Making key pattern in Insular art: AD 600-1100

Key pattern is a type of abstract ornament characterised by spiral shapes which are angular rather than curved. It has been used to decorate objects and architecture around the world from prehistory onward, but flourished in a unique form in Insular art (the art of early medieval Britain and Ireland, c. AD 600-1100). Ornament of many kinds was the dominant mode in Insular art, however, key pattern has remained the least studied and most misunderstood. From the 19th century, specialists mainly have relied on simplified, line-drawn reproductions rather than original artworks. These ‘correct’ hand-made details, isolate patterns from their contexts, and in the case of Insular key pattern, de-emphasise its important physical structures. This resulted in misunderstandings of key pattern’s structure and an inability to recognise evidence for medieval artists’ working processes. Postwar art historians and archaeologists then largely abandoned study of ornament structure altogether, in critical reaction to this earlier method. For two centuries, academics have overlooked the artists’ role in pattern-making, and how their creative agency is reflected in patterns’ internal structures. In response, this thesis presents a new, artist-centred method for the study of Insular key pattern, which adapts Michael Brennan’s pioneering approach to Insular interlace (a different pattern), to suit key pattern’s distinct structure. Close examination of objects and monuments, rather than idealised ‘types’, has revealed how Insular artists themselves understood key pattern and handled it in the moment of creation. The core of the thesis is an analysis of key pattern’s structural properties, i.e. its physical parts and the abstract, often mathematical concepts that Insular makers used to arrange and manipulate these parts, in order to fix mistakes, fulfill specific design goals, or invent anew. Case studies of individual artworks support this analysis and demonstrate how key pattern is a vehicle for accessing Insular artists’ thought processes, as they improvised with the pattern’s basic structures for maximum creative effect. For the first time, this thesis also places Insular key pattern in its global context, via comparative analyses of key patterns from other world art traditions. This investigation has confirmed key pattern’s origin in prehistoric basketry and weaving technologies and explains why Insular key pattern’s geometric complexity remains unparalleled. The adaptation and expansion of this new analytical method for key pattern also proves its applicability to any type of ornament from any culture, making it immediately useful to art historians and archaeologists. This thesis therefore represents a larger paradigm shift that brings ornament study into the 21st century

‘Public temper tantrums…frequent weeping and boisterous joy’: tears in text and ritual in Frankish kingship

In recent decades, historians have reassessed scholarly assumptions about the primitiveness of medieval emotional life. For example, Barbara Rosenwein’s exploration of emotion words, Geoffrey Koziol and Gerd Althoff’s analyses of ritual gesture in political interaction, and Philippe Buc’s study of the partisanship in medieval accounts of such rituals have revealed the complexity of medieval modes of expression. However, while theological analyses of Christian tears abound, no historian has yet undertaken an extended investigation of weeping in early medieval kingship, and its role in textual debate and political performance. This dissertation is a study of royal weeping in the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties, and also explores how Gallic and Frankish bishops used rhetoric on tears to formulate ideals for Christian kingship and put ideological pressure on their rulers. Chapters are divided into three chronological areas of inquiry. The first section examines two distinct streams of ecclesiastical thought emerging from late Roman changes in elite masculine comportment, one which criticized weeping as inappropriate, while the other praised tears as a sign of fitness for rule. The second chapter addresses Gregory of Tours’ contribution to the conceptual development of royal weeping, as the first Gallic bishop to unambiguously endorse tears as a kingly virtue. This dissertation then concludes with Emperor Louis the Pious’ penitential dethronement of 833, in which his weeping became a cause of political debate. Finally, on a methodological level, the following study demonstrates how analysis of royal tears can further illuminate the political biases of contemporary texts and the function of gestures in political ritual, while contributing to modern appreciation of the sophistication of medieval emotional expression

Furnishing an early medieval monastery:New evidence from Iona

This paper describes and discusses the significance of a number of metalwork and glass finds from the important early medieval monastery on the island of Iona, Argyll and Bute, Scotland. The finds mainly come from previously unpublished excavations, especially those by Charles Thomas from 1956–63. They include unique items such as an 8th-century lion figurine, and a 12th-century human head, both in copper alloy. These finds attest, for the first time, to the production of complex ecclesiastical metalwork such as reliquaries at Iona, and are some of the few such items to be recovered from excavated contexts. Fragments of early medieval window glass demonstrate that the buildings of the early monastery were more sophisticated than previously believed, and moulds and a reticella rod indicate decorative glass-working. A number of copper-alloy pins, strap-fittings and other decorative pieces of 9th- and 10th-century date show significant Norse-period occupation, and probably continuing metalworking traditions throughout the early medieval period. Taken together, these new finds begin to reveal that Iona was furnished with richly decorated shrines and reliquaries similar in sophistication to the illustrated manuscripts and sculptured monuments known to have been produced in the monastery