Architectural Space and The Imagination Houses in Literature and Art From Classical To Contemporary by Jane Griffiths, Adam Hanna, 2020

Architectural Space
and the Imagination

Houses in Literature
and Art from Classical
to Contemporary
Edited by
Jane Griffiths · Adam Hanna
Architectural Space and the Imagination
Jane Griffiths · Adam Hanna
Editors
Architectural Space
and the Imagination
Houses in Literature and Art from Classical to
Contemporary
Editors
Jane Griffiths Adam Hanna
Wadham College School of English and Digital
University of Oxford Humanities
Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK University College Cork
Cork, Ireland
ISBN 978-3-030-36066-5 ISBN 978-3-030-36067-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2
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Cover illustration: ‘Fortescue’ by Carlos Zapata and ‘Statue’ by Will Schofield
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Contents
Christina’s World ix
Jane Griffiths
1 Introduction 1
Jane Griffiths and Adam Hanna
Part I Foundations
2 Bifurcated Thought: Reflections on Inventive

Thinking 19
Andrew Lanyon
3 Murmuring Houses for the Mythical Mind 33

Christian Illies
4 The House of the Senses: Experiencing Buildings

with Peter Zumthor and Pliny the Younger 53
Martin Düchs and Sabine Vogt
v
vi CONTENTS
Part II Reading Literary Architectures
5 Behold the House of the Lord: Encountering

Architecture in the Codex Amiatinus 69
Meg Boulton
6 Placing the Dead: Architectural Imagination

and Posthumous Identity in Medieval France 85
Helen Swift
7 Domestic Devotion: Representing Household Space

in Late Medieval Religious Writing 101
Aparna Chaudhuri
8 ‘Drawd Too Architectooralooral’: Charles Dickens,

the Bildungsroman and the Spatial Imagination 117
Ushashi Dasgupta
9 Spaces of the A-Temporal: Italo Calvino’s Invisible

Cities and the Early Modern Imagination 131
Jelena Todorović
Part III Architectures of the Literary Imagination
10 ‘His Midas Touch’: Building and Writing in the Poetry

of Edmund Spenser and Seamus Heaney 149
Archie Cornish
11 Yeats’s Stanzas, Yeats’s Rooms 167

Adam Hanna
12 Nature’s Cabinets Unlocked: Cognition, Cabinets,

and Philosophy in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems
and Fancies 181
Sarah Cawthorne
CONTENTS vii
13 Elizabeth Bishop’s House in the Mind: Memory,

Imagination, and Interior Space in ‘The End of March’ 197
Jane Griffiths
14 ‘The Mind in the House’ or the ‘House in the Mind’:

Poetic Composition and Reclaimed Memory 213
Stephanie Norgate
House Painting 225

Jane Griffiths
Index 227
Christina’s World
(after Andrew Wyeth)
If I paint the light, the way it catches each blade

of grass that points to the house, and sharpens it,
they will say I am evading the issue.
If I render the faded clapboard, tease out its fibrous
softness in paint, they will say it wants context.
If I allow house and shed to stand for what happened
they will say these are empty forms.
If I paint what happened, who’d look at the grass
again, or trace the shape of what can’t be spoken
in the grey-skied space between the house and the barn?
First published in Jane Griffiths, Terrestrial Variations (Tarset: Bloodaxe

Books, 2012), p. 11. The editors are grateful to Bloodaxe Books for
permission to reproduce the poem here.
ix
Notes on Contributors
Meg Boulton is a Teaching Fellow in History of Art in the Edinburgh

College of Art at the University of Edinburgh. She studied Fine Art as
an Undergraduate, and completed her doctorate in Art History in 2013.
Since then she has taught at various Institutions, including the Depart-
ment of Continuing Education at Oxford, the University of Leeds, and
the V&A. She has published widely on topics including early Medieval
Art, Inuit Sculpture, and the writings of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She
is currently completing a monograph entitled Constructing Jerusalem: A
Phenomenology of Space in Early English Medieval Art.
Sarah Cawthorne was awarded her Ph.D. by the University of York
in 2019. Titled The Architectures of Knowledge: Spatial Metaphors in
Seventeenth-Century Science, it investigated how notions of space and
place provided conceptual models for natural philosophers investigating
a diverse range of topics. She is interested in the intersections between
scientific and literary culture, the domestic household as a site of scientific
investigation, and early modern material culture.
Aparna Chaudhuri is an Assistant Professor of English at Ashoka
University, Delhi. She specialises in the study of medieval English liter-
ature, and earned her doctorate at Harvard University for a disserta-
tion entitled ‘Willful Submission: A Study of Obedience in the Middle
Ages’. She is currently working on a book version of the same project.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
She has published on Chaucer and medieval women’s religious writing,

and also works as a literary translator from Bengali to English.
Archie Cornish recently completed a D.Phil. at the University of
Oxford, where he has also worked as Lecturer in English. His doctoral
thesis concerns the spatial aspects of Renaissance allegory, with a particular
focus on Edmund Spenser. He has also published on the significance of
architecture in Northern Irish poetry. General interests include the writing
of space, architecture, and landscape, allegory and metaphor, ecocriticism,
nationhood, narrative and poetic form, and writing of and from Ireland
in early modern and contemporary contexts.
Ushashi Dasgupta is the Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow and Tutor
in English at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. Her research
centres on nineteenth-century fiction, with a particular focus on litera-
ture’s engagement with space and architecture. She also works on theo-
ries of authorship, the development of the novel, and the global histories
of reading. Her first book, Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction:
The Lodger World (forthcoming in 2020 with Oxford University Press)
explores the significance of tenancy in the Victorian imagination.
Martin Düchs is a qualified architect and Assistant Professor of Philos-
ophy at Bamberg University, Germany. He has previously worked as an
architect, gained a doctorate in philosophy at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-
University in Munich and has been visiting fellow at Clare Hall,
Cambridge University. His books include Architektur für ein gutes Leben
(Waxmann, 2011) and 50+1 architektonische Gewissensfragen (Dölling und
Galitz, 2019). Currently he is preparing a book on architecture and its
relation to different concepts of the human being.
Jane Griffiths is Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, and
Placito Fellow and Tutor in English, Wadham College, Oxford. She
previously taught at the University of Edinburgh and the University
of Bristol. Her two monographs, John Skelton and Poetic Authority:
Defining the Liberty to Speak (2006) and Diverting Authorities: Experi-
mental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (2015) are published
by OUP. She is also the author of six collections of poetry, of which
the most recent, Silent in Finisterre (2017) was a Poetry Book Society
Recommendation.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Adam Hanna is Lecturer in Irish Literature at University College Cork.

He has previously taught at Trinity College Dublin, the University of
Aberdeen, and the University of Bristol, where he gained a doctorate for a
study of representations of domestic spaces in modern Irish poetry. He is
the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space (Palgrave, 2015).
He is currently working on a monograph about the intersections between
the law and Irish poetry.
Christian Illies holds a Chair of Philosophy at the University Bamberg.
After his studies of biology and philosophy (Diplom-Biologe Konstanz
1989), he continued his studies as a Rhodes-Scholar in Oxford (Magdalen
College; D.Phil. 1995). Habilitation at the TU Aachen, 2002–2008
Universitairdocent at the TU Eindhoven, 2006–2008 KIVI-NIRIA
Professor of Philosophy of Culture and Technology at the TU Delft.
His research focuses on ethics and meta-ethics, philosophy of biology,
philosophical anthropology, and philosophy of politics, culture, and tech-
nology, in particular architecture.
Andrew Lanyon is an artist and writer from Cornwall. He gradu-
ated from the London School of Film Technique in 1968 and spent
several years as a photographer, presenting a major touring show, The
Rooks of Trelawne, at The Photographer’s Gallery in 1976. He has self-
published over thirty limited edition letterpress books since 1987, begin-
ning with Deadpan, the first of the Rowley series that still continues.
He has also written highly acclaimed books on his father the painter
Peter Lanyon as well as other artists and poets. During the 1990s, along-
side painting, collage, and writing, Lanyon returned to filmmaking. His
work is in private and public collections including the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, and Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Stephanie Norgate is a poet and playwright. Her plays have been broad-
cast on BBC R4. Her two books of poetry from Bloodaxe Books are:
Hidden River (2008) and The Blue Den (2012). Stephanie is a former
Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester and is currently
a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Southampton. Her third
poetry collection from Bloodaxe will be published in 2021.
Helen Swift is Associate Professor of Medieval French and Tuto-
rial Fellow at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. Having
focused for several years on the fifteenth-century querelle des femmes
(including Gender, Writing and Performance: Men Defending Women in
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Late Medieval France [OUP, 2008]), she now explores more broadly
questions of narrative voice and identity. Representing the Dead: Epitaph
Fictions in Late-Medieval France (D. S. Brewer, 2016; runner-up, Society
for French Studies R. Gapper Book Prize) examines challenges to the
construction of identity posed by voices speaking from beyond the grave.
Jelena Todorović is a full professor of Early Modern Art at the Faculty
of Fine Arts in Belgrade. In addition to her academic duties she is, since
2006, head of the research project into the State Art Collection in the
Royal Compound in Belgrade, for which she received the highest Euro-
pean award for cultural heritage, the Europa Nostra Award, in 2018.
Her main research interest is the culture of the Baroque, on which she
has published widely. Her latest book is on the liminal spaces of the
Baroque, The Spaces that Never Were in Early Modern Art: Exploration
of Edges and Confines (Cambridge Scholars, 2019).
Sabine Vogt is Professor of Greek and Latin Languages and Literature
at the University of Bamberg, Germany. She studied Classical Studies at
Munich, Oxford, and Cambridge. From 2002 to 2012 she worked as
an editor for the Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies programme
of the De Gruyter publishing house in Berlin. In October 2012 she
took up her present position. Her publications include a monograph and
commentary on Ps-Aristotle, Physiognomonica; she is currently preparing
a commentated translation of this text for the Loeb Classical Library.
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Having divided into sight and sound, a bifurcated

thought reunites 20
Fig. 2.2 This obstacle, at first a formless mass, grew rapidly into a
substantial structure, something as sturdy and unadorned
as this dovecote 21
Fig. 2.3 Like the universe itself, or a single thought, the building
expands exponentially. Here is the lobby 22
Fig. 2.4 The maid’s room 23
Fig. 2.5 The stairs 23
Fig. 2.6 The wind goes in to play a tune 25
Fig. 2.7 Prototype model sea 25
Fig. 2.8 The chandelier 26
Fig. 2.9 ‘Size differences’ 27
Fig. 2.10 Joy and sorrow: detail from a French chair 28
Fig. 2.11 Vera’s foot and a geological map of Cornwall 29
Fig. 2.12 A conversation between Mervyn and Walter about
surrounding hills 29
Fig. 2.13 A coloured x-ray taken by Walter to see whether a camera
he had not used for years contained any film 30
Fig. 2.14 Vera’s watch with 9.5 mm film ‘strap’—film being a
medium capable of speeding, slowing, stopping, and
reversing time 31
Fig. 3.1 ‘Holmes’ Castle’, welcoming its guests 34
Fig. 3.2 Staircase in Peter Zumthor’s Kunsthaus Bregenz 36
Fig. 3.3 A room with two views 49
xv
xvi LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 4.1 The main facade of the Therme Vals, Switzerland 62

Fig. 5.1 Tabernacle diagram, Codex Amiatinus, pre-716,
Wearmouth-Jarrow. Florence, Laurentian Library, MS
Amiatino 1, fols. 2v-3r 72
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Jane Griffiths and Adam Hanna
In the artist Andrew Lanyon’s playful textual exploration of the creative

process, The Only Non-Slip Dodo Mat in the World (2013), his protag-
onist Ambrose Fortescue takes up residence in the heads of a series of
public statues. He treats them like themed hotel rooms, literally looking
out through their eyes, and choosing his hosts according to the direction
he wants his writing to take:
His progress from one character to another was colouring his thinking as
well as initiating new trains of thought […] A week spent inside Peter Pan
was different from what it might have been had he not first spent a week
in Sigmund Freud.1
1 Andrew Lanyon, The Only Non-Slip Dodo Mat in the World (privately published,
2013), p. 16.
J. Griffiths
Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK
e-mail: jane.griffiths@ell.ox.ac.uk
A. Hanna (B)
School of English and Digital Humanities, University College Cork, Cork,
Ireland
e-mail: adam.hanna@ucc.ie
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. Griffiths and A. Hanna (eds.), Architectural Space
and the Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_1
2 J. GRIFFITHS AND A. HANNA
Lanyon’s collaborator Carlos Zapata created a richly suggestive model of

