Medieval scholars are accustomed to marking with conferences and publications such moments as the 900th anniversary of the birth of Hildegard of Bingen, or the 1300th anniversary of the mission and martyrdom of St. Kilian. There is, however, really nothing more compelling about the 900th anniversary of Hildegard's birth than the 882nd, except, of course, the roundness of the time span, a predilection for round numbers shared by many cultures. Yet the recent turn of the millennium in 2000 or 2001 (depending on whether one followed popular conceptions or the purist party line) was an anniversary whose significance lay only partly in the simplicity of the number itself. Unlike other anniversaries, which for the most part mark events on a local scale, the millennium induced worldwide anticipation and discussion, to which medievalists who study the first millennial change C.E. had much to offer. The White Mantle of Churches is only one of many publications to arise from the run-up to the new millennium, but it is surely one of the best, for its essays provide a sober and stimulating analysis of architectural activity around the year 1000 (despite the broader subtitle, eleven of the fourteen essays focus squarely on architecture). The value of these contributions lies not only in the timeliness of the insights they provide about a topic of very recent interest, but also in the way they offer a multifaceted view of a phenomenon still widely misunderstood despite renewed interest in all things millennial.
As the title of the volume indicates, the point of departure for the original Leeds 2000 sessions and this subsequent publication is the famous statement by the Cluniac monk Rodulfus Glaber, who, writing his chronicle in the years after 1000, wrote that "Just before the third year after the millennium it seemed as though each Christian community were aiming to surpass all others in splendour of construction. It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches."[[1]] The goal of the book is to integrate architecture into the millennial debate and to do so in a more nuanced way than historians, who generally have neglected the architectural evidence altogether, or art historians, whose concerns primarily have been in charting the development of Romanesque architecture (as we have come to call it) divorced from a cultural and, specifically, millennial context. The question that looms over the volume, as Nigel Hiscock states clearly in his introduction, is the degree to which any causal connection can made between rising and passing apocalyptic fears and the apparent increase in construction after the millennium, as Glaber would seem to suggest. Although not all of the fourteen essays address this question directly, the overriding conclusion is that the architectural record indicates a decided continuity in building motivations and practices before and after the year 1000.
Because the book's essays are grouped according to region, beginning with Germany, then England, France, Italy, and Spain, the most direct evidence of Glaber's own connection to architecture, the church of St. Bénigne in Dijon, only appears in essay nine, by Carolyn Malone (to which I will return). Nonetheless, this is a reasonable way to organize the material, because Germany was the major political force in Europe around 1000. It was also home to a vibrant monastic reform movement--not that of Cluny, but of Gorze--which spread throughout Lorraine, Flanders, and Germany in the tenth and early eleventh century before slowly being surpassed by the Cluniac reform. In his opening essay, "The Ottonian Revival: Church Expansion and Monastic Reform," Hiscock provides a good overview of Ottonian history and outlines how expanding political boundaries created new sees and consequently the need for new buildings. This, coupled with initiatives in monastic reform, was the motor for episcopal and monastic architecture, rather than anxieties associated with the year 1000.
Richard Plant continues the discussion of Ottonian Germany in "Architectural Developments in the Empire North of the Alps: the Patronage of the Imperial Court." This is a remarkably rich essay that is especially welcome as a vehicle for bringing English readers up to date on the most current research in medieval German architecture and archaeology. Plant provides detailed descriptions of many buildings and offers sensible insights into such contentious issues as the origin and function of the galleries in the women's foundation of Gernrode (not influenced by the Empress Theophanu; likely used as a choir). Like many authors in this book, Plant resists the temptation to view Ottonian architecture as an evolutionary step toward "Romanesque," but rather examines the material in its own terms. The well-known church of St. Michael's at Hildesheim, consequently, is best understood not in relation to later buildings, but in light of the imperial abbey of Memleben, founded in 979, which was likely the first church in Saxony to employ the double apse later used in Hildesheim. What emerges above all from this survey is a thorough analysis of the architectural features of numerous buildings and an overdue shift of emphasis from imperial to episcopal patronage, which does nothing to minimize the importance of the so-called Ottonian imperial church system in which state and church worked in tandem to mutual benefit.
