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.

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.

Reviews

"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