Strasbourg Cathedral Research Articles

3D AND HBIM MODELS: DIGITAL TOOLS FOR THE DIAGNOSTIC STUDY OF THE STAIR TURRET OF THE SOUTH-EAST CORNER OF THE MAIN TOWER OF STRASBOURG CATHEDRAL

Abstract. During the construction of Strasbourg Cathedral, men aspired to see it radiate eternally. However, like any monument, it experiences structural weakening due to the effects of time, but also to the many external aggressions that damage the materials. Regular interventions therefore make it possible to preserve this building over time. It is in this context of conservation that the cathedral lives to the rhythm of a major restoration campaign since 2014. The objective of this project was to carry out a modeling and a BIM model of the stair turret in the south-east corner of the main tower built entirely of sandstone. This work was part of the preparatory phase of the restoration work on the south-east stair turret of the high tower scheduled for 2024–2025. The objective was to carry out a diagnosis of the turret (35 m high, 168 steps) with the help of a 3D and BIM model. This study could be understood as the beginning of a more global work of 3D representation extendable to the entire monument. In addition, in the spirit of gathering information and building knowledge base, it could be interesting to develop a complete BIM model of the entire building later.

“Strasbourg Miracles of the Blessed Mary” and the Influence of the City Cathedral Church on Pilgrimages in Alsace in the 13th Century

The relevance of the research topic is determined by the historical continuity of the cultural traditions and models of religious worship of objects of spiritual heritage in the urban habitat as well as their [traditions and models] variability depending on the particular circumstances. The purpose of the study is to identify the forms of influence of a unique place of concentration of the spiritual life namely the Strasbourg Cathedral of the Virgin Mary on the individual strategies of medieval pilgrims in the particular region. During the process of research the particular interest presents the writing “Strasbourg Miracles of the Blessed Mary” containing episodes of the miraculous events and healings which took place in the Strasbourg Cathedral church in 1280. In the process of analyzing this and other historical writings we got an overview of the pilgrims’ cultural perception of the Cathedral construction process, their religious leisure and interaction with urban dwellers and habitat. It was found that in the process of engagement between pilgrims and urban dwellers with a specific place of concentration of spiritual life (taking into account the scale of its [place] of cultural and religious significance for the region) there are seen special, exalted forms of religious activity namely public statements about the miraculous healings etc. The act of “miracle”, in its turn, becomes into a ceremony where a participant has a high social value and presents the primary interest for spectators and witnesses. Thus, the study expands the existing scientific ideas about the forms and peculiarities of the medieval Catholic piety completing their general picture by an episode of the faithful’s interaction with a unique religious object.

Blindfolded

AbstractIn a monograph-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on contextualism, the journal's editor decontextualizes and then recontextualizes the medieval iconographic trope of Ecclesia and Synagoga in an effort to make plausible a news story about Pope Francis that received little coverage in the press. During 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of the Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate, Francis paid a surprise visit to a new statue in the United States, “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” by Joshua Koffman, as a sign of his endorsement of its radical reconsideration of a trope long associated with anti-Jewish sentiment in the Catholic Church. This article, which begins with a detailed analysis of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI's essay on the Nostra Aetate treatise De Iudaeis, deals primarily with twelfth- and thirteenth-century uses of the iconography. Special attention is paid to the Anagogical Window of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis and to the Ecclesia, Synagoga, and King Solomon statues on the south facade of Strasbourg Cathedral, in both of which is found previously overlooked evidence of philo-Semitic, rather than anti-Semitic, thinking on the part of the designers. The article concludes that contextualist scholars of medieval art have found what they expected to find and ignored contrary indications.

