Building Vienna

Project Information

BV

Grant agreement ID: 895794

DOI

10.3030/895794

Project closed

EC signature date 28 February 2020

Start date 1 October 2020

End date 30 January 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 174 167,04

EU contribution

€ 174 167,04

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BV (Building Vienna)

Reporting period: 2020-10-01 to 2022-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In towns across Europe, the late Middle Ages were characterised not only by economic, social and political instability often to the point of violence and civil war but also by architectural creations of a magnificent scale and quantity. This remarkable paradox is only rarely noted by scholars and typically discussed within the borders of modern nation states and without reference either to the continental context or to social or political theory. This project takes an exceptionally useful case study, Vienna, and does so from a deliberately comparative and theoretical perspective. During the later Middle Ages nearly every church in Vienna was extended, embellished or rebuilt, including the vast Stephansdom, despite – or perhaps because of – the city’s intense civic and political instability.
This project aims to provide an explanation for this paradoxical situation, or more specifically, for the specific economic and political conditions that determined its manifestation in Vienna by contrasting them to those that enabled a similar building boom in another European capital, London. By reflecting on the particularities of Viennese socioeconomic and architectural history in the long fifteen century, it aims to model the relationship between changes in civic politics and architectural production that can be used for future scholars of urban life across the European Middle Ages. Although its ambitions are to profoundly shaped the field of medieval historical research, it offers a tool and a perspective that can be applied to our own time as we try to understand how urban life is constituted today.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Work carried out for BV is best grouped under preparatory, primary source research, the production of deliverables and dissemination activities.

To prepare to carry out the primary research for this project, I immersed myself in the secondary literature about medieval Vienna, and especially its economy, politics, society and architecture, understanding the main debates, scholarly consensuses and available primary sources. I discovered through this process that more discursive sources were available to me than most scholars had realised – discoveries that would later lead to my addition work on gender in the history of Vienna’s architecture.
I also read widely in comparative methodologies, socio-political theory and gender theory that I could then apply in the next stage of my research. In particular I also gained expertise in Jewish history and in the relationship between Christian and Jewish architecture in this period.
I also developed my German skills, attaining C2 German at the University’s Language Centre, took Latin classes, learnt paleography skills for archvial sources, taught my Mittelhochdeutsch and attended project leadership courses. I also joined, and regularly attended events at the Verein für Geschichte der Stadt Wien; the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History; the Center for Austrian Studies; and the Verband österreichischer Kunsthistorikerinnen und Kunsthistoriker.

The next step was to conduct primary source research in archives around Vienna and to read and translate other important chronicles that I had discovered during my preparatory work. This included both exciting discoveries and disappointing ones. I realised early on that the building accounts at the Stephensdom were an exceptional source for both economic and political history, and that chronicle or other literary evidence would be much more useful than I had realised; however the taxation data I had hoped to use was hopelessly partial and would reveal little about the economic basis of building work. While lockdowns kept me out of the archives, I also worked hard to develop new methodological and conceptual focussed for my work, reading widely around both social theory (including Marx, Durkheim, Foucault and Reckwitz) and the approaches that older generations of scholars had taken to the relationship between social and architectural history in Europe. This would ultimately lead to some of the most important research outputs that I would make in the project (see the next section).

The next step was to produce my research deliverables, which would, in fact, become more extensive than those I had proposed. In total, this included completing four major journal articles, three of which have already been accepted by major journals, and one is currently under review. This process of planning, drafting and editing, then revising in light of comments by peer reviewers occupied much of my time. I also wrote a Training Plan, Ethics Statement and Data Management Plan.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Building Vienna has exceeded its ambitions, providing a ground breaking comparative study of Vienna and London that came to exceed the boundaries of both cities and to include almost the entirety of Latin Europe, and to provide a radical new theoretical approach to the discipline that will be of use to scholars of many different times and places.
Although Vienna and London are superficially similar in so far as both were large, European cities that experience both considerable church building and civic unrest during the later Middle Ages, BV found that they represented a profound difference in their architectural politics. BV demonstrated a sharp contrast between the centralised politics of Vienna and the distributed powers of London in the oversight of architectural production. It showed that this division, never before identified, can be generalised across the continent, with Spain, northern France and some cities in the Low Countries following the ‘London’ model and cities elsewhere following the 'Vienna' model. This marks a radical new observation into architectural politics at a continental level, that will shape national research for decades to come.
BV extended its focus to the theoretical underpinnings to the study of the relationship between architecture, politics and economics in an article that will appear in the Journal of Medieval History. It surveyed the immense influence of two thinkers, Marx and Durkheim, on scholars of the politics of medieval architecture and argued that these approaches had failed to identify architectural production as constitutive, rather than representative, of medieval society. BV argued that future historians should turn to practice theory instead, showing how it could transform contemporary understanding of the nature of the medieval building site in Vienna and elsewhere.
BV exceeded its aspirations in two further ways, however, by explicitly considering religious and gendered discrimination in the politics of medieval Vienna, using often overlooked sources. One publication considered the ways in which Jewish architecture was destroyed - or maintained while dispensing with its functions - in medieval Austria. I also highlighted the many references to the city's architecture made by Agnes Blannbekin, one of very few female writers (probably, indeed, of a peasant background) in medieval Vienna. Another article looked at the ways that the city's churches were regulated to exclude women and suggested how she managed to subvert this. This article will be published in Medieval Religious Cultures in 2023. Not only does this restore a lost female voice to the history of city, it also highlights for the first time that gender was one of the major political divisions of medieval architectural history.

The interior of St Stephen's, showing it in use. © Bwag/CC-BY-SA-4.0.