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University of California Press

UC Press Blog

Dec 20 2024

How did Medieval People Feel about Notre-Dame?

By Paul Binski, author of Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages

The exciting reopening of Notre-Dame in Paris after the fire in 2019 has revealed the sheer power such great medieval structures still have to move and fascinate. I recall with shock and disbelief the images of this church—truly a monument to France and its culture—going up in flames. And of course I’m pleased it’s all being put back. Lovers of Gothic tend to see Notre-Dame and other Gothic cathedrals through the eyes of Romanticism—through the writings of Victor Hugo, Goethe, Coleridge, and the Sublime. Cathedrals and other great buildings are still objects of awe, which frame the fearful and overpower their witnesses. 

But am I right to “feel” about Notre-Dame in this way?  Is this how such structures were perceived by those that first built and experienced them? Of course there are no “right” responses. But it is possible to say more about the nature of what we call “emotions” and emotional reactions to artifacts, from an historical point of view.  

Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages is the first attempt to understand medieval emotional responses to buildings like Notre-Dame built across the whole of Western Europe. The book includes Byzantine and Arabic-speaking sources too, for the idea of great building was certainly not just a Christian one. It ranges from Rome to Paris, Hagia Sophia to the Alhambra. In looking at the many written sources for these reactions, I argue, we are not reconstituting medieval experience as such, because experience proper is irrecoverable. What we can do is gather and look closely at the language used of such buildings to rule in (and perhaps rule out) some of the options. 

What I found in writing the book is that the true break in the discourse of ‘feeling’ (I prefer to use the words ‘affects’ or ‘passions’ used in the Middle Ages) didn’t come between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a traditional point of rupture in the history of art and architecture, but far later, with the Enlightenment and Romantic emotional model I mentioned a moment ago. 

There’s a great deal to gain by setting aside the Romantic approach, brilliant and powerful as its insights are. “Medieval people” (for they were pretty diverse) thought and wrote about these structures in a way far more consistent with the ancient world, religious differences aside. Their value-systems promoted admiration, wonder, the healing powers of architecture, useful but not damaging fear, exhilaration, luminousness, good cheer and even nobility—ideas and sensations which separate them from the Romantic ideal. Individual subjective response mattered less than what communities thought. This way of thinking (and so feeling), rooted in a common heritage of rhetorical practice, originated with early writers like Eusebius and stayed in place through the Renaissance, over the course of a millenium. 

In writing this book I wanted to develop an aspect of my own work on Gothic which has insisted on re-inserting human subjects into their built environments, including not just sight but sound. This is one aspect of a larger project to look at how medieval art moved and motivated, part in turn of the study of “emotionology.” In a way I’m both critiquing and deploying ideas which arose with Romanticism and Modernity. These brought with them for the first time a “scientific” way of analysing buildings from the perspective of their style, archaeology and function. But they also legitimized the idea that buildings provoke big emotions, and have power. Here were two ways of appreciating architecture that diverged almost from the start: the writers on buildings tended to exclude people, while the writers on people didn’t bother with the niceties of buildings. Both are important, but the scientific way of thinking has tended to dominate institutional architectural history. So, in Architecture and Affect I want to rebalance things by taking the risk of looking at human emotion too, and bringing these paths back together. 

As Notre-Dame returns to life, brilliantly clean, light-filled and elevating, it comes to symbolize the many ways our thoughts and feelings about Gothic have themselves changed.