Wilhelm Vöge’s sonnet “On the platform of Strasbourg Cathedral” and his monograph on Niclas Hagnower

Wilhelm Vöge’s sonnet “On the platform of Strasbourg Cathedral” and his monograph on Niclas Hagnower

Hybride Temporalitäten

Abstract When the astronomical clock of the Strasbourg Cathedral was inaugurated in 1574, Nicodemus Frischlin, humanist and professor of poetics in Tübingen, responded to this monumental, ‘time-defining event’ with a didactic poem – in Latin, and profoundly informed by the great models of Classical Antiquity – in which he embedded the stages of human life in an encompassing horizon of both secular and religious temporality. With his ‘carmen’, Frischlin aimed to complement the ambitious technological construction with an equally ambitious literary account, gradually tracing the building’s multiple and hybrid conceptions and semantics of ‘time’ in versified description. This article examines how Frischlin’s didactic poetry organizes knowledge of anthropological, historical, and eschatological times; moreover, illuminating the motifs of the moon disc, the ‘Lebensalterautomat’, and the mechanical figure of Death, it sheds light on the emulating adaptation of Classical tradition (Lucretius; Ovid). Frischlin portrays the Strasbourg clock as a technological masterpiece without equal in Classical Antiquity.

The Men Who Stare at Cathedrals: Aesthetic Education, Moral Sentiment, and the German Critique of French Revolutionary Violence, 1793–1794

AbstractThe despoliation of the Strasbourg Cathedral during the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94 has long been considered a high point of revolutionary iconoclasm, which manifested for some the anti-enlightened nature of the Terror regime and the violence inherent in the French Revolution itself. The hybrid space—linguistic, cultural, and political—in which these vandalizing acts took place, however, brings to the fore the problem of Franco-German cultural transfer and its politics of emotion as a significant, yet previously untapped, interpretative layer. This article explores the emotional vocabularies used by both French and German commentators, which substantiated their divergent stances regarding historical consciousness, aesthetic sensibility, and national identity in the debate on the legitimacy of revolutionary violence. It argues that while it contributed to the denouement of intercultural transfer in the German-speaking sphere, the vandalism debate also had long-term consequences for German communal identity formation in a sentimental key.

Experiencing the Gothic Style

Eighteenth-century French accounts of Gothic churches are testimonies of both negative preconceptions about the Gothic style formed through reading and actual positive experiences of Gothic buildings. While Goethe at Strasbourg Cathedral reconciled the discrepancy between preconceived opinion and opinion based on experience by referring to history, many 18th-century French architects avoided any historicist interpretation after they visited churches. They continued to express a dislike for Gothic ornament, but also found they could admire the spaciousness of Gothic churches. Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who analysed the church of Notre Dame in Paris by moving through it, suggested disregarding ‘entirely the chimerical and bizarre ornaments of the Goths’, in favour of experiencing the church’s spatial qualities. This article argues that we can only understand how ideas about the Gothic style changed if we study them from the point of view of the observer of these buildings. This turnaround happened precisely through experience, which allowed 18th-century architects to reconcile their conflicting feelings. By moving through the buildings, they came to understand the idiosyncrasies of the Gothic, from its ornamentation to its spatiality. Beginning with Soufflot’s lecture of 1741, ‘Memoire sur l’architecture gothique’, this article analyses similar experiences of 18th-century architects and writers who focussed not on historicization (like Goethe did) but on the ahistorical aspects of the Gothic. It thus aims to unveil the complexity of the workings of style.

Review: Michael von Savoyen und der Fassadenriss des Kölner Doms, by Johann Josef Böker

Johann Josef Boker Michael von Savoyen und der Fassadenriss des Kolner Doms Cologne: Bohlau Verlag, 2018, 170 pp., 53 b/w illus. €30 (cloth), ISBN 9783412501006 Johann Josef Boker's new book stands as a coda of sorts to one of the most significant publishing enterprises in medieval architecture undertaken in recent years. Two decades ago, Boker began to study the hundreds of medieval architectural drawings in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, by far the largest such collection in the world. His lavishly produced catalogue of this collection appeared in 2005, followed by two similarly grand volumes written with a group of younger colleagues, the first published in 2011 on drawings from Ulm and the Danube region, the second in 2013 on drawings from the Rhineland.1 With their superb illustrations and comprehensive coverage, these catalogues constitute an essential new resource for the study of medieval architecture in the Germanic world. The texts of these catalogues are also rich in revisionist hypotheses, especially involving dating and attribution, some of which work better than others. For example, while Boker's rehabilitation of the fifteenth-century Viennese designer Laurenz Spenning makes excellent sense on documentary and stylistic grounds, his treatment of the earlier Rhenish builder Erwin von Steinbach is more problematic; he attributes to Erwin nearly every important architectural design made in the upper Rhineland in the decades around 1300, often neglecting evidence that would complicate this thesis. He thus credits Erwin not only with the original design drawing for Strasbourg Cathedral's west facade but also with the facade as built, where ideas from the drawing were dramatically transformed. Boker also assigns to Erwin the design of Freiburg Minster's magnificent spire, a pyramid of openwork tracery whose format has no precedent in the early drawings for the Strasbourg facade. The origins of the openwork spire format have long been controversial. The Freiburg spire was certainly the first of this type to be built, but many scholars have suspected that …

