Researcher ORCID Identifier
0009-0008-3892-6497
Graduation Year
2023
Date of Submission
4-2023
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
History
Reader 1
George Gorse
Reader 2
Chanchal Dadlani
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2023 Addison A Duvall
Abstract
By examining the histories of the Notre-Dame and Chartres cathedrals, I will consider three academic schools of thought regarding the high Gothic Cathedrals: the balanced and rational feat of engineering, the communal and social rituals that bond humans to this space, and the iconographic manifestation of the supernatural. Functionalist engineering paradoxically lays at the heart of these cathedrals' capacity to open the human consciousness to the sacred by using recurrent symbolic patterns from nature, music and mathematics to create divine ratios that transport us. Integrated into these larger architectural designs the repeating visual patterns exalting both biblical and supernatural icons further bridges and opens the worlds of the sacred and the mystical to congregations past and present. And finally, the divinely sanctioned code imposed by the church, and backed by the king’s court in 1193, to lift taxation within the cloisters for merchants, tradesmen and serfs enhanced the power of the divine in daily secular life. These three approaches reveal different ways that one is able to experience these sacred spaces and allow us to imagine how the universe was known to humans in the Middle Ages.
Recommended Citation
Duvall, Addison, "Mysteries of the Gothic" (2023). CMC Senior Theses. 3237.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/3237
Included in
Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture Commons, History of Religion Commons, Medieval History Commons
