International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

This paper examines how architectural forms become prototypes that rely on individual and collective memories to produce new meanings.  Richard Krautheimer first analyzed the relationship between architectural forms and meanings in his seminal essay from 1947 on architectural iconography.(1) Simply stated, this mode of analysis claims that the significance of architectural copies is dependent on recognition and recollection of selected formal prototypes.  More recently, Mary Carruthers has shown not only that images of architecture served as powerful mnemonic devices but also that architecture itself, especially the church and the cloister, functioned as tools for medieval meditation, a form of cognition.(2) Through a case study of the Sainte�]Chapelle of Paris, my research demonstrates the broader application of these ideas, namely, that architecture can at once stimulate memory and generate new meanings in relation to the audience and its context.  The royal chapel, a monumental reliquary chapel built by Louis IX to house the Crown of Thorns of Christ between 1239 and 1248 integrated aspects two architectural types, the palatine chapel and the bishop’s chapel.  The former was well known among élites and the latter was part of habitual practices.  The unification of these two types created an architectural trope, the content of which, in combination with the chapel’s liturgy, would have been unambiguous to a large thirteenth�]century audience.  I shall discuss this in view of the fact that the Sainte�]Chapelle became an architectural prototype itself.  The conclusion will discuss the extent to which prototypes functioned as loci for memory and cognition within the larger context of medieval architecture. 

1. Richard Krautheimer, “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (London, 1942), 1-33.
2. Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).