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
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 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.
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’).

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 19th century to make way for the railway line, but the marvellous late 11th-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.
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.
Hotel d’Assezat in Toulouse houses the Georges Bemberg art collection: https://www.fondation-bemberg.fr/musee/lhotel-dassezat.
Almodis the Peaceweaver, https://meandabooks.com/historical-fiction/almodis-the-peaceweaver/.






This sounds amazing! Thanks for sharing. Hope you have your home all sorted after the flood.