Overview

A historian of medieval art and architecture with a rich appreciation of literary studies, Stephen Murray brings all those fields to bear on a new approach to understanding the great Gothic churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Plotting Gothic positions the rhetoric of the Gothic as a series of three interlocking plots: a spatial plot tied to the material construction of the churches, a social plot stemming from the collaborative efforts that made Gothic output possible, and a rhetorical plot involving narratives that treat the churches as objects of desire. Drawing on the testimony of three witnesses involved in church building Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, Gervase of Canterbury, and the image maker Villard de Honnecourt and a range of secondary sources, Murray traces common patterns in the way medieval buildings were represented in words and images. Our witnesses provide vital information about the way the great churches of Gothic were built and the complexity of their meanings. Taking a fresh approach to Gothic architecture, Plotting Gothic offers an invigorating new way to understand some of the most lasting achievements of the medieval era.

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9781336022621

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Reviews

With insight and verve, Murray pries open the major rhetorical constructions of Gothic--writings that nurtured Gothic's emergence and bore witness to its contemporary reception--and in the process reconciles, indeed synthesizes, them in a totally novel way. Murray's reputation among art historians and medievalists will galvanize a wide audience for this book; his innovative approach to historiography and discourse analysis will attract even more readers. There is really nothing comparable in the recent literature on Gothic architecture and art. --Mitchell B. Merback, author of Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria

Author Information

Stephen Murray is the Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor of Medieval Art History at Columbia University and the author of many books.

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