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

物品通常不会被制造成能持续700年的。当一件物品确实完好无损地存在了这么长时间时，要么它是为数不多的考虑到长寿的作品之一，比如宏伟的虔诚手势或王朝的虚荣项目，要么是一系列的所有者将它们代代相传，每个人都在其生命周期中留下了新的背景。正是这些物品一直是中世纪绝大多数视觉艺术学术的主题。在中世纪宗教的视觉艺术研究中，保留下来的彩色玻璃窗等物品，或者设计成持续到世界末日的圣物，主导了对中世纪宗教视觉艺术的研究，并从这些物品中得出了关于大众虔诚的结论。在过去的30年里，专注于俗人的学术蓬勃发展，教区历史学家将14世纪视为虔诚的时期，并引用私人小教堂和本地宗教文本等趋势的出现作为证据。然而，这些形式的宗教表达触动了少数人，而不是大多数人，因为它们依赖于中世纪英格兰大多数人无法达到的识字和投资水平。在对中世纪碎片的研究中，这个项目的目标是拥抱大多数因意外和疏忽而幸存下来的破碎的材料。在这样做的过程中，它将特别关注普通人，而不是中世纪社会的遗产创造者。基于历史学家的工作，他们强调物品在日常生活中作为表演者的作用，本论文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，碎片是整体的一部分，但选择碎片并将其视为完整的对象将错过该项目的真正潜力。我建议使用一种受到起源起源档案原则启发的方法，即不仅对碎片进行单独研究，还将碎片集合放在一起研究，以便出现生存模式。我还将使用与伦敦教区有关的资料，如主教登记册和教区记录，如教堂典狱长的记述，以评估地方层面上信仰景观中碎片的背景。通过财产碎片来解决个人虔诚的问题，本论文旨在填补中世纪宗教历史学家留下的空白。开启了对中世纪宗教如何在中世纪社会更广泛的社会阶层的日常生活中经历的观察，而不仅仅是受过教育的土地精英。在研究14世纪和15世纪伦敦的物质文化时，这里建议揭示宗教虔诚的日常小手势，而不是宏大而昂贵的手势。

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