It is Eliza Garrison's essay, "Henry II's Renovatio in the Pericope Book and Regensburg Sacramentary," that allows for the "Art" in this volume's subtitle, but despite its intrinsic interest, the essay fits uncomfortably into the volume as a whole. Garrison discusses the portraits of Emperor Henry II in two deluxe manuscripts that were made in Reichenau and Regensburg before being transferred to Bamberg, Henry's newly elevated see. Imperial portraits have long been a central concern in Ottonian scholarship, and Garrison deftly connects the book illuminations with Henry's broader theo-political ambition to renew the East Frankish realms through the establishment and rich endowment of Bamberg. I think Garrison is quite right when she embeds the books, their portraits, and other material enrichments of Bamberg's treasury within Henry's goal to cultivate and shape a personal and familial legacy in Bavaria, but I doubt that the emperor himself would have been involved in the decision to expand one book's single page compositions to double pages in its copy, or that such a formal compositional decision could carry as much political weight as Garrison puts on it. She and I have argued some of these points before, but what is without question, as Garrison puts it so well, is that the Bamberg "treasury was a material self portrait, wherein the king's rule was not only represented by Herrscherbilder · but also by the individual histories [and] provenances" of the objects themselves.
The final essay that deals with central Europe is Warren Sanderson's "Monastic Architecture and the Gorze Reforms Reconsidered," which picks up a theme highlighted by Hiscock and marks another contribution in Sanderson's long preoccupation with the relationship between monastic reform and architectural forms in Lorraine. This essay is essentially an update of the author's important 1971 article on "the formal characteristics and the liturgical and symbolic reflections of the Gorze-Trier and later Lorraine usages in the outer crypts of seventeen reformed monasteries." Sanderson offers here an updated account of the Gorze reform, which takes into account recent work by John Nightingale, and considers in particular key features of buildings associated with Archbishop Brun of Cologne (St. Pantaleon) and Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim (St. Michael's). Although Sanderson observes architectural features in St. Michael's that can be linked to the major reform center of St. Maximin at Trier, Bernward emerges as a remarkable designer who reworked such major elements as the westwork and hall crypt to create an exceptional building. Despite such individual observations, the full history of the architectural record of the Gorze reform remains to be written, as Sanderson himself concludes.
The following two essays, by Helen Gittos ("Architecture and Liturgy in England c. 1000: Problems and Possibilities") and Nils Holger Petersen ("The Representational Liturgy of the Regularis Concordia") complement each other in assessing the evidence for Anglo-Saxon England by going beyond the usual reliance on the Regularis Concordia, the monastic reform agreement propagated in the 970s by King Edgar and Bishops Aethelwold, Dunstan, and Oswald. While both authors demonstrate the central role of that document, they remind us that the Regularis reflects intention and prescription more than the description of actual practice. Unfortunately, very little remains of Anglo-Saxon architecture around the year 1000, though Gittos and Petersen successfully manage to communicate with the scant archeological and literary remains a sense of the vibrant liturgical practices that made different kinds of sacred space part of meaningful religious experience for the Anglo-Saxons. Malcolm Thurlby, in "Anglo-Saxon Architecture beyond the Millennium: its Continuity in Norman Building," effectively demonstrates the eclectic nature of English architecture after the Conquest, which not only reveals formal and technical aspects of pre-Conquest buildings, but also the continued strength of indigenous practices, especially in the smaller churches that typically receive little attention in the scholarship.