Fortescue at work, a photograph of which is on the front cover of this
book. It shows Fortescue writing at a desk in an attic that is located in a
cut-away sculpture of a head. This is not the head of a recognisable figure
such as Freud or Peter Pan. Rather, it is anonymously generic, and the
way its white expanse is mirrored by the bald dome of Fortescue’s head
as he bends over his paper implies a close correlation between the two:
that the head in which he is at work is his own. This collapses the distinc-
tion between house and mind; they are equated as both the space where
creation occurs and the space that informs and directs such creation.
The representation of Fortescue at work neatly encapsulates the inter-
ests of the essays collected in this volume, which explore the inter-
play between architectural space and the literary imagination. Bringing
together research into a range of periods, and with contributions from
architectural and art historians, poets, and artists as well as from liter-
ary scholars, it aims not simply to complement existing research into the
house in literature and art, but also to suggest how this field of enquiry
might be developed. In recent years, both representations of architec-
tural space and individual writers’ and artists’ houses (as well as the rela-
tionship between them) have been the focus of a great deal of critical
attention. In particular, they have been linked to questions of nationhood
and political identity, as well as to questions of gender—as witnessed, for
example, in Gill Perry’s discussion of home and identity in Playing at
Home: The House in Contemporary Art (2013), and in Imogen Racz’s
Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday (2015). The
national and gendered politics that inhere in domestic spaces are at the
forefront in such academic studies as Karen Lipsedge’s Domestic Space
in Eighteenth-Century British Novels (2012), as well as Monika Shafi’s
Housebound: Selfhood and Domestic Space in Contemporary German Fic-
tion (2012). Further, they have been the subjects of the essays in Gerry
Smyth and Jo Croft’s Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space
in Modern Culture (2006) and, more recently, Terri Mullholland and
Nicole Sierra’s edited collection Spatial Perspectives: Essays on Literature
and Architecture (2015). More recently still, the essays in Rhona Rich-
man Kenneally and Lucy McDiarmid’s edited volume, The Vibrant House:
Irish Writing and Domestic Space (2017), have combined contemporary
theories on the agential qualities of material with more traditional preoc-
cupations with gender, nationality, and identity. Such critical and scholarly
1 INTRODUCTION 3
attention has extended to the actual houses inhabited by writers and

artists, as seen in studies including Phyllis Richardson’s The House of Fic-
tion: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature
and Life (2017)—which examines actual houses such as Walpole’s Straw-
berry Hill and Sterne’s Shandy Hall as well as fictional structures such
as Pemberley and Brideshead—and Kirsty Bell’s The Artist’s House: From
Workplace to Artwork (2013), which is concerned both with work that is
shaped by the house an artist lives in, and with houses that are shaped by
the resident artists’ work.
While this volume reflects many of these areas of interest, its primary
focus is on direct relationships between the house and the creative imagi-
nation, specifically on architectural space as the object of the imagination,
the house as shelter for the work of the imagination, and (significantly)
architectural space as a means of envisaging the shape and the workings
of the imagination itself. Its contributors acknowledge the importance of
current scholarship on house and nation, house and politics, house and
the uncanny, house and gender identity, but its main interest is in the
various ways in which the house may be ‘in the mind’. Like Lanyon’s
and Zapata’s work, it explores the points where the boundary between
house and mind becomes indistinct: houses that are coterminous with
the writer’s mind, and minds that are imagined in architectural terms.
It is not surprising, then, that Heidegger’s ‘Building, Dwelling, Think-
ing’ (1951) and, especially, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958,
first English translation 1964) are recurrent points of reference.2 Hei-
degger’s cornerstone essay inverts the traditional view that humans are
dwellers because they have built spaces in which to dwell. Rather, accord-
ing to Heidegger, building arises from the impulsion to dwell. ‘To be a
human being’, he wrote, ‘means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means
to dwell’.3 The primordial dwelling place, a built space that symbolised
urges that could perhaps be better described as expressive than literary,
is famously exemplified by Heidegger’s own simple, slope-roofed hut in
the Black Forest—a place that contained almost no books, but copious
supplies of writing paper.4 In the work of both Heidegger and Bachelard,
2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press,
1994); Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought,
trans. by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971), pp. 141–60.
3 Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, p. 147.
4 J. H. Prynne, ‘Huts’, Textual Practice, 22 (2008), 613–33 (p. 628).
ideas of the built dwelling place as a fundamental element of human expe-

rience loom large. For Bachelard, as for Heidegger, the idea of the house
is one that is embedded deeply in the collective unconscious as an image
of shelter and protection.5 He argues that this image is informed by mem-
ories of a childhood house as an entirely safe and private space for day-
dreaming. As the locus of remembered daydreaming—the lost great good
place—the house becomes embedded in the adult imagination as ‘one of
the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams
of mankind’.6 For Bachelard, the house as object of the imagination is
inseparable from the idea of the house as shelter for the work of the imag-
ination, and it is the fusion of these two roles that gives the image its uni-
versal appeal. Indeed, when he writes that it is ‘thanks to the house [that]
a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elabo-
rate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have
refuges that are all the more clearly delineated’, he comes close to repre-
senting thought itself in explicitly architectural terms; when he states that
‘our soul is an abode […] by remembering “houses” and “rooms”, we
learn to “abide” within ourselves’, he seems to imply that Heideggerian
dwelling takes place not in the world, but in the imagination.7
Through their emphasis on the embodied nature of dwelling, both
Bachelard and Heidegger are closely associated with phenomenology.
Although debate as to what phenomenology constitutes is almost as
old as the word itself, the term most frequently connotes a preoccupa-
tion with what has been described as ‘space, time, and the world “as
lived”’.8 Its focus, therefore, is neither on causality nor on the nature of
being, but rather on the granular, irreducible nature of experience itself.
According to David R. Cerbone, its central concerns with experience and
consciousness make the practice of phenomenology inextricable from
5 Although Bachelard’s work has recently attracted criticism on the grounds that it is
based purely on his own essentially middle class experience (see Gerry Smyth and Jo
Croft, Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture [Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2006], pp. 14–15), his work seeks specifically to discover the complex relationship
between the personal and the universal.
6 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 6.
7 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 8, p. xxxvii.
8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John F. Bannan, ‘What Is Phenomenology?’ CrossCurrents
(1956), 59–70.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
‘introspection’.9 This turn inwards can readily be imagined in spatial

terms; conversely, the house, where space is first known and experienced,
becomes a basis for how ‘the world “as lived”’ is understood. Such
phenomenological theorisations of the house in the mind are as central
to this volume as they are to Bachelard’s and Heidegger’s work. Yet
with contributions drawn from a range of periods and disciplines, it
also extends and challenges their positions, setting contrasting views of
the interrelationship between architectural space and the imagination in
dialogue. Prefaced by the poem ‘Christina’s World’, which speaks to the
possible ways in which an artist might imagine a house, the first three
chapters, grouped under the heading ‘Foundations’, establish a number
of ideas and approaches that recur throughout the volume. The first
of these, an extract from Andrew Lanyon’s privately printed Bifurcated
Thought (2013), does so with remarkable flair.10 As a piece of imaginative
writing, a cross between essay and short story, it is, perhaps, an unusual
opening for a book of academic essays. Its presence is vital, however. An
extended exploration of the house as image of the thinking mind, it does
not just illustrate the possibility of imagining the mind in architectural
terms, forming the equivalent of the ‘pertinent literary documents’ that
Bachelard quoted in support of his reading of the symbolism of the
house.11 It also displays an almost uncanny consonance with classical and
medieval traditions that discuss the mind as architectural structure, play-
fully introducing connections that will be the subject of more traditional
forms of investigation later in the volume. Lanyon’s piece suggests how
closely theory and artistic practice may be related, and how new perspec-
tives may be gained from their juxtaposition. He dramatically riffs on the
idea that the house may serve as image of the thinking mind, seeming to
stumble upon it almost by accident. Setting out to write about thought,
he claims that the metaphor he had originally intended to use for it was
9 David R. Cerbone, ‘Phenomenological Method: Reflection, Introspection, and Skep-

ticism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, ed. by Dan Zahavi
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 7–25 (p. 7).
10 The Only Non-Slip Dodo Mat in the World and Bifurcated Thought are the third and
fourth of a series of privately published books in which Lanyon explores the nature of
creativity through imaginative fictions; the two previous volumes are Von Ribbentrop in
St Ives (2010) and The Daughters of Radon (2011).
the wind, but that, as he followed the wind on its course, he unexpectedly
discovered a dovecote in its path. In consequence of this encounter:
Wind moves in a new direction. Within moments the dovecote has become
a small cottage, to which rooms, stairs and wings are rapidly added. While
wind is pouring down the chimney, this building is already changing from
a substantial house into a mansion and by the time wind bursts into an
attic, the place is teetering on the brink of being opened to the public.12
This series of transformations continues as the wind that pours down the
chimney turns into a maid who is leaving her room and in doing so cre-
ates the stairs which she descends to encounter a piano tuner who later
composes a tune for her and, in the process, calls into being a further
addition to the house: ‘an uncurtained glass conservatory’ that completes
the imaginary structure with a flourish.
Lanyon’s jeu d’esprit thus brings together a number of possible rela-
tionships between house and mind. His house is, explicitly, a ‘thought-
house’: a house that is the direct expression of mental activity. It also
creates a space in which further creation occurs, in the form of the piano
tuner’s composition, and that creation in turn feeds back into the shape
of the house, making it not the result of a single thought process, but a
collaborative effort. In addition to representing the creative process, the
house is the visible form in which that process results; indeed, the great
glass conservatory that is the culmination of the edifice is explicitly said to
realise ‘the link between inside and out’—that is, it symbolises the way in
which a private, internal thought is made publicly manifest.13 As Lanyon
describes it, there is no distinction between form and content: the mind
imagines a house that gives shape and direction to the mind’s own subse-
quent imaginings and simultaneously results in a physical presence in the
outside world. Moreover, Lanyon not only writes that this is what hap-
pens, but also lays out his text so as to allow the reader to share in the
experience. The dovecote that so unexpectedly interrupts the passage of
the wind of thought and provides the foundations for the elaborate manor
house is given physical representation on the page by the insertion of a
small black and white photograph of a foursquare stone dovecote. This
quite literally interrupts the text, to the extent that the sentence ‘This
12 Lanyon, Bifurcated Thought , p. 8.

