Floreat Semper: Rebuilding, Stone by Stone

Abstract

This chapter examines the abbey’s repeated recovery efforts. It asks two principal questions: why, after every episode of destruction between the sixth and twentieth centuries, was it deemed necessary to rebuild the abbey? And, how was this task successfully achieved? Such questioning necessarily considers the role of human agency, both individual and collective, in the overall enterprise. But it also counters the problem of historical determinism: the view, in this case, that the abbey’s recovery was somehow inevitable or predetermined.