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Since its construction, Notre Dame Cathedral has played a central role in French cultural identity. In the wake of the tragic fire of 2019, questions of how to restore the fabric of this quintessential French monument are once more at the forefront. This all-too-prescient book, first published in French in 2013, takes a central place in the conversation. The Gothic cathedral par excellence, Notre Dame set the architectural bar in the competitive years of the third quarter of the twelfth century and dazzled the architects and aesthetes of the Enlightenment with its structural ingenuity. In the nineteenth century, the cathedral became the touchstone of a movement to restore medieval patrimony ...
The essays in this volume reflect on and build on the remarkable legacies of Robert Mark and Andrew Tallon, who pioneered the application of high-technology research methods to the study of Gothic architecture.
This volume engages with notions of lateness and modernity in medieval architecture, broadly conceived geographically, temporally, methodologically, and theoretically. It aims to (re)situate secular and religious buildings from the 14th through the 16th centuries that are indebted to medieval building practices and designs, within the more established narratives of art and architectural history.
Paris: The Powers that Shaped the Medieval City considers the various forces – royal, monastic and secular – that shaped the art, architecture and topography of Paris between c. 1100 and c. 1500, a period in which Paris became one of the foremost metropolises in the West. The individual contributions, written by an international group of scholars, cover the subject from many different angles. They encompass wide-ranging case studies that address architecture, manuscript illumination and stained glass, as well as questions of liturgy, religion and social life. Topics include the early medieval churches that preceded the current cathedral church of Notre-Dame and cultural production in the...
This volume is dedicated to eliciting the interactions between localities across late antique and early medieval Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Significant research has been done in recent years to explore how late "Roman" and post-"Roman" cities, towns and other localities communicated vis-à-vis larger structural phenomena, such as provinces, empires, kingdoms, institutions and so on. This research has contributed considerably to our understanding of the place of the city in its context, but tends to portray the city as a necessarily subordinate conduit within larger structures, rather than an entity in itself, or as a hermeneutical object of enquiry. Consequently, not enough research...
Follow in the footsteps of history to discover the hidden places, extraordinary people, and captivating stories of Paris. Paris: Secret Gardens, Hidden Places, and Stories of the City of Light, Mary McAuliffe’s multilayered exploration of Paris, weaves a narrative that takes the reader into secret and hidden places, even in the midst of the most well-known Paris destinations. McAuliffe’s hidden places can be small but are always revealing, whether a bas-relief on an ignored corner of Notre-Dame or an overlooked courtyard inside an ancient and busy hospital. She takes the reader below the streets and sidewalks of Paris to discover ancient aqueducts and a lost river, and she prompts the re...
This book charts the past, present, and future of studies on medieval technology, art, and craft practices. Inspired by Villard’s enigmatic portfolio of artistic and engineering drawings, this collection explores the multiple facets of medieval building represented in this manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr 19093). The book’s eighteen essays and two introductions showcase traditional and emergent methods for the study of medieval craft, demonstrating how these diverse approaches collectively amplify our understanding about how medieval people built, engineered, and represented their world. Contributions range from the analysis of words and images in Villard’s portfolio, to the close analysis of masonry, technological marvels, and gothic architecture, pointing the way toward new avenues for future scholarship to explore. Contributors are: Mickey Abel, Carl F. Barnes Jr., Robert Bork, George Brooks, Michael T. Davis, Amy Gillette, Erik Gustafson, Maile S. Hutterer, John James, William Sayers, Ellen Shortell, Alice Isabella Sullivan, Richard Alfred Sundt, Sarah Thompson, Steven A. Walton, Maggie M. Williams, Kathleen Wilson Ruffo, and Nancy Wu.
The intertwined histories of Paris and of the River Seine are interesting but complicated. It is the Seine, however with all its ports, bridges, boats, commerce, monuments, and vistas, that has always been the keystone in the arch of Paris life, both in the past and now in the present. The great French medievalist Jean Favier (1932-2014) summed up its story in just six words: "Paris is born of the Seine." Paris may be known today as "The City of Light" but, like most big cities, it also has a sordid side. This book introduces to the reader not only the rich and the famous of Paris, but also some of "the unknown people of the Seine." These latter include traders, police officers, millers, fishermen, charlatans, monkey handlers, jugglers, water carriers, and the homeless men searching through the cold mud of the Seine trying to find a small gold ornament of some kind lost by a rich traveler passing by in a boat.
From an intercultural perspective, this book focuses on aesthetic strategies and forms of representation in premodern Christian and Islamic sepulchral art. Seeing the tomb as an interface for eschatological, political, and artistic debate, the contributions analyze the diversity of memorial space configurations. The subjects range from the complex interaction between architecture and tomb topography through to questions relating to the funereal expression of power and identity, and to practices of ritual realization in the context of individual and collective memory.
Phenomenologies of the City: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Architecture brings architecture and urbanism into dialogue with phenomenology. Phenomenology has informed debate about the city from social sciences to cultural studies. Within architecture, however, phenomenological inquiry has been neglecting the question of the city. Addressing this lacuna, this book suggests that the city presents not only the richest, but also the politically most urgent horizon of reference for philosophical reflection on the cultural and ethical dimensions of architecture. The contributors to this volume are architects and scholars of urbanism. Some have backgrounds in literature, history, religiou...