Postcolonising the Medieval Image

Eva Frojmovic, Catherine E. Karkov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351867238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte medieval

Postcolonial theories have transformed literary, historical and cultural studies over the past three decades. Yet the study of medieval art and visualities has, in general, remained Eurocentric in its canon and conservative in its approaches. 'Postcolonising', as the eleven essays in this volume show, entails active intervention into the field of medieval art history and visual studies through a theoretical reframing of research. This approach poses and elicits new research questions, and tests how concepts current in postcolonial studies - such as diaspora and migration, under-represented artistic cultures, accented art making, displacement, intercultural versus transcultural, hybridity, presence/absence - can help medievalists to reinvigorate the study of art and visuality. Postcolonial concepts are deployed in order to redraft the canon of medieval art, thereby seeking to build bridges between medievalist and modernist communities of scholars. Among the varied topics explored in the volume are the appropriation of Roman iconography by early medieval Scandinavian metalworkers, multilingualism and materiality in Anglo-Saxon culture, the circulation and display of Islamic secular ceramics on Pisan churches, cultural negotiation by Jewish minorities in Central Europe and the Iberian peninsula, Holy Land maps and medieval imaginative geography, and the uses of Thomas Becket in the colonial imaginary of the Plantagenet court.

Part 1
The language of the postcolonial

1 Decolonising gold bracteates

From Late Roman medallions to Scandinavian Migration Period pendants

Nancy L. Wicker

While it may seem counter-intuitive to propose ‘decolonising’ an area that was never colonised, I begin this paper with the premise that even though Scandinavia was never occupied or colonised by the Romans, we can productively apply the concepts of postcolonial theory and hybridity to the study of the region. These approaches provide a useful perspective from which to examine the reaction of northerners to foreign Roman prestige goods, using the concept of hybridity to acknowledge that neither group was homogeneous.¹ While there are many categories of Roman objects that reached the North, I focus on one type of artefact – the Late Roman medallion – and discuss how it was transformed into something else that was not Roman – the Migration Period Scandinavian gold bracteate, an ambiguous hybrid object that does not fit neatly into a traditional binary opposition of Roman versus Scandinavian.² In the first part of this paper, I present a case study on how Roman medallions were incorporated, imitated, assimilated, and adapted in northern society,³ investigating the postcolonised experience of the reception of Roman material beyond the provinces. In the second part, I move beyond this specific material to consider how postcolonial theory might, in the words of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘encourage an opening up of what the medieval signifies’ by challenging traditional limitations to the discipline of early medieval art history through this consideration of Scandinavian bracteates.⁴

Scandinavian Migration Period art of the fifth and sixth centuries CE has been largely overlooked in the study of early medieval art.⁵ This northern, pagan culture is sometimes characterised as ‘non-Christian’, which is a curious way of defining a society by what it is not (by this line of thinking, it is also ‘non-Buddhist’, ‘non-Hindu’, etc.), or as ‘pre-Christian’, which presupposes an orthodox and inexorable teleological march toward the supposed civilising impetus and ultimate triumph of Christianity. The period is proto-historic rather than fully historic since there are only brief cryptic inscriptions in runic characters but no other contemporary indigenous inscriptions. The sources of our knowledge of this culture are thus mostly archaeological, with the period regarded as part of the Iron Age in Scandinavia, where the medieval period is considered to begin only with Christianisation in the eleventh century. Before I turn to theoretical and methodological concerns to suggest how the application of the concepts of postcolonialism and hybridity may inform our understanding of bracteates and their place in medieval art history, I will introduce this material that has been marginalised in the art historical canon and thus is relatively unknown outside the specialty of Scandinavian Iron Age archaeology.

During the period known as the Roman Iron Age in Scandinavia, from the beginning of the Common Era through the fourth century, Roman vessels and coins were deposited in hoards and in prestigious graves. Research on these imported objects has traditionally revolved around three theories for why they were brought to Scandinavia: trade, subsidies, and war booty.⁶ Rather than matter-of-factly accepting Roman vessels as imported materials, Fredrik Ekengren takes a different approach and asks how the significance of these objects changed once they were brought to the North – that is, how their meanings or symbolic values may have been altered.⁷ In this paper, I will pose similar questions about how Roman medallions were reinterpreted in a new environment after their arrival in Scandinavia.

A case study of medallions, medallion imitation, and bracteates

Roman medallions and medallion imitations

Medallions, based on the solidus coin introduced by Constantine around AD 310, were minted by Roman emperors for special occasions.⁸ A total of seven fourth-century Roman medallions have been found in Scandinavia – five from Denmark and two from Norway. They include individual medallions of Constantine the Great (reigning 306–37), Constantius II as Caesar (before 337), Constantius II as emperor (r. 337–361), Constans (r. 337–50 but represented by an example dated more closely to 347–48), and Valens (r. 364–78), as well as two examples of medallions of Valentinian I (r. 364–75).⁹ These pieces display a portrait bust of the Emperor on the obverse and seated or standing figures on the reverse. Little is known about how such medallions were used among people outside the Empire, but they may have served as ceremonial gifts or payments. We base our understanding on a passage from Gregory of Tours who wrote in his sixth century History of the Franks that the Emperor Tiberius II (r. 574–82) had given medallions to the Frankish king Chilperic (r. 561–84).¹⁰ Thus medallions found in Scandinavia have been explained as imperial rewards for loyalty or compensation to northerners who had served in the auxiliary troops and then returned home.¹¹ We can only imagine how these objects were used after they reached this alien, northern society that did not have a monetary economy.

