Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in Cambridge explores the archaeology, art, and architecture of Cambridge in the Middle Ages, a city marked not only by its exceptional medieval university buildings but also by remarkable parish churches, monastic architecture, and surviving glass, books, and timber work.
The chapters in this volume cover a broad array of medieval, and later, buildings and objects in the city and its immediate surrounds, both from archaeological and thematic approaches. In addition, a number of chapters reflect on the legacy and influence medieval art and architecture had on the later city. Along with medieval colleges, chapels, and churches, buildings in villages outside the city are discussed and analysed. The volume also provides detailed studies of some of the most important master masons, glassmakers, and carpenters in the medieval city, as well as of patrons, building types, and institutional development. Both objects and makers, patrons, and users are represented by its contents. The volume sets the archaeological and art historical analysis in its socio-economic context; medieval Cambridge was a city located on major trade routes and with complex social and institutional differences.
In an academic field increasingly shaped by interdisciplinary interest in material culture, Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in Cambridge marks a major new contribution to the field, focussing on the complexity, variety, and specificity of the buildings and objects that define our understanding of Cambridge as a medieval city.
About the Author: Gabriel Byng holds a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship at the University of Vienna and was previously a research fellow at the University of Cambridge. His first monograph, Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages, was published in 2017.
Helen Lunnon is Head of Learning at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Her fascination with the mutual influence of people, places, and things is explored in East Anglian Church Porches and their Medieval Context, published in 2020.
