St Stephen's, Vienna, and the crises of 1408: practice theory and the socio-politics of the medieval building site

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1408 Vienna's politics were traversed by violence. Dynastic conflict among the Habsburgs and internecine differences between residents culminated in executions and overthrows of the city's government. Concurrently, building work at the city's largest church – overseen by leading figures in its civic politics, also victims of one of the year's purges – slackened. It was a moment when high politics, architectural production and the everyday practice of urban life intersected in ways unusually visible to the historian. Historians have adopted different historiographical positions for positing medieval architecture as a socio-political phenomenon, based on unilateral acts of princes and churchmen, dynamics of class conflict, administrative techniques of project managers or shared ‘imaginaries’. This article reflects on the events of 1408 using a new approach, taken from practice theory, to describe how the building site, reconceptualised as an open-ended bundle of doings and sayings, constituted and transformed the late medieval Viennese social.