Le pont d’Avignon: une société de bâtisseurs (XIIe–XVe siècle)

Abstract

in Denmark to explore the object’s agency between form and substance. Two chapters by archaeologists bridge the Viking and early Christian periods. Mette Højmark Søvsø and Maria Knudsen offer an archaeological overview of small, wearable objects excavated in Ribe based on the recent, exciting discoveries from metal detecting. The final chapter on the medieval burials in Odense by Jakob Tue Christensen and Mikael Manøe Bjerregaard turns to the grave to consider the visible and invisible materials of death. Both chapters use empirical evidence from specific geographic places in Denmark to show the changing nature of Christian ritual practice across centuries. Denmark, once on the frontiers of Christendom, was certainly not a peripheral participator of Christian religious practice. Although ‘materiality’ is the core concept of the book, most chapters stay close to Caroline Walker Bynum’s Christian Materiality (2011). Materiality as employed throughout the anthology — connecting the material presence of the object to theological and ideological practices — has mostly remained synonymous with conceptions of Christian matter as espoused in Christian Materiality. Bynum’s object agency and materia also receives the bulk of references in line and in citations on ‘materiality’ in general, leaving absent the post-Bynum discourse on materiality which has proven both robust and ‘vexed’. The volume’s geographic emphasis on Denmark is contradictory at times. Some chapters use the large number of objects preserved in rural parish churches as testimony to Denmark’s continental orientation. J€ urgensen in particular substantiates this position with the well-preserved polychromy sculpture, such as the Entombed Christ from the Danish National Museum (fig. 5.3). At the same time, such richly preserved material in Denmark left the reader wanting more materia that makes Denmark distinct. Simply put, what is universalizing about the material turn that encourages the study of physical objects in Christian practice, no matter their geographic origins? Nonetheless, this anthology from Brepol’s accessible Acta Scandinavica series makes the holy stuff of Denmark present, visible and tangible.