Architecture, allegory, and revelation: these three words communicate in a remarkably wide-ranging and complementary way the artistic, intellectual, and religious cultures of medieval Europe. If one wishes to understand medieval beliefs, fears, and aspirations, architecture offers the most commanding visual sources of discovery. It is also an art form that is unsurpassed in its collective powers of expression, including its function as a location for secular and sacred liturgies. Allegory in turn is one of the chief philosophical, religious, and literary modes of medieval expression. From Origen to the sculptors of Chartres Cathedral to Dante, medieval theologians and artists chose allegory as the means of expression most effective and most worthy of communicating the relation between the divine world and human experience. Finally, revelation – and here I use the term to mean an intimate awareness of God’s presence – is the highest spiritual end, the definitive goal of human experience in the medieval world. Revelation is what medieval church architecture aspires to and what medieval religious allegory unveils.

This book is an investigation of how these aspects of medieval thought and expression functioned simultaneously as form, method, and meaning – how architecture, allegory, and revelation worked together in an effort to represent the New Jerusalem on earth. As a way of usefully limiting this investigation, I focus my attention on the architectural approach to divine revelation in the medieval west, including its manifestation in liturgy and literature. This focus contributes to the tradition of scholarship, especially in the last decade, that has explored ways in which architecture and architectural motifs in other areas of medieval studies stand out as among the most pervasive and complex significations in medieval culture.

There are many ways of studying these medieval accomplishments. Much recent scholarship has focused on technical, sociological, and political questions including, in the last twenty years, a whole range of theoretical perspectives that have stimulated discussion on the contexts and meanings of medieval art and culture.