Architekturzeichnung und ihre Rolle beim ­Entwurf komplexer Werksteinkonstruktionen in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit

Abstract Although the affinity of medieval architectural drawings to the graphic procedures of setting-out has been extensively discussed, the role of scale drawings in the design practice of the late Middle-Ages and the Early Modern period is still subject of debate. This regards also the drawings of complex late Gothic rib vaults. An opportunity for better understanding their precise use and function within the design and planning of complex stone structures is given by a case study on the vault in St. Catherine’s chapel in Strasbourg Cathedral, where an original drawing of the plan can be compared with the existing structure as it was actually built. The vault with looping ribs was completed in 1547. The comparative study of the drawing and the building is based on the previous research on the procedures of stone-planning in late Gothic vaults, and comprises also building archaeology, surveys, and geometric analyses of the vault.

Reverse engineering marvelous machines: The design of Late Gothic vaults from concept to stone planning and the prehistory of stereotomy

In Late Gothic rib vaults, we admire the complex stone structures with intricate meshes of ribs interlacing in different levels, in some cases even composed of looping ribs soaring along spatial curves. On the base of case studies where detailed surveys, geometric analyses, investigations through reverse engineering, and experiments in full scale in collaboration with the workshop of Strasbourg Cathedral were carried out, we propose a complete picture of the design process from the overall concept to its implementation in the design of the single stone elements. The profound understanding of the design process in Late Gothic vaults gives a new insight to Late Medieval and Early Modern design practice for stone structures. In particular, we are able to propose a new interpretation of the early treatises of Stereotomy and the “prehistory” of the classical procedures in stone-cutting.

Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art by E. R. Truitt

Reviewed by: Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art by E. R. Truitt Jonathan Sawday E. R. Truitt. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. x + 255, 36 ill. Spot is a 160-lb, four-legged robot, designed (so its makers, Boston Dynamics, claim) “for indoor and outdoor operation . . . electrically powered and hydraulically actuated, Spot has a sensor head that helps it navigate and negotiate rough terrain.” A video of Spot marching through a corporate of ce, gamboling up and down hill, cantering across a parking lot, and most memorably, being kicked by a technician in order to demonstrate the structure’s seemingly miraculous power of self-recuperation as it scrambles to remain upright, has generated thirteen million views on YouTube. Viewer comments in response to watching the uncanny mechanism being put through its paces are illuminating: “eerie . . . creepy . . . terrifying . . . cute . . . trippy.” Boston Dynamics, the manufacturers of Spot and its various [End Page 286] electromechanical cousins (including “Cheetah,” “BigDog,” and “Sand-Flea”), is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google, and has worked in tandem with the U.S. armed forces, the Sony Corporation, and DARPA—the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency—to create (according to the company’s website) “the most advanced robots on earth.” Spot does not feature in E. V. Truitt’s intriguing Medieval Robots, but, if one wants to understand something of the lengthy intellectual and imaginative antecedents of Spot, which stretch back at least to the mythical Homeric “robots” created by the god Hephaestus in the Iliad or to the designs of the Alexandrian engineers of remote antiquity (Ktesibios, Hero of Alexandria), Truitt’s carefully researched book would be a good a place to start. But Spot, or rather, human responses to Spot, perhaps also illustrates a major dif culty in thinking about automata (whether in the past or the present), which Truitt’s careful scholarship does not entirely overcome. Divided into six chapters and an introduction, with a lavish set of color illustrations, Medieval Robots contributes to an increasingly densely populated eld that straddles both academic and more popular readerships, and that include works by (inter alia) Adelhid Voskuhl, Kevin LaGrandeur, Wendy Beth Hyman, Minsoo Kang, Gaby Wood, Tom Standage, and (full disclosure) the present reviewer. Perhaps under the pressure of our own cybernetic technologies, we have become increasingly fascinated by the history of the automaton. Truitt’s book is organized (in the author’s words) both “chronologically and thematically” as it traces the history of pre-Renaissance automata from their rst appearance in Greek and Arabic texts, their migration to the Latin West, their re nement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as products of Natura Artifax (“Nature as Artisan”), to their emergence as the ctional automata (oracular statues, speaking heads), powered by sorcery and magic, attributed to gures such as Gerbert of Aurillac, Roger Bacon, Robert Grossteste, or Albertus Magnus (8). In succeeding chapters, Truitt contemplates the function of automata to “guard or memorialize the dead” between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, before introducing us to the appearance of “mechanical marvels” in the princely European courts of the fourteenth and fteenth centuries (11, 37). She ends by turning to the eld of clockwork technology whose most famous manifestation was the magni cent Strasbourg Cathedral Clock, frequently described and discussed by the adherents of the “mechanical philosophy” in the seventeenth century (155). Truitt’s canvas is a broad one, in both spatial and chronological terms. Stylishly written, she navigates the complex history of automata with real skill, moving deftly between (for example) Baghdad and Byzantium, the Mongol Court of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, or texts such [End Page 287] as Lydgate’s Troy Book and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The chapter dealing with the appearance of automata as textual objects in the Franco-phone world of Romans, chansons, and historiae in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is particularly thoughtful, and displays Truitt’s considerable reading, as well as her ability to digest both primary and secondary sources to produce a coherent and compelling narrative. As Truitt amply demonstrates, automata were deigned not to perform...

