Medieval Ironwork in Sweden by Lennart Karlsson

Abstract

514 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Medieval Ironwork in Sweden. 2 vols. By Lennart Karlsson. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1988. Pp. 437 + 615; illustrations, bibliography. Skr 655.00. To some extent Medieval Ironwork in Sweden is misleadingly titled. It deals only with decorative ironwork and overwhelmingly with the decorative ironwork on church doors. Lennart Karlsson describes a few examples of medieval ironwork on grilles, chests, and cupboards, but he consciously excludes other examples of decorative ironwork, such as chandeliers and candlesticks. The book covers medieval Swedish church door ironwork within the modern boundaries of Sweden for the period 1150-1520. The first volume provides a descriptive account of surviving examples of this ironwork and its cultural, architectural, technological, and international context. The second volume is a catalog of 536 surviving examples of Swedish medieval ironwork arranged alphabetically by location and illustrated with 1,120 photographs and drawings. Karlsson’s work is as comprehensive and as complete a work on medieval Swedish church door ironwork as we are likely to see. He covers every possible aspect of the subject in considerable depth. For example, little is known about the smiths who fabricated medieval church ironwork. But Karlsson devotes seven pages to providing readers with everything that is known or can be conjectured about them. In addition, he discusses in some depth medieval Swedish church architecture, the provincial or regional characteristics of the surviving ironwork, the iconographic patterns used, the carpentry to which the iron was attached, and the paints, textiles, and other materials used in conjunction with iron on medieval church doors. Moreover, he places these discussions in both a cultural and an international context. In the cultural area, for example, he deals with the role of the church door and particularly its wrought-iron ring handle in the medieval right of asylum. Similarly, he provides a comprehensive review of ironwork on medieval church doors in Denmark, Norway, Finland, England, Germany, and France to pro­ vide a comparison with Swedish ironwork and to deal with the question of foreign influence versus domestic design. The focus of Karlsson’s work is overwhelmingly on the aesthetic elements of medieval Swedish church door ironwork, but some of the discussions are of potential interest to historians of technology. First, the aesthetic and decorative nature of most surviving Swedish iron­ work provides evidence to support Cyril Stanley Smith’s long-held contention of the importance of aesthetic elements in the emergence of metallurgy. In reviewing the photographs in Karlsson’s catalog, one can hardly avoid being struck by the importance of aesthetics in the early use of iron. Second, Karlsson’s discussion of the role of the Cistercians in the early development of the iron industry in Sweden is quite good, providing additional evidence of the role tbe Cistercians’ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 515 centralized structure played in diffusing both technological and artistic innovations in medieval Europe. Third, Karlsson provides some new evidence of the importance of monasteries in diversifying the use of waterpower beyond grain milling. He argues convincingly that in certain regions of Sweden waterpower was used on a signifi­ cant scale in the medieval period by some monasteries for iron production (vol. 1, pp. 213—15). In addition, Karlsson provides extended and well-illustrated discussions of iron forging and carpen­ try practices in medieval Europe. On the other hand, the section on the techniques used to produce the wrought iron that went into medieval Swedish ironwork is too brief and based on questionable assumptions. The generally accepted date and place for the emergence of the blast furnace are the 15th century and Flanders. But Karlsson accepts contested claims made by several recent authorities that blast furnaces emerged far earlier in Europe, perhaps as early as the 12th century. He suggests further that some of the larger examples of iron construction from late in the medieval period presuppose the use of the blast furnace (vol. 1, p. 362). But he offers no evidence based on the surviving examples of medieval Swedish ironwork that he has cataloged to support this contention. This is, I suspect, because Karlsson made his judgments relating to Swedish medieval ironwork largely on the basis of aesthetic characteristics; he did not...