Integrated Pasts: Glencairn Museum and Hammond Castle

In this article we investigate two medievalist enterprises built in the 1920s and 1930s: Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, and Hammond Castle in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Both buildings were created as homes for wealthy industrialists—Raymond Pitcairn and John Hays Hammond Jr., respectively—and both are structures built in a medieval style that also incorporate actual medieval objects, including architectural fragments, stained glass, and sculpture. Although they do it somewhat differently, the two buildings resituate the art of the past in the present, reinterpreting the past but also reinventing the medieval objects through recontextualization. We examine these revivalist buildings as products of the trend of medievalism prevalent among collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who conflated original and reproduction elements to create a pastiche of medieval and modern. Instead of searching for origins and privileging the “authentic,” however, we interrogate the very meaning of authenticity. The spoliated fragments of architectural salvage, sculpture, and glass function as relics of the Middle Ages, but they also transcend their identity as historical markers of the past. Resituated and regrouped in their new environments, the objects in these eclectic collections span centuries but work together to create richly evocative meanings that free them from the constraints of provenance. Glencairn and Hammond Castle provide experiences of the medieval world, ultimately reminding us that all interpretations of a period, whether scholarly or popular, are, in the end, reconstructions.