An Unruly of Archaeologists

The British Archaeological Association in Romanesque Toulouse

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

Sculpture in Saint-Sernin Basilica, Toulouse

A small sample of the papers: Martin Jurgensen and Line Bonde’s discussed ‘The Lick’, the tongue motif in 12^th-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 of the authenticity of the golden Christ in Majesty in Toulouse’s Saint-Sernin Basilica; and Michele Luigi Vescovi’s investigated drill holes in sculpture as if he were a detective at a crime scene.

Golden Christ in Majesty in Saint-Sernin Basilica, Toulouse

There were excursions to Musee des Augustins,³ Musee Saint-Raymond⁴ and Saint-Sernin in Toulouse⁵ and to Saint-Pierre Abbey and Monastery in Moissac⁶ where highly knowledgeable guides coped with good humour with interventions from their highly knowledgeable listeners (hence the ‘unruly of archaeologists’).

Richard Plant coping admirably with his unruly of archaeologists as they poked around in hedges during his talk at Saint-Sernin

Moissac is one of the oldest monasteries in France, and prospered due to the town’s port on the River Tarn, where wine embarked to go to Bordeaux for export, and thanks to its association with Cluny and the route to Compostela. The monks’ kitchen was demolished in the 19^th century to make way for the railway line, but the marvellous late 11^th-century cloister with its historiated (storied) capitals survived. Visiting Moissac was particularly meaningful for me for two reasons. First, there was the alphabet capital, adjacent to the door to the novices’ school, which was used to teach reading and writing.

Alphabet capital in the Moissac cloister

Second, there was the fact that Almodis (the heroine of my first novel⁷ and the subject of a biography I am currently writing) was at Moissac at the end of June 1053 with her husband, Count Pons of Toulouse and the monastery’s abbot, Durand de Bredon, whose image is in the cloister. Almodis initiated the abbey’s connection with Cluny. Her visit to the abbey took place weeks, perhaps days, before her ‘abduction’ in Narbonne by the count of Barcelona, Ramon Berenguer I.

Abbot Durand de Bredon, Moissac Cloister

1. https://thebaa.org/

2. Hotel d’Assezat in Toulouse houses the Georges Bemberg art collection: https://www.fondation-bemberg.fr/musee/lhotel-dassezat.

3. https://augustins.toulouse.fr/

4. https://saintraymond.toulouse.fr/

5. https://basilique-saint-sernin.fr/

6. https://www.abbayemoissac.com/en

7. Almodis the Peaceweaver, https://meandabooks.com/historical-fiction/almodis-the-peaceweaver/.