13 Lanyon, Bifurcated Thought , p. 14.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
obstacle, at first a formless mass, grew rapidly into a substantial structure,

something as sturdy and unadorned as this dovecote’ is forced into the
position of caption. The reader’s eye thus encounters a physical obstruc-
tion in the text at precisely the moment that the ‘obstacle’ is written of,
while the building it represents forms a counterpart on the page to the
image that is called to mind by the word ‘dovecote’. In this way, readers
are given their own experience of the phenomenon that Lanyon goes on
to explore in more detail—that the process of thought both forms and is
informed by its contents. They are furnished with their own house in the
mind.
Lanyon’s work thus recalls Bachelard’s idea of the ‘housed’ memory,
but it also recalls two much earlier models of the mind and its move-
ment: from antiquity onwards, wind was frequently used to figure inspi-
ration, whose etymological root is the Latin inspirare, to breathe into.
Such inspiration was frequently linked with precisely the kind of excited
and inventive improvisation that appears in Lanyon’s own writing. For
example, the classical rhetorician Quintilian asserted that:
If a speaker is swept away by warmth of feeling and genuine inspiration,

it frequently happens that he attains a success from improvisation which
would have been beyond the reach of the most careful preparation. When
this occurred, the old orators used to say that some god had inspired
the speaker. But the reason is obvious. For profound emotion and vivid
imagination sweep on with unbroken force.14
For Lanyon, however, such inspired free-association cannot work in a

vacuum. It requires a local habitation, which it finds in the dovecote—
an image that also recalls some much earlier ways of thinking about the
house in the mind. In classical memory arts, which remained influential
well into the medieval and early modern periods, public speakers were
encouraged to visualise an architectural space, and to associate each of
the various topics of their speech with a particular location in the build-
ing. The idea was that, when giving their speech, this spatialisation would
enable them to retrieve the topics in any order they desired, as one might
locate items in the familiar cupboards of one’s own home. The imagined
14 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. by H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 10.7.13-14. For this connection, see fur-
ther Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 125–56.
architectural space could be either real or invented; it could be ‘a house,

an inter-columnar space, a recess, an arch, or the like’.15 The crucial point
was that it would enable the retrieval of material, and its re-use in a new
form. This, in turn, encouraged the visualisation of the memory itself
in spatial terms; common metaphors that recur throughout both classi-
cal and medieval writing include ‘thesaurus’ (‘storage room’, ‘treasury’,
or ‘strong-box’), ‘cella’ (‘storeroom’), ‘arca’ (‘chest’), library, hive—and
dovecote.16 In one of the earliest occurrences of this image Plato writes
in the Theaetetus of the contents of an orderly memory as resembling
pigeons in a pigeon-coop, while Cassiodorus deploys the metaphor at
greater length in his Institutiones; as Mary Carruthers puts it:
He describes the structured memory […] as a kind of inventoried set of

coops or animal-pens. […] Whatever experiences one has will be channeled
by this previously laid-out inventory, and will find their appropriate place,
each contributing its matter to the general store. Without the sorting struc-
ture, there is no invention, no inventory, no experience, and therefore no
knowledge – there is only a useless heap, what is sometimes called silva, a
pathless forest of chaotic material.17
While we might now associate the orderliness implied by architectural

metaphors for the memory with stasis, or a want of creativity, for those
who used them, the images implied the opposite: the material stored in
the mind’s orderly apertures was there to be taken up and shaped into
some new form. It was the spatial, architectural structure of the memory
that enabled thought.
Lanyon’s dovecote, of course, first appears as an image in the mind
rather than one of it. Moreover, it is possible that the way in which
his work echoes memory arts is accidental: reinvention rather than allu-
sion. Nevertheless, exploring the subject of thought and creativity, the
material he discovers is a classical image of the mind, and this interacts
15 The quotation is from one of the most popular rhetorical treatises, the Rhetor-
ica ad Herennium, trans. by Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1954), III.xvi.29. Cf. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XI.2.1; and Thomas Bradwardine,
‘On Acquiring a Trained Memory’, trans. by Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A
Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), pp. 361–68.
16 See further Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 37–55.
17 Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 38–39.
1 INTRODUCTION 9
with thought to create new structures which themselves take architectural

form, as he not only shows the transformative processes of thought, but
also the spaces in which that transformation occurs. His allusive, elusive,
manically extended riffs on the idea of ‘chambers of the mind’ reanimate
ways of thinking about the creative process that have been dormant for
centuries, and this suggests the persistence of house not only as a mem-
ory place, but as image of the mind itself: as both literal and metaphorical
starting point for creativity.
The second and third chapters in the ‘Foundations’ section take a
more traditional academic form, but are equally radical in the approaches
they propose to the house in the mind. Whereas Lanyon represents cre-
ative thought in explicitly architectural terms, Christian Illies focuses on
architecture as a stimulus to further forms of creativity. At the outset, he
explores the auras and atmospheres that are inspired by built spaces and,
consequently, are projected onto them. He does this by writing about
the strange mix of fear and allure that attaches itself to buildings with
grisly pasts, raising the idea that haunted places have such a hold on the
imagination because, by virtue of their limits, they are able to make the
fearful and uncanny knowable and contained. Illies suggests that magical,
mythical approaches to built space, which make it a locus for story-telling,
enable a discourse he terms ‘narrative beauty’. Such beauty, Illies argues
(in ideas that take a distinctly Heideggerian bent), can help human beings
find a meaningful place in the world.
The narration of architecture is also central to Martin Düchs and
Sabine Vogt’s chapter, which is concerned with the sensory experience
of architecture, and how this is reflected in both literary and architectural
texts. Their piece begins with an outline of the different ways in which a
house may be held in the mind—as a two-dimensional picture, as a three-
dimensional vision of space, as an imagined experience of space in time,
and finally as an imagined experience of space in time that also engages
the senses. The authors then examine how architecture’s appeal to the
senses finds expression both in one of the earliest literary discussions of an
architectural structure, Pliny the Younger’s epistle about his villa at Lau-
rentum, and in the work and writing of the present-day architect Peter
Zumthor. Tracing a shared interest in architecture as an immersive expe-
rience in such diverse figures, and bringing together architectural and lit-
erary analysis, this chapter suggests that a phenomenological experience
of architecture is fundamental not only to the experience of buildings
themselves, but also to the ways in which they are re-imagined in writing.
By directly investigating relationships between built space and the

imagination, the first three chapters raise questions that are explored
further in the rest of the book. These subsequent chapters are divided
into two sections, ‘Reading Literary Architectures’ and ‘Architectures of
the Literary Imagination’. Those in the former section focus on ways in
which imaginary architectures have been deployed in a variety of texts
to envisage and articulate the experience of being in the world; those in
the latter turn to the various relationships between architectural space
and writers’ own imaginations, whether that space takes the form of the
houses they lived in, the structure of their work, or the source of their
images of making.
The first literary architecture to be examined is that of the eighth-
century Codex Amiatinus , a manuscript whose text of the Bible is
accompanied by a series of complex miniatures. Focusing in particular
on its elaborate representation of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, Meg
Boulton radically extends and develops the argument that the image is a
composite of several ecclesiastical structures and Old Testament spaces,
representing a layered amalgam of Tabernacle, Temple, Church, and the
Heavenly City yet to come. Drawing on Bachelard’s consideration of
architecture as understood through lived experience, Boulton argues that
to view the book’s miniatures may constitute an equivalent experiential
encounter. By depicting a variety of architectures that were considered
to house God, its pages themselves come to function as a representation
of the earthly and structural guises of the Church that also prefigure
Jerusalem; its representation of built space contains within it a represen-
tation of all Christian time. Like Düchs and Vogt, Boulton presents built
space as something that is most fully experienced through the reader’s
imagination in the act of engaging with the words and images on a
printed or manuscript page.
Helen Swift’s chapter, too, is concerned with the relationship between
texts and the imagined architectures they contain. Whereas Boulton’s
interest is in the way the physical book comes to serve as a substitute
for the architecture it represents, Swift discusses how a book’s contents—
its poetic fictions—may take on the function of memorial architecture.
Focusing on the profusion of fictional spatial structures—tombs, cemeter-
ies, palaces and temples—which are described as housing the dead in late
medieval French writings, she explores the possibility of constructing a
meaningful place in the world for those who have departed from it. While
tombs have traditionally been conceptualised as frameworks intended
1 INTRODUCTION 11
to fix, monumentalise, and immortalise, Swift reveals the limitations of

such architectural ‘placing’ of the dead in the work of Jean Bouchet
and Octovien de Saint-Gelais, arguing that memorialisation occurs more
effectively within the poetic fictions themselves. Indeed, the analysis of
Pierre de Hauteville’s poetic inventory of a house formerly occupied by a
deceased lover, with which her chapter concludes, demonstrates in detail
how it is the process of describing the contents of the house that ren-
ders the vacated domestic space a memorial. The large issue that Swift
sees being addressed in the creation of these literary grave-sites is to do
with how human identity is constituted. The kinds of Heideggerian ideas
raised in Illies’s chapter are pushed to and beyond their logical limits.
What does it mean to imagine ‘being in the world’ for someone who is
no longer ‘of the world’?
Built space as metaphor for a meaningful place in society is further
explored in Aparna Chaudhuri’s chapter. Focusing on the late medieval
religious texts Abbey of the Holy Ghost , The Doctrine of the Hert and The
Book of Margery Kempe, Chaudhuri analyses the use of home and house-
hold as metaphors for the pious heart, or as the imaginary backdrop of
the soul’s encounter with God. These household metaphors have conven-
tionally been seen as a means of configuring the domestic environment as
a legitimate devotional space, anticipating Bachelard’s association of the
home with the inmost recesses of the psyche. Chaudhuri’s chapter, how-
ever, takes another approach, suggesting instead that a principal objec-
tive of domestic metaphors in medieval religious texts is to reimagine the
religious environment as a domestic one. This transposition, she argues,
enabled the export of increasingly well-theorised household principles of
careful husbandry, thrift, order and harmony to the church, but also pro-
vided grounds for an understanding of ‘homeliness’ as the site of spiritual
independence. Chaudhuri thus locates in medieval England a conception
of domestic space as a repository of values and ideas that could be taken
out of doors and applied in other contexts. In showing how such space
provides a structure for thinking about women’s place in the world, she
extends and revises Bachelard’s concept of the ‘housed’ imagination.
A comparable extension of Bachelardian theory is found in Ushashi
Dasgupta’s chapter, which discusses Charles Dickens’s fascination with
rented houses. Such houses have typically been excluded from Heidegge-
rian–Bachelardian readings, perhaps because their status as relatively pro-
visional dwellings makes them less subject to a sense of ownership and
belonging than owned houses. Yet although dwelling places occupy the
literary imagination differently when they are rented than when they are
owned, Dasgupta argues that imaginative engagement with the rented
house significantly informed the plots of the nineteenth-century Bil-
dungsroman, or coming-of-age narrative. Focusing particularly on David
Copperfield (1849–50) and Great Expectations (1860–61), she demon-
strates how this genre proselytises for a certain kind of domestic ideology:
at the end of a novel, the protagonist is rewarded for his unflagging sense
of aspiration with a stable and private home. He may only move into this
kind of home when he finds his place in society, and when he finds him-
self. Rented houses are thus crucial to the very textures of narration, as
Dickens’s metaphors of rented space indicate how his narrators perceive
the world around them, make sense of their lives, and express themselves
on paper; in David’s and Pip’s cases, specifically, they reveal two imagi-
nations gripped by tenancy. Like Swift, Dasgupta is concerned with the
location of the self; like Chaudhuri she examines ways in which the house
may be imagined as a kind of self, while the self in turn is understood in
terms of the domestic sphere.
In the final essay of this section, Jelena Todorović’s chapter discusses
another writer for whom representations of architectural space are central
to the imagination. Focusing on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972),
her concern is with imagined architectures as a form of literary inheri-
tance; she traces consonances between Calvino’s fluid, open-ended built
spaces and the plural, liminal spaces of a series of Baroque texts, paintings,
architectures, and artefacts of the seventeenth century, showing that they
have close parallels with Calvino’s presentation of the city as dream-scape.
Todorović’s interdisciplinary approach decisively connects his literary city
to material culture, yet at the same time shows how imagined architec-
tures may reveal a fundamental disbelief in what she terms ‘the solidity
of our realities’. Like Chaudhuri’s and Dasgupta’s chapters, her concern
with imaginative representations of a sense of transience and unbelonging
challenges and extends the Heideggerian and Bachelardian foundations
of this volume; the architectures that she explores serve as a means of
envisaging un-dwelling, un-housing, unbelonging.
Whereas the chapters thus far suggest ways in which Bachelard’s and
Heidegger’s understanding of the house might profitably be extended
through engagements with imaginary architectures, those in the final part
of the volume indicate ways in which house, mind, and literary produc-
tion become coterminous. Archie Cornish’s chapter examines how very
different relationships with their dwellings are reflected in the work of two
1 INTRODUCTION 13
poets who wrote in Ireland, albeit in very different eras: Edmund Spenser
and Seamus Heaney. He argues that, for Spenser, building is antecedent
to writing: in consequence of his dubious title to Kilcolman Castle and its
estate, the provisionality of the former enables the deliberation of the lat-
ter. In Heaney’s work, however, building is not antecedent to the writing
of verse, but its equivalent: for Heaney, poetry ought not to outstrip the
bricolage of building, but take it as its model. Cornish asks how the mes-
sages transmitted by and the ideas ascribed to dwelling places are affected
when memories of bloodshed and contestation rise like damp from the
very land on which they are situated. He shows that the methods and
circumstances by which built spaces were created form the imaginings of
their inhabitants, changing the texture of writing itself.
As Adam Hanna shows, the connection between Yeats’s writing and
his dwelling place is still more intimate. In his chapter, Hanna suggests
that the forms that Yeats frequently wrote in for the dozen-or-so years
from 1919—grand, architecturally constructed octave stanzas—shape and
influence the imagery in the poems themselves. The role of built space in
Yeats’s poetry—its limits, effects, and possibilities—are of a piece with his
writings in his essays, diaries, and letters on the effects on his work of
employing regular, stanzaic poetic forms. Yeats started writing in these
great forms at around the same time as he moved into a renovated
medieval fortification in the rural west of Ireland, a fact that suggests
how close the relationship between writing and dwelling can be. Making
reference to Yeats’s letters and journals as well as his poems, this chapter
therefore argues for the existence of a greater self-referentiality in his later
work than has been discerned hitherto. Like Andrew Lanyon’s dovecote
that is both made of a metaphorical creative wind and inspires further
creation, Yeats’s stanza-forms give rise to the images that fill the stanzas
themselves.
Turning from real houses that inform the writerly imagination to
spaces that reflect the structures and processes of the writer’s mind,
Sarah Cawthorne’s chapter examines the extended conceit of nature’s
cabinets in Margaret Cavendish’s 1653 verse miscellany, Poems and Fan-
cies, as a metaphorical use of the constructed environment. Describing
the brain as one such cabinet (a term that in Early Modern English
was synonymous with ‘chamber’), Cavendish draws on the realities of
domestic and scholarly space to integrate the poetic faculty into a coher-
ent cognitive and sensory anatomy and construct a natural philosophy
that recognises the poetic imagination as an active philosophical tool.
Using the conceit to tease out the connections between mind, body,
chamber, and world, Cavendish not only illustrates how the cabinet was
a potent structure in the early modern natural philosophical imagination,
and how spatial poetics could enable natural philosophical inquiry, but
also how they provide a metaphor for Cavendish to understand the
workings of her own mind. Like Lanyon’s chapter, Cawthorne’s shows
how persistently the imagination is envisaged in architectural terms. It
not only demonstrates how models of the mind drawn from classical
memory arts both informed and were modified in seventeenth-century
thought, but also considers Cavendish’s work as an early exploration of
the phenomenological imagination.
A comparable architectural imagining of the creative process is
explored in Jane Griffiths’s chapter, which centres on a single poem by
Elizabeth Bishop. In ‘The End of March’, Bishop imagines an alternate
life in a house she sees by a beach, interpreting the makeshift quality
and liminal position of the house as conveying freedom from everyday
responsibilities. Her poem thus strongly recalls the theory advanced
in Bachelard’s Poetics of Space that the house is a shelter that enables
daydreaming, yet at the same time presents the house as impossibly out
of reach. Griffiths argues that the conflicting features of this dream-space
are intimately connected with the poet’s mental processes. Drawing both
on classical and medieval memory arts, and on the consonances between
Bishop’s work and the shadow boxes constructed by the artist Joseph
Cornell, she posits that Bishop’s dream houses do not just enable the
creative process, but are coterminous with it; ultimately—like the cabinets
discussed in Cawthorne’s chapter—they come to stand for the poetic
imagination itself. Like Lanyon’s, Cawthorne’s, and Todorović’s chap-
ters, Griffiths’s cross-period approach reveals the persistence with which
connections between architectural structures and the imagination recur;
it echoes Lanyon’s in particular in showing how imaginary architectures
provide a means of envisaging the structures of thought.
The volume concludes with an exploration of how that process of asso-
ciation works in practice, as the poet Stephanie Norgate examines ways in
which a glimpsed house may be mentally inhabited. Norgate describes
how houses that she sees—beginning with another derelict house on
a beach—come to embody certain emotions and states of being. From
this opening, in which she examines correspondences between her own
responses and Bachelard’s ideas of refuge, Norgate goes on to describe
the process of creating the poems in her sequence ‘The Fallen House’,
1 INTRODUCTION 15
poems which were originally developed through collaboration with the

