I recently returned from a hugely stimulating British Archaeological Association1 Romanesque Conference in Toulouse. Speakers and delegates ranged from PhD students to eminent professors and came from all over Europe, Scandinavia and the United States to discuss artefacts, sculpture and architecture from the early medieval period. Coins, wall paintings, manuscripts, cartularies, croziers, giant bibles (averaging a whopping 970 pages), enamels, ivories, thrones were all topics for presentations and debate. The conference was convened by Richard Plant and Quitterie Cazes and held at the Hotel d’Assezat.2
A small sample of the papers: Martin Jurgensen and Line Bonde’s discussed ‘The Lick’, the tongue motif in 12th-century sculpture; Wilfried Keil used two small fluffy lion toys to assure us that ‘not every man between two lions is Daniel’ in his presentation on Romanesque architecture and sculpture in Pavia and Speyer; Gabriel Imbert convinced us …
