Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages

Auteur
Paul Binski is Emeritus Professor of the History of Medieval Art at Cambridge University, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

Texte du rabat
"With characteristic elegance and humor, Paul Binski powerfully reinserts human subjectivity into medieval architectural history and addresses the profound aesthetic effect of the great cathedrals, halls, and mosques of the Middle Ages on the men and women who used them."—Matthew Reeve, author of Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole
 
"Binski shifts attention from the design of medieval buildings to their affects, drawing on a formidable range of Greek, Latin, and medieval sources to retrieve a historically authentic vocabulary to describe Gothic architecture's emotional power. Crucially, he shows how these affects—from fear to joy or wonder—were shaped by rhetorical, ethical, philosophical, and even musical traditions and how they diverge from post-Romantic responses to Gothic churches."—Tom Nickson, author of Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile
 
"This book provides a cultural analysis of architecture that weaves together philology, anthropology, and reception theory, among other approaches, with insight and erudition unique to Binski, who illuminates in clear and flowing prose just why great Gothic churches have the power to move individuals and societies."—Meredith Cohen, author of The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy

Contenu
Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments 

Introduction 
Making “Sense” of Medieval Architecture 
Language, Experience, and Decorum 
Gothic Sublimity? 
Introducing the Argument 

1. Admiratio 
   Metaphor and Aspect 
   Columns and Import: Th e Backstory 
   Great Churches and Rhetorical Occasions 
   Eusebius: Jerusalem and Tyre 
   Wonder 
   Megalomania 

2. Tristitia-Laetitia 
   The Road to Compostela and the Banishment of Grief 
   Orphic Concord and the Gothic Organum 

3. Terror 
   The Place of Fear 
   Fruitful Fear 
   The Thundering Ark: Organs, Bells 

4. Sublimia 
   Suger, Jean de Jandun, Photius 
   Gothic Angelization and Exhilaration 
   Utterance 

5. Claritas, Jucunditas, Nobilitas 
   Claritas 
   Jucunditas 
   Light, Color, and Countenance 
   Nobilitas 

   Conclusion: Spectacle, Genre, and Imitation 
   Spectacle 
   Implications and Challenges 
   Genre 
   Imitation 

   Notes 
   Bibliography 
   List of Illustrations 
   Index