painter Jayne Sandys-Renton. In particular, the erosive proximity of the
sea to the house is shown deeply to inform the texture of the work that
arose from this collaboration. Like Bishop, Norgate is drawn to dam-
aged and precarious seaside dwellings; like Todorović and Dasgupta, she
is concerned with the tensions between belonging and unbelonging that
houses may reflect. Her chapter shows how the sheer susceptibility of the
imagination to built spaces operates in practice as well as in theory: how
built spaces can generate or perhaps uncover ideas of which the artist was
hitherto unaware.
In each of these chapters architecture is shown to be not so much
a class of inert object as an energy within the imagination. The ways it
shapes the mind are all the more irresistible for being (very often) beneath
the level of consciousness. The chapters gathered in this volume confirm
Bachelard’s argument that the image of the house is an irreducible one—
one that is thought with rather than thought about. Yet by approaching
the subject of the house in the mind from a cross-period and interdisci-
plinary perspective, they also demonstrate how Bachelard’s findings may
be extended and modified. Not only do they show how the domestic and
non-domestic architectures that serve as a means of articulating the self
extend beyond Bachelard’s primary images of house and hut, but they
also indicate how the imaginative work performed by such architectures
extends considerably beyond the provision of a safe enclosure for the day-
dreaming mind. Representations of built spaces, as the ‘Reading Literary
Architectures’ section of the book shows, are ways of representing such
intangible ideas as belonging, piety, inheritance, and aspiration. Partic-
ularly significant is the way in which these chapters repeatedly uncover
what happens when space is narrated or represented by textual means,
and the frequency with which such texts posit built space as something
that is experienced primarily through the imagination. The final part of
the book, ‘Architectures of the Literary Imagination’, still further empha-
sises the centrality of house to mind, revealing the striking frequency
with which texts render house and mind coterminous; while this elision is
implicit in classical memory arts, and some writers—such as Cavendish—
are likely to have been aware of this tradition, others—including Dickens,
Lanyon, Bishop, and Cornell—seem rather to rediscover the metaphor.
Its persistent recurrence appears to confirm Bachelard’s argument that
the image of the house provides a fundamental way of ordering and
understanding experience of the outside world—yet at the same time,
Bachelard’s position is extended and modified by the very diversity of

the work under discussion. The emergence of strong recurrent themes
and tropes across periods and genres indicates just how effectively liter-
ary architectures provide ways of envisaging both the self in the world
and the imagination itself. They serve both as memorial and as point of
departure; as Jane Griffiths puts it in the poem with which the volume
concludes: ‘As for the house, you have your back to it: | it is where you
start from’.18
18 Jane Griffiths, ‘House Painting’, in Another Country: New & Selected Poems (Tarset:
Bloodaxe Books, 2008), p. 52.
PART I
Foundations
The opening section, ‘Foundations’, contains three essays that bring

phenomenological perspectives to the experience of built spaces. The first
piece takes an imaginative approach to the way that thoughts and archi-
tecture intersect, while the second two essays that comprise this section
examine the work of thinkers from Pliny the Younger to contemporary
philosophers.
CHAPTER 2
Bifurcated Thought: Reflections on Inventive

Thinking
Andrew Lanyon
This chapter is an extract from Bifurcated Thought , privately printed in

2013, and the fourth of a series of books about accessing inventive-
ness. The first (Von Ribbentrop in St. Ives ) assumes danger is the original
initiator of inventiveness. The second (The Daughters of Radon) takes
the viewpoint of an inventive thought itself, which tries to get out of
the mind. In the third (The Only Non-Slip Dodo Mat in the World), the
protagonist becomes a thought voyaging into the head, where a void at
the centre is seen as the fountain of pretence. In this fourth book it is
proposed that a forming thought is made of two things: ‘events’ and
‘energy’. This energy is the force that drives the thought. To help think
about such a driving force, it is likened to the wind.
To begin with, then, wind does what it does best, it blows. Following
a long, hot summer, the first breaths of autumn sweep through a
wood, rattling the dry leaves. While these exploratory blasts lack purpose
and direction, in dividing to avoid trees, their pace quickens. Exhorted
onwards from behind by an ever-expanding body of air that musters on
the other side of a nearby hill, these zephyrs rush forward. Here and there
A. Lanyon (B)
Independent Artist, Porthleven, UK

20 A. LANYON
they leave signs for the waiting companies, so that when these break camp,
having a clear trail to follow, they will move faster. Thus the scouts kick
up dust, knock off bonnets and crack twigs, which fall, so men collecting
them for their fires will light beacons to guide wind at night.
Is this metaphorical wind helping? Surely, a single thought only
requires to be driven by a single force, but the wind has already split
into a small marauding advance guard and gathering regiments of gales.
However, maybe a thought’s driving force is like this and it too makes its
way by dividing its energy.
Now that these wintry riders are underway, they course ahead like
hares, marking a route for the lumbering tortoises who will drag thun-
der’s battering rams and lightning’s trebuchets behind. While the smaller
force darts ahead, chancing its arm, the larger one waits. The first is fast,
like vision, the second slow, like speech (Fig. 2.1).
Fig. 2.1 Having divided into sight and sound, a bifurcated thought reunites
The intention had been to present a single thought as the main topic,
employing wind as a brief metaphor for its motive force. But within
moments wind had swept up and absorbed the thought. This now fused
unit—a wind-driven thought—was moving so fast, it was all the author
could do to keep up. But suddenly, it seemed as if wind’s headlong charge
was to be halted, for an obstacle lay in its path (Fig. 2.2).
2 BIFURCATED THOUGHT: REFLECTIONS ON INVENTIVE THINKING 21
Fig. 2.2 This obstacle,

at first a formless mass,
grew rapidly into a
substantial structure,
something as sturdy and
unadorned as this
dovecote
There was not time to wonder how such an obstruction happened to

be there. A loose thought driven by a wayward wind is probably capable
of creating conditions that best suit its escapades. Gaining confidence as
it rises above this obstruction, wind moves in a new direction. Within
moments the dovecote has become a small cottage, to which rooms, stairs
and wings are rapidly added. While wind is pouring down the chimney,
this building is already changing from a substantial house into a mansion
and by the time wind bursts into an attic bedroom, the place is teetering
on the brink of being opened to the public (Fig. 2.3).
22 A. LANYON
Fig. 2.3 Like the universe itself, or a single thought, the building expands
exponentially. Here is the lobby
Having formed a shape in smoke, a flourish like the one described

in the air with a cane in Tristram Shandy, this wind-driven thought
turns into a maid leaving her room.1 As she closes the door, the smoky
fragrance clings to her pinafore like a koala. Carried downstairs, this whiff
of soot turns itself into a movement and then a tune: that melody with
which a piano tuner serenades the maid. Transferred from one sense to
another, the shape is this thought’s DNA (Fig. 2.4).
1 See Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Tim
Parrell (London: J. M. Dent, 2000), p. 507.
Fig. 2.4 The maid’s room
As she descends the stairs, the maid fashions its measured treads with
her feet, while a handrail flows out behind her. Because one of these two
extreme choreographed forms is made of straights, the other of curves,
they are easily turned by a pianist’s left hand into supporting chords, and
by his right into a fanciful tune (Fig. 2.5).
Fig. 2.5 The stairs
Like any house, this one has sensitive spots, where emotions are most
likely to be experienced, vented or bottled. One particular architectural
24 A. LANYON
erogenous zone exists in the living room, through which the maid makes
her way while the piano tuner tightens the grand. Fully aware of his
feelings for her, she veers towards him as he commandeers the roar of
the velvet curtains pulled on their brass runners, a contrast to the single
more hesitant notes made by any tuner tuning any grand. And he copies
the movements of her hands as they open curtains, sweeping his to and
fro over the keys to produce arpeggios. On a music score, these ‘almost
circles’ begin to echo the handrail. As the maid moves further down and
through the house opening curtains, the first gale arrives and snow starts
to fall. As each flake floats from side to side, it looks like someone reaching
this way and that, opening curtains. By the time the maid arrives in the
kitchen, light is reflected onto its ceiling from the snow-covered ground,
the dazzling whiteness a contrast to the dark oven dotted with black-
ened kettles and pots. ‘Black-and-white’ as an idea is being stretched to
its extremes by the weather, until it bursts into all the colours on a tray
of breakfast: the warm yellows, reds, and browns of butter, marmalade,
eggs, bacon, kippers, coffee, and toast.
As the maid arrives back in the room, she is divided into functional
and decorative halves, like the stairs.
Holding the tray with one hand, the other is free. With this free hand,
she mischievously closes the curtains which she had opened earlier. Inten-
sified in the dark, the smells of breakfast assail the tuner. The scents of
bacon, kippers, coffee, and toast evoke the faint smoky fragrance he had
sensed on her as she passed him earlier, smells linked in his mind to her
lingering. And these movements and smells touch chords, so that in the
dark, the tune takes shape. As well as his searching for this melody, the
maid challenges him to play her the tune at night, a scene from Romeo
and Juliet springing to her mind. When closing the door, she tells him
where her room is.
Realising the living room is directly below the maid’s bedroom, the
tuner returns that night and plays the tune through the network of flues
(Fig. 2.6). As she listens, she notices that the warm colours of the embers
in the grate are the same as those that frame the setting sun outside.
Suddenly, as the link between inside and out is taken up by the architect of
this imaginary domain, an uncurtained glass conservatory is built. In this
see-through vestibule, exterior variables are connected by wires so that at
a glance they can be gauged from within. Wind speed and direction are
indicated within a chandelier joined to a weather vane above, while a pipe
running from a cave far below allows the rising tide to push air up, to fill
a balloon concealed beneath a miniature sea (Figs. 2.7 and 2.8).
Fig. 2.6 The wind goes in to play a tune
Fig. 2.7 Prototype model sea

