Murray Seminar
Imago Dei, Imago Mundi: Matthew Paris’s saints, relics, maps and wonders
Paul Binski
Online and
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
17 November 2025, 17:00 — 18:30 GMT
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At this Murray Seminar, Paul Binski will share his research on 'Imago Dei, Imago Mundi: Matthew Paris’s saints, relics, maps and wonders'.
This paper will place one aspect of Matthew’s work, his representations of exceptional things, in the context of his unfolding life story. It will discuss his unusual position as a writer and artist, his interest in saints and relics, his map-making and his recording of wonders as part of a single and in many ways coherent view of the World.
Paul Binski is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and was Slade Professor, Oxford University, 2006-7. A leading international authority on Gothic art and architecture, and medieval culture more widely, his publications include Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets (1995), Becket’s Crown. Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170-1300 (2004), Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style 1290-1350 (2014). He published Gothic Sculpture in 2019 and Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages in 2024. He now writes widely on general issues of aesthetics, ethics, affectivity and form in the Middle Ages, and is also a guest curator at the National Gallery, London.