Introduction

Materiality and cultural formation

PAUL FOURACRE

The medieval world is often characterized as an entity bound together by

shared theological certainties. With one eye fixed on salvation, medieval
persons supposedly privileged the spiritual over the material and
perceived their ecology and landscape but dimly, through ‘the idealized
lens of doctrine and ritual’ according to Benjamin Graham, one of the
authors in this themed issue of Early Medieval Europe. The five papers
and one review article published here, take issue with the idea that the
evolution of medieval culture was simply driven by a need to conform
to norms within a spiritual landscape. It can be shown in various ways
that it was material conditions that might shape a cultural response,
rather than vice versa, for it was not possible to unify the material
experience of religion across the varied climates and physiography of
the European landmass. Thomas Pickles picks out the essential point in
relation to ‘Anglo-Saxon’ farming in his review of Allen Frantzen’s
work: ‘English and England did not make an English landscape, the
landscape of farming in early medieval Britain had a crucial role in
making the English.’ Pickles points out that scholars are still driven by
the problem of English exceptionalism, and bothered by the question
of whether there was a continuity or break in farming and settlement
patterns in the post-Roman period. There is still no basic agreement as
to what constituted a farm or a nucleated settlement in lowland
Britain. The other papers in this issue of Early Medieval Europe start
not from the global, as in the case of farming, but from the local and
from the material immediately to hand.
Benjamin Graham elucidates the ecology of olive oil, the preferred
material for the provision of lighting in churches. Material conditions

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342 Paul Fouracre

here determined that oil was best suited for keeping a light burning day
and night in the church. It was the quality of oil and, initially, its
availability, that allowed early Christians to take up the Mosaic
injunction to keep a light burning before the altar at all times, and it
was the ability to do just this that powered Carolingian notions of the
priesthood. In my paper on ‘Lights and the Moral Economy’, I take
this point further by setting out the way in which control over the
materials needed to provide for these eternal lights gave those in power
the added legitimacy that came from facilitating religious activity.
Society was increasingly organized around that activity, but the
organization had a material driver. A society based on taxation and
bureaucratic direction may have been transformed into one that, by the
Carolingian period, more resembled a theocracy, but there remained an
urge to commodify the various elements of religion, including salvation
itself. Widening participation in this moral economy would enable a
new political order to evolve.
In her turn, Julia Smith draws on the evidence of relic labels to tackle
the issue of religious commodification. Demonstrating the materiality of
early medieval devotion to the saints, she shows how these
sometimes-tiny labels gave concrete form to the saints of different
centuries. They provided the essential link between saint and
substance, and both label and relics could be tweaked to bring them in
line with the contemporary imagination of what a given saint should
have been like. Again, material prompts were needed to show the
direction of eternity. Jamie Kreiner, in contrast to Julia Smith’s micro
study of the labels, sets a discussion about the importance of pigs in
the early medieval economy against the wider formation of cultures,
social status, justice and metaphysics. ‘Pigs’, Kreiner argues, ‘convert
organisms and spaces into commodities.’ Pigs converted fodder into
flesh and acted as an excellent model of resource management. The
augmentation of material through fattening made pigs essential to the
establishment of lordship. Giving and receiving pigs was instrumental
in the determination of property rights and obligations between owners
and tenants. There are links here to the moral economy described by
myself: a degree of social consensus and social responsibility could be
built around the pig’s ability to grow large, but also around its capacity
to do harm.
In the last paper in this issue, Lukas Werther and Jinty Nelson (with
Franz Herzig, Johannes Schmidt, Stefanie Berg, Peter Ettel, Sven Linzen,
and Christoph Zielhofer) show the convergence of evidence from written
sources and from archaeological excavation which together shed light on
Charlemagne’s attempt to dig a canal that would link the Rhine and
Danube river systems, with the former draining into the North Sea and
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Introduction 343

the latter into the Black Sea. The attempt took place in the year 793. The
project failed, as the written sources explain, and the dendrochronology
of the planks that were to line the canal shows that work stopped on
the site at exactly the moment that the Carolingian Annals said it did.
The episode of the fossatum magnum, or the ‘big ditch’, demonstrates
how an idea, almost certainly taken from the Roman author Vitruvius,
was put into practice. Carolingian rulers were big on ideas of salvation
and empire, but they were acutely aware of the logistics of reform and
progress. As with the plan for the perfect monastery at St Gall, they
wished to see ideas expressed in material form.
All the papers in this themed issue converge on this point: material
form was essential to the definition of early medieval culture. It created
the space in which ideas could develop, and ideas had to be seen to
have a practical purpose before they could be put into material form.

University of Manchester

Early Medieval Europe 2020 28 (3)

© 2020 The Authors. Early Medieval Europe published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd