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Valhalla Is Burning: Theory, the Middle Ages, and Secularization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

John Parker
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In 1802 the Franciscan Friary standing in Munich since the late thirteenth century was razed to make room for the national Theater. Many of its books found their way to the state library where, among further spoils swept up in the waves of secularization following the French Revolution, they fed the growth of modern medievalism. Other relics fed other tastes. A profitable brewery remained in the friary's basement, operated now under secular license, while everything else detachable—furniture, copper gutters and plates, lead and iron fittings, window frames, artwork, altars, the tower clock and organ—went to the highest bidder to pay for the theater's troubled construction. Buttresses buckled and pushed through walls. When three workers raising the roof beam fell into a pit, critics divined the hand of God in retaliation for the friary's ruin. Different observers, more favorable perhaps to the cause of art, stressed the workers' survival and took it as a miraculous omen for the theater's future—God's blessing, so to speak, on historical progress. In the short term, it wasn't. In 1823 the theater caught fire and burned to the ground, as onlookers claimed to see in the rising smoke “the face of a monstrous Franciscan.”

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 3 , May 2015 , pp. 787 - 798
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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