The SAHGB Annual Lecture
Architecture and Affect in the Middle Ages
Professor Paul Binski
Thursday, 14 March 2024, 18:30-20:20GMT/14:30-16:20ET (In-Person & Online)
Church House, Great Smith Street, London, England, SW1 United Kingdom
Much has been said in recent years about the emotional power of medieval religious art and its capacity to move audiences: think of the Pietà, the Crucifixion, the Virgin and Child.
But why has this interest not included the power of the buildings that sheltered and framed that art? There is no shortage of modern beliefs about the emotional power of architecture. The great religious structures of the Romanesque and Gothic eras, along with their counterparts in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, are for many among the most self- evidently moving creations of their, or any, age. ‘Like a Bach fugue, a Gothic cathedral demands all our emotional and intellectual powers’, said Nikolaus Pevsner rather dauntingly in his widely-read An Outline of European Architecture. Yet as objects of historical enquiry into the emotional power of architecture, such structures are neglected to a striking extent.
Our speaker, Professor Paul Binski, promises an evening that will sharpen the focus on this neglected area, with skilled reflection and eloquence. Of his lecture, he gives a taste of what we can expect:
“My aim in delving into this relationship is not to promote the rights and wrongs of particular emotional responses to buildings, or to pretend that a study of such responses exhausts our critical understanding of architecture. It is simply to propose a way of exploring the capacity that built structures had to move their beholders, and particularly the way that those experiences were communicated by what those people actually said.”
This will be a hybrid event. We warmly invite you to register for a place in person or as part of a remote audience. Please note that the lecture will be recorded and may be shared with SAHGB members.
There will be a reception after the lecture for those who join us at Church House, a historic Westminster site newly emerging from refurbishment following an extensive project. This provides an opportunity to meet the speaker and other guests over a drink before concluding the evening.
Paul Binski is Emeritus Professor of the History of Medieval Art at Cambridge University. He 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. 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) and most recently Gothic Sculpture (2019). He now writes widely on general issues of aesthetics, rhetoric and the visual arts in the Middle Ages.
Remote Zoom places will be bookable until 3pm on the day of the event, but all should have registered in advance, as we will not be able to sell tickets on the door. The Annual Lecture is often one of the key annual events so we recommend booking early if you can.