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Mont Saint Michel Reveals New Secrets
From https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/mont-saint-michel-reveals-new-secrets
Despite its uniform appearance, the abbey founded in the 8th century is a veritable architectural kaleidoscope, revealing layer upon layer of constructions, demolitions, and reconstructions. © Gédéon Programmes
Mont Saint Michel Reveals New Secrets
03.08.2018, by Laure Cailloce
The Mont Saint Michel was thought to have revealed all its secrets. Yet a group of historians and archaeologists, armed with the latest technologies, are taking advantage of a restoration project to shed new light on the history of this iconic monument, which stretches back more than a thousand years.
It is one of the world’s most famous landmarks. Every year, 2.5 million visitors storm the Mont Saint Michel, a tidal island off the coast of Normandy and a protected historical monument since 1874. Yet despite its seemingly homogenous architecture, the abbey, which was founded in the 8th century by Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, and became a powerful Benedictine monastery in the 10th century, is a structural kaleidoscope. It took more than a thousand years, and layer upon layer of constructions, demolitions and reconstructions to make it what it is today—a historical conundrum! However, it was only two decades ago that scientists, mainly historians and archaeologists, began to explore the monument dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel.
“For a long time, we presumed that the history of the Mont Saint Michel had all been written,” notes Yves Gallet, professor of medieval art history at the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne. “In the 17th century, the monks of the Congregation of Saint Maur, who had just settled there, retraced the entire history of the site since its founding. This manuscript, published in the 19th century, was an especially precious resource because the monks had access to medieval archives that have since been destroyed during the 1944 bombing of Saint Lô, in Normandy.” In the late 1990s, the decision was made to restore the maritime character of the Mont Saint Michel, and a large-scale refurbishment project was launched, rekindling interest in the monument and leading to the first new scientific discoveries.
The enigma of the early Christian church
The Chapelle Notre Dame Sous Terre (the Underground Chapel of Our Lady), open to visitors only on rare guided tours, is one of the island’s most intriguing features. “Everyone agrees that it is the oldest part of the monastery, with its brick walls typical of buildings from the first millennium,” archaeologist Christian Sapin recounts. “But was it the early Christian church erected in the 8th century, or a construction from the 9th or 10th centuries?” A specialist in medieval architecture at the ARTEHIS1 laboratory, Sapin dated parts of the edifice—the first such studies ever conducted on the site. The hundred or so bricks analyzed in the 2000s using three different techniques—carbon-14, archaeomagnetism and thermoluminescence, carried out jointly with the IRAMAT2 —revealed that the double-naved chapel was built partly in the first half of the 10th century and partly in the second half. Therefore, it cannot have been Aubert’s original church.
...
03.08.2018, by Laure Cailloce
The Mont Saint Michel was thought to have revealed all its secrets. Yet a group of historians and archaeologists, armed with the latest technologies, are taking advantage of a restoration project to shed new light on the history of this iconic monument, which stretches back more than a thousand years.
It is one of the world’s most famous landmarks. Every year, 2.5 million visitors storm the Mont Saint Michel, a tidal island off the coast of Normandy and a protected historical monument since 1874. Yet despite its seemingly homogenous architecture, the abbey, which was founded in the 8th century by Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, and became a powerful Benedictine monastery in the 10th century, is a structural kaleidoscope. It took more than a thousand years, and layer upon layer of constructions, demolitions and reconstructions to make it what it is today—a historical conundrum! However, it was only two decades ago that scientists, mainly historians and archaeologists, began to explore the monument dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel.
“For a long time, we presumed that the history of the Mont Saint Michel had all been written,” notes Yves Gallet, professor of medieval art history at the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne. “In the 17th century, the monks of the Congregation of Saint Maur, who had just settled there, retraced the entire history of the site since its founding. This manuscript, published in the 19th century, was an especially precious resource because the monks had access to medieval archives that have since been destroyed during the 1944 bombing of Saint Lô, in Normandy.” In the late 1990s, the decision was made to restore the maritime character of the Mont Saint Michel, and a large-scale refurbishment project was launched, rekindling interest in the monument and leading to the first new scientific discoveries.
The enigma of the early Christian church
The Chapelle Notre Dame Sous Terre (the Underground Chapel of Our Lady), open to visitors only on rare guided tours, is one of the island’s most intriguing features. “Everyone agrees that it is the oldest part of the monastery, with its brick walls typical of buildings from the first millennium,” archaeologist Christian Sapin recounts. “But was it the early Christian church erected in the 8th century, or a construction from the 9th or 10th centuries?” A specialist in medieval architecture at the ARTEHIS1 laboratory, Sapin dated parts of the edifice—the first such studies ever conducted on the site. The hundred or so bricks analyzed in the 2000s using three different techniques—carbon-14, archaeomagnetism and thermoluminescence, carried out jointly with the IRAMAT2 —revealed that the double-naved chapel was built partly in the first half of the 10th century and partly in the second half. Therefore, it cannot have been Aubert’s original church.
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