International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2009 - Space/l'Espace
Abstract

When the architecture that we call Gothic appeared in the first half of the twelfth century, sciences enjoyed renewed attention in the West.  Scholars offered, for example, increasing attention to the mathematical sciences, and addressed its possibilities to explain all sorts of observations. Also, more than before, intellectuals investigated and proposed rational explanations for methods since long practiced without precise knowledge of underlying principles.  Among the methods under scrutiny, measuring large objects or wide areas received particular attention. These activities, commonly exercised by land surveyors since antiquity, were explained in treatises of the twelfth century. Today, these manuscripts show how literati devoted most of their attention to one principle, the right-angled triangle  In my presentation of twelfth-century architecture in Paris, I will propose that also the architects addressed this principle for designing their buildings. I will explain how builders fixed the positions of supports using triangulation, and thus applied a mathematical concept familiar to the educated elite in order to create an architectural space.