Medieval Allegory and the Building of the New Jerusalem (review)

This is a book with an ambitious agenda: the correlation of architectural form, allegory, and revelation to link the artistic, intellectual, and religious cultures of medieval Europe. Linking mechanisms are provided by the author's concern with allegory as a means of communicating the relation between human experience of the divine world and the image of Heavenly Jerusalem. "Allegory" is understood as a language capable of "saying other things": cloaking hidden meaning behind palpable form. The image of the New Jerusalem is derived, above all, from chapters 21 and 22 of the Revelation of Saint John: "And I John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband."

The material is organized in three parts. The first part deals with the reworking of Hellenistic ideas on art and the sensible world by Plotinus—whose ideas were then further developed by Saint Augustine, whose concept of the relationship between visible and invisible worlds echoed down through the Middle Ages. Particularly important in Augustine was the eschatological image of the Church as the New Jerusalem reunited with Christ at the end of time with the understanding of the Church as the community of the faithful. There appears to be nothing controversial here—the reader will find a useful summary of a stream of thought that certainly illuminated the mentality of medieval thinkers.

In the third part of the book the author builds upon her own earlier research on the fourteenth-century account of the late-fourteenth century dream-vision known as Pearl, where the author describes "the spiritual progress of a man grieving over the death of a beloved young daughter." Professor Meyer focuses upon the account of the vision of the celestial City, New Jerusalem—an account that occupies a substantial portion of the text. What begins to be troublesome is the desire on the author's part to construct very close links with contemporary architectural forms, comparing the "private New Jerusalem" of the text with the specific forms of English Decorated and Perpendicular architecture, particularly chantry chapels.

But it is the second part of the book that is most provocative. Based upon two case studies, the author seeks a global understanding of the meaning of medieval church space as an eschatological landscape. The key text is found in the liturgy of consecration so dramatically described by the Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis. As Stookey demonstrated many years ago, the liturgy of consecration made extensive use of the image of the Celestial City described by Saint John. Although the author claims to be building upon art historical scholarship of recent years, in fact her account of the dependency of the abbot upon the writings of the Pseudo Dionysius is heavily based upon the canonic work of art historians such as Erwin Panofsky and Otto von Simson—work which has been repeatedly challenged in the art historical scholarship of the last thirty years by scholars such as Peter Kidson, Willibald Sauerländer, and Christoph Markschies, none of whom find their way into the bibliography.

Despite these reservations (and some editorial problems) there is, nevertheless much to like about the book. Particularly important is the author's insistence upon the idea that the church edifice is not a static thing but a medium providing the possibility of a transformative experience and her concern with the integumentum—overlaid form that partially both conceals and reveals underlying truth. Architectural historians could gain much through the application of such ideas to the understanding of medieval buildings.