“Romanesque” Conques as a Neo-Carolingian Project

Abstract

– “Romanesque” Conques as a Neo-Carolingian Project – Begun in 2021, the first team encounter of the project “Conques in the Global World” generated an innovative reinterpretation of the site. Departing from the nineteenth-and twentieth-century explication of Conques as the ideal image of the Romanesque Middle Ages, the site is here envisaged as a space of memorialization of the past for the present. This memorialization, we argue, began in fact at the church’s conception, with the founders’ decision to reflect the character and significance of Carolingian antecedents. This Carolingian echo is evident in the material and epigraphic culture created at Conques around 1100, from the portal inscriptions to the reliquaries held below ground in the treasure. What is postulated here, and proposed for future research, is the understanding that Conques has been a memory space since it was conceived the eleventh century – a space in which a specific memory of an authoritative past is reinvented for the longue durée to confer legitimacy to a place and its religious community.