The Baptismal Font Canopy Of St Peter Mancroft Norwich

The early 16th-century baptismal font canopy of the church of St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich, is one of only three such structures to survive anywhere in the British Isles. This study, inspired by the recent rediscovery of four attributable panels at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, offers a trans-temporal account of the canopy’s initial creation and subsequent use, mutilation, and modification. Written by a team of scholars in art/architectural history, art conservation, heritage documentation, literary studies, and museum curation, it explores the installation’s multiple artistic, ritual, and cultural contexts, from late medieval and early modern Europe to modern-day North America. Contributors are Benjamin Baaske, Sarah Blick, Kate Duffy, Brent R. Fortenberry, Amy Gillette, Jack Hinton, Lesley Milner, Peggy Olley, Ellen K. Rentz, Behrooz Salimnejad, Zachary Stewart, Achim Timmermann, Charles Tracy, Kim Woods, and Lucy Wrapson.

This volume brings together scholars of history, manuscript studies, and art and architectural history to examine in conversation the varieties of medieval archival acts, the heterogeneity of collections, and the motivations of collectors. It is united by the historically flexible concept of the archive, and contributors examine material from Seville to Prague, from the early Christian period through the Reformation. Premodern collections and archival practices are increasingly becoming the subject of academic inquiry. Chapter authors investigate how institutional, communal, and familial identity accrued to material culture, including illuminated manuscripts, ecclesiastic vestments, ancient sarcophagi, and reliquaries. Others examine the social impulses behind the documentation of such collections, namely through the creation of inventories, but also in the production, management, and use of parchment records, including cartularies, estate records, and legal documents. Finally, contributors question how medieval people evaluated historical age and outmoded artistic styles; shaped and promoted collective memory through preservation, display, and ritual; and attached value, both monetary and symbolic, to their collections. The volume is cross-disciplinary and will appeal to a variety of readers, both in and out of academia. Curators, librarians, and archivists working with medieval collections will find it valuable, as will heritage professionals and charities involved in the care of properties which presently or formerly contained medieval treasuries, libraries, and archives.

This volume engages with notions of lateness and modernity in medieval architecture, broadly conceived geographically, temporally, methodologically, and theoretically. It aims to (re)situate secular and religious buildings from the 14th through the 16th centuries that are indebted to medieval building practices and designs, within the more established narratives of art and architectural history.

The English Reformation was no bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky. Nor was it an event that was inevitable, smooth, or predictable. Rather, it was a process that had its turbulent beginnings in the late medieval period and extended through until the Restoration. This book places the emphasis not just on law makers or the major players, but also, and more importantly, on those individuals and parish communities that lived through the twists and turns of reform. It explores the unpredictable process of the English Reformation through the fabric, rituals and spaces of the parish church in the Diocese of Norwich c. 1450–1662, as recorded, through the churchwardens’ accounts and the material remains of the late medieval and early modern periods. It is through the uses and abuses of the objects, rituals, spaces of the parish church that the English Reformation became a reality in the lives of these faith communities that experienced it.

Manuscript notes and newspaper clippings inserted.