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| The two recurring themes in the literature on Cormac's Chapel are its formal/conceptual sources and its place within the historical evolution of the Romanesque in Ireland. These are important matters, and not just for the archaeologist or architectural historian; if architecture is an expression of ideology or world-view, Cormac's Chapel provides us with a whole package of clues about the origins and ordering of Reform. This paper is about reading those clues. We must move beyond the 'Romanesque symbolises Reform' sound-bite and begin to think about the ways in which such symbolic cross-referencing might have been made intelligible to contemporary spectators. In this paper I will adopt a post-structuralist perspective to explore the bridging of that gap between the actual observation of the building and the understanding of its metaphoric value. |