Chapter 15 Jerusalem Commonplaces in Danish Rural Churches: What Urban Architecture Remembers

Abstract

The phrase SALOMON ME FECIT MONASTERIU(m) (Solomon made me, the church) is carved in majuscules on the inner northern jamb of a portal in the rural Hunseby Church on the small island of Lolland, Denmark (Fig. 15.1a). It evokes the metaphor of the Christian church as Solomon’s Temple, effectively establishing the rural church as a local Jerusalem. Hunseby Church, built during the long twelfth century, is part of the massive wave of stone churches built all over medieval Denmark in this period. The art of building in stone came in the wake of the late Christianization of the Danes and was exclusively used to erect churches; churches built in the style of the socalled Romanesque. However, the visual articulation of the “novel” architectural expression was more than mere play with forms and formats; it was visual rhetoric. As such, the “style” of the early stone churches carried with it a plethora of Christian metaphors and allusions intended to translate Jerusalem and the Christian storyworld onto Danish soil.