Monday, March 27, 2006
2005-2006/048
Art historian visits U. of I. April 7 to review
history of French medieval abbey at Cluny
URBANA—Janet T. Marquardt, professor of art history at Eastern Illinois University, will give a lecture entitled, “The Ruined Abbey: Romantic Memory and French Patrimony at Cluny,” on Friday, April 7, at 2 p.m., in Room G-13, Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana.
The lecture, sponsored by the U. of I. Department of French, is free and open to the public.
In her talk, Marquardt will discuss the medieval abbey of Cluny, which was nearly entirely demolished after monastic orders were disbanded during the French Revolution of 1789.
The ruins that remained were of little interest to the town of Cluny until late in the nineteenth century when a popular reanimation of both Christian ritual and medieval pageantry caused leaders to organize celebrations commemorating events from the abbey’s heyday.
Marquardt asserts that by analyzing how the town inhabitants used these festivals to form a collective memory of their past, scholars are better equipped to understand the way cultural heritage is shaped everywhere by effective conservation, management, and marketing of the sites. |
