“Romanesque” Conques as a Neo-Carolingian Project

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Authors

FOLETTI Ivan PALLADINO Adrien DEBIAIS Vincent SPARHUBERT Eric VOYER Cécile

Year of publication 2021
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Convivium : Exchanges and Interactions in the Arts of Medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterreanean
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Web http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503592084-1
Keywords Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy at Conques; Carolingian past; Catholic ; longue durée; medievalism; memory space
Attached files
Description 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.
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