26 A. LANYON
Fig. 2.8 The

chandelier
In this table-top model, when the balloon expands, the water creeps
up a sloping beach, thus conveying the state of the real tide, as well as
its direction. Here, in this slightly moving still-life devoid of heroes and
heroines, inside and out combine.
This tempest’s residence, built in a moment by a wind-driven thought,
happens to be the second dwelling in which the seeds of thoughts
have been planted. For twenty-five years, another house—the imaginary
Rowley Hall—has acted as a catalyst for a number of narratives about its
occupants: Walter, Mervyn, and Vera Rowley. Such houses are able to be
adjusted instantly, in order to nurture a new thought or embrace fresh
pairs of extremes. Such structures are as happy to be flesh and blood as
bricks and mortar. And they are also as likely to be fashioned by forces
acting on them from without, like the wind, as from within, by a maid
moving along corridors opening curtains.
There are numerous claimants to the design of Rowley Hall. Even

some of the architectural features themselves have dropped hints that
it was from them that everything else sprang, particularly those features
whose purpose is bound up with movement, like curtains, or those that
connect extremes, like speaking tubes, lifts, chimneys, and drains.
Rowley Hall still continues to alter in order to accommodate the
comings and goings of its inhabitants. Recently, however, I realised that
during those years this hall had been gently moving between being two
real houses I have known well, one a tiny compact cottage crammed with
books and oriental treasures, the other a courtier’s palace, designed for a
possible royal visit. The imaginary Rowley Hall has been expanding and
contracting, then, like a camera or an accordion, to embrace not just size
differences, but any kind of contrast (Fig. 2.9).
Fig. 2.9 ‘Size differences’

28 A. LANYON
Whenever a new element is introduced to this imaginary building, say a

colour, a time, temperature, emotion, weight, or a degree of transparency,
by inviting their opposite extremes as well, the hall’s volatile qualities are
kept elastic enough to act as host to any new thought, theory, or event.
Such a changeable quality is vital to the place (Fig. 2.10).
Fig. 2.10 Joy and

sorrow: detail from a
French chair
If something is going on in one small corner of this mercurial abode,

the rest of the address is informed. Thus, if a forgotten room should turn
translucent from neglect, the surrounding countryside will sympatheti-
cally follow suit, becoming skeletal or taking the form of a cross-section,
x-ray, or sketch (Figs. 2.11 and 2.12).
Fig. 2.11 Vera’s foot and a geological map of Cornwall
Fig. 2.12 A conversation between Mervyn and Walter about surrounding hills
Such infectious sketchiness will also be taken up by Rowley Hall’s

residents themselves, whether at the time they are pretending to be
asylum inmates or ale-house revellers, so that suddenly ‘transparency’
30 A. LANYON
becomes the thing, the central topic of hallucination or revelry. It is always

Walter, though, who may be depended upon to take a thing too far …
(Fig. 2.13).
Fig. 2.13 A coloured x-ray taken by Walter to see whether a camera he had
not used for years contained any film
I was unaware that this earlier imaginary hall had evolved from the
differences between two places I often visited, places which exhibited
very clear differences. For example, having no servants, the occupants
of the larger house had developed an ability to project their voices with a
throaty resonance along corridors, downstairs, out through open doors,
and across fields. Because the era in which these people lived happened
to fall between maids and mobile phones, they had to rely on their lungs.
However, sounds in a cottage full of objects were muffled and hushed.
To follow its largest occupant as he shuffled along a narrow passageway
like a badger was to be drawn quietly behind, as if in a vacuum, because
he swept the roof and sides like a leather washer in a pump.
If the fictitious stories that we write are nearer to reality than we
suppose, then they might well provide answers to questions. So it could
be worth looking closer at something one has written, say something
about an invented hall. Might the imagery one selects, particularly when
searching for a metaphor, give the memory its big chance, allowing it to
slip an appropriate slide from its collection into the carousel? (Fig. 2.14).
Fig. 2.14 Vera’s watch with 9.5 mm film ‘strap’—film being a medium capable
of speeding, slowing, stopping, and reversing time
Then I realised there was something I had missed, another example of

how difficult it is to move back far enough from one’s work to be objec-
tive. This was the fact that there were not two real houses contributing
to Rowley Hall, but three. There was our own home. Here we kept
warm and ate in a caravan, slept in an uninsulated, unheated cottage,
and spent the days in bubble-wrapped polytunnels protected from wind
by trees. These also provided shade in summer. The tunnels were too-hot,
too-dry, and too-light. But at no cost, such defects could be simply and
quickly remedied, whereas a too-cold, too-damp, too-dark cottage must
be addressed with switches wired to set fire to one’s pocket. Rowley Hall
is as spatially elastic as our three-part home, but it also happens not to be
located in any fixed time.
In an earlier century, Rowley Hall had contained an internal wheel. By
rotating this, any room required would come to rest at the only window
in the place. This, an elaborate scheme for the avoidance of window-tax,
freed up a hundred recesses, which the owners merrily filled with figures
that postured and gesticulated rudely at the imposers of darkness.
Just as it can be helpful to think spatially, say by employing the idea
of a close-up, to see if looking in more detail elicits anything useful,
so it can be instructive to slow something down, like the opening of
curtains. Since the structure around the curtains is so adaptable, it would
soon suggest a fitting context. Thus we learn that the slow movement
of curtains in Rowley Hall is related to something quite different from
the emotional reason why, in wind’s story, the maid chooses to prolong
32 A. LANYON
rolling them back, in order to draw out the time she spends beside the
tuner. Adjusting the fabric of Rowley Hall to embrace such a lengthened
chore, we learn how in the late sixteenth century its master had fallen
out of favour with his sovereign. The royal personage, having set off on
her ‘rusticated progress’, sent a herald ahead to announce that together
with one hundred courtiers she would be arriving for a week. Any victim
of such a precipitation into penury might prefer to face an advancing
army, choosing rather to be killed outright in honest slaughter than to be
stretched gradually on the rack of hospitality. This early Rowley knew how
the imminent Queen would tease loose a golden thread to his pocket and
tie it to her fastest dog before the hunt. This Rowley, refusing to suffocate
in his own politeness while biting his tongue, before expiring in a fit of
patriotism, hurriedly created a dozen ersatz halls, each in its own grounds,
scattering these identical mansions around the genuine one. Each fake
had dozens of silken threads running to the real hall, so that when a real
window was opened or a real fire lit, simulated windows and fires in the
phony abodes were also opened and lit. (All this simply to slow down
some old curtains.) This explains why prospective butlers and maids were
required to pass trials of strength. When raising a single sash window,
twelve others had to be raised as well. What’s more, birds from a nearby
rookery were fond of gathering on the silken threads, contributing to the
effort required to open a cupboard. An early rate-collector estimated that
there were as many as nineteen mock halls, including a couple of dupli-
cates in Kent. The instigator of this architectural deceit hugely enjoyed
having many sets of things, like chefs, because such a surfeit meant alter-
native broths. It was rumoured that in the false halls there lodged at one
time dozens of false Rowleys. But it is more likely that the sounds and
movements of the genuine scrapings of their boots and their scufflings
were piped through tubes, while their real shadows were projected onto
the walls and floors.
While Rowley Hall had sprung in part from the differences between
two actual houses, all the narratives arising from it have been built with
the assistance of extremes, like images and words or people who repre-
sent extreme types, like Mervyn, an artist, and Walter, a scientist. Maybe
when the imagination has real houses for anchors, invention is accessed
by running the mind to and fro between their differences, so that elec-
tricity sparks as if between plus and minus. If there are several contrasted
elements, the mind is offered more options. While this adds excitement,
the greater mobility also aids invention.
CHAPTER 3
Murmuring Houses for the Mythical Mind
Christian Illies
The ‘Other Side’ of Architectural Experience

Would you rather spend a night in a dirty and draughty bus station, or in a
house where a murder had recently taken place? When asked this question
about 50% of people in the USA preferred the bus station. It is as if the
house was cursed and had become dangerous to enter. In Hong Kong, a
flat or house where a murder has occurred is usually up to 40% cheaper
than a comparable residence. Such a dwelling is called a haunted house
or ‘hongza’ which means ‘bad-luck-residence’.1 In many places (such as
California and several other states of the USA) but not in others (such as
Germany or Austria) it is a requirement that the real estate agent informs
1 Some investors have specialised in buying this kind of property in order to sell it or rent
it out to tenants who are more relaxed about this aspect of property, especially to foreign-
ers from Europe or the USA, or to doctors or nurses (‘who are used to working around
the dead’ as the real estate agent Eric Wong observes). Peter Shadbolt, ‘Hong Kong’s
Hot Market in “Haunted” Houses’, CNN, available at http://edition.cnn.com/2011/
11/22/world/asia/hong-kong-haunted-houses/index.html [accessed 20 January 2018].
C. Illies (B)
University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
e-mail: Christian.illies@uni-bamberg.de

34 C. ILLIES
Fig. 3.1 ‘Holmes’ Castle’, welcoming its guests (Picture from Wikimedia Com-
mons, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:H._
H._Holmes_Castle.jpg&oldid=330893935 [accessed 12 January 2019])
potential purchasers or tenants as to whether a property is stigmatised

by murder or any other violent crime or tragic event. It diminishes the
property’s economic value.
Another response to the problem caused by such properties is simply
to destroy them. This was the fate of the cellar in the house in Amstetten
(Austria) where Josef Fritzl held his daughter captive for 24 years, raping
her and fathering her seven children. The cellar was finally concreted over.
This seemed insufficient for Chicago’s notorious ‘murder castle’ where
the serial killer H. H. Holmes, at the close of the nineteenth century,
created a hotel building with many hidden passages, rooms, stairways,
and even chutes that dropped into the cellar. He welcomed visitors of
the World’s Colombian Exhibition, but more than 27 of the hotel-guests
never returned, because they were taken to the basement and tortured,
hanged, or gassed, and finally dismembered, before Holmes burnt the
remains in a specially built incinerator. The building strangely burnt down
two weeks after the police investigations and the remaining ground floor
was finally demolished in 1938 (Fig. 3.1).2
2 See Lauren Whalen, ‘A History of Chicago’s Murder Castle’, http://chicagoist.com/