Kristina Krüger's "Architecture and Liturgical Practice: the Cluniac galilaea," opens the section on France with an outstanding essay devoted to an explication of the western narthex in Burgundian churches. This space, which Krüger more precisely calls the avant-nef, has usually been implicated in discussions of the so-called westwork, though Krüger decisively demonstrates the formal, functional, and iconographic differences in this structure from Carolingian precedents. A feature specifically of monastic churches, and first called a "Galilee" in a Cluniac customary of 1027ö48, these spaces are characterized especially by an upper story whose altar(s) provided opportunities for additional masses for the Cluniac dead. In addition, the name "Galilee" evoked several overlapping ideas about sacred topography and the journey toward piety and eternal life. Krüger's essay is exemplary in blending precise architectural analysis with broader interpretations grounded in contemporary sources in order to document the form, function, and meaning of medieval buildings.
The subsequent contribution, by Carolyn Malone, is equally a tour-de-force. In "St. Bénigne in Dijon as Exemplum of Rodulf Glaber's Metaphoric 'White Mantle'," Malone builds on her earlier work on this critical church, which was rebuilt by Abbot William of Volpiano beginning around 1001. The church is exceptional in many ways, and in this volume Malone truly does it justice. Not only was William one of the most important ecclesiastics of his day, but it was also at his instigation that Rodulfus began his Chronicle, which specifically mentions the "wondrous" and "incomparable" church of St. Bénigne. This is another of those occasions when medieval eyewitnesses are far too elliptical to satisfy the modern historian, but Malone marvelously articulates what it was about the church that Rodulfus would have found so wonderful. Foremost was the three-story rotunda added to the chevet in 1018 while Glaber lived as a monk in St. Bénigne. It is not possible in this review to do justice to the building or Malone's treatment of it; suffice it to say that this space, modeled after the Pantheon (the Church of St. Mary and All Martyrs) in Rome, was a reference to papal authority but also a site for theosis, a progression toward light and unification with God anticipating the better-known example of St. Denis by over one hundred years. Whether or not St. Bénigne was the church Glaber had in mind when he wrote of the "white mantle of churches," it is clear that he had a justifiable awe of the building and that for him, as for Abbot William, church construction was intrinsically bound up with the process of monastic reform and the reconstruction of the world.
William of Volpiano was also responsible for the reform and reconstruction of St. Germain-des-Prés, the only extant eleventh-century church in Paris. Scaffolding erected in 1989 allowed Danielle Johnson to examine closely the nave capitals that are at the heart of her "The Architecture and Sculpture of the Eleventh-Century Church of St. Germain-des-Prés: their Place in the Millennial Period." Stylistic comments predominate, and Johnson's iconographic suggestions are tentative, but, as she concedes, the essay is only meant to serve as an overview of the church's main architectural and sculptural features. More satisfying is the last in the quartet of essays devoted to France, "Architecture and Sculpture at Autun around the Millennium," by Sylvie Bacon, Walter Berry, and Christian Sapin. All of them have worked extensively at Autun as is made clear in their detailed analyses of what little remains from the early eleventh century. The authors neatly describe the development of the urban fabric of Autun from the Roman period through to the eleventh century, and they are refreshingly honest about what the archaeological record can and cannot reveal. Combining this evidence with the forty examples of early eleventh-century sculpture still extant, Bacon, Berry, and Sapin draw a convincing picture of building activity in Autun related to the monastic reform movements of the late tenth century, which at this point in the volume is hardly exceptional. The key lessons seem to be, first, that the appearance of antique building practices in the Carolingian period represents a continuation of local practice rather than a conscious "renovatio," and second, that architects and sculptors of the tenth and eleventh centuries were bringing "au courant" practices to Autun long before the famous twelfth-century church.
The Western European scope of the volume is rounded out in the next two essays, by Charles McClendon ("Church Building in Northern Italy around the Year 1000: a Reappraisal") and Janice Mann ("A New Architecture for a New Order: the Building Projects of Sancho el Mayor (1004ö1035)"). McClendon traces the development of three major architectural features in northern Italy: bell towers, freestanding baptisteries, and large hall crypts. Although the combination of the first two would later lead to spectacular results in Pisa and Florence, their roots can be found around the year 1000. It is not surprising to learn that monastic and canonical reform and concomitant liturgical needs motivated many of these architectural changes. In addition, McClendon emphasizes that transalpine architectural features were apparently incorporated in such northern Italian churches as the cathedral at Ivrea or S. Salvatore at Monte Amiata to express links to the dominant Ottonian imperium.
