Fragments of Medieval London: Visual Culture through the Museum of London's Archaeological Collection

700年的历史并不多见。当一件物品在这么长的时间里完好无损地存在时，它要么是少数几件考虑到寿命而创作的作品之一，比如宏伟的虔诚姿态或王朝的虚荣项目，要么是一系列的所有者将它们传承下来，每一件都在它的生命周期中留下了新的背景。正是这些物品成为了中世纪绝大多数视觉艺术研究的主题。在中世纪宗教的视觉艺术的研究中，诸如在其原始环境中幸存下来的彩色玻璃窗或设计为持续到世界末日的圣物箱等物品占据了主导地位，并从这些物品中得出关于群众虔诚的结论。在过去的30年里，随着教区历史学家将十四世纪视为虔诚变得更加个人化的时期，列举了私人教堂和本地宗教文本等趋势的出现作为证据。然而，这些宗教表达形式触及的是少数人，而不是大多数人，因为它们依赖于中世纪英国大多数人无法达到的识字水平和投资。在对中世纪碎片的研究中，该项目旨在拥抱由于事故和忽视而幸存下来的破碎的大多数材料。在这样做的过程中，它将特别关注普通的外行人，而不是中世纪社会的遗产创造者。历史学家强调物品在日常生活中扮演表演者的角色，本论文以这些历史学家的工作为基础，旨在收集关于这些物品的使用者和所有者的见解。根据定义，片段是整体的一部分，但选择片段并将其视为完整对象将错过该项目的真正潜力。我建议使用一种受档案出处原则启发的方法，即不只是单独研究一个片段，而是将片段的集合放在一起看，以便能够出现生存模式。我还将使用与伦敦教区有关的来源，如主教的登记簿和教区记录，如教堂管理员的帐户，尽管这些中很少有16世纪世纪之前的幸存者，通过解决这个问题的个人虔诚，通过碎片的财产，这篇论文旨在填补一个空白，已经留下的中世纪宗教历史学家，开辟观察中世纪宗教是如何在日常生活中经历了更广泛的社会光谱的中世纪社会，而不仅仅是受过教育的，精英登陆在研究14和15世纪伦敦的物质文化时，这里提出，宗教虔诚的日常小姿态，而不是宏伟的，昂贵的姿态，将被揭示出来

Objects are not often made to last 700 years. When an object does exist unbroken for this amount of time either it was one of the few pieces that were created with longevity in mind, such as grand devotional gestures or dynastic vanity projects, or a series of owners have passed them down, each imprinting a new context into its lifecycle.It is these objects that have been the subjects of the overwhelming majority of scholarship about the visual arts in the Middle Ages. Objects such as stained glass windows that have survived in their original context, or reliquaries designed to last until the world ended have dominated the study of the visual art of medieval religion and from these objects conclusions are drawn about the piety of the masses.In the last 30 years, scholarship focussed on the laity has flourished with historians of the parish seeing the fourteenth century as a period of piety becoming more personal, citing as evidence the emergence of trends such as private chapels and vernacular religious texts. However these forms of religious expression touched the few rather than the many as they are dependent upon a level of literacy and investment unattainable to most people in medieval England. In its study of medieval fragments, this project aims to embrace the broken majority of material that has survived by a combination of accident and neglect. In so doing it will take particular interest in ordinary lay people rather than medieval society's legacy makers. Building on the work of historians who have stressed the role of objects as performers in everyday life, this thesis aims to gather insights on the users and owners of these objects. A fragment by definition is part of a whole but selecting fragments and treating them as if they were complete objects would miss the true potential of this project. I propose to use a methodology inspired by the archival principal of provenance whereby a fragment is not just studied individually but collections of fragments are looked at together so that patterns of survival can emerge.I will also use sources relating to the London Diocese, such as bishops' registers and parish records such as church wardens' accounts, although few of these survive from before the 16th century, to assess the context of the fragments in the landscape of faith on a local level.By addressing this question of personal piety through fragments of possessions, this thesis aims to fill a gap that has been left by historians of medieval religion, opening up observation of how medieval religion was experienced in the daily lives of a broader social spectrum of medieval society than just the educated, landed elite. In studying the material culture of fourteenth and fifteenth-century London, it is proposed here that small everyday gestures of religious devotion rather than grand, and expensive, gestures, will be revealed