Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin (Victoria and Albert Museum): ‘Material memories of the guildsman: crafting communal identities in early modern London’
During a century of acute religious and political uncertainty, when institutional identities were highly fluid, the visual and the material were essential mediums, for artisanal guilds in particular, to articulate communal histories and personal memorials. Recent analyses of early modern English guild culture have stressed the significance of the establishment of civic forms of communal memory in a post-Reformation landscape; including the creation of a secular urban mythology, the employment of civic regalia and the display of civic portraiture (R. Tittler, 1998; 2007). However, a closer consideration of the relationship between gifting, materiality and the memorial culture of the craft guild might challenge this clear distinction between pre-and-post-Reformation interpretations of the past. The use of material culture as a form of personal memorial within the communal guild hall had particular connotations for artisanal communities which were highly attuned to craft skills, techniques and materials. Physical gifts arranged throughout the building might have spoken simultaneously of artisanal expertise, material values, civic worth and fraternal spirituality.
This paper will consider the significance of material traces and memories for two particular communities of skilled craftsmen in early modern London: the Armourers’ and Carpenters’ guilds. Though each case study represents an attempt, within a competitive political and artisanal environment, to enshrine personal memory in the collective guild consciousness, the material and spatial circumstances of each were quite distinct. The donation to the Armourers’ in 1528 of a polychromed oak sculpture of St. George, clad in miniature iron armour, crafted by the benefactor himself, demonstrates how personal artisanal virtuosity could be inextricably linked to a communal mnemonic of late-medieval devotional practices. By contrast, the commissioning of a frieze of wall paintings across the high end of the Carpenters’ hall in the early 1570s, depicting the role of the carpenters throughout biblical history, reveals the way in which the artisanal skills of another guild, in this case the Painter Stainers’, might be deployed as a means of making a complex statement about personal status, spiritual legitimacy and communal craft memories.