3D modeling of the Strasbourg’s Cathedral basements for interdisciplinary research and virtual visits

Abstract. On the occasion of the millennium celebration of Strasbourg Cathedral, a transdisciplinary research group composed of archaeologists, surveyors, architects, art historians and a stonemason revised the 1966-1972 excavations under the St. Lawrence’s Chapel of the Cathedral having remains of Roman and medieval masonry. The 3D modeling of the Chapel has been realized based on the combination of conventional surveying techniques for the network creation, laser scanning for the model creation and photogrammetric techniques for the texturing of a few parts. According to the requirements and the end-user of the model, the level of detail and level of accuracy have been adapted and assessed for every floor. The basement has been acquired and modeled with more details and a higher accuracy than the other parts. Thanks to this modeling work, archaeologists can confront their assumptions to those of other disciplines by simulating constructions of other worship edifices on the massive stones composing the basement. The virtual reconstructions provided evidence in support of these assumptions and served for communication via virtual visits.

Die Logik der Lyrik: Goethes Phänomenologie des Geistes in Gedichten. Teil 1, Die Genese des Genies by Christian P. Weber (review)

Christian P. Weber, Die Logik der Lyrik: Goethes Phanomenologie des Geistes in Gedichten. Teil 1, Die Genese des Genies. Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2013.486 pp.This monograph is the substantially revised and expanded version of the author's dissertation. It presents a comprehensive study of Goethe's early hymns-I follow Weber's own nomenclature here (I4n8)-as they were assembled by Goethe himself around 1777 in the unpublished Erste Weimarer Gedichtsammlung (EWG). Weber argues that this collection not only contains the most authoritative versions of the poems but also is the result of a (more or less explicit) systematic plan with which Goethe attempted to bring into existence the poetic idea(l) that guided the formation (Bildung) of his poetic genius, with each poem simultaneously being a performative act and a self-reflection of the creative spirit. Weber's study is divided into three parts: a theoretical-method- ological examination of the logic of poetic production, an analysis of the intertextual allusions of the individual poems, and a reflection on the ensemble that lets the reader experience, in its intracontextual (intra-kontextuell, 146) constella- tion, the pure phenomenon of the poetic spirit.Weber fleshes out how Goethe's poems negotiate and accomplish the emergence of the poetic paradigm of autonomy-that is, the production and reception of literature based on a creative imagination that is freed from the theological and philosophical ideologies and institutions of the eighteenth century yet avoids the dangers of solipsistic excess. The 'Vernunftigkeit' oder Poeto-Logik (15 -l6) of the creative spirit cannot be represented within the confines of a single poem but rather materializes only in the metapoetics of the EWG cycle, where the various poems taken together allow for reflection on the promises and limits of autonomous production. Weber argues that the cycle presents Goethe's own version of a poetic Critique of the Imagination as complement to Kant's work and precursor to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, a poetic critique that escapes discursive thought and rational cognition. Poetry actively material- izes products that are individual moments of the poetic spirit, a spirit whose essence can be aesthetically experienced, hermeneutically achieved, and intuitively accessed only in the ensemble of a poetic cycle. The unavoidable circularity of a spirit producing individual poems under the auspices of an overarching poetic idea that is only truly accessible after the individual texts have been collected into a larger ensemble is, according to Weber, itself an essential aspect of the project and establishes a never-ending adjustment of the relation between the particular and the universal that results in the ever-new production of more poems, leading to more reflection, more poems, and so on.The study argues that each poem (re-)presents a necessary step in which the budding author projects certain aspects of his imagination onto poetic roles in order to exorcize (austreiben, 58) his inner demons, the inevitable conflicts of world and imagination. Weber finds the aesthetic idea governing this poetic pro- duction articulated in Goethe's writings on the Strasbourg Cathedral,particularly the unfinished west facade, whose imaginary wholeness in the plans of the architect Erwin von Steinbach serves as a blueprint for the succession of the eleven poems of the EWG. Weber analyzes the poems in the order of the EWG: Mahomets Gesang,Wandrers Sturmlied,Kunstlers Morgenlied,An Schwager Kronos,Prometheus,Ganymed,Menschengefuhl,Eislebens Lied,Koniglich Gebet, Seefahrt, Der Wandrer. …

Nicolaï Karamzine et la cathédrale de Strasbourg

The article focuses on Nikolay Karamzin's depiction of the Strasbourg cathedral in Letters of a Russian Traveler. Even though it is very likely that the Russian writer did not personally visit the cathedral, since, at the time of his stay in Alsace, the city was overtaken by mutinous soldiers, Karamzin could not avoid describing one of Strasbourg's main landmarks in his travelogue. In order to do so, he had to turn to written sources, the identification of which is the first aim of the present paper. The second issue adressed here is that of Karamzin's aesthetic appreciation of the monument and of gothic architecture in general. Aware of the current aesthetic debate on Greek and Gothic styles fuelled by the ongoing British gothic revival, Karamzin appears to approve of the gothic structural design. Furthermore, he seems to have valued gothic churches as places where one can experience Burkean sublimity, and as an expression of the bold génie of Nordic peoples, to which the Russian traveler is proud to belong.

Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger (review)

