| Traditional studies focusing on the spectacular building boom that took place across Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries have often concentrated on the shared formal characteristics belonging particular regional "schools." This dissertation demonstrates the advantages of adopting a new perspective on this eleventh- and twelfth-century architecture. To achieve this goal, the text focuses on a case-study group of monuments---located within an area bordered by the south-central French cities of Limoges, Perigueux and Cahors---that does not correspond with any one of these traditional schools, but that did share many common communities of interest in the High Middle Ages.; This break with academic tradition is not passed over lightly; the text begins with a thorough examination of the nineteenth-century conditions of creation of this older, regional approach, in order to understand more fully its original utility and present problems. Since this method of approaching this architecture was so thoroughly based on the notion of connecting a monument with its regional geography, the present study continues by addressing the ways in which the inhabitants of eleventh- and twelfth-century south-central France imagined and experienced their own geography, in an attempt to understand more clearly how geography may, or may not, have interacted with this architecture. The text then proceeds to investigate the ways in which this particular group of monuments displays a complex balance of formal similarity and difference, and what these forms might have implied about the social, religious, economic and political functions of architecture within the different communities of interest that inhabited the case-study region during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The study concludes that the formal differences of these monuments should not be ignored in favor of their similarities, and that their variety of form encourages many different types of imagined meanings.; The arguments found in the text have as their foundation a computerized database, attached to this project as a catalogue, that indexes the 292 eleventh- and twelfth-century structures considered in the text. This database contains over 3,000 digital photos, as well as spatial diagrams and individual bibliographies for each monument. |
