8 - Illustrating the Material Past: A Pictorial Treasury in the Later Medieval Manuscripts from St Albans Abbey

Summary

Medieval monasteries like St Albans Abbey were sites of great splendour, filled with innumerable treasures. These possessions formed heterogeneous collections consisting of liturgical vessels and vestments, reliquaries, sculptures, gemstones and a wide variety of other precious objects and curiosities, and both individually and collectively these items represented the wealth, glory and history of their respective institutions. Unfortunately, the vast majority of such objects no longer survive and are known only from written documents, if they are known at all. St Albans is among the many monasteries whose treasury has, by and large, been lost over the centuries, but because of the documentary efforts of the house's later medieval monks, a remarkably rich record of these objects still survives. In addition to texts that list or describe the abbey's artworks and possessions, several illuminated manuscripts produced between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries preserve a total of over 100 pictorial representations of objects – ranging from vestments and reliquaries to ancient cameos and royal seals – that constituted the abbey's collection of treasures, as well as over 700 years’ worth of its institutional material past.

That it was at St Albans that such a collection of images appeared is, perhaps, not surprising. The abbey boasted a long and illustrious history, tracing its roots back to the third- or fourth-century martyrdom of Alban, the Anglorum protomartyr, as well as to King Offa of Mercia's purported eighth-century foundation of the monastery at the site of Alban's tomb. This early history proved crucial to the abbey's post-Conquest rise to prominence as one of the most privileged and powerful monasteries in England, and the house's renowned tradition of historical writing may have been spurred by the monks’ desire to document and assert their monastery's antiquity and history. These writings indicate that the material past figured prominently within the monks’ understanding of the abbey's history and identity. The Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani includes numerous descriptions of the monastery's buildings, artworks and other possessions, and more systematic descriptions of such objects appear in several inventories, as well as in the Liber benefactorum (Book of Benefactors) and two shorter texts that describe the church's paintings, altars and monuments.