Professor Paul Crossley

 

course description


The Gothic Cathedral is much more than a work of architecture. No-one doubts that the cathedrals are supreme achievements of human labour and inventiveness, and this course examines the skills of their builders and the myths of the medieval architect as a wonder-worker. But cathedrals are also totalities of sculpture, monumental painting, stained glass, metalwork and liturgical vestments.

All these artistic media were integrated into a set of concerted meanings and, with architecture as their organising principle, they acted as the instruments and settings of the liturgy. This course sets out a new intellectual agenda for the study of cathedral art. It examines, firstly, the impact of the cathedral on its medieval audiences – the shaping of space into hierarchies by screens and thresholds; the theatre of the jongleurs enacted in front of the portals; the drama of the liturgy played out in the presence of permanent and impermanent images inside the church. How do recent developments in narratology help us to ‘read’ the narratives of the stained glass as the cleric or the pilgrim did? How did contemporary ideas of physical deportment shape the growing interest in emotion in cathedral sculpture? At the same time, the course underlines the diversity of motive that inspired the patrons of these vast undertakings. Ranging from the higher clergy to kings, merchants and city councils, the medieval benefactors shaped the cathedral and its art into a flexible symbolic language. The cathedral was most things to most men, a vehicle of neo-Platonic theology a flagship of church reform; an instrument of clerical oppression over its local town; a shrine of national identity and emblem of civic pride.

The course examines the whole phenomenon of the cathedral in the High and Late Middle Ages, from England to France to Bohemia. It begins with the formation of Gothic in the self-consciously ‘Antique’ shrine choirs of St-Denis and Canterbury; it studies the deliberately ‘modern’ cathedrals of northern France and their celebrations of the Church Triumphant; it analyses Westminster Abbey as a symbol of Plantagenet power and Benedictine piety; it singles out the cathedral of Lincoln as a test case of architectural virtuosity and a setting for pilgrimage. The course ends with an analysis of Charles IV’s Prague cathedral, as a celebration of Bohemian history and the centrepiece of an urban and liturgical scenography.

language or other requirements


Standard entry requirements