Key Pages:
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]
Re-Presenting the Medieval Monastery: From Ordo to Google Earth
Sheila Bonde, Brown University, and Clark Maines, Wesleyan University
Monasteries were (and continue to be) complex sites consisting of a set of elite and quotidian buildings, and a series of stratified structures reused and rebuilt across time. Monastic sites include not only these structures, but the landscape in which each monastery is set, including gardens, cemeteries, and dependent properties. Monasteries also included the people who lived, worked and prayed there.
In the Middle Ages, monasteries represented themselves through written texts: the ordo, customaries and charters issued by these houses, as well as through material presentations: seals, images in illuminated manuscripts and the rare plan. Modern archaeologists and architectural historians have wrestled with the problem of representing the monastery. Recent work has begun to engage with the representation of monasticism –the social aspects of the monastery—and not just its architectural frame. Our paper will briefly survey the history of monastic representation, and will examine the potential for future imaging.