We are thrilled to announce that the 2025-2026 Schallek Fellowship has been awarded to Jack McCart (University of Toronto). In his words:
The present study, “The Material Cultures of Memory: Death, Patronage, and Self-Presentation in Later-Medieval London,” explores the types of self-presentation that were embedded in Londoners’ activities as patrons, donors, and benefactors. It is interested in questions of how medieval Londoners defined themselves as patrons and sought to shape the posthumous memory of their patronage. It considers here their material interventions, commemorative foundations, and the documentary strategies they used to establish and sustain them. Urban patronage, whether concentrated within the parish or ward or at ecclesiastical sites as prominent as Old St. Paul’s or Greyfriars London (which have attracted considerable scholarly attention), functioned both as an effort to secure the soul’s salvation and as a form of conspicuous social display. Methodologically, therefore, this study takes cues both from the extensive historiography of death and commemoration (in England as well as continental Europe) and more recent interest in the textual, material, and spatial strategies of demarcating status and identity within premodern urban environments. By approaching Londoners’ patronage through the lens of self-presentation and foregrounding its financial bases, it draws attention to how patrons’ and benefactors’ legacies were, then as now, often carefully and deliberately shaped.
The study therefore traces these threads of patronage and self-presentation through Londoners’ building works, material donations, and documentary provisions. In particular it demonstrates that many of their foundations and endowments (such as chantries and collegiate chapels) were gradual and accretive processes, realized in stages over the course of longstanding patronal relationships, whether individual or familial. Some of these works actively, indeed by design, reshaped the religious topography of their parishes or wards even during their founders’ lives. As sites of (perpetual) commemoration and intercession, these foundations were also the recipients of material largesse, including of objects commissioned and displayed during life and repurposed after death, as in the case of armorial textiles, signets and seal-chains that became altar adornments associated posthumously with their patrons. Throughout the study, several individual vignettes, including the patronage of the fourteenth-century London mayor and financier John de Pulteney, serve to draw together these themes and illustrate the processes at play patronal self-presentation.
The relationship between patronage and documentary practice, too, is of interest here, for in a highly commercialized urban milieu that relied on pragmatic literacy, the evidentiary and probative role of the written word became increasingly central to the process and practice of commemoration. By extension, written and documentary forms became central to the kinds of self-presentation that lay at the heart of patrons’ efforts. Londoners sought also to shape their memory through the contracts, indentures, and testamentary stipulations they used to manage their commemorative and intercessory foundations and ensure their perpetual observance. It is partly for this reason that in their patronage of parish churches and local priories they furnished scripts for their identification as founders (fundatores), affixed letters and names to the tombs of their forebears, and integrated the clauses of their wills into devotional sculpture. These memorial modes served both as material reminders of obligation, anchors for intercessory prayer, and means of fixing the terms of their remembrance as benefactors. Where the written word provided the connective link between writing, obligation, and remembrance, such acts were strategies of self-presentation aimed toward eternity.
The study itself relies on in situ consultation of a wide range of materials, mainly archival and manuscript (wills, accounts, inventories, and institutional memoranda and registers) but also material and architectural, particularly where Londoners’ patronage extended outside the city. The Schallek Fellowship will enable me to complete this program of research, and I am therefore deeply grateful to the Schallek estate for making this award possible and to the Medieval Academy of America and the Richard III Society-American Branch for generously supporting my postgraduate work.
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