The Evidence of the Training of Tour Guides in the Middle Ages (original) (raw)

2021, "The Evidence of the Training of Tour Guides in the Middle Ages," in ed. Julian Luxford, Tributes to Paul Binski: Studies in Gothic Art, Architecture, and Ideas (Brepols/Harvey Miller, Turnhout/London, 2021) 398-411.

The Evidence of the Training of Tour Guides in the Middle Ages Conrad Rudolph "The Evidence of the Training of Tour Guides in the Middle Ages," in ed. Julian Luxford, Tributes to Paul Binski: Studies in Gothic Art, Architecture, and Ideas (Brepols/Harvey Miller, Turnhout/London, 2021) 398-411. Abstract Very generally speaking, the greatest manifestation of medieval popular spirituality was the pilgrimage, whose basis, the localization of the holy, engendered expectations of some great experience on the part of a typically illiterate public. In order to address these expectations, recognition of the popular perception that increased levels of art indicated the presence of the holy often led elite institutions in control of the holy places to establish lavish and complex art programs, programs whose complexity was then commonly mediated for the illiterate pilgrims by on-site guides representing the institutions. This practice not only gave these elite institutions the opportunity to engage with the non-elite public in the pilgrimage as an expression of popular spirituality (as well as taking part in the lucrative sacred economy of the pilgrimage), it also allowed them to shape their identities and claims as institutions to this vast audience through art in a highly controlled way. [For more on this, see my "The Tour Guide in the Middle Ages: Guide Culture and the Mediation of Public Art," Art Bulletin 100 (2018) 36-67.] Specifically with regard to the training of guides, while it would be only natural to assume that they would receive some type of training, like those in any other occupation at the time, the vast majority of guide training was presumably oral and so has left no trace. In the few written vestiges of guide culture discussed in this essay--some for public display and some for individual reading, some general and some more specialized--we have evidence from the vicars choral of York and Guillaume de Saint-Pair that explicitly indicates that the knowledge expected of an on-site guide was not something that was simply absorbed in the course of daily life at one of these institutions but was expected to be acquired through some sort of additional learning provided in one way or another by the institutions themselves. And, from the vicars choral, we have further evidence that this learning--this training--could be both formal and required, and that at least some of it might come from texts of undeniably dual purpose, such as the York tabula. Using these few vestiges of guide training to suggest the likely if hypothetical training of such a guide, this person would have been expected to be well versed in the history of the place (pre-foundation to the present), its claims and assertions of privilege, its relics, its significant burials, its art--the literal subject matter of presumably all works of art and sometimes even the elite content (the exegetical meaning) of at least some, possibly even in the context of larger artistic programs--its architecture, its architectural history, and the location and certain specifics of all this, apparently sometimes as part of a larger tour of the institution (for example, the extended tour of the cloister of Christ Church) and sometimes as a more focused presentation (e.g., the typological windows as conveyed by the clerk of the high altar shrine of Christ Church). Ultimately, the on-site guide was part of a complex infrastructure and his mediation was part of the natural way of experiencing works of art--part of the object-viewer dynamic--for many in the middle ages. Ephemeral by nature, medieval on-site guide culture has been completely forgotten and evidence of it almost completely lost. But it can still be reconstructed, in however limited a way, from these vestiges and, by recognizing its unique role, contribute to a better understanding of medieval artistic culture.