Orford Castle, Nostalgia and Sophisticated Living

Abstract

Medieval architecture, considered specifically as architecture, has been unevenly treated by its historians. The vast majority of the literature is devoted to churches, for the most part large cathedral or monastic churches. The implication that other types of building either do not survive or are not architecture is patently false since there are many of them, and not a few manifest a degree of complexity in design and detail equal to a major ecclesiastical building. In particular there has been no strong tradition among architectural historians for discussing the planning, iconography and aesthetics of eleventh- and twelfth-century secular structures. Perhaps this is because they fit uneasily within the style categories of Romanesque and Gothic, which were largely devised and developed through the analysis of ecclesiastical buildings.

Gender and medieval archaeology: storming the castle

“…The emphasis has shifted from simply recounting detailed architectural descriptions towards integrated, interpretative approaches that view the spatial arrangement of buildings as a reflection and enactment of cultural ideologies (e.g. Coulson 1976; Heslop 1991; Fairclough 1992; Gilchrist 1999; Marshall 2002; Richardson 2003; Mol 2011; O'Keeffe 2015). Subsequently, a new wave of castle studies operating at a landscape-scale have looked beyond the masonry buildings to propose that the castle was only one part of a seigneurial package.…”

Beyond the martial façade: gender, heritage and medieval castles

“…During the 1990s and 2000s, medieval archaeologists, historians and architectural historians began to emphasise more social questions and interpretations. The discipline moved away from understanding medieval castles solely in terms of military power (Heslop 1991;Coulson 1993;Gilchrist 1999). Subsequently, it became widely acknowledged that castles functioned in multiple ways, including as residences, centres of administration as well as statements of power, status and wealth, whilst also performing military functions periodically (Speight 2004).…”