2015/11/02/i_was_born_with_the_devil_in_me_a_h.php [accessed 11 February 2018].
3 MURMURING HOUSES FOR THE MYTHICAL MIND 35
One intuitive response is to feel that such buildings can hold and
emanate evil. There are many stories (and, of course, films) concerning
ongoing curses, such as that of the Pharaohs, cast upon anyone who enters
an ancient Egyptian tomb, archaeologist or grave robber alike. In general,
however, it seems that time diminishes this magical power of a building
in the eyes of most. If the event has occurred a sufficiently long time ago,
it may horrify people no longer. The reality-TV series Most Haunted was
a great success in the UK and English Heritage, to beguile visitors, even
lists stories of all ‘hauntings’ and unexplained events recorded at its sites.
Such stories can also increase the attraction, and thus the market value,
of a building. One real estate agent advertises stigmatised houses on the
internet for people who are in the ‘Halloween spirit’. They are all houses
with a ‘nefarious past’, which he calls ‘spooky spots that take our love for
all things otherworldly to the next level: ten homes that are wonderfully
creepy to their core’.3
Buildings can energise people in positive ways. The Chinese cultural
tradition of Feng Shui, for example, claims to identify architectural fea-
tures (such as the orientation of buildings, shapes of rooms, and so on)
which harmonise human beings with their environment—or, in the case
of bad design, set them at odds with it. There are temples, churches,
and tombs considered holy by many people, and which seem to demand
respect. The ancient Romans identified and worshiped the genius loci of a
place, its protective spirit. Today the term ‘genius loci’ generally refers to
the distinctive ambience or atmosphere of a place or building, and is usu-
ally used in a positive way to refer to a friendly or welcoming impression.
A staircase with sophisticated lighting, such as the one by Peter Zumthor
in the Kunsthaus Bregenz, invites the visitor to climb it (Fig. 3.2).
Most people seem to grasp these effects of architecture. That is why
artists feel the liberty and desire to construct imaginary edifices. Piranesi’s
etchings exploit this reaction by presenting inescapable carceri; expres-
sionists and surrealists delight in depicting extremely alienating dwellings;
and Claude Debussy famously composed a piece about a sunken cathedral
(La cathédrale engloutie, 1910) based on an ancient Breton myth.
3 Kelly Chronis, ‘Real Estate’s 10 Most Haunted Houses on the Market’, avail-
able at MyDomaine, http://www.mydomaine.com/real-estates-10-most-haunted-houses-
on-the-market [accessed 21 June 2018].
36 C. ILLIES
Fig. 3.2 Staircase in

Peter Zumthor’s
Kunsthaus Bregenz.
Photo courtesy Martin
Düchs
Literature is particularly notable here because it presents the experience

of the ambience of the built environment in two ways: in the third per-
son, by speaking about it from afar, and in the first person, by re-creating
characters’ experiences in the reader. Consider Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights (1847), with Catherine’s ghost trying to enter through the win-
dow of Thrushcross Grange, or E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910),
where the old country house seems to be mysteriously pre-destined for
its next owner. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) reaching a
specific building (as an emblem of desires) seems to be the goal of both
the characters in the novel and the reader. P. D. James’s Death in Holy
Orders (2001) is a more recent example from another genre. Here the
Victorian seminary at the cliff mirrors, or even forms the spirit of, those
of its inhabitants who seem to have no true future. In The Remains of the
Day (1989) Kazuo Ishiguro shows how the formal setting of Darlington
Hall, among other influences, causes the butler Stevens to restrain his true
feelings. A much darker example is found in Ian McEwan’s The Cement
Garden (1978), which is set in a house where a father tries to pave over
the garden in order to make life easier to control. Soon afterwards, the
house and garden take over and become intractable non-places for his
now orphaned children.
Not all literary childhoods are as miserable. The German poet Theodor
Storm had a happier one. In ‘The Town’ (‘Die Stadt ’), a poem from
1851, he articulates how early memories can transform a ‘grey town’
into an attractive and magical place. He is fully aware of the rather
monotonous, charmless ambience of his hometown Husum, which is
close to ‘the grey shore, by the grey sea’ and where ‘The fog rests heavy
round the roofs’—but all of that does not matter:
But all my heart is still with you,

O grey town by the sea;
The magic of youth, for ever and ever,
Rests smiling still on you, on you,
O grey town by the sea.4
In his 1909 novel Die andere Seite (The Other Side), Alfred Kubin,
the symbolist and fantasy-artist avant-la-lettre, imagined and illustrated
a dream city, Perle, behind a curtain of clouds. In many ways this city
seems to correspond closely with its inhabitants. It begins, for example,
to go mouldy at the same time the manners and morals of its inhabitants
decay. This work heavily influenced Franz Kafka whose unfinished novel
Das Schloß (1926, English: 1930: The Castle) depicts a village with an
inaccessible castle that expresses, among other things, a mysterious and
alienating deeper structure of reality than that which is intelligible to us.
To give a more recent (and again rather dark) example: the description of
a labyrinthine bunker-city with an almost autonomous power to expand
ever further in Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) seems to correspond with the
world-view of its builders and inhabitants. They have created in stone a
heartless labyrinthine approach to reality and to fellow human beings—an
approach that finally takes over their minds. Buildings permeate human
beings.
4 These lines are translated from Theodor Storm’s ‘Die Stadt ’. The original is available
in A Book of German Lyrics, ed. by Friedrich Bruns (New York: D. C. Heath & Co.,
1921), p. 93.
38 C. ILLIES
A Phenomenology of the ‘Other Side’

All the examples above seem to have in common that inhabitants, passers-
by, and other visitors have experiences that are not easily rationalised or
conceptualised. Perhaps they are not even experiences of the real (that is,
of epistemic events), but rather inner states of mind. Let us look briefly for
a psychological explanation for these experiences. Certain colours, shapes,
forms, smells, temperatures, haptic impressions, cold air, or even our last
meal may trigger some inner response such as fear or the desire to escape.
Such reactions may be attributable to functions of our brain that in some
point in the past brought an evolutionary advantage. Dark passages are
simply more dangerous, and it is therefore of selective advantage to have
an innate uncomfortable feeling when faced with an unwieldy space such
as an underground car park which is not properly lit. Light, by contrast,
promises a better view, open air, less danger, and new possibilities. It has
certainly been better for our selective fitness to be attracted by light:
an innate incentive Peter Zumthor’s design seems to play with. Thus a
psychologically trained architect might follow Christopher Alexander and
write a manual: A Pattern Language: Building and Constructing Atmo-
spheres, that shows how design can evoke a specific kind of experience, at
least for observers who share the architects’ cultural background.
Does this suffice to account for the examples above? It might explain
simple cases, such as a frightening dark car park, but Zumthor’s staircase
seems more complex. It is like a virtuous symphony of impressions: it is
a well-designed sequence of rooms, passages, and changing illuminations
which prepare the visitor for the full experience. Here the experience is
embedded in a context of previous ones, and relies on knowledge and
expectations (for example about rooms and light in a house). However,
even if all of that can be detailed in an imaginary encyclopaedic man-
ual, our other examples cannot be explained purely in terms of physical
stimuli and responses. What we experience is, at least in part, shaped by
inner states, together with emotions and thoughts, memories, and expec-
tations. These might include our knowledge of, for example, a murder
or myths about divine intervention, or even beliefs about the power of
‘spiritual forces’, as Feng Shui claims. This is why a deeper understand-
ing of our hermeneutic experience of buildings will also give us a deeper
understanding of ourselves.
The experience of the ‘other side’ of architecture concerns some
unique quality a building may seem to have, a quality that is in some
way meaningful and relevant to the observer and which asks for (or even
triggers) a response. Three aspects of this experience can be identified in
all the above examples: (i) a meaningful quality experienced in or around
the building, that has (ii) relevance for the observer, and corresponds with
(iii) the observer’s responsiveness.
(i) Meaningful quality. This occurs when we attribute some peculiar
quality to the town, house, room, or other architectural space. The build-
ing seems to offer not merely sense-data (such as yellow, square, dark,
and so on) but to offer them with meaning attached to them. The stig-
matised house communicates a warning, a genius loci refers to a specific
power of a place, and Feng Shui identifies ‘spiritual forces’ which influence
human beings. This peculiar quality cannot be understood without both
components: on the one hand the physical structure, the features of the
building, and its architectural context; on the other hand, its mental ele-
ments, such as stories, memories, and ‘spiritual forces’. Only when these
come together does a new meaningful quality arise in the experience of
the observer.
(ii) Relevance for the observer. This peculiar quality is not neutral. How-
ever obscure and vague, it pertains to something we should be attentive
to. The high priest experienced the Most Holy Place as a part of the tem-
ple that he should not enter; Scandinavian cultures feel that it is impor-
tant for them to appease the sprits of the trees; knowledge about a murder
transforms a property in ways that matter to potential buyers. We may not
be able clearly to articulate this meaning, but perhaps simply feel uneasy,
uplifted, or lured by some building, as Margaret Schlegel does in Howards
End. The building may seem to have some peculiar importance, some rel-
evant information to grant us, for better or worse. Certainly, the relevant
message is usually not directly legible and remains rather Sybilline, but at
the very least it reveals some direction, attraction, or aversion. Such mes-
sages may usefully be contrasted with the Isthmian stela from the Gulf
of Mexico, which we cannot decipher at all; it may contain merely the
scores from some Mesoamerican ballgame or the exact date of the world’s
end—we do not even know whether it matters for us. Our experience of
the other side of architecture involves at least some kind of directionality
and therefore does have some relevant meaning.
(iii) Responsiveness. It is important to note that we are generally open
to this kind of experience. We are ready to give some emotional or
practical response. Our reactions to these experiences are not like sober
risk assessments, as they might be in case of a building that is structurally
40 C. ILLIES
compromised. In the case of a murder-house our reaction is primarily on

a more emotional level. Certainly, since we are human, our response is
still partially one of reflection and thought, at least when we try to artic-
ulate it. We talk about some revenant or alien power inhabiting the old
edifice; the emotional response to the house or city of one’s childhood is
penetrated by memories, sweet or sour. Houses can stir up more holistic
moods or ruminations about life in general. Viewing Berlin’s Marzahn,
a brutalist high-density residential area of Berlin built in the 1970s and
1980s, for example, might make any sensitive human being melancholy
thinking about the people who have to live there, while the view of
the palace named Sanssouci in Potsdam can evoke deeply felt joy and
happiness and dreams of a better life. This response can be fundamental;
it can involve us entirely. ‘The house’, writes Bachelard in this sense,
‘is our body and soul. It is the first world of the human being.’5 In
other words, our responsiveness is not only triggered by (some) physical
properties of where we are, as in the case of nausea, but also involves our
subjective perception, what we know, what we care for, and who we are.
Margaret is instinctively attracted by the house in Howards End, whereas
the male members of the Wilcox family, who care primarily for economic
value and status, do not feel its unique atmosphere. (E. M. Forster
describes Margret’s response so well because he modelled the cottage on
the happily remembered house of his own childhood in Hertfordshire.)
Obviously these three aspects are deeply intertwined, and each one is
in some way implied by the other two. Meaning implies relevance—the
experience of a meaningful quality reflects its relevance or importance for
the observer. That is why it is meaningful for us. It is a meaning point-
ing towards us—and our responsiveness is directed towards this meaning-
ful quality and acknowledges its importance. Following Reinhard Knodt
(2017), we might also talk about a ‘correspondence’ between a building
and ourselves. Our experience is not merely that we give some importance
to it, but that a concrete building or town with its features or history (at
least as we perceive them) have this meaning. It is as if bricks and mortar,
shapes and windows, were words of a hidden story that they tell. That
metaphor might be the best way to capture the phenomenology of the
experience of the other side.
5 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas, 2nd edn (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1994), p. 7.
Narrative Architecture
Architecture as a kind of language is a very old metaphor, even though
there are obvious differences between visual and linguistic forms. Archi-
tectural design can, however, contain meaningful signs, very much like
language. Heike Delitz (2005) and Joachim Fischer (2010) have there-
fore interpreted architecture in general as a ‘medium of communication’,
that makes some ‘offer of meaning’, for example, by suggesting a cer-
tain relation between things or their overall order (such as private/public,
or holy/profane). Paul Ricoeur argues that there is a close parallelism
between narrativity and architecture; a verbal story is a ‘process’ of putting
time ‘into narrative form’, while architecture puts space in a narrative
form.6
Ricoeur’s approach to architecture is a helpful way of understanding
the experience of the other side of architecture. Proper narratives, he
argues, can be divided into three steps: the first is the ‘prefiguration’ or
grounding of narratives in daily life (the little stories that we exchange in
gossip, for example).7 The second is the ‘elevation from daily life to a nar-
rative level’, which he calls ‘configuration’.8 Events in time are selected
and synthesised into a plot someone tells: that is, into a chronological
order or arrangement where ‘cause, motive or reason’ are important. It
makes some aspects of the unclear events of life more intelligible, relates
them to others, and looks for influences or juxtapositions. Thirdly, a narra-
tive must have a responding audience. It is here that the narrative ‘unfolds
its capacity to illuminate or clarify the life of the reader; it has both the
power of discovering, of revealing the hidden, the unsaid of a life shielded
from Socratic scrutiny, and that of transforming the banal interpretation
that the reader makes according to the bent of day-to-day life’.9 This
response is what Ricoeur call the ‘refiguration’ of the narrative.
Architecture, similarly, begins with a prefiguration, namely its man-
ner of dwelling or inhabiting; as Ricoeur writes: ‘Before any architec-
tural project, humankind has built because it has inhabited’.10 Inhabiting
6 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984),
p. 31.
7 Ricoeur, Time and Narration, p. 31.
8 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Architecture and Narrativity’, Ricoeur Studies, 7 (2016), 31–41.
9 Ricoeur, ‘Architecture and Narrativity’, p. 39.
42 C. ILLIES
includes our tracks and paths, how and where we undertake individual or
corporate tasks, and spaces used for certain activities; all of these things
reveal that: ‘Inhabiting is made of rhythms, stops and starts, settlement
and movement’.11 In Ricoeur’s second step (configuration) architecture
turns inhabitation into buildings, where ‘the constructed space consists
in a system of gestures, of rituals for the major interactions of life’.12
Ricoeur emphasises that architecture is not about ‘the three-dimensional
geometrical space in which each point is some place’ but the ‘places of
life that surround the living body’.13 Places of life are environments that
hold importance. This renders constructing a space rather like finding a
plot, a ‘synthesis of the heterogeneous’ which brings together not only
events ‘but points of view, as causes, motives and chance occurrences’.14
All of these need finally to be understood as ‘inscribed signs’; this is the
refiguration.15 A house can be read ‘from the point of view of our way
of inhabiting’—which is to say that we read it by using or inhabiting it.16
This is a practical ‘response, even an answer to the building’.17 Accord-
ing to Ricoeur, our practical response can range ‘from passive reception,
subdued, indifferent reception, to hostile and angry reception’.18 Michel
de Certeau was the first to emphasise that our movements and activities
reveal are part of this reception and create the importance of a place. As
he puts it:
If it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g.,

