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Alexander Peplow, The Political Message of the Shrine of St. Heribert of Cologne: Church and Empire after the Investiture Contest, German History, Volume 42, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 295–296, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghae006
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Few subjects in medieval German history—especially in Anglophone historiography—have been as voluminously discussed as the Investiture Controversy and its consequences. In this work, Carolyn Carty offers not so much a new interpretation of the issues debated, but an analysis of how they were received by contemporaries. To do so, Carty focuses on a single object: the twelfth-century reliquary shrine of Heribert (d. 1021), archbishop of Cologne and chancellor to the emperors Otto III and Henry II, made for the Abbey of Deutz which he had founded. This shrine, a major work of Rheno-Mosan art, has never previously received a book-length study in English.
The book has three substantive chapters, focusing in turn on the shrine itself, the interpretation of the shrine’s iconography, and the possible motivations for the political message of that iconography. The first chapter consists of a description of the shrine, accompanied by a comprehensive set of clear images of its details; the parts of the shrine most prominently discussed in the later chapters of the book are presented in colour. The shrine itself, constructed in two stages between 1150 and 1175, is a large and richly decorated gabled box shrine, decorated with twelve enamelled medallions which depict scenes from the life of the saint. Comparing it to a number of other Rheno-Mosan shrines of the twelfth century, and particularly with St Hadelin’s shrine in the Church of St Martin in Visé, Carty shows that the unusual survival of these medallions and their narrative scheme makes Heribert’s shrine a uniquely detailed opportunity for the study of any political messaging that these shrines could have.