Besides the seven medallions discovered in Scandinavia, thirteen so-called ‘barbarian’ medallion imitations have been found in Scandinavia, including one from Denmark, seven from Norway, and five from Sweden.¹² These ersatz medallions display simplified variations of the images known from medallions – the portrait bust (Figure 1.1) and standing figures – but also a horse and rider (Figure 1.2) and various enigmatic hybrid images. Occasionally the design on a Scandinavian example is specific enough to recognise it as an imitation of a particular medallion type. Namely, a piece from Godøy, Norway, mimics the image and inscription of a medallion of Constans, and imagery on an example from Åk, Norway, simplifies an image of Victory and Liberty with a trophy on a medallion of Magnentius (r. 350–53),¹³ but it is not easy to trace exemplars for others. In most cases, dates of the issues of particular medallions by emperors are known; however, it is difficult to date medallion imitations. We do not know how much time elapsed between the production of medallions and their imitations, nor do we know when the medallions arrived in Scandinavia. In fact, we do not even know where these imitations were made. Yet it seems apparent that images on medallions (and also perhaps medallion imitations) were the models for the objects known as the Scandinavian Migration Period gold bracteates.

Figure 1.1 Obverse, Medallion imitation, from Lilla Jored, Kville parish, Bohuslän, Sweden (IK 107); Statens Historiska Museet, Stockholm, inv. no. 421; diam. 3.9 cm (photograph no. 14710 by Ulf Bruxe, SHM 1993–06–18, reproduced under Creative Commons).^*

Figure 1.2 Reverse, Medallion imitation, from Tunalund, Hjälsta parish, Uppland, Sweden (IK 193); Statens Historiska Museet, Stockholm, inv. no. 420; diam. 3.8 cm (photograph no. 14436 by Ulf Bruxe SHM 1993–07–28, reproduced under Creative Commons).

Scandinavian Migration Period bracteates

Over one thousand bracteates have been found, mostly in southern Scandinavia but also distributed across Europe from England to Hungary.¹⁴ Unlike medallions and their imitations that were struck from both sides simultaneously, bracteates were made by means of a simpler one-sided stamping technique, perhaps reflecting what Greg Woolf calls a ‘technology gap’ that was experienced in the provinces when local artisans aspired to produce Roman-type artefacts.¹⁵ Scandinavian bracteates are dated to the fifth and sixth centuries due to their presence in hoards with over three dozen Late Roman and Byzantine solidi coins, which range in date from Valentinian (r. 364–75) through Justinian (r. 518–27).¹⁶ Yet the models for bracteate imagery are presumed to be the fourth-century Roman medallions (and perhaps their imitations) with the Emperor’s head in profile, not these later solidi with en face Emperor’s head that have been found with bracteates. Thus, although bracteate images seem to have been developed from fourth-century medallions and coins, they were in use alongside fifth-century solidi. Why Scandinavians in the fifth century began to manufacture an object emulating earlier Roman or Roman-like objects is baffling. From our standpoint of unmasking a postcolonised relationship, this question may be considered fascinating. However, instead of delving into the dilemma of the genesis of the bracteate object type and its imagery, the study of these objects has been almost entirely dominated by investigations into typology and iconography.

In 1855, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen – who is best known for his division of European prehistory into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age – identified Scandinavian bracteates as imitations of Late Roman coins and medallions.¹⁷ From this time onwards, scholars have focused on organising bracteates by classifying them according to images depicted in the central field of these small disks. In 1895, Oscar Montelius applied the methods of typological classification to the study of bracteates and arranged most of them into the types A, B, C, and D, which are the basic categories still used today.¹⁸ The first three types are linked closely to images on Late Roman medallions, with Type A derived from the portrait bust of the emperor (Figure 1.3), Type B stemming from various Roman compositions with standing figures including Victory Crowning the Victor (Figure 1.4), and Type C perhaps indebted to images of the arrival of the Emperor on horseback (the Roman Adventus scene) (Figure 1.5). Type D bracteates (Figure 1.6), on the other hand, show abstract interlaced animal ornamentation known as Germanic Style I or Salin’s Style I after the Swedish scholar Bernhard Salin, with no obvious connection to Roman imagery.¹⁹

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars advocated a rather hermetic stylistic evolution of bracteates from early examples that closely follow Roman examples through later iterations that depart radically from classical figural art. Those who study bracteates often seem – as Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk noted for artefacts from outside Western painting – ‘to proceed as if these were objects that simply appeared from nowhere and were no more than formal exemplars that allowed artists to rethink style and aesthetics’.²⁰ Similarly, Fredrik Svanberg notes for Viking art of the ninth through eleventh centuries that the ‘interesting thing was [merely] the series of types of artefacts’, pointing to scholars who ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 The language of the postcolonial
• Part 2 The location of the postcolonial
• Part 3 The ambivalence of the postcolonial
• Bibliography
• Index