This dissertation focuses on the arrangement and interpretation of secondary sculpture of village churches in the Saintonge region of southwestern France. These churches are notable for the inclusion of corbels or modillons (small, slender stone projections that help support the roof) which are carved in the likenesses of a variety of profane motifs. Since corbels comprise most of the sculptural decoration on most of these village churches, it is unlikely that the corbels were placed there in an arbitrary order or with no preference regarding the motifs used, yet such sculptural objects have been overlooked or ignored by traditional scholarship. The primary purpose of this research is to establish a rubric for reading and interpreting these sculptural elements.

My fieldwork required photographing and sketching the corbel tables of fourteen churches, six of which form the core of this dissertation. The results of this fieldwork revealed recognizable patterns of usage among specific corbel motifs. Many of these patterns imitate medieval guidelines and practices for building syntactical and grammatical structures in written text. Furthermore, many of the corbel motifs discussed herein appear in medieval written texts as mnemonic devices or punctuation marks. The identification of syntactical and grammatical components on the corbel table has aided in the construction of a heuristic model by which visual phrases may be identified, thus forming visual groups of images that were meant to be perceived as individual units.

Additionally, I have presented hermeneutic assessments of several of the most prominent profane motifs and their variations and have shown them to be relevant to the vitwelfth-century culture of the people who comprised the original congregation of these churches. Much of the imagery contained within these corbel tables reflects misogynistic attitudes and anti-Semitic polemical speech that was popular and has been documented in medieval Aquitaine or is connected to the popular literature that flourished in twelfthcentury Saintonge, such as folk tales, fabliaux, and troubadour poetry.

In combining a model of syntactical construction and hermeneutic interpretation, I have developed a rubric illustrating how such sculpture would likely have been understood and read by medieval villagers of Saintonge.