by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that
prevents one from going further), than the walked actualizes some of these
possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge.19

19 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011), p. 98.
Looking at architecture in this way offers a useful hermeneutic tool

intended to account for our experience of the other side of architecture.
It suggests that some buildings have specific narratives which on some
deep level include us, rendering them important in this other way. It is
an approach that is not covered by traditional aesthetic categories such as
beauty.
Let us first consider how this suggestion applies to our examples. Many
holy places, and entire cities, have foundational stories or myths that
involve gods or demigods such as Romulus and Remus.20 The build-
ings are part of such stories and this links them strongly with people who
live within that mythology. The ancient genius loci, a snakelike deity or
spirit, for example, inhabits a particular place and asks for and receives
sacrificial offerings from the traveller. Other narrative plots may concern
sacrifices offered to assuage the gods of fire, earthquake, or other misfor-
tune in some particular place, and here the building is as much part of a
grand narrative as is the visitor. The sacrifice is the practical refiguration
in Ricoeur’s analysis. Topping-out ceremonies are also part of such nar-
ratives; in ancient Scandinavian cultures a tree was placed atop a newly
erected house to appease the spirits of the trees felled in the building of
the house.21 For us, the narrative has been secularised but some vague
idea of it being necessary remains. Even without personal gods, the foun-
dational narratives of Feng Shui concern dynamic realities (among them
Ying and Yang ) striving for some kind of harmony that will be achieved
when the spirits of air and water are calmed. Good architecture and sen-
sitive inhabitants accept their role and place in the cosmic plot.
Today, though, when most gods are dead and many old narratives
have died with them, we might ask how we explain phenomena such
as haunted houses and our fascination with them. The answer may be
that we do still have some (possibly inevitable) narratives, and that these
20 Jacob Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte: Staat und Religion (Leipzig: Kröner

1929).
21 According to Scandinavian mythology, each tree has its own spirit, which occa-
sionally incarnates as a human being and returns to the tree after that person’s death.
Consequently, ‘before cutting a tree, ancient Scandinavians would formally address the
forest, reminding it of the consideration they had always shown toward the trees and
asking the forest to grant use of a tree for construction of their home.’ From ‘History
of the “Topping Out” Ceremony’, Columbia University School of Social Work, available
at https://web.archive.org/web/20120611090101/http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ssw/
news/apr03/history.html [accessed 6 June 2012].
44 C. ILLIES
are about fundamental social orders. Haunted houses concern disturbed

orders of that kind: events such as murder cannot be placed in a meaning-
ful landscape of social interaction. That is why these places seem danger-
ous. When the fundamental social or moral order is lost, it cannot easily
be restored. We fear we might be drawn into the void.
Even when we refer simply to the ‘atmosphere’ of a place, we com-
monly connect it to some, often rather minimal, narrative. A homely
atmosphere (Theodor Storm’s ‘smile’ of ‘youth’s magic’) can be evoked
by reference to childhood memories, the prefiguration of the narra-
tive. Similarly, the oppressive atmosphere of an abandoned house can
be evoked within the narrative of previous occupants, as for example
in Coleridge’s ‘On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country’, where
the speaker exclaims: ‘And this reft house is that the which he built, |
Lamented Jack!’22 Time often plays an important role. A building dis-
plays its presence, tells something of its past, and points to its future.
This also explains why ruins are paradigmatically frightening places: they
reveal the vanity of any fight against time. The frightening atmosphere
of a sinister and labyrinthine building may also be connected to a narra-
tive conjecture that someone is threatening me from a place hidden to
my eyes.23 Giovanni Piranesi created the oppressive Carceri, in which the
observer is placed in a space full of whispers, impending harm, and suffer-
ing. (Consider also Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings where the last dwarves
have taken refuge at Balin’s tomb in Moria and can hear the steps of the
deadly orcs approaching from afar.) Refiguration here amounts to the pro-
cess of approaching the built environment, selecting points of greater or
lesser significance, and connecting them in some meaningful, mostly prac-
tical way. As Michel de Certeau remarks about such a positive response:
‘“I feel good here”: the well-being under-expressed in the language it
appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.’24 We pay atten-
tion to places and structures that speak of some special importance and
22 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘On a Ruined house in a Romantic Country’, Coleridge’s

Verse: A Selection (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), p. 118.
23 Martin Düchs and I have elaborated the claim that architectural atmosphere is expe-
rienced and articulated in a narrative form in much more detail in Martin Düchs and
Christian Illies, ‘Editorial: The Human in Architecture and Philosophy: Steps towards an
Architectural Anthropology’, Architecture & Philosophy Special Issue: Philosophical Anthro-
pology, 3.1 (2018).
24 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 109.
ignore others that seem banal. Polarities are central in such built narra-
tives, as they often concern elemental ambivalences: holy or profane, light
or dark, public or private, sometimes positive or negative, or, following
Michel Foucault, both in- and ex-clusion.25
These narratives can vary widely. Some, such as those concerning ‘at-
mosphere’, are rather fragmented, minimal, and often reflect merely the
‘murmur of a place’, to use Rafael Moneo’s expression.26 Other stories,
such as murder stories, can be spelt out more clearly; and may even grow
in the telling. The stories can be more or less trivial, can concern earthly
or divine events, and the meaningful order they provide can be of narrow
reach or cover the whole world. This is the case when a building expresses,
or attempts to express, an entire world-view. Many religious buildings do
so. Stonehenge, for example, attempts to embody the principles of the
whole cosmos and of light itself. In the Pythagorean tradition certain pro-
portions, numbers, and (importantly) musical ratios refer to the harmony
of the entire cosmos (the music of the spheres) and are used as patterns
in the design of buildings and cities. (Krakow, for example, is built upon
a Pythagorean system.)27
If, then, buildings are ‘fragmentary and inward-turning histories’, how
can we read that narrative and how does it affect us?28 It is useful to
consider the circumstances in which a building and its narrative become
uncanny. That happens, I shall argue, when they are important for our
own identity.
Narrativity, Identity, and Self-Formation

The importance of narrativity for human identity finds articulation in the
current psycho-philosophical theory of ‘narrative identity’, inspired by the
philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard and developed by philosophers such as
25 Michael Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’, in Dits et Ecrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994),
pp. 752–62.
26 See Francisco Gonzalez De Canales, and Nicholas Ray, Rafael Moneo: Building,
Teaching, Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
27 Boguslaw Krasnowolski, ‘Muster urbanistischer Anlagen von Lokationsstädten in
Kleinpolen, Forschungsstand, Methoden und Versuch einer Synthese’, in Rechtsstadtgrün-
dungen im mittelalterlichen Polen, ed. by Erich Mühle (Köln: Böhlau, 2011), pp. 275–322
(p. 321).
28 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 109.
46 C. ILLIES
Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Paul Ricoeur. In brief, the the-
ory states that we are what we are because we tell certain stories about
ourselves (to us and to others). More technically, human beings form
and stabilise their individual identity by connecting personal experiences
into an internalised, evolving narrative that provides them with a sense
of unity and meaning or purpose. The individual’s story is embedded in
the larger story of a certain culture and of a certain time, perhaps told by
religions, philosophies, or the sciences but also more simply by traditions,
books, films, etc. (Or by soap-operas, in which the individual’s story can
be too deeply embedded, as we learn from Woody Allen’s Midnight in
Paris (2011): ‘Does art imitate life, does life imitate TV?’).
Consider, for example, our temporal identity. As human beings we
enjoy subjectivity and reflexivity. The subject of this reflexivity, however,
must endure or have some inner continuity in its experiential world. In
order to live a meaningful life—or possibly any life at all—we must know
that we are the same being: a consistent homogenous ‘I’. Whatever this
identity might (or might not) mean metaphysically, for us it takes the form
of a meaningful sequence which connects events experienced at different
times by according them all to one agent. That is exactly what stories do.
If I ask myself whether the happy child in the sandpit in the photo is me,
I can find out only by recollecting and retelling the narrative of my life,
of what I did as a little child, what I experienced and how I felt, and by
seeing myself in the long narrative which began then and still continues.
The more I can contextualise individual life events into one overall story
the more I experience meaningful identity. That is why life is, as Ricoeur
sums it up, ‘an activity and a passion in search of a narrative’.29 Stories
(and identities), however, can be rich or poor, meaningful or banal, good
or bad, approximately true to the facts and events of one’s life, or illu-
sionary and unrealistic. And occasionally, no unifying story can be found.
Some people fail to find a meaningful order in their life and experience
mere incoherent fragments.
This narrative activity of identity-constitution or self-formation may
have a counterpart at the cultural level. Ernst Cassirer argued along
these lines and Jean Gebser looked at cultural developments of forms of
29 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Life in Quest of Narrative’, in On Paul Ricoeur, ed. by D. Wood

