Historic Preservation and the Image of the Middle Ages.Conceptual Paradigms and Image Production in the Context of Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture in Germany and France

我们对中世纪神圣建筑的印象在很大程度上受到历史保护领域不断变化的概念范式的影响，这种范式根据其对中世纪过去的愿景和理解塑造了这些建筑。拟议的研究项目的中心是对20世纪展开的这一“图像产生”过程进行系统和比较的调查。随着对现代时期的关注，这项研究开辟了新的天地。自1900年以来，随着历史决定论和“创造性保护”的实践，历史保护学科越来越被理解为一门客观的科学，致力于研究和保护现存的文物。这项研究挑战了这种理解，认为20世纪修复的正式目标实际上代表了塑造过去形象的做法的延续--尽管是以另一种形式，而且很少是明确或自觉的。因此，尽管该领域公开致力于现代科学客观主义，但该领域继续产生不断变化和多样化的中世纪神圣建筑图像。研究项目旨在重建法国和德国运作中的不同概念范式，这两个国家的制度化保护历史相对较长，在20世纪的大部分时间里在国际保护话语中占据主导地位。在第一步中，将对每个国家的古迹样本进行分析，以了解开展的不同修复活动以及这些活动似乎所体现的图像制作过程。在第二步中，将调查这些修复做法与当时公认的历史保护原则以及流行摄影的代表性模式(如明信片、旅行或建筑指南)的关系。最后，我们将进行比较，以阐明在20世纪的较长时期内，法国和德国是如何以及为什么追求截然不同的中世纪形象的。这项研究所采取的广泛视角将使我们对中世纪在现代性中的接受情况的认识建立在相应的更广泛的基础上。此外，通过在当代理论辩论和大众印刷媒体不断变化的想象中对修复运动进行一致和适当的背景介绍，该项目将对知识史作出重要贡献：与普遍认为历史保护是一门客观科学的自我概念不同，该学科将始终如一地被呈现为历史决定的文化技术。这是一种有望为目前陷入概念危机的领域提供新动力的方法。

The image that we have of medieval sacred architecture is to a large extent coloured by changing conceptual paradigms in the field of historic preservation, which has shaped these buildings according to its vision and understanding of the medieval past. The proposed research project centres on a systematic and comparative investigation of this process of "image production" as it unfolded during the 20th century. With this concentration on the Modern period, the study breaks new ground. Since 1900, with the move away from Historicism and the practice of "creative conservation", the discipline of historic preservation has come to understand itself increasingly as an objective science, one dedicated to studying and preserving artefacts as they exist. This study challenges this understanding by suggesting that the formal goals of 20th-century restorations in fact represent a continuation - albeit in another form, and rarely explicitly or self-consciously - of the practice of shaping the image of the past. As a result, changing and varied images of medieval sacred architecture continue to be produced by the field, despite its overt commitment to a modern doctrine of scientific objectivity.The research project aims at reconstructing the different conceptual paradigms in operation in France and Germany, two countries with comparatively long histories of institutionalized preservation as well as dominant roles in the international preservation discourse during much of the 20th century. In a first step, a sample of monuments from each country will be analyzed with respect to the different restoration campaigns carried out and the processes of image production that these seem to embody. In a second step, the relationship of these restoration practices both to the accepted tenets of historic preservation at the time and to representative modes of popular photography, such as postcards and travel or architectural guidebooks, will be investigated. Finally, a comparison will be undertaken to clarify how and why markedly different images of the Middle Ages were pursued in France and Germany over extended periods during the 20th century.The broad perspective taken by the study will place our knowledge of the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity on a correspondingly broader basis. Moreover, through its consistent and appropriate contextualization of the restoration campaigns within both contemporary theoretical debates and the changing imaginary of popular print media, the project will make an important contribution to intellectual history: in contrast to the prevailing self-conception of historic preservation as an objective science, the discipline will be consistently presented as historically-determined cultural technique. It is an approach that promises to offer new impulses to a field that currently finds itself in conceptual crisis.