Writing the Materialities of the Past

Cities and the Architectural Topography of Historical Imagination

Sam Griffiths

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138340244
• eBook ISBN: 9780429804052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Writing the Materialities of the Past offers a close analysis of how the materiality of the built environment has been repressed in historical thinking since the 1950s. Author Sam Griffiths argues that the social theory of cities in this period was characterised by the dominance of socio-economic and linguistic-cultural models, which served to impede our understanding of time-space relationality towards historical events and their narration.

The book engages with studies of historical writing to discuss materiality in the built environment as a form of literary practice to express marginalised dimensions of social experience in a range of historical contexts. It then moves on to reflect on England's nineteenth-century industrialization from an architectural topographical perspective, challenging theories of space and architecture to examine the complex role of industrial cities in mediating social changes in the practice of everyday life.

By demonstrating how the authenticity of historical accounts rests on materially emplaced narratives, Griffiths makes the case for the emancipatory possibilities of historical writing. He calls for a re-evaluation of historical epistemology as a primarily socio-scientific or literary enquiry and instead proposes a specifically architectural time-space figuration of historical events to rethink and refresh the relationship of the urban past to its present and future. Written for postgraduate students, researchers and academics in architectural theory and urban studies, Griffiths draws on the space syntax tradition of research to explore how contingencies of movement and encounter construct the historical imagination.

Part I

Contingency in the historiographies of the English Reformation, French Revolution and period of the Industrial Revolution in England

1 Contingency and artifice

I Definitions

This chapter explores the qualities of contingency and artifice in architectural topographic descriptions in the narratives of contrasting events from different epochs of English and French history. The historiographical survey reveals how widely different levels of investment in architectural topographic description are associated with different approaches to historical writing. These approaches do not simply reflect stylistic choices but different ideas about the nature of historical knowledge. The historian’s imaginative response to the problem of representing the specificity of when-where events as a coherent narrative succession is architectural topographically encoded, allowing scope for the play of divergent possibilities and unknowns in the light of sparse and ambiguous source material. The artefactual domain does not give unlimited scope to contingency in the sense that ‘anything’s possible’ but expresses the time-space figurational constraints of a specific historical reality in terms of its contingent possibilities for movement, bodily co-presence and encounter.

In developing this argument I distinguish three kinds of historical contingency in architectural topographic description: chance, programmatic and figurational. Contingency as chance (e.g. an overheard conversation or the taking of a wrong turning) refers to social actions that are essentially unpredictable and least susceptible to contextual or deterministic explanation as to when and where they took place. These may be trivial in themselves or ‘one-off’ events, but that is not to say they do not have important, though quite possibly unintended, consequences. Contingency of programme (e.g. a dance or procession) refers to social actions that are highly codified in advance and which may recur in similar formats at different times and locations. Here the contingent element is relatively constrained but arises from the particular situation of the ritual, namely when-where it actually happened. Figurational contingency (examples might equally include a riot or a process of scientific discovery) refers to the pattern of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter in the architectural topographic field that extends beyond the localized resolution of social action to define a specific higher-order historical event dynamically, in relation to other, lower-order events. These three kinds of contingency are far from being mutually exclusive. In narrative terms both chance actions and programmatic actions constitute relatively localized figurational descriptions that serve to differentiate the apparently random element (contingency as chance) and element of flux in an otherwise predictable pattern (contingency of programme) from the prefigured architectural topographic field of quotidian, and therefore largely generic or routine, past social action. In historiographical terms architectural topographic description can be used to define different kinds of contingency that express the particular figuration of an historical event at contrasting resolutions of time-space.

The historical imagination draws on architectural topographic description to express contingencies and resolve uncertainties in the process of consolidating the discretely located when-where actions of people in the past as nameable historical events. This is historical understanding in narrative mode but it does not necessarily lead to the writing of narrative history. It is the chronotopical quality of narrative in expressing the contingent figuration of historical events that explains its appeal to popular historians, historical novelists and their readers. I distinguish between artifice, where figurational contingency is exploited to assert possible relations between specific when-where actions that would be considered improbable on other grounds, and embellishment where figurational contingency is exploited for scene setting, the addition of period details for contextual or literary effect rather than narrative purpose – quite possibly (though not necessarily) without any evidential basis.¹ If the architectural topographic dimension enables these fictionalizing tropes in historical writing, however, it equally reveals itself as an important source of authenticity in historical writing. This is because architectural topographic description is integral to how the historical imagination figures ‘messy’ patterns of socialized action into narratable historical events. The scholarly practice of history however, cannot stop there. It must critically engage architectural topographic intuitions of when-where relationality with archive evidence and competing historical accounts, such that the contingency admitted by the narration of events is used constructively to extend rather than distort the interpretative field.

