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IMC 2013: Sessions

Session 324: Medieval to Modern: Raptors, Reading, and Restored Glass

Monday 1 July 2013, 16.30-18.00

Moderator/Chair:Louise D'Arcens, Department of English, University of Wollongong, New South Wales
Paper 324-aA Bird in the Hand: A Comparison of the Practical Usage of Raptor Traps in the 14th and 21st Centuries
(Language: English)
Leslie Jacoby, Department of English & Comparative Literature, San José State University
Index terms: Art History - General, Daily Life, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Technology
Paper 324-bMedieval Stained Glass in Wales after the Middle Ages: Survival, Loss, and Reinvention
(Language: English)
Martin Crampin, Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Index terms: Architecture - Religious, Art History - Decorative Arts, Ecclesiastical History, Medievalism and Antiquarianism
Abstract

Paper -a:
As one of the only 14th-century Old French manuscripts that describes and instructs using illustrations as to the making and the methodology of various bird traps and nets, Le livre du roi Modus et de la reyne Ratio by Henri de Ferrières helps medievalists who examine medievalisms to place a practice into the context of the modern material world, allowing us to explore and then openly debate the contextual value and historical function of such an expensive and clearly aristocratic medieval instructional text. Given the fact that falconry is primarily an apprenticeship-based or experienced-based vocation, I propose to discuss the contextual and instructional application of these 14-century modern French style miniatures, with their lack of proper perspective or natural accuracy, as traps built and used in the 21st century. As a congruent investigation, I will explore how a 21st-century 30-year scientific study at the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory methodically makes reflective traps as the means to capture, examine, document, band, and then release raptors traveling through a major western United States migratory route. To this end, the similarities and differences between the two timeframes and their respective practices are more pronounced than expected, questioning how a medievalism discursive approach might produce a modern ideological, yet entertaining and academic quagmire.

Paper -b:
The presence of medieval stained glass in 21st-century Wales is a story of preservation both by chance and by deliberate action. Whole or partial scenes, figures and individual fragments have been restored and occasionally been given new meaning in new contexts. Tradition has recorded the movement of glass from dissolved abbeys to parish churches, and imported glass from the continent has also been given to churches by gentry families. Artists and antiquarians recorded medieval glass in the 18th and 19th centuries, some of which is no longer extant, and since the Gothic Revival in the 19th-century artists have continually reinterpreted medieval styles, techniques and imagery in new works.