Reviewed by: Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger Daniel Purdy (bio) Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger. By Susan Bernstein. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. 216 pp. Cloth $60.00, paper $21.95. Susan Bernstein's Housing Problems: Writing and Building in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger examines how architectural terminology organizes literary and philosophical texts. She presents striking new scholarship, moving clearly beyond the first forays to unearth the architecture of metaphysical thought. This is an important work that will be read by architects, literary critics, and philosophers alike. The author's theoretical alliances are clear from the first page. She cites Mark Wigley's important Derrida's Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), but she has a much more nuanced deconstructive manner. When required, the book provides clear, useful summaries of major theoretical terms; however, it is mainly interested in exposing instability and the lack of clarity when architecture is invoked to provide order in a literary narrative. Bernstein's brilliant introduction argues that architecture is divided between ideal plans that lay out a structure of meaning and real, empirical buildings that often diverge into domestic complexity. Bernstein provides concise summaries of architectural reasoning in Descartes and Hegel as she elaborates on Derrida's key interventions into architectural debates. Her opening lays out a complex plan for the book, yet the order of this book [End Page 669] is never uncertain. The thread of the argument is never lost. Each chapter ends with a pithy theoretical conclusion that brings the reader back to the opening section. Bernstein is very careful about her theoretical terms; she is never jargony, and the simple verbs she chooses often have a rich theoretical connotation. These loaded terms are not repeated as fetishes; instead, each chapter has its own terms to describe how its texts organize and define an inside and an outside. The themes of housing, holding, containing, and walling-in run through the book but always resurface in such a manner as to seem fresh and relevant. The book is very well written; it feels well honed, as if each argument has been pondered for a long time and carefully rephrased. The title and introduction do not reveal just how deeply Bernstein is interested in the gothic, both as a literary genre and an architectural style. These connections become clear slowly in the first chapter in which she explains the importance of architectural distinctions in Goethe's formulation of education (Bildung) as a lifelong project. She couples a compelling reading of Goethe's encounter with the Strasbourg cathedral with the climax of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Goethe's musealized house in Weimar. She shows compellingly how texts and the museum embody the tension between abstract plans and lived space. Her discussion of Goethe's essays about the gothic cathedral goes beyond the traditional commentaries because she juxtaposes Goethe's famous early essay against the revisions he made in old age. The importance of the gothic comes to the fore in the chapter on Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, where Bernstein argues that architecture's traditional role as the physical framework that stabilizes meaning falls together, that is, literally collapses, thereby producing a distinctly gothic effect wherein signifiers produce and participate in the signified. In other words, gothic architecture shapes Walpole's narrative while lending it the telltale signs that define the genre—dark corridors, vaulted rooms, twisted, mysterious labyrinths. The novel's concern for establishing authenticity, both as a compelling tale and as a standard of moral judgment, depends upon a gothic organization of space. Having laid out the gothic novel's features, Bernstein reads Edgar Allan Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey as gothic tales that mimic Walpole's architectural language only to bring about the demise of its references, most literally with the gothic structure's collapse. In discussing Goethe's Elective Affinities, Bernstein explains how the novel depicts the protagonists' failed attempt at constructing a coherent architectural hermeneutic. Bernstein goes further than any previous scholar in taking up Derrida's challenge not to read figures as metaphors...

Sébastien de Brossard, theGalantAir, and French Hegemony in Strasbourg during the Nine Years War

While serving as maître de chapelle of the Strasbourg Cathedral, composer theorist Sébastien de Brossard (1655–1730) published six volumes of secular Airs sérieux et à boire (Paris: Ballard, 1691–1698). This article examines why Brossard, a church musician operating on France's cultural periphery, would have devoted so much attention to composing galant song. Like all galant art forms, the air served to indoctrinate French aristocrats into an emerging nationalistic class ideology that regarded taste as a requisite criterion of social distinction. When Brossard moved to Strasbourg, the German Lutheran city had only recently been annexed to France. Subsequently, most of his time there coincided with the Nine Years War. During the war, the crown attempted to impose French Catholic hegemony on the local population by making the adoption of French cultural practices a requirement for social and professional advancement. As a composer, teacher, and performer of airs and other forms of galant music, Brossard inevitably identified himself as an advocate for the galant political agenda, which in turn supported his own pretensions to aristocratic status along with the crown's hegemonic policies in Strasbourg.

From the Forbidden to the Familiar: The Way of Natural Theology Leading up to and beyond the Long Eighteenth Century

