Choirstalls as history-writing - an example from Toledo cathedral

 

As a prefatory note, I will admit that this blogpost uses the term ‘history-writing’ in a very loose sense, since the form for conveying history that I look at here has very little writing in it. However, drawing on Cynthia Hahn’s concept of ‘pictorial hagiography’ – that a saint’s legend can be told through images rather than text – I have decided to embrace the more ample definition of ‘writing’. The argument is, in essence, that choir benches, or choirstalls, in cathedrals and churches can serve as a form of communicating history. This form of communicating history has in turn a function as identity-construction. This is to say that the placement of the history-writing, or history-communication, the media by which history is communicated, and the type of history all serve to contribute towards the construction of a particular identity, be it institutional, ethno-religious, or national.

The inspiration for this blogpost comes from a visit to the cathedral of Toledo, whose choirstalls are the most richly and consummately adorned that I have ever seen. Two recent blogposts have also been concerned with choirstalls, but what I saw in Toledo was on a very different level of craft and communication. These choirstalls contain an array of elements typical of medieval decorations – be they in ink, paint, wood or stone – but they also have a degree of coherence and narrative that is unusual for choirstalls. The cases I have seen in previous travels – Ripon, Lund, Erfurt, for instance – are all exquisitely detailed and draw on the same iconographic programme and its stock figures, such as the dragon, the wild man of the woods, the mermaid, and so on. However, in these instances I have not been able to detect anything resembling a consecutive and coherent narrative.         

Overview of the arrangement of the choirstalls of Toledo cathedral  

The fall of one city whose name I have been unable to identify. 

Above the episode we see decorations that combine vegetation and animal life.

The choirstalls of Toledo cathedral are markedly different, because there is a story that is being told, and one can follow that story by going from seat to seat. The story in question is the conquest of the Kingdom of Granada, the last pocket of Muslim Spain which fell to the combined forces of Castilla and Leon towards the end of the fifteenth century, and which culminated with the fall of Granada in 1491. This campaign is commonly known as the Reconquest, but given that a) this is a much-abused term in right-wing corners of the world, and b) the area had been under Muslim rule for so many generations that it is difficult to justify the term ‘reconquest’ rather than ‘conquest’, I will avoid this term here.

That the choirstalls of Toledo cathedral are used to tell this story, and that this is the story being told, is significant, as it can most likely be explained by Toledo’s fame as a border city between Christian and Muslim Spain, and as a city particularly marked by the co-existence of Jews, Muslims and Christians. When the Granada Wars were carried out towards the end of the fifteenth century, Toledo had been under Christian control for four centuries, and when these choirstalls were constructed – seemingly in the course of the sixteenth century – Jews and Muslims had either been expelled or forcefully converted long ago. This means that the story of the Granada Wars told in these choirstalls are not contemporary events as such, but a generational touchstone that served as a point of reference and as a point of identity-construction of Christian Spain long after it was finished. Or rather, it is perhaps more correct to say that the choirstalls were constructed in a time when the aftermath and consequences of the Granada Wars were still strongly felt, for instance in the persecution of individuals suspected of being Jews and Muslims, and the continuous distrust in converts. Since the Granada Wars had defined Christian Spanish identity with such force, it is no wonder that a city so far removed from Granada, and who had long ago undergone its own takeover by Christian rulers, would still use this story as an identity-forming element. Moreover, that this story is being told through choirstalls also points us to its more specific function as a form of identity-construction, namely that it served as a constant reminder for the cathedral chapter and the community of clerics that the antagonism against Islam was the order of the day. We can imagine the stalls being used as both constant reminders to those who knew the story, but perhaps also as a way to educate choir boys about the foundation for the bellicose rhetoric wielded in those days. 

It is easy enough to recognise the story that is being told, and it is easy enough to recognise the purpose of that story. The form of communicating the story, however, might be less straightforward, as the choirstalls comprise a complex assemblage of iconographic features, which may or may not contribute towards a whole. The reason for this difficulty is simply the question of whether all the iconographic features pertaining to one particular seat can be seen as a communicative unit, or whether we have one unit telling the story of the Granada Wars, and other units that communicate other messages. In other words, the big question has to do with coherence. The many details carved into the choirstalls all conveyed some sort of message, whether it was by allusion to common iconographic tropes, to stories, or to biblical narratives. The scenes that depict the taking of a specific town or city under Muslim rule is part of a coherent story across the choirstalls. But the question is whether each episode is somehow iconographically connected to the other elements of that particular seat. I have no definite answer to this question as of now, and it would require its own book-length study to approach some sort of conclusion. In the following, therefore, I will only present the challenges of trying to recognise that kind of coherence.   

For each seat of the choirstall, the episode from the Granada Wars is the most striking feature and is level with the head. In each case, the name of the city in the episode is marked in writing, and in the picture below we see the conquest of Ronda. Atop and below the panel containing the episode, we find decorations drawn from the well-established iconographic programme of medieval art, which consists of vegetation, hybrid creatures, ridiculous scenes, battles between beasts, between beasts and humans, and between humans, and also stock characters like the wild man or the mermaid. There seems to be some sort of pattern in that below each episode from the Granada Wars were sets of two beasts of the same type fighting each other. But whether this pattern is on a meaning-bearing, or semiotic, level different from the episode from the Granada Wars – a level that runs along the choirstalls but independent of other levels in the decoration – or whether there is some relationship between these decorations and the taking of the town, is a question that deserves a study in its own right. 

Below the episode we find two beasts of the same kind battling each other. 

On the next level, a wild man is battling, and losing, to what looks like a bear.

The next strata of the seat is at shoulder or chest level, and here we see battle scenes between various stock figures of medieval art. These battle scenes follow a coherent line across each choirstall and thereby connects each seat. The big question, however, is whether the coherence is not only horizontal, but whether there also is some sort of vertical coherence, i.e., a coherence between the different pictorial levels. This same question applies to the last two pictorial levels as well: the back of the seat which is covered with non-figurative patterns, and the underside of the seat itself – which is shown in an upright position when the seat is empty – where we find figures or scenes with figures drawn from the well-established and centuries-old repertoire of medieval iconography. Moreover, between each seat, a figure is protruding from the panel that divides one seat from the next. While each of these levels, and while each of these scenes or figures or assemblages carry meaning and convey some sort of message or allusion, it is difficult to assess whether we can see them as contributing towards one and the same message. On the one hand, these various scenes all serve to communicate prevalent ideas about the created world: that it was inhabited by various creatures, that it was told through various stories, that it consisted of battles and dichotomies. In that sense, we might argue a universal message in the choirstalls, much the same way that an encyclopaedia can be said to provide a unified story in that it seeks to describe the world, or a discipline, or a phenomenon. The question is whether the history-writing conveyed through the episodes depicting the Granada Wars is somehow aided by or connected to the allusions, allegories and stories that surround the episodes. At present I have no idea, and I suspect that there is no overall coherence, but I would love to see a study in which the seats and the decorations were examined in detail to assess whether such a coherence could make sense. 

All the various levels in one picture

What is clear, however, is that the inclusion of episodes from the Granada Wars in such a holy space as the cathedral choir, with such an influential audience as the cathedral chapter and with the telling of this history within a space filled with various other stories well-known to the medieval Latin Christian eye, the Granada Wars are both situated within a wider universal frame – a frame represented by the iconographical tropes that are universal in their agelessness – and within the community of cathedral clerics. Such a placement provides a powerful potential for identity-construction, reminding the cathedral clerics that they are Spanish Christians whose identity is linked with the recent paradigm shift of the Granada Wars.