Donington : Shaun Tyas, 2015.
XV, 304 p. : il.
Serie: Tower Studies ; 1 & 2.
/ EN / Libros / Congresos / Castillos – Europa / Fortificaciones – Europa / Torres – Europa
📘 Ed. impresa: ISBN 9781907730405
Cita APA-7: Oram, Richard D. (2015). A House That Thieves Might Knock at : proceedings of the 2010 Stirling and 2011 Dundee Conferences on 'The tower as lordly residence' and 'The tower and the household'. Shaun Tyas.
ehuBiblioteka BCG A-728.81 HOU
https://ehu.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1151008848
[…] Eadie herself bemoans the dearth of documentary and archaeological evidence where Irish towers are concerned. Two other papers amply demonstrate just how crucial these are to our understanding and perception of the tower. Shannon Marguerite Fraser and Thomas Addyman's ‘The Price of Ambition: Making the House of Muchalls Fit for Lordship’, combines documentation, standing building and below-ground archaeology to present a cogent re-analysis of a much-studied, but nevertheless still complicated, standing building set within an equally complex landscape. Their erudition leaves the reader distinctly feeling that they know precisely what Andrew Fraser of Stoneywood and Muchalls had in mind when he set about rebuilding his inherited property in the 1580s, how its numerous internal spaces were intended to be used and by whom, and also, to an extent, how the grounds around it – the ‘setting for lordship’ – were developed to enhance his vision. Likewise, Taco Hermans in his ‘Towers and Households: Eating at Polanen Castle’ who benefits from large-scale archaeological excavation, including most importantly results from botanical and zoo-archaeological analyses, to present a highly revealing picture of lordly life at this Dutch castle site around 1300, including such fascinating conclusions as the fact that the lordly family itself only lived there during the winter months, and that their household of servants lived not in the tower itself but in a separate building across the courtyard. As an archaeologist myself, I was left wondering what image of lordly life might have been forthcoming in Eadie's Irish towers had just one of them been excavated.
In his introduction, the editor, Richard Oram, articulates why and how ‘Turris’ came about – namely, a frustration borne of the fact that our current understanding of the structures we today describe as ‘tower houses’ is still inextricably linked with ‘general surveys of medieval military or militarised architecture’ – namely castles – and as such are regarded ‘primarily as a military artefact or an exercise in military engineering’. Well, this collection of papers certainly goes some way to correcting that perception, focussing the reader's attention on the non-military function of ‘towers’. From the very outset of the castle's emergence in the eleventh century, as Pamela Marshall so eloquently demonstrates, the overtly ‘military’ towers (donjons) that lay at the core of these first castles were ‘primarily vehicles for the display of power’, where ‘security was not deemed to be a priority’, and whose ‘architecture suggests a predominantly ceremonial function’. All the other papers reinforce this ‘non-military’ image of the ‘tower’, each in its own, special way. Even Scotland's mightily impressive Doune Castle, in Stirlingshire, for long depicted by architectural historians as ‘representative of a particular vision of a militarised aristocratic society in which nobles employed large forces of mercenary retainers’ is persuasively repackaged by Oram, an historian, as a ‘symbolic projection of status and authority’. […]
In his introduction, the editor, Richard Oram, articulates why and how ‘Turris’ came about – namely, a frustration borne of the fact that our current understanding of the structures we today describe as ‘tower houses’ is still inextricably linked with ‘general surveys of medieval military or militarised architecture’ – namely castles – and as such are regarded ‘primarily as a military artefact or an exercise in military engineering’. Well, this collection of papers certainly goes some way to correcting that perception, focussing the reader's attention on the non-military function of ‘towers’. From the very outset of the castle's emergence in the eleventh century, as Pamela Marshall so eloquently demonstrates, the overtly ‘military’ towers (donjons) that lay at the core of these first castles were ‘primarily vehicles for the display of power’, where ‘security was not deemed to be a priority’, and whose ‘architecture suggests a predominantly ceremonial function’. All the other papers reinforce this ‘non-military’ image of the ‘tower’, each in its own, special way. Even Scotland's mightily impressive Doune Castle, in Stirlingshire, for long depicted by architectural historians as ‘representative of a particular vision of a militarised aristocratic society in which nobles employed large forces of mercenary retainers’ is persuasively repackaged by Oram, an historian, as a ‘symbolic projection of status and authority’. […]
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