These propositions are developed in this chapter through an historiographical analysis of six key events in the histories of the English Reformation in the sixteenth century, the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth-century phase of the Industrial Revolution associated with rapid urbanization of Britain. The events that have been selected are widely referenced in most histories of these paradigmatic episodes of social change, making it possible to compare the architectural topographic descriptions of a range of different historians. The contrast between historical periods and events helps to identify different architectural topographic dimensions of the historical imagination. It was also intended that the selected events, whenever possible, should be those relatively likely to be familiar to the reader, in order to make the theoretical argument more accessible.

II Events of the English Reformation

The marriage of King Henry VIII of England (1491–1547) and his second wife Anne Boleyn (1501-36) is a key episode in any account of English national history. Henry’s desire that his first marriage to the Spanish Catherine of Aragon (1485–1526) should be nullified in order to allow him to marry Anne, eventually led to the separation of the English church from the Roman Catholic church, and the establishment of the Church of England. Two examples from the narrative of their relationship will be used to illustrate how event contingency is expressed through its architectural topographic description. First, the possible initial meeting of Henry and Anne in June 1520 during the diplomatic spectacle known as the Field of Cloth of Gold, offers an example of contingency as chance.² Secondly, Henry and Anne’s dance at Greenwich Palace in December 1526 that marked the beginning of their serious courtship, offers an example of contingency of programme. Given its pivotal role as a catalyst of the English Reformation, a major turning point in national history, the circumstances of Henry and Anne’s liaison before their courtship was formally established from the late 1520s are not only of interest to royal biographers but carry broad historical significance.

Historians have long wondered whether the first meeting of Henry and Anne occurred at the extravagant Field of Cloth of Gold pageant in June 1520 when the courts of Henry VIII and Francis I, King of France, met at a site not far from Calais to compete in diplomacy, sports and conspicuous displays of wealth. Elaborate and highly choreographed occasions such as royal pageants lend themselves to a synchronic description as a kind of visual tableau, replete with details of luxurious residences, sartorial magnificence and excessive consumption, the claret flowing from fountains. Their contemporary renown means that royal spectaculars such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold are likely to be relatively well-documented events. To the cultural historian they offer an almost hyper-real snapshot of a period: its hierarchies, fashions, tastes and neuroses, but in narrative terms they can appear more recessive as it is less clear what significance they hold as events. This is exemplified by a scholarly review of a major academic study of the Field of the Cloth of Gold published in 1969 by historian Joycelyne Russell. The reviewer accused Russell’s work of being “simply antiquarian” on the basis that it offered insufficient interpretation of the significance of the event in the broader political and diplomatic contexts of early sixteenth-century English history (Epperson 1970, 194). Whether or not this is fair criticism of Russell is less important here than how it reveals the difficulty of accommodating the density of impressionistic, material and visual description of an event such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold in the compressed narratives of traditional political history. The choice seems to be between ‘thick’ anthropological description on the one hand and reductive linear narrative on the other.

The potential significance of Henry and Anne’s first mutual encounter taking place at the Field of the Cloth of Gold problematizes this academic division of labour by drawing the historian into a detailed consideration of the architectural topographic specificity of an event narrative that the majority of Tudor historians view as a colourful, static tableau of marginal significance in political and diplomatic terms. In any case, it is far from certain that Anne Boleyn herself was then-there at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It is the particularity of a unique occasion that begs the question; the evidence is at best circumstantial. The consensus of Anne’s biographers is that she probably was present in attendance on Francis I’s wife Queen Claude and hoping to see her sister Mary Boleyn and father Thomas Boleyn, both of whom who attended as members of the English court. Perhaps more to the point for Tudor historians though is it simply does not matter enough to the broader narrative of the English Reformation whether Henry and Anne were introduced in 1520 or not. The possibility of a chance meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold can be safely localized because they had many other opportunities to encounter one another as participants in the rituals of court life after Anne returned to live in England in 1525.

Having said this, if Henry and Anne had become mutually acquainted in June 1520 and if this had been a factor in seeding their subsequent relationship, it would be highly significant given the role of their eventual marriage in precipitating the English Reformation. As the Tudor historian C.S.L Davies (1988, 13) noted, it would be “absurd to underestimate the importance of chance” in the unfolding of historical events, for all the influence of socio-economic and cultural determinants. And for the popular historian or novelist, would not the Field of the Cloth of Gold be the perfect dramatic setting for such an encounter? But if there is a theatrical backdrop and a genuine possibility of bodily co-presence on the site, what is the credible narrative of any possible encounter? Russell states the historian’s dilemma as follows:

[Anne in 1520] would have been about 19, and it may be that her dark but striking beauty was noticed by Henry of England. We have no evidence, but inevitably speculation is rife.

