From the Ruine to the Historic Monument - The process of becoming a National Heritage using the example of Cistercian minasteries in England

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Jens Rüffer
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509793488

After the middle of the 19th century, the perception of the abbey ruins changed from an aesthetic symbol to an historical monument, especially among antiquarians and architects. The monastic architecture was now discussed in the context of the Cistercian Consuetudines, which led to the question of the arrangement of the cloister buildings, which Matthew Bloxam first posed in 1849 and Edmund Sharpe answered in 1871 with the thesis of the „Model Plan“. Thomas Micklethwaite corrected Sharpeʼs ideal plan in 1882 by resorting to the Ecclesiastica Officia. The second innovation was the monographic treatment of the Cistercian monasteries in the sense of building history by Gordon M. Hills (1871) and Arthur Reeve (1892), whereby Reevesʼ analysis was based on extensive building surveys. These specific measurements thus formed the basis for the interpretation of the building history for the first time. Hope complemented this approach with coloured construction phase plans in his works on Fountains, Kirkstall, and Jervaulx Abbey. With a view to visual documentation, the architectural-historical descriptions were gradually supplemented by photographs towards the end of the 19th century. In architectural history, Sharpe and Micklethwaite were the first to ask about order-specific architectural features. However, it was John Bilson who was the first to place early Cistercian church architecture in England in the European context. Archival materials for a publication on Kirkstall Abbey provide an insight into the disputes about the quality of publication standards. There were discussions about technical terms and their spellings, about the avoidance of redundancies, about the form of the footnotes but also about the quality of the illustrations. This was not only about the fidelity to scale as with Bilson's floor plans, but also about the quality of the photographs, since the camera position could not always be freely chosen, the quality of the light no longer allowed a shot, but also the problem of depth of field with longer exposure times had not yet been solved (halo effect). Towards the end of the 19th century, the west façade in Byland and the entire monastic church in Kirkstall were structurally secured. Both measures are reconstructed on the basis of archival materials and newspaper announcements, whereby the conservation work in Kirkstall under the supervision of the Leeds City Council and the architect Micklethwaite is comparatively well documented and shows a high standard of monument preservation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants