Session: #37

Content:

Stone was a widely used material throughout the Middle Ages. It was used in buildings of all social statuses, in industry or agriculture (e.g. for loom weights or plough stones), and also for sculpture. Regular contact between people and stone will have resulted in perceptions of the material. Stone is a perpetual material, thus it was often reused—e.g. Roman inscribed stones in medieval churches across Europe and prehistoric rock art on slabs in Irish souterrains.
Stone was conceptually complex in medieval culture; for theologians like the thirteenth-century scholar Albertus Magnus it was a ‘lively’ material with idiosyncratic personality traits. In a similar vein, Leonardo da Vinci’s fable about a stone imagines the world from a petrine perspective. Such thinking clearly anticipates Jane Bennett’s recent research into Vibrant Matter and reveals much about how and why stone was conceived as a ‘living’ entity in medieval culture.
This session seeks to expand on our knowledge of stone in a later medieval context and to explore it from many different perspectives. Combining archaeological data with insights from multidisciplinary studies will enhance our understanding of the choices made in selecting stone for buildings and monuments. It will also shed light on its broader conceptualisation in medieval culture.
Some topics we would like to cover include (but are not limited to):
• The use of stone in medieval buildings (as opposed to timber or other materials)
• The choice of stone for sculptures and funerary monuments
• Medieval perceptions and knowledge of stone
• The re-use of earlier stones in later medieval contexts, or the re-use of medieval stones in modern contexts
• The symbolism associated with stone and stone objects
• The trade of stone as a building material
• The intersection of medieval and modern thinking about stone

Session: #37

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