed a theory of the anachronic, where copies of historical objects retained an inner authenticity in the eyes of contemporary viewers.

This talk pushes that theory further back into the central Middle Ages by framing it within Latin theories of the world and its inner nature. Medieval church architecture provides an excellent framework to understand this relationship between the material reality of the building and its allegorical links to history. But this relationship is not easily defined and is frequently contradictory. In contemporary texts, the altar, for example, is Christ, but it is also Jerusalem, Goliath and any number of other people, objects, and places in the Christian bible. How can something be both something in front of a medieval churchgoer and also something from history, and how is that seeming contradiction resolved within a contemporary understanding of materiality? This talk will address those questions and allow people to see the church and its embedded significance in a new light.

This seminar will last approximately 60 minutes including a Q&A, and will begin at 6pm GMT on Monday 4th April. You can register for your free ticket here.

Any questions, please email Emmie (erpg500@york.ac.uk) or Tim (tim.wingard@york.ac.uk)