Le Verre de Charlemagne : rencontres méditerranéennes
The so-called ‘Cup of Charlemagne,’ today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Chartres, was kept for centuries in the treasury of the nearby church of the Madeleine de Châteaudun. The enamelled and gilt glass can be dated and localized to Syria at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century; its gilt copper base was added towards the end of the thirteenth century, in France. A number of gilt and enamelled glasses similarly circulated around the Mediterranean during this period, and the roles these objects played in forging relationships between East and West are here demonstrated to be various and complex.  The current project thus aims to retrace the journey taken by the Cup of Charlemagne across continents and across the centuries, with the aim of demonstrating the importance of the object’s double identity as a product of both East and West. Thus, the means by which the Syrian glass was integrated into its new use context in France will be given particular attention. The origin and technique of enamelled and gilded glass in general will first be treated, then the creation of the Cup of Charlemagne in particular, before turning to the historical context for the transfer of this astonishingly fragile glass across the Mediterranean. The study will probe the ‘Christianisation’ of such Islamic objects, and will treat the various metamorphoses they withstood once having reached Western Europe. A variety of other enamelled glasses that similarly reached Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries will be considered alongside the Cup of Charlemagne to enrich and flesh out its history.
Islam Christianisation Enamelled Glass Medieval Islam Christianization Materiality