Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages - Hardcover

by Paul Binski (Author)

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.

Back Jacket

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

Author Biography

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.