Hunt, Elizabeth Moore

Leson, Richard A.

English

Kenyon College: Digital Kenyon - Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange

Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture Volume 4 Issue 4 i-iii 2014 Negotiating Identity in Northern France and the Lowlands in the High Middle Ages Elizabeth Moore Hunt Richard A. Leson Follow this and additional works at: https://digital.kenyon.edu/perejournal  Part of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture Commons Recommended Citation Hunt, Elizabeth Moore and Richard A. Leson. "Negotiating Identity in Northern France and the Lowlands in the High Middle Ages." Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 4, 4 (2014): i-iii. https://digital.kenyon.edu/perejournal/vol4/iss4/1 This Feature Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture by an authorized editor of Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact noltj@kenyon.edu. i   Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the Spring of 2013. That session stemmed from our mutual interest in material and visual expressions of identity in the Flemish Low Countries during the High Middle Ages. With the kind encouragement of Peregrinations general editor Sarah Blick we have expanded our scope to include relevant developments across the contiguous landscapes of northern France, western (or  “royal”) Flanders, and the County of Brabant. The manuscripts, monuments, luxury objects and common materials explored in these essays bear witness to the ever-shifting allegiances and political boundaries that defined this region in the High Middle Ages. In the shadow of the French King and the German Emperor, ecclesiastics and nobles consolidated identities through material and visual means. Thus, Jeff Rider’s examination of authorship in the twelfth-century autograph manuscript of the Genealogia  Flandrensium comitum (Saint-Omer, Bibliothèque d’Agglomération, MS 746, 64r-68v), a seminal source for the historiography of the Counts of Flanders in Saint-Omer composed at the Abbey of Saint-Bertin, sheds light on the monastic author’s efforts to navigate a  Negotiating   Identity in Northern France and  the Lowlands in the High Middle Ages     The inspiration for this volume was a session titled  “Lions of Flanders: Material Culture and Identity in the Flemish  Low Countries” that we organized for the 48 th   International  Hunt and LesonPublished by Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange, 2014ii  “readable” path through the complicated interdynastic history of the Flemish nobility. In the Psalter of Guy of Dampierre (Royal Library of Belgium MS 10607), Elizabeth Moore Hunt demonstrates how heraldic decorations—another means of qualifying allegiance and descent—constituted the political and dynastic network of the Count and, in tandem with the visual and material environment of the comital family, substantiated his identity. The Dampierre family shared this heraldic language with the French monarchy; accordingly, Anne Lester’s examination of the Parisian Longpont coffret—an object later repurposed in Picardy—demonstrates the rich valences of a heraldic constellation that moved across borders temporal and geographical. The diffusion of an architectural language is the subject of Bailey K. Young and Laurent Verslype’s report on recent excavations at the castle of Walhain-Saint-Paul in Walloon Brabant. While the lesser lords of Walhain held their lands in fief to the Duke of Brabant, their castle testifies to the transmission of phillipien fortification models and demonstrates the surprising material resources that members of the lesser nobility might bring to bear. Finally, Richard Leson shows how the fragmentary tomb of Robert of Cassel in Warneton—a monument that once boasted a Parisian alabaster effigy—embodied the local and supraregional powers of the Franco-Flemish nobility in the early fourteenth century.   During the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, the material articulation of identity, whether individual, familial, or regional, depended upon a range of media to assert claims of power, legacy, or allegiance. Through written and illuminated manuscripts, structural and architectural elements, and funerary and luxury displays, Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, Vol. 4, Iss. 4 [2014]https://digital.kenyon.edu/perejournal/vol4/iss4/1iii  the emphasis on materiality in this special issue promotes the idea that a cross-section of media is necessary to understand the creation and validation of identity among noble families, particularly those residing in the northern European counties between the crowns of France and Empire. The objects covered here resonate with one another and formulate sites for memory that were as potent to their original viewers as they are to us today.   -Elizabeth Moore Hunt and Richard A. Leson            Hunt and LesonPublished by Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange, 2014

Negotiating Identity in Northern France and the Lowlands in the High Middle Ages

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Negotiating Identity in Northern France and the Lowlands in the High Middle Ages

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