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Often fragmented and without context, early medieval inscribed and sculpted stone monuments of the fifth to eleventh centuries AD have been mainly studied via their shape, their decoration and the texts a fraction of them bear. This book, investigating stone monuments from Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia (including the important memorials at Iniscealtra, County Clare), advocates three relatively new, distinctive and interconnected approaches to the lithic heritage of the early Middle Ages. Building on recent theoretical trends in archaeology and material culture studies in particular, it uses the themes of materiality, biography and landscape to reveal how carved stones created senses of identity and history for early medieval communities and kingdom. An extensive introduction and eight chapters span the disciplines of history, art-history and archaeology, exploring how shaping stone in turn shaped and re-shaped early medieval societies.Howard Williams is Professor of Archaeology, University of Chester. Joanne Kirton is Project Manager, Big Heritage, Chester. Meggen Gondek is Reader in Archaeology, University of Chester.Contributors: Ing-Marie Back Danielsson, Iris Crouwers, Meggen Gondek, Mark A. Hall, Joanne Kirton, Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh, Clíodhna O'Leary, Howard Williams.
THE VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE of medieval Ireland is far from a neglected area: indeed, with the constant expansion of the road network, man-made objects and landscapes are brought to the public's attention in the most dramatic as well as most humdrum ways, through court cases, media coverage, traffic jams, academic petitions and governmental propaganda. Yet despite this ongoing spectacle of discovery, the study of Ireland's medieval built environment is far from high-profile, while within the academic disciplines, there is a subtle but perceptible friction between art history and archaeology. Given Eric Fernie's contribution to, and continuing interest in, debates on the crossovers between these disciplines, it seems pertinent here to explore the problems and pitfalls of studying Ireland's medieval buildings as architecture. Architectural historians have generally eschewed their study, and the perception has been that they are marginal to the history of European architecture. This apparent marginality is one with which Irish history more generally has also to contend, except perhaps for the period of the sixth and seventh centuries. This paper aims to trace some of the reasons for such perceived irrelevance through a brief historiographic survey, to suggest that a more open theoretical model might allow the reintegration of Irish medieval buildings into their European context, and to raise the problem of modern subjective experiential alienation from such built forms. It is not so much that exciting interpretations of Irish architecture are not being written, as that they are failing to be incorporated into the discourse outside a very limited sphere of specialist writing.
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