About the Book
Open Access: Contextualizing the Archivolted Portals of Northern Spain and Western France within the Theology and Politics of Entry explores the history, development, and accrued connotations of a distinctive entry configuration comprised of a set of concentrically stepped archivolts surrounding a deliberate tympanum-free portal opening. These "archivolted" portals adorned many of the small, rural ecclesiastical structures dotting the countryside of western France and northern Spain in the twelfth century. Seeking to re-contextualize this configuration within monastic meditational practices, this book argues that the ornamented archivolts were likely composed following medieval prescriptions for the rhetorical ornamentation of poetry and employed the techniques of mnemonic recollection and imaginative visualization. Read in this light, it becomes clear that the architectural form underlying these semi-circular configurations served to open the possibilities for meaning by making the sculptural imagery physically and philosophically accessible to both the monastic community and the lay parishioner. Pointing to an Iberian heritage in which both light and space had long been manipulated in the conveyance of theological and political ideologies, Abel suggests that the portal's architectural form grew out of a physical and social matrix characterized by pilgrimage, crusade, and processions, where the elements of motion integral to the Quadrivium sciences of Math, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music were enhanced by a proximity to and cultural interaction with the Islamic courts of Spain. It was, however, within the politics of the Peace of God movement, with its emphasis on relic processions that often encompassed all the parishes of the monastic domain, that the "archivolted" portal, with its elevated porch-like space, are shown to be the most effective.
About the Author :
Mickey Abel is Associate Professor at the University of North Texas, USA. Her scholarly interests focus on Medieval architectural space of both France and Spain – its historical analysis, its contextual setting, its liturgical and experiential perception, and its geographical determinants. She has published in Gesta, Avista Forum, Peregrinations, and the Hispanic Research Journal. Her current work engages the mapping of spatial/geographical relationships between religious buildings, historical events, and social/economic life. Underway is a monograph on the monastic development of the canal system in western France.
Review :
"With Open Access, Mickey Abel establishes a paradigm-shift in our understanding of hundreds of small, rural church façades of eleventh- and twelfth-century western France and northern Spain. The portals of these façades have concentrically-stepped archivolts surrounding a deliberately tympanum-free portal opening, and previously have been dismissed as merely decorative. Abel contextualizes and unlocks the complexities of these compositions and convincingly elucidates the profound meanings of these façade designs, distinguishing them from the narrative 'Grand Tympanum' portals traditionally valued as the ultimate in Romanesque architectural sculpture. Chapters reveal and build understanding through the application of medieval prescriptions for the rhetorical ornamentation of poetry, analyses of liturgical practice – especially micro-pilgrimage processions – and the presentation of sculpture as visual text. Abel reveals how these archivolted portals articulate non-corporal concepts through time/space/action; she demonstrates the activation of architecture through human movement, from regional landscape through the doorway to the altar and the divine presence; and she provides fresh insight into contemporaneous philosophical, political, and social organization. Through her incremental explanation of physical elements and their theoretical foundations, these church portals are made accessible and comprehensible for readers not only with words but also through extensive and detailed photographs."– Janet Snyder, PhD, School of Art and Design, College of Creative Arts, West Virginia University"In this perceptive, interdisciplinary study, Dr Abel focuses her scholarly analysis on a ubiquitous but often neglected group of medieval artworks: the archivolted portals of Romanesque churches in southern France and northern Spain. Their lack of tympana has caused scholars to label them as merely decorative without any narrative focus. Dr Abel masterfully demonstrates how that perceived lack, the void at the center of the doors and their physical openness, opened them in turn to a variety of different interpretations and receptions. In this rich, reception-based analysis, Dr Abel focuses on the cognitive skills a medieval viewer would bring to his or her experience of these church entrances, highlighting the spatial and temporal dimensions of a viewer's experience, and the kinetic, dynamic reception of portal sculpture that changed over time. She also effectively demonstrates the archivolted portal's multivalence, weaving together in a skillful synthesis the various roles these portals might have played as memory devices, locations of micro-pilgrimage and religious contemplation, and statements of territorial possession and corporate affiliation. The emptiness of the door's space provided a blank page on which medieval viewers could inscribe a variety of religious, mnemonic, judicial, political, and economic associations. This comprehensive and well-structured study shows, then, that the Romanesque archivolted portal required no master key to unlock its iconographic significance; rather, the medieval viewer activated the meanings for the door in an ongoing and dynamic process that addressed contemporary needs, interests, and realities."– Karen Rose Mathews, PhD, Department of Art and Art History, Miami University
