Conclusion: The Persistence of the Medieval

Abstract

Place is rich, evocative, and layered. As the visitor stands in central Vienna a few blocks from St. Stephan’s, she finds herself surrounded by rich Baroque facades, classical era palaces that front the busy city streets, nineteenth-century neoclassical columns and cornices, and the modern-day shops that so often replace the residences and churches of former times. In alleys, side streets and out-of-the-way corners, one can still capture hints of the past in twists of path and in the happenstance of the individual decorative gesture. Elsewhere, however, the medieval aspect of the city is all but eradicated, covered over by new architectural decisions, sacrificed to the grander statements of the city triumphal. Vienna lacks the picturesque medieval and medievalist archaisms of Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany or of the city of York in England, where an ethos akin to an omnipresent Renaissance Faire informs tourist packaging, and where the sense of the past derives as much from popular imagination as from the archeological and historical record. Vienna’s touristic touchstones are of a more recent vintage, and its medieval materials largely ensconced in museums and church collections. To be blunt, Vienna is neither themed “medieval” nor architecturally attuned to its medieval past. Yet, those earlier ghostly residences of Vienna matter to us, as they mattered to our ancestors, because the historical grounding of the city in its ancient and medieval majesty became over time one of the standard tropes of Vienna’s civic identity.