(Russell 1969, 126)

In the absence of any certainty all the historical imagination has to work with is the architectural topographic description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a temporary settlement at which the two protagonists may have been bodily co-present. The English and French encampments sharing a central ceremonial space, the arrangement of the royal apartments, the ceremonials of access to their residences describe a dynamic encounter field that readily translates into particular narrative figures that makes the unlikely meeting between Henry and Anne a coherent proposition in imaginative terms; an event that could have happened. It necessitates a research process involving cross referencing such contextual evidence as is available to evaluate the likelihood that it actually did.

Russell’s study traces ‘speculation’ as to Henry and Anne’s encounter to the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874). For Michelet it was a meeting “fraught with significance”, on the basis that it would precipitate the English separation from Rome – a development for which as a protestant, he had some sympathy (Russell 1969, 126). Michelet viewed the contingent circumstances of their first meeting less as chance so much as divine providence. Of the occasion when Henry went to dine with Queen Claude, Michelet writes:

This prince […] found her in the middle of that beautiful crowd of ladies and damsels. Was he so blind that he did not see the youngest and the most charming? Has the queen forgotten to point out to him that a child of fourteen³, beautiful, witty, graceful, advanced, and well educated, was one of her subjects? It seems unlikely to me.

(Michelet 1876, 219, author’s translation from the French)

The Victorian archivist and popular historian Alexander Ewald (1842–1891) subsequently speculated as to Anne’s presence “under canvas” in the tents belonging to the French court on the slopes outside the abandoned town of Arde where the main ceremonial would take place (Ewald 1883, 445).

On arriving at the lodgings of the Queen of France, he was met at the entrance by the most beautiful of the ladies of the household dressed in cloth of gold. The weakness of Henry for the sex did not permit him to hurry over this part of the ceremony; he passed slowly along the line of fair dames—was Ann Boleyn among them? —and amused himself by critically inspecting its ranks. […] At the end of the corridor he was met by the mother of Francis “dressed as a widow,” who did him reverence and led him to the apartments of her daughter-in-law. (450-51)

Simon Schama in A History of Britain presents the reader with an evocative sketch of the Field of the Cloth of Gold tableau before continuing that “somewhere in the middle of this over-dressed mêlée was the young woman who would bring down […] quite inconceivably, the Roman Church in England” (Schama 2000, 244). Schama is understandably equivocal about whether the two actually met at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He allows the possibility they were introduced while declaring that more likely Henry’s attention was “engaged elsewhere” at this time.

Historians who admit the possibility of Henry and Anne’s meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold use architectural topographic description of the occasion to shift from largely synchronic, illustrative accounts of the pageant to descriptions of the routines and rituals of movement, bodily co-presence and encounter that co-opt Anne herself into the narrative of English history at a definable point in time and space. For Michelet (1876, 215) Henry “found” Anne in Queen Claude’s accommodation. For Ewald, Henry observed her in a line of women as he moved along a corridor towards the threshold of Queen Claude’s apartments. Schama, with less precision, imagines Anne emerging from the inchoate noise of the “mêlée” to position herself at the centre of the action. Of course each of these historians is alluding to an almost intangible occurrence. It could never be established for sure, even in so well a documented event as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, whether one human being (Henry) noticed another human being (Anne) so as to differentiate her from any number of other females of the French court. However attractive this narrative is in literary or historiographical terms, the architectural topographic field in itself can only prefigure narrative possibilities in the historical imagination. It is not enough to rely on establishing the probability of mutual co-awareness of Henry and Anne in the absence of specific evidence – still less without considering what any co-awareness may have meant personally to these individuals at this time. But if architectural topographic description cannot tell us exactly what did happen, it is essential to the imagining of the what might have happened were the evidence there to confirm or deny it, and also what could not have happened. For where the shape of the encounter field precludes the bodily co-presence of two people then it follows that any attempt to imagine and thereby narrate such a meeting must be logically incoherent as history.

I have used the event or (more likely) non-event of Henry and Anne’s meeting at the field as an example of ‘contingency as chance’ because an unscheduled encounter between two people producing mutual co-awareness is essentially an unpredictable event. It follows that it is the most likely of my three categories of contingency to stimulate the sceptical question ‘would history have been written differently if it were possible to establish whether this encounter had/ had not taken place’? I have already explained how the historiography of the relationship of Henry and Anne establishes that any meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold can be consigned to localized significance; they were probably introduced to each other at a later date. On the other hand, the possible presence of Anne at the pageant in 1520 is not a possibility that more recent biographies, both of Anne (Bernard 2010) and h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Lists of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the architectural topography of historical imagination
• PART I: Contingency in the historiographies of the English Reformation, French Revolution and period of the Industrial Revolution in England
• PART II: Writing history as a city
• Appendix A A notation for the architectural topographic sequencing of texts
• Appendix B Synopsis of Cinderella
• Appendix C Additional architectural topographic sequences from Cinderella
• Appendix D Search terms and subcategories used in toponemic analysis
• References
• Index