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The White Mantle of Churches. Architecture, Liturgy, and Art around the Millennium. Edited by Nigel Hiscock. [International Medieval Research, Volume 10: Art History Subseries 2.] (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers. 2003. Pp. xix, 283. Paperback.)
One intriguing issue facing medieval historians is whether the passing of the millennium in the year 1000 had any connection with the birth of Romanesque architecture. Nobody can deny that the early years of the eleventh century brought a new and more ambitious approach to building, something that the contemporary chronicler Rodulf Glaber appeared to sense in his famous comment about the world "shrugging off the burden of the past" and "cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches." But was the chronicler providing a literal description of church building or was the phrase "white mantle of churches" merely a metaphor for a new world order, brought about by monastic reform and political stability? The interpretation of Glaber's comments lies at the heart of several of the essays in this impressively produced collection, nine out of fourteen of which were delivered as papers at the Leeds medieval conference in a session designed to mark the year...