Art and Education: The Medieval Stained Glass of Merton College, Oxford

Merton College, Oxford was among the first academic colleges in England and arguably the most important, in that it became a model directly or indirectly for most subsequent foundations. It rapidly established an international reputation as a centre of intellectual excellence in the natural sciences and, in the fourteenth century, no college contributed more alumni to the elites of church and state. In its fabric, the founder, warden and fellows pioneered a new scholastic architecture and developed monumental images of themselves, as individuals and as a community, often presented in relation to images of the society that they served. Of these images, the stained glass is exceptionally well preserved, especially in the chapel but also elsewhere. Yet, it remains astonishingly unstudied. Indeed, while constructions of institutional identity have been examined fruitfully for other kinds of medieval institution, the relationship between Gothic art and scholasticism has rarely attracted sustained attention, in spite of Erwin Panofsky's famous article on the subject (1951).

This project will provide the first systematic record and interpretation of the stained glass at Merton, in a volume to be published in the British Academy's Corpus Vitrearum series. The materials are outstandingly rich. The glass is among the most extensive of its period to survive in England, and certainly one of the most important collections to survive in either of the English medieval universities. The Merton archives are also exceptionally full, from the thirteenth century onwards, but they have not been explored from this point of view since the 1930s. They have been thoroughly trawled for the present project, yielding new evidence for the production of the college's glass and for the circumstances surrounding it. The book presents the glass within its fullest context, intellectually, institutionally and architecturally, in an extended general introduction and then, in more detail, in the introductions to five chapters, accompanying definitive cataloguing of the entire collection.

The general introduction will explore the place of art and architecture within the perennial conflict between expenditure on material display and the priorities of scholarship. Other themes are the use of art to construct the roles of knowledge and the learned in society, and the place of the college within networks of patronage, national politics and English orthodoxy, at times of perceived threat. It will range from the first establishment of such institutions in the later thirteenth century, when Merton set new standards; through visual discourses of rivalry within the university, and engagement with those operating outside it; to the well documented destruction of the fabric of the chapel at the Reformation - and beyond. During the Gothic Revival, the importance of Oxbridge's ancient colleges in the life of the university and the nation ensured that their medieval fabric came to the attention of artists and designers, including John Everett Millais, William Morris and Philip Webb. No collection of stained glass was more influential upon that of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. than that at Merton.

Grounded in empirical observation and historical contextualization, the project is fundamentally interdisciplinary. This research reveals clearly that art and architecture were fundamental to the ways in which this community conceived of itself, articulated its ideals and answered institutional and political challenges. On one level, this project is a case study of a centrally important college within the late medieval university. On another it underlines the extraordinarily neglected potential of visual evidence within such interdisciplinary contexts.