Short description:

The Regional and Transregional in Romanesque Europe considers the historiography and usefulness of regional categories, and in so doing explores the strength, durability, mutability and geographical scope of regional and transregional phenomena in the Romanesque period.

Long description:

The Regional and Transregional in Romanesque Europe considers the historiography and usefulness of regional categories and in so doing explores the strength, durability, mutability, and geographical scope of regional and transregional phenomena in the Romanesque period.

This book addresses the complex question of the significance of regions in the creation of Romanesque, particularly in relation to transregional and pan-European artistic styles and approaches. The categorization of Romanesque by region was a cornerstone of 19th- and 20th-century scholarship, albeit one vulnerable to the application of anachronistic concepts of regional identity. Individual chapters explore the generation and reception of forms, the conditions that give rise to the development of transregional styles and the agencies that cut across territorial boundaries. There are studies of regional styles in Aquitaine, Castile, Sicily, Hungary, and Scandinavia; workshops in Worms and the Welsh Marches; the transregional nature of liturgical furnishings; the cultural geography of the new monastic orders; metalworking in Hildesheim and the valley of the Meuse; and the links which connect Piemonte with Conques.

The Regional and Transregional in Romanesque Europe offers a new vision of regions in the creation of Romanesque relevant to archaeologists, art historians, and historians alike.

Table of Contents:

1. The epistemological, political, and practical issues affecting regional categories in French Romanesque architecture 2. Hans Kubach?s treatment of regions in the study of Romanesque architecture 3. Did Zodiaque?s regional portrayal create a false impression as to the nature of Romanesque 4. Romanesque sculpture in Aquitaine: a history of the marginalisation of a widely imitated regional sculptural style 5. The baldachin-ciborium: the shifting meanings of a restricted liturgical furnishing in Romanesque art 6. Hildesheim as a nexus of metalwork production, c. 1130-1250 7. 'Mosan' metalwork and its diffusion in the Rhineland, France, and England 8. Winchester's Holy Sepulchre Chapel and Byzantium: iconographic transregionalism? 9. Transregional dynamics, monastic networks: Santa Fede in Cavagnolo, Conques, and the geography of Romanesque art 10. Tiron on the edge: cultural geography, regionalism and liminality 11. Four Romanesque Cistercian abbeys in Lesser Poland: the context of their foundation 12. The Cathedral of Catania and the creation of the Norman County of Sicily: transregional and transalpine models in the architecture of the late 11th century 13. ?School? or ?masons? workshop??: reflections on the so-called Wormser Bauschule and on the definition of regional style 14. Towards an anatomy of a regional workshop: the Herefordshire School revisited 15. Crossing the Pyrenees: migration, urbanization, and transregional collaboration in Romanesque Aragon 16. Transregionalism and particularity in Romanesque woodcarving in 12th-century Catalonia 17. Romanesque woodcarvers and plasterers in the Abruzzi: the Mediterranean connection 18. A country without regions?: the case of Hungary 19. Reassessing the problem of Scandinavian Romanesque 20. The creation of Castilian identity under Alfonso VIII and Leonor Plantagenet