From the Forbidden to the Familiar:The Way of Natural Theology Leading up to and beyond the Long Eighteenth Century Stuart Peterfreund (bio) Overview Natural theology is a meta-scientific discourse. As such, it seeks to reconcile and harmonize the truths discovered by that discourse which, in a given age, performs the function of scientifically explaining the natural world with the revealed religious truths of the Bible. The rhetorical foundation on which natural theology has always rested is the argument from design, which ascribes the perceived order of the natural, material world to God, the creator of that world, according to Genesis (1–2) and other pertinent biblical texts, such as the Book of Job (38–41). While the rhetorical basis of natural theology has remained constant, precisely what the source of the design in question is has not. Prior to a breakthrough that was made by Robert Boyle near the beginning of the long eighteenth century, the design in question was that of the creature: a personate, passionate God manifested himself in the ways of his animate, living creations. But such design did not account for the operation of inanimate phenomena in such scientific discourses as those of chemistry and physics. In order both to save the phenomena and keep the faith, Boyle and others of the age, such as Isaac Newton, identified the design in question as that of the mechanism, which could be equally manifest in the anatomy of a creature, [End Page 23] in the behavior of a gas under pressure, or in the regular motion of a clockwork universe. A somewhat distant and dispassionate artificer, Boyle's God manifested himself in the ways of his mechanisms. For Boyle, the world and all the creatures in it are like the great clock of the Strasbourg cathedral. But when the focus of scientific inquiry shifted back in the late eighteenth century from the study of the mechanism to the study of the creatures, with the goal of moving from a contemplation of anatomy and physiology to an understanding of how life itself is possible and how it occurs, the design of the mechanism lacked the necessary explanatory power, and the design of the creatures was seen for the fanciful variant of the bestiary tradition out of which it arose. For a time the argument from design became both fanciful and strained as scientists who were also religious apologists struggled to devise a designer-God with whom a burgeoning catalogue of scientific lore could be reconciled. Ironically enough, Charles Darwin—who in his middle and later years was, to say the least, estranged from the practices of the Anglican Christianity that Boyle had embraced—offered a solution, applying the demographic analysis of Thomas Malthus to devise the concept of natural selection and relocating the site of design from the mechanism to the system. To this very day, the argument from design, as mobilized by advocates for intelligent design, finds its locus in the design of the system. In the essay that follows, I shall lay out each of the three phases of the argument from design in order to show how each of the loci was used to mount the argument from design and to focus in on the moment of transition from one locus to the next. The Design of the Creature By the time that modern science became the focus of concerted intellectual interest and inquiry in England in the last third of the seventeenth century, natural theology was already a concept familiar to English thinkers. As Barbara J. Shapiro notes, "beginning in the mid-1650s, John Wilkins and Seth Ward at Oxford, the Cambridge Platonists, and a number of others developed a rational or natural theology that repudiated the anti-intellectualism which characterized so many of the enthusiasts." As it evolved, according to Shapiro, natural theology steered the middle course between such enthusiasm, on the one hand, and atheism on the other.1 But the natural theologians of the mid-seventeenth century were hardly the first in England to be familiar with or espouse the concept, and an understanding of some of the thinking that preceded the mid-seventeenth [End Page 24] century may help...

Benjamin Franklin in Europe: electrician, academician, politician

Le canard est une trouvaille de Franklin, qui a invente le paratonnerre, le canard, et la republique. Balzac, in Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and his French contemporaries (New York University Press, 1957), p. 95.I am pleased and honoured to be here tonight as the Royal Society's Wilkins

From Bishop's Grave to Holy Grave: The Construction of Strasbourg Cathedral's St. Catherine Chapel

The St. Catherine Chapel of Strasbourg Cathedral, erected about 1340-49, has traditionally been accepted as an expression of the religious devotion of its founder, Bishop Berthold II. The incorporation of innovative architectural forms in this chapel situates its construction within a larger context of political tension with the city council and clergy. The initial conception of the monument was crafted in a way that emphasized the episcopal presence, expressed through the use of modern forms (such as star vaults and syncopated fenestration) that challenged the architectural sovereignty of the imposing citizen-supported west front campaign at the cathedral. As the bishop's political situation altered, so did the forms and purpose of his chapel. After a brutal political struggle with the cathedral chapter, Berthold converted his projected tomb into a Holy Grave monument. This introduced into the chapel a program of liturgical Easter sculpture in a sepulchral context, for the benefit of the lay congregation. The new Holy Grave type thus developed must be seen not only in light of its significant formal impact on later sculpture of the region but also as an important tool in the diplomatic exchange between bishop, city, and chapter.

Delacroix and Sculpture

Editor of a new, more complete edition of Delacroix's Journals, Hannoosh studies the Romantic artist's comments on sculpture from two recently discovered notebooks, showing an evolution in his view that sculpture and painting should remain within the limits set by their media and that painting, not sculpture, is the art most appropriate to modernity. Hannoosh shows that Delacroix, in the process of viewing and writing about medieval and Renaissance sculpture, conceives of both an authentic modern sculpture and a sculptural treatment of color in painting. He even imagines a style of colorist painting that would be imbued with the force, grandeur, and immediacy of ancient sculpture.