Based on the cultural insight that ‘historism’ – understood as the projection of the past into the present by artistic means, or the ‘invention of tradition’ – always occurs in close connection with the emergence of nation states, this volume describes for the first time the cultural and denominational character and development of the Maas-Rhine region during the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. Seventeen contributions shed new and revealing light on the cultural identity of this Catholic-dominated core region of Europe, using the defining term ‘historism’ as the historiographical element that unifies the book’s four sections (Social and Church Historical Context, The Organisational Structure of Ecclesiastical Art, Centres of Art, ‘Grenzgänger’: between Theory and Praxis).
