Join us for another seminar in our series co-supported by the Institute of Historical Research and organised in collaboration with the Oxford Architectural History Seminar. For more information on the series click here. Meg Bernstein examines an understudied parochial monument to reveal a complex social network inscribed in stone.
In the thirteenth century, a new, low-level gentry was emerging as a social class in medieval England, and seeking to establish new modes for self promotion. One crucial, but understudied example of this phenomenon is the parish church of Cogenhoe (Northamptonshire) where in the 1270s, Sir Nicholas of Cogenhoe, a knight of modest means and local authority, rebuilt the nave to honor his family and serve as his place of burial. In addition to a set of grotesque heads adorning the column capitals, probably at the patron’s direct request, the masons created a series of heraldic shields which linked Nicholas to other English gentry families. This paper argues that with this lithic heraldry, Nicholas built an elite social network in stone. By including his own arms four times among those of other families, Nicholas ensured his own placement in this elite network; and in leaving one of the shields blank, he shows that even though his relationships had literally been carved in stone, they were not static.
Meg Bernstein is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where she is working on a book on the development of parochial architecture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She earned her PhD in 2019 from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Columbia University. She is a council member of the British Archaeological Association
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