‘Christian Sacred Places and Spaces’, The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, ed. H. Hamerow, D. Hinton, S. Crawford (OUP, 2011), pp. 824-43 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Monastic and Church Archaeology
Annual Review of Anthropology 43, 235-50, 2014
Major advances in church and monastic archaeology are discussed in terms of two distinct waves, c. 1970–95 and 1995– to the time of writing (2014). The first wave was influenced by landscape history and processual archaeology; scholarship focused principally on historical, economic and technological questions and targeted individual sites and monuments for study. The second wave has been informed by post-processual approaches and considers change and complexity in religious landscapes and perspectives on religious space, embodiment and agency. In conclusion, a more holistic approach to the archaeology of medieval Christian belief is called for, one which moves beyond the focus on institutions and monuments that has characterized ‘monastic and church archaeology’ and extends archaeological study to include the performative rituals of Christian life and death in the middle ages.
Life before the minster: the social dynamics of monastic foundation at Anglo-Saxon Lyminge, Kent
Anglo-Saxon monastic archaeology has been constrained by the limited scale of past investigations and their overriding emphasis on core buildings. This paper draws upon the results of an ongoing campaign of archaeological research that is redressing the balance through an ambitious programme of open-area excavation at Lyminge, Kent, the site of a royal double monastery founded in the seventh century AD. The results of five completed fieldwork seasons are assessed and contextualised in a narrative sequence emphasising the dynamic character of Lyminge as an Anglo-Saxon monastic settlement. In so doing, the study brings into sharp focus how early medieval monasteries were emplaced in the landscape, with specific reference to Anglo-Saxon Kent, a regional context offering key insights into how the process of monastic foundation redefined antecedent central places of long-standing politico-religious significance and social action.
In early medieval Winchester, three monastic communities were enclosed together in the south-eastern corner of the town. By the later Anglo-Saxon period, Old Minster was a monastic cathedral and New Minster and Nunnaminster were monastic communities for men and women respectively. This paper addresses ways in which the three foundations collaborated and co-ordinated with each other and with the city. While gender segregated these communities, both liturgy and the urban context integrated them, as can be seen from the books used and produced by religious men and women in this city in later Anglo-Saxon England. The importance of prayer to the inhabitants of the city and the wider locale can be seen in the documents that request liturgical services – most often prayers and masses – in return for grants of land and other gifts. Ecclesiastical and lay individuals alike allied themselves to these religious houses, seeking commemoration and often also burial in their cemeteries and hoping to benefit spiritually from their prayers. The ways in which gender affected the religious experiences of Winchester's citizens and their consecrated brothers and sisters are complex, but they are also important in understanding how the saints and their servants on earth related to God, to each other and to the surrounding urban space.
Monasteries and places of power in pre-Viking England: trajectories, relationships and interactions
2017
Recent archaeological studies conducted at different scales, from the level of site through to landscapes and regions, have focused critical attention on the connections and interactions existing between secular and religious realms of life in Anglo-Saxon England. Settlement archaeology has made an important contribution to this re-evaluation by drawing attention to a series of high-status residences of the seventh-ninth centuries AD whose trajectories and lifestyle blur the boundaries between monastic and secular aristocratic culture in pre-Viking England. Recent excavations in the Kentish village of Lyminge extend an appreciation of this theme into a region which has hitherto suffered from a deficit of Anglo-Saxon settlement archaeology. Originally conceived to improve archaeological understanding of a documented pre-Viking monastery, the Lyminge Project has subsequently gone on to uncover the remains of a separate and spatially distinct royal focus – a rare example of a seventh-c...
Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 20, 2017
This volume is based upon a conference convened at the University of Kent in April 2015 to celebrate the conclusion of a major programme of archaeological excavation targeting the Anglo-Saxon royal centre and monastery of Lyminge, Kent. The aim of the conference was to contextualize the principal findings of the Lyminge Project by drawing upon a range of historical and archaeological perspectives on early medieval monasticism in northwest Europe, with a geographical emphasis (though not exclusive focus) on Kent and neighbouring regions of the continental North Sea basin. In planning the conference, the organisers were conscious of following close on the heels of a number of high-profile academic networks and initiatives examining the Christianization of the ‘Insular’ British Isles with the spread of monastic culture forming one of its pivotal themes and institutional contexts.1 On the other hand, it was felt that the initiative had something genuinely distinctive to offer by shifting the spotlight of attention from Northumbria and the Celtic-speaking regions of the British Isles to Kent, a geographical zone which has been somewhat neglected in recent evaluations of Insular monasticism.2 This refocusing, it was hoped, would offer an opportunity for scholars to come together to look afresh at Kent as an early medieval monastic province, to re-evaluate the external (in particular) Frankish influences that shaped it and its own shaping influence on the expansion of monastic culture in the Insular British Isles. One of the key objectives of the current volume is to provide a fresh and current overview of the Lyminge Project and its contribution to early medieval studies at the end of the data-gathering phase and before the initiation of a large and complex programme of post-excavation analysis which lies ahead. For this reason, with the exception of Broadley’s contribution on the Anglo-Saxon glass, the editors decided against soliciting additional ‒ or, in the case of the three speakers who were unable to offer their papers for publication, replacement – contributions on the grounds that it would have resulted in an undue prolongation in the publication process. If the end product falls some way short of a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of recent historical and archaeological scholarship on early medieval monasticism in north-west Europe, then it is hoped that it provides a useful entry-point into some of the key debates and research agendas shaping the field as outlined in the rest of this introduction.
Anglo-Saxon burial practices are particularly interesting because there is considerable variation in the archaeological record. In the earlier period local communities used a single cemetery site and grave goods were a mode of expression that signalled difference. In the Christian period grave goods were not employed in the same way but this change may not have had religion as its central agent. Moreover, the context of display changed and diversity was found in the location of burial – Minster, churchyard, field cemetery or execution site, and amongst the social-signals that these contexts indicated were included rank and religious association as well as family and deviant status. Dissimilar numbers of children – up to 51% in churchyards compared to 25% in field cemeteries – show that cemeteries must have held a different meaning amongst different social groups, indeed England’s earliest Christian communities’ seem to have considered churchyards to be significant places for the burial of children, but not the rural family, a contrast which may also have extended to other social groups.
This article takes as its point of departure the loss of various 18th and 19th- century burial grounds to development in South Yorkshire. Case studies are given based upon recent work at Sheffield Cathedral, the Peace Gardens, and Carver Street Methodist Chapel Sheffield, as well as the New Street Wesleyan Methodist Chapel Barnsley. Current archaeological approaches to the study of 18th and 19th- century burials are far from satisfactory. There is an urgent need for curatorial archaeologists to stress the importance of such later post-medieval urban burial grounds to potential developers, and for contracting archaeologists to ensure that proper provision, both in terms of access and funding, is made by their clients for appropriate scientific study. The information gained from the study of later post-medieval urban burials would benefit from synthesis and analysis at a regional level. This may serve to establish variations in osteological data, as well as funerary practices and associated material culture within and between different congregational groups and different localities. In support of this suggestion we examine the significance of Nonconformist burial grounds and identify some potential research questions for future work.