Similarly, Janice Mann investigates changing architectural patterns in northern Spain in light of connections to neighboring France, which has typically been seen as the font for the introduction of Romanesque features into Spanish buildings. Yet Mann convincingly demonstrates that Cluny played very little role in Count Sancho of Navarre's efforts to further political expansion by underwriting extensive church building. The architectural record indicates that the churches constructed at the beginning of the eleventh century were a pastiche of old and new formal elements. To be sure, such new buildings as the church of San Millán de la Cogolla were meant to express piety, leadership, and thus a new order as Sancho pushed out the caliphate and unified the provinces of northern Spain under one Christian ruler, but they also incorporated references to Visigothic, pre-Islamic architecture in order to establish a link to the venerable past. In short, "these buildings were the product of the local needs of a burgeoning kingdom rather than the provincial by-product of an international aesthetic movement."
This last point emerges as the leitmotif of the book as a whole, which, because it is so tightly focused on one theme, avoids the problems common among many volumes of collected essays. The White Mantle of Churches looks thoroughly at architecture around the year 1000 and reminds us especially that all architecture is primarily local, and that the best way to understand it is to probe the motivations and needs of the individuals and communities who made and used buildings. Grand paradigms are rarely supported by the particularity and complexity of the evidence.
In this regard, the decision to include an essay by Richard Landes as the final contribution to the volume is a bold choice. In "The White Mantle of Churches: Millennial Dynamics and the Written and Architectural Record," Landes offers a historian's view of the relationship between architecture and the millennial politics and controversies around the year 1000. Landes is the most articulate and ardent advocate of the view that millennial fears--with attendant opposition on the part of the political and ecclesiastical authorities--were rife in the years before and after 1000. In his view, "Relics, Peace assemblies, popular enthusiasm for a demotic Christianity, and devotion to a clergy willing publicly to embrace its own, biblical values of peace and the spiritual dignity of all--these are the socio-religious foundations of the campaigns of church building that appear to have marked the turn of the millennium." Here is a grand theory, and Landes is generous to admit that others may opt for different readings. He recognizes, as he must, and as the essays in this volume demonstrate, that buildings around the year 1000 represented the decisions and ambitions of the few. But he also proposes that ecclesiastical and political authorities were responding to a popular desire for relic worship, pilgrimage, and a reach for ever greater space that was driven purely by technology, such that Romanesque architecture was the product of a meeting between "top-down" and "bottom-up" social forces.
Reading this ambitious synthesis alongside the other essays did not convince me that millennial fears and responses unleashed the forces that produced Glaber's "White Mantle of Churches" around the year 1000. Landes may well be right, though the historical record is unlikely ever to divulge the truth on this matter. What is certain is that monastic and ecclesiastical reform, which was a phenomenon that pre- and post-dated the millennium, was perhaps the most potent stimulus for church building at the beginning of the eleventh century. Furthermore, as the essays in this volume make clear, there is little that formally distinguishes architecture made just prior to and just after the year 1000. Hiscock sought to introduce architecture into the debate about millennial concerns, and in this I would have to conclude that, fortunately, he has failed, simply because the collection of essays he has gathered in this volume demonstrate very little link between the two. Churches around the millennium ranged from the brilliantly complex, like William of Volpiano's monastic church of St. Bénigne at Dijon or Bernward of Hildesheim's St. Michael's, to the more humble, like the church of St. Pierre-l'Estrier in Autun. What they shared was based not on any particular fear of the millennium or attempt to suppress the masses, but on the abiding desire of the Christian faithful at all levels to commune with God in the most fitting space possible.
NOTES
[[1]] The quote is from Glaber's book 3, chap. 4. The specific passage is conveniently printed in English and Latin before the essays of this volume, but in general, see Rodulfus Glaber, The Five Books of the Histories, ed. and trans. by John France (Oxford, 1989), esp. 114ö117.