Plotting Gothic

A historian of medieval art and architecture with a rich appreciation of literary studies, Stephen Murray brings all those fields to bear in presenting a new way of understanding the great Gothic churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: as rhetorical constructs.

Plotting Gothic begins by positioning the rhetoric of the Gothic as a series of plots, or stories intended for visitors, then extends that concept to the relationship between a building, its audience, and the many interlocutors involved in that relationship, such as builders, scholars, tour guides, and resident clergy. What were the rhetorical commonplaces that such interlocutors used to interpret the Gothic when it was new? Drawing on building records and personal recollections of architects and churchmen, Murray traces common analogies between rhetoric and architectural space that date back to late antiquity, then shows how those links were translated into wood, stone, and space under specific local conditions. The resulting book offers an invigorating new way to understand some of the most lasting achievements of the medieval era.