Architecture & Eloquence (1350-1750)

“Architecture & Eloquence” aims to broaden the literary repertoire for understanding pre-modern architecture, foster dialogue across disciplines, and encourage intermedial perspectives on architecture and literature.

Architectural historians typically rely on histories, biographies, and financial accounts for facts about buildings, and architectural treatises for theories and ideals. However, a range of literary texts are virtually untapped as a source for the architectural imagination and the reception of individual buildings. Poetry is paramount, but other types of literature include dramaturgy, the picaresque novel, speeches for inaugurations and consecrations, travelogues, concrete poetry, epigraphy, and so on.

“Architecture” includes cities, civic buildings, palaces, villas, housing, gardens, grottoes, fountains, monuments, engineering, and components of buildings (e.g., murals, vault or dome painting, statuary, topiary, sundials, etc).

The focus is on the Early Modern period (broadly defined, c. 1350- c. 1750), but manuscript submissions for earlier periods will also be considered and diachronic examinations are encouraged.

The series will encompass the Ottoman Empire as well as Europe and other territories ringing the Mediterranean basin, i.e. North Africa and the Middle East. Descriptions of architecture transmitted by the global missions of the Church are included, whether written by Europeans or indigenous persons newly converted. The range of sources aims to encourage cross-cultural discourse as another aspect of potential analysis.

The primary sources may be in any vernacular or dialect. The editors are particularly interested in Neo-Latin, Neo-Greek, and Classical Arabic as legacy languages of cultural transmission across history and language borders.

Each book should comprise a critical edition of an unknown/under-examined text(s), a translation into English, line-by-line commentary where necessary, interpretative essay(s) explaining historical and theoretical importance, and a representative complement of images.

A particular theoretical concern is the intermedial relations between immaterial words and solid buildings. Analysis should recognise how descriptions were mediated by occasion, architectural tradition and debate, religious tradition, philosophical precepts, poetics and literary theory, rhetoric, and attempts to emulate or rival the building in words, syntax, style (“ut architectura poesis”).