Medieval Architecture

“The book attempts to unravel only a single thread from the tangled skein of medieval art. This thread has its origins in Antiquity and stretches unbroken to the Renaissance; it is made up of that succession of formative or generative styles that shaped the architectural destinies of Europe. These formative styles are the key of medieval architectural history; if the main events of their development be once firmly grasped, a perspective has been gained on the entire subject of medieval art, and the various minor styles will at once fall into their due position in regard to the broader tendencies of the times. For this reason, I even hope that the present volumes may prove to be of more value to readers to whom the devious turnings of the art of the Middle Ages are comparatively unfamiliar, than a book more comprehensive in scope.

In order to trace more clearly these formative styles and their growth, I have tried to write not so much a history of a certain number of more or less arbitrarily chosen monuments, as a history of groups of monuments, of styles. I have not hesitated to devote much space to the discussion of the formation, the development, the culmination of these styles considered in their broadest terms; to their mutual interrelations, and to the effect on architecture of the social and economic peculiarities of the age”. – Excerpt from the author’s Introduction.