As one of the editors of Romanesque and the Past, John McNeill’s opening article sets the stage by taking the view of the ‘dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants’. From this overview, he leads us to the questions that no doubt shaped the original ‘Call for Papers’ for the 2010 London conference, from which this set of articles derives. Within the art-historically defined era we define as the Romanesque, where can we witness a nod to the past? A purposeful embracing of the past? Or a deliberate shrugging off of the shadow of the past? McNeill suggests that while references to the past might be detected in the use of ‘spolia’, or illustrated in an act of ‘emulation’, they might also be signalled in concepts of ‘locality’ or memorialised in ‘familial relationships’ between objects, patrons or places.

In the exploration of the visual evidence of these types of time-based relationships, the arrangement of the nineteen articles eschews both the traditional chronological order and the familiar geographical groupings, although the volume is inclusive of the full historical period and cultural breadth encompassed under the Romanesque designation. Rather more interestingly, the reader will discover, if they read from beginning to end, an intertwining theoretical undercurrent that serves to link the papers and develop in complexity as one progresses. These articles challenge the field’s own defining quagmire based on a visual ‘style’ – as reiterated by Eric Fernie’s concluding article – but more provocatively, they are eminently suggestive of new and productive directions for future scholarship. Broadly stated, four interrelated lines of enquiry can be found to weave their way through the volume: the looming presence of the antique Roman model; the importance of memory in shaping, replicating or transforming ideas into the visual; the cross-fertilisation and intermingling of word and image; and the agency of distinct individuals. Underlying the whole, however, is the overwhelming importance of specificity in the contextualisation of the problem at hand.

The Rome of antiquity is not only implicated in the designation ‘Romanesque’, but is presumed to be the model for much of the material culture produced in the period, most particularly architecture. Several articles take this as their point of departure: Gem, in his analysis of the ‘antiquity’ of St Peter’s – its form, its liturgical use and its symbolic meaning; Kappel, as a foil for his examination of the architecture of the Norman conquest in southern Italy; and Andrault-Schmitt in her focus on the rarity of the Roman clerestory in Aquitaine, which when employed should be seen as evidence of a meaningful choice on the part of the patrons. Like the multifaceted political arguments of Albrecht and Szakacs, Fergusson illustrates three relatively contemporary examples of patronage – Anselm at Bury St Edmunds, Wibert at Canterbury and Aelred at Rievaulx. Each uses the Roman past to serve different political agenda in order to convey significantly different ideas. Finally, Valdez del Alamo sees in the architectural monuments of Tarragona – the Roman amphitheatre, the layers of Christian construction within it and the Romanesque church that cuts through the ancient walls – a particularly vivid ‘lieu de memoire’.

Looking to the concept of ‘imitatio’ as a factor of memory, Lutz traces a type of sculpted crucifix over time, suggesting that specific contextual meanings are signalled in what aspects of the ‘type’ remain the same over time, and what parts are altered, emphasised or eliminated. For Donkin, it is in the ritual of consecration that she finds the creation of memories. Literally ‘making an impression’, the physical tracing of the alphabet into the ashen cross laid out on the nave floor employed an ancient rhetorical model that served to ‘re-collect’ and link the past with the present. Kahn finds her contextually revealing moments in the instances where the past ‘resurfaces’ in the art of the newly vanquished. Rather than a Roman past, however, her post-Conquest examples explore when manuscript motifs make their way into sculpted stone and thus replicate and / or transform the not too distant ‘living-tradition’ of the Anglo-Saxon past. Similarly, Stalley shows that for the Irish sculptors of stone, ‘Romanitas’ is not found in Roman monuments, but rather in indigenous manuscript ornamentation and metalwork.

Shifting from the contextualised evidence of imagery to that of words, Franklin looks to the works of Stephan Harding, Peter Damian and William of Malmesbury, to explore the notion of reform as it can be seen in various adaptations of the Ambrosian single nave church of Milan; while Stratford seeks to contextualise viewership by examining contemporary litterati, finding insight not in who was writing, but rather in what was being read. In the nuanced connections between ‘word and image’, Castiñeiras illustrates corollaries between Ripoll’s triumphal arch facade and manuscripts produced in the monastery’s scriptorium, both of which reference a ‘local past’ in the building’s consecration and its politically astute abbot, Oliba. Conversely, trying to untangle the word / image, Kitzinger traces the shifting philosophy regarding the worship of material objects through an analysis of Hrabanus’s In Honorem across time – from its ninth-century reliance on the Libri carolini, to Inglehard’s eleventh-century retro-employment of the Liber Pontificalis; while Worm traces the concept of time itself, moving from the teleological timeline of Hugh of St Victor to the mapping of time in Peter of Poitiers, and finally the diagramming of time as place in Peter Comestor. Bringing us full circle, Rudolph sees in the vivid descriptions and precise correlations written into Hugh of St Victor’s Mystic Ark a fight against the future – a didactic response to the threat of the ‘new theology’, whose philosophers pitted faith against reason.

While unable to do full justice to the rich material found in any of the individual articles, in summing up, I would argue that similar to the manner in which Hugh’s visually didactic methodology provided stimulating sustenance for his students, the dynamic breadth of examples and the innovative variety of approaches presented in this volume lend themselves particularly well to use in the classroom, where they might well inspire a new generation of students and future scholars of the Romanesque.