Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages: (Franklin D. Murphy Lectures)

How did people living in the Middle Ages respond to spectacular buildings, such as the Gothic cathedrals? While contemporary scholarship places a large emphasis on the emotional content of Western medieval figurative art, the emotion of architecture has largely gone undiscussed. In a radical new approach, Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages explores the relationship between medieval buildings and the complexity of experience they engendered. Paul Binski examines long-standing misconceptions about the way viewers responded to medieval architecture across Western Europe and in Byzantine and Arabic culture between late antiquity and the end of the medieval period. He emphasizes the importance of the experience itself within these built environments, essentially places of action, space, and structure but also, crucially, of sound and emotion.  

Table of Contents:
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 

About the Author :
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.

Review :
"[A] fascinating new book."