Worn Stone Research Articles

Charnel-associated burial and monuments in late medieval England: Henry Barton’s effigy and its afterlife at Old St Paul’s Cathedral

In late medieval England, high-status individuals sometimes requested burial and/or memorialisation in association with charnel chapels, which primarily housed the exhumed and redeposited remains of the anonymous collective dead. The monument of Henry Barton (d.1435) in the charnel chapel at Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London, was one such memorial which held distinctive secular as well as religious resonance in context. In order to fully situate its significance, 40 examples of English cathedral, monastic, and parish charnel-associated burials and/or monuments will be identified and explored here for the first time. Their interrogation will furnish a broad understanding of this phenomenon’s meaning and motivation within the context of intercessory belief and mortuary practice in late medieval Catholic England. Further consideration of Barton’s monument will trace its revaluation following the 1547 dissolution of the chantries, which catalysed the widespread destruction of associated structures and material culture. While Barton’s effigy was subsequently destroyed in 1549, an ‘old worn stone’ bearing his name remained visible at the chapel site until c1666. Critical consideration of its form and survival will provide insight into the status of pre-Reformation monuments in the post-Reformation cathedral landscape, as well as the fate of the charnel chapel structure and site itself.

Piedras viajeras. De las misiones a Buenos Aires

El estudio de las piedras y escombro de una pequeña sección de la costa ya totalmente artificial de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, mostró la presencia de dos piedras recién llegadas y muy desgastadas. Por su coloración rojiza, su composición geológica y con la evidencia de tallado manual era de suponer que provenían de la zona de Misiones y que debieron formar parte de uno o dos edificios. Desconocemos de dónde vienen, cómo se hizo ese viaje enorme en distancia y en siglos, pero llegaron en fecha reciente y quedaron sobre la tierra de la costa. Finalmente es solo una curiosidad, deben ser cientos los edificios jesuíticos destruidos en el tiempo y cuyas piedras cayeron al agua; estas dos curiosamente quedaron a la vista a una enorme distancia, y poco antes de salir al océano y perderse para siempre.

Banks and bankers

He was gaunt, hollow cheeked, prematurely aged and panting for breath. His complexion matched the sheets of the hospital bed he lay in. His eyes told me that he knew that he was soon to die. Yet when I examined his chest, his musculature told of an active and physical life. ‘How many men are working there?’, I asked. ‘There are six bankers with eight men and three apprentices’, he replied. It was the first time I had heard the incongruous noun and I queried it; ‘bankers?’ ‘Aye, our workbenches’, he replied. Some hours later I was in Elgin among the ruins of the 14th century cathedral and there in the masons’ workshop I saw the men standing at their bankers, carving the hard local sandstone with air-powered chisels and buffers. They were working from the original mediaeval drawings, carving the intricate tracery to replace worn stone in the windows of the baptistry. They all wore helmet respirators and their tools raised a cloud of fine dust. Measurements showed concentrations of quartz up to 100 times the occupational exposure standard, even grossly exceeding it when measured within the respirator. It did not take long to persuade the management to stop the work. The men knew of …

Walter Pater et la vieillesse : humanité et esthétique de la culture

Old age in Walter Pater's works is the time when the individual has the opportunity to think thoroughly upon life and culture. The feeling of growing old may first engender melancholy and bitterness as one considers all those lost days of youth. However, Pater's characters generally take the opportunity to start again and fulfill their quest of wisdom. Old people are more sympathetic with the sorrows of humankind. Looking back upon their own past, they remember their childhood and their first experiences and reflect on their own identity, on the human condition and on culture. Ageing is also an essential element in the arts, especially in architecture as buildings mature and ripen in the course of years and centuries. Old worn stones, old aesthetic forms are for future generations witnesses of immemorial times, allowing Pater's nineteenth-century arts critic to spiritually restore the past and contribute to the development of culture thoughout the ages.

Worn stones with flat sides all time regularity of the interface

We study the all time regularity of the free-boundary problem associated to the deformation of a compact weakly convex surface Σ in ℝ3, with a flat side, by its Gaussian Curvature. We show that under certain necessary regularity and non-degeneracy initial conditions the interface separating the flat from the strictly convex side, remains smooth on 0<t<Tc, up to the vanishing time Tc of the flat side.