(London: Routledge, 1991), p. 29.
consciousness and the phylogenetic role of myths and stories.30 While

narrative identity theory is interested in the ontogenetic aspect of this
approach, Gebser bridges the cultural and the individual levels, arguing
that, during a long developmental history, human cultures have moved
from a magical to a mythological and finally to a modern cultural form
of consciousness. Each epoch has a characteristic world-view, which we
do not abandon but rather carry with us in some form: our mythologi-
cal instincts underlie even our apparently enlightened and sober scientific
world-view. Gebser also relates story-telling to self-formation of both the
individual and the culture. This is why he stresses the indispensability of
the narrative or (in his word) mythical approach to the world. Story-
telling is not an outdated pre-rational activity but rather an activity still
native to us and one which fulfils certain roles. Most importantly, it helps
us form a stable identity: that is, it stops us from falling apart and from
losing our orientation. We will always have minds that are mythical at
some deep and foundational level of their identity.
Let us return to architecture. It should come as no surprise that houses
are privileged objects of identity-forming-narratives. They are particularly
important to us because space is, after all, where we realise ourselves. Mar-
tin Heidegger had already argued that our subjective being-in-the-world
is always ‘in a literal sense spatial’: because we occupy a place, activities,
including relations need a realisation in space.31 This is why houses are
in many ways like an outer skin of our identity; following Gottfried Sem-
per, who famously considered clothes to be our second skin, and houses
to be the third. In buildings people show what interests them, how they
live, their presence and past, and the social class they belong to, but also
the ways in which they desire to be different from others. (All this, of
course, assumes that the householder has choice in these matters, but the
need to express oneself in one’s surroundings begins even in the poorest
favela.) Psychologists advise us therefore to look carefully not merely at
our potential mother-in–law, but also at the house and the housekeeping
of a potential partner. Such an inspection may not be very romantic but
30 Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 2: Das mythische Denken (Berlin:
B. Cassirer: 1925); Jean Gebser Ursprung und Gegenwart (Schaffhausen: Novalis, 1979),
published in English as The Ever-Present Origin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,
1985).
31 Ricoeur’s three steps of dwelling, building, and responding are meant to echo the title
of Heidegger’s great 1951 lecture Bauen Wohnen Denken (Building Dwelling Thinking ).
48 C. ILLIES
reveals her or his personality with startling accuracy. (Listen to the estate
agent who claims that choosing a bride and buying a house are emo-
tional equivalents.32 ) Sigmund Freud considers houses to be important
elements in dreams, as they reveal much about the dreamer’s personality.
And of particular interest is the role dark basements play in our dreams.
For Carl Gustav Jung houses are archetypical symbols of the soul—some-
thing echoed by Bachelard when he writes: ‘The house image would
appear to become the topography of our intimate being’ and therefore
‘a tool for analysis of the human soul’.33 That might also be a reason
why we tend to see human faces or bodies in buildings (see Fig. 3.3).
As Gestaltpsychologie has observed, a house is like an alter ego. (This is
one aspect of a more general psychological phenomenon, called pareidol,
where we perceive even vague visual stimuli as significant, for example
when we see faces in clouds.)
It is no wonder, then, that we are inclined to approach houses from
the reference point of their narrative or to give them a place in our own
personal narratives. Houses are elements of stories particularly well-suited
to helping us find meaning in the world, a meaningful place for ourselves,
and thus a place where our identities may be formed.
That explains why the anxieties one might feel when entering a stigma-
tised house or the disturbing buildings or districts of Berlin’s Marzahn,
for example, are uncanny: They are close to our own selves. The experi-
ence of architecture is often not like that of a subject observing an object,
but rather a kind of self oberservation; and that is why the phenomenon
(for example the atmosphere of a building, the sacredness of a place, or
the horror of a haunted house) gets somehow ‘under the skin’. Often the
implicit narrative overcomes the dichotomy between ourselves and our
surroundings and makes us act. A delightful atmosphere sheds its light
on many things and raises our mood such that we want to climb the
staircase in the hope of reaching beyond where we are. An oppressive or
sinister atmosphere, by contrast, threatens to suck us in such a way that
we feel both strangely attracted and repelled at the same time (an ambiva-
lence exploited by true-crime reports and the horror-genre). That is why,
to use Walter Benjamin’s term, we can become ‘enveloped’ by buildings.
32 Katharina Dippold, ‘Die Wohnungssuche ist vergleichbar mit der Partnerwahl’, Icon-
ist, available at https://www.welt.de/icon/design/article173100621/Immobilienmakler-
Ziegert-Wohnungssuche-ist-wie-Partnerwahl.html [accessed 2 February 2018].
33 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. xxxvii.
Fig. 3.3 A room with

two views. Photo
courtesy of Martin
Düchs
Looking Back at the Other Side

What, then, makes us experience some buildings in the unique way shown
by the examples at the beginning of this article? All of them concern nar-
ratives which involve us deeply and which also question us, irritate or
disturb our identity, challenge it, or intensify what we are, promising to
raise and transcend it. They affect us as individuals in a similar way that
‘heterotopies’ do societies: according to Michel Foucault, places like ceme-
teries, ships, or gardens are outside the normal order, and thus intense,
disturbing, or transforming.34 They are somehow ‘other’ and can there-
fore mirror or upset what is outside these places; without them, he adds,
we can no longer ‘dream’.35 It seems to me, however, that we should
focus less on the collective order of things and more on the individual
identity. The ‘strange’ house is one that does not fit with our norms,
expectations, or memories; it is like a jarring note in a symphony. In case
34 Michael Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’.

35 Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres’, p. 762.
50 C. ILLIES
of a positive atmosphere, it can also be like a counterpoint or deep chord

underlining memories, or the beautiful new melody of an oboe, promising
to enrich our identity. Whenever a building touches at these possibilities
in me, I experience it in the ‘other’ way.
All of this may explain why architecture is at the centre of so much
controversy. Buildings are important for our identity, not merely intellec-
tually, but in more profound ways. A classic disagreement over building
design (or over architectural narrative, as we can now call it), namely the
1982 debate between Christoph Alexander and Peter Eisenman, illustrates
this point. When they discussed roofing, Alexander favoured pitched roofs
because they evoke feelings (tell a story) of protection and homecoming.
He argues that we find ‘fundamentally an order produced by centres or
wholes which are reinforcing each other and creating each other’. The
pitched roof belongs in this narrative as it ‘has a very primitive essence as
a shape, which reaches into a very vulnerable part of you [….] that is the
most natural and simple roof to do’ (italics added). Eisenman agreed that
there is some message of wholeness in the pitched roof and condemns
it exactly for this reason. For Eisenman such a roof is a deceptive expres-
sion of an illusionary and, indeed, evil metaphysics. Houses, in his view,
ought to speak of alienation and fragmentation, for it is not wholeness that
will evoke our deepest feelings but the presence of absence, that is, the
non-whole or the fragment, that most closely approximates our innate
feelings today.36 Whatever we think the right answer is, both Alexander
and Eisenman seem to assume that human identity is not left unaffected
by architectural decisions. And the profoundness of their disagreement
shows how deep these issues go. It is all about us.
Houses can be elements of narratives of great importance to human
beings. Such importance might even become a criterion of good architec-
ture. Not all house-narratives are desirable; some are ambivalent. Others
36 This is from the debate ‘Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture: The 1982
Debate Between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman’, Katarxis, 3 (September
2004), available at http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm [accessed
2 February 2018]. Though their positions are more complex than this suggests, in broad
terms Eisenman agrees that modernity is accompanied by an anxiety which cries out for
change but, following Adorno, does not want to mellow this revolutionary spirit: ‘I do
not believe that the way to go, as you suggest, is to put up structures to make people feel
comfortable, to preclude that anxiety. What is a person to do if he cannot react against
anxiety or see it pictured in his life? […] And so the role of art or architecture might be
just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right’.
are positive inasmuch as they provide an important contribution to human

self-formation. Much modern architecture does not make any narrative
offer, or merely murmurs depressing sounds of monotony and isolation.
Good architecture, by contrast, offers more, by suggesting to our myth-
ical minds who we are and who we could become, how we should live
together, and how we can be at home in nature. As Karsten Harries puts
it: ‘An architecture is needed to recall the human being to the whole self:
to the animal and to the rational, to nature and spirit’.37
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Klaus Bieberstein, Martin Düchs, Jane

Griffiths, Andreas Grüner, Adam Hanna, Friederike Illies (always), Gisela Lilje,
Bernhard Malkmus, Graeme Napier, Nick Ray, Sabine Vogt, and Christiania
Whitehead for stimulating discussions, inspirations, critique, information, or help.
37 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (London: MIT Press, 1997),
p. 362.
CHAPTER 4
The House of the Senses: Experiencing

Buildings with Peter Zumthor and Pliny
the Younger
Martin Düchs and Sabine Vogt
Introduction: Thinking About the Way

We Think About Architecture1
Architecture is an almost omnipresent topic in our society. Newspapers
tell us about major projects such as opera houses and museums almost
every day, politicians discuss measures to remedy the shortage of housing,
1 This paper emanates from a research project on the Perception of Atmospheres in ancient
and modern architecture by Andreas Grüner (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg), Christian

Illies, Martin Düchs and Sabine Vogt (University of Bamberg), funded by the VolkswagenS-
tiftung, to whom we owe special thanks for funding our participation at the Oxford conference
‘The House in the Mind’. The current paper is a thoroughly revised version of a paper
presented by Andreas Grüner, Martin Düchs and Sabine Vogt at the conference in March
2016. The two authors are grateful to Andreas Grüner for valuable input and critical comments
on a prior version of this contribution, and to Jane Griffiths and Adam Hanna for their
stimulating comments and suggestions on the current version.
M. Düchs (B) · S. Vogt

University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
e-mail: martin.duechs@uni-bamberg.de
S. Vogt
e-mail: sabine.vogt@uni-bamberg.de

54 M. DÜCHS AND S. VOGT
glossy books celebrate the architectural beauties of foreign cities, and

dozens of magazines are devoted to showing the latest home renovation
ideas. Nevertheless, we rarely think about the ways in which we think
about architecture. Houses, buildings and cities seem to be quite liter-
ally a part of the landscape, and most of our interactions with them take
place without any deep reflection. However, the processes that are at work
when we do this are neither obvious nor trivial. The forms in which built
spaces, and houses, in particular, occupy the memory and imagination
might be understood in a number of ways: they might be envisaged as
a two-dimensional picture, a three-dimensional vision of space, a visual
experience of space in time (the fourth dimension) or, finally, as a multi-
sensoric experience of space in time—as it were, a five-dimensional entity.
Literary descriptions of buildings provide a special case of this ‘dimension-
ality’ and a particularly rewarding medium for analysing how it works,
because—in the wake of Gaston Bachelard’s ‘topoanalysis’—poetic and
literary descriptions reveal the writers’ emotional and psychological rela-
tions and associations towards the object of their description.2 Thus,
literary descriptions of architecture may guide us towards a more reflec-
tive engagement with all elements of our built environment. Reading
the writings on architecture of two very different personalities—Pliny
the Younger, a Roman senator who lived around 100 CE, and Peter
Zumthor, a contemporary Swiss architect—provides a gateway into
exploring the concept of the five-dimensional in architecture and its
perception.
The Architect’s House in the Mind:

Representations from 2D to 5D
There are several distinctive ways of having a house in the mind. Some-
times, when we think about a specific building, we remember its distinc-
tive smell or acoustic.3 More often, however, we conceive of, perceive,
or remember a building in the form of a picture, understood as a two
2 Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

1957); English translation: The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon,
1994).
3 Cf. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. 60–61, where he writes that those who seek to
understand the first house must ‘recapture the quality of the light […] the sweet smells
that linger in the empty rooms […] the resonance of each room’.
4 THE HOUSE OF THE SENSES: EXPERIENCING BUILDINGS … 55
-dimensional representation of reality. When we think of the Eiffel Tower,

the first thing that is likely to come to mind is a representation of its form
as it appears on a postcard.4
A second way of conceiving of a building would be to imagine it
as a more or less autonomous object in a Euclidean ‘neutral’ space.
This accords with one of the key ideas that was current in architec-
tural theory at the beginning of the twentieth century: that architecture
was the art of designing spaces.5 We re-phrase this notion as ‘three-
dimensional’ perception of architecture. Theoreticians of the modern
movement in architecture such as Sigfried Giedion added a fourth dimen-
sion: time. While continuing to acknowledge the importance of space,
they laid emphasis on the visual experience of space in time.6 One of
the most renowned exponents of this approach is the theorist-practitioner
Le Corbusier, who famously conceived of the ‘promenade architecturale’,
a mode of design in which the varying visual experiences of a building
were central. The visual effect of driving by it, walking around it, strolling
through it, discovering its inside, using it, lingering outside it and so on,
were all given consideration. An obvious example of a building that was
designed with this idea in mind is the Villa Savoy in Poissy, which Le
Corbusier built between 1928 and 1931. A large ramp guides the inhabi-
tants and the visitors through this house from the ground floor to the roof
garden. In emphasising the ramp in this way, Le Corbusier also dramatises
the way that one has to navigate the building. In this way, the Villa Savoy
4 At least, this seems to be true for ‘normal’ people. According to Oswald Mathias
Ungers, however, architects bring many other modes of perception to the design of a
building (‘Designing and Thinking in Images, Metaphors and Analogies’, in Quellentexte
zur Architekturtheorie: Nachdenken über Architektur, ed. by Fritz Neumeyer and Jasper
Cepl [Munich: Prestel, 2002], pp. 531–39). The experience of one of the authors of this
paper, who is an architect, confirms his findings.
5 In his inaugural lecture at the University of Leipzig in 1893, the art historian August
Schmarsow defined architecture as ‘the art of space’. See August Schmarsow, Das Wesen
der architektonischen Schöpfung, http://www.cloud-cuckoo.net/openarchive/Autoren/Sch
marsow/Schmarsow1894.htm [accessed 7 February 2018]. Literally he speaks of ‘the
art of space’ (‘Raumkunst ’) and ‘architecture as the designer of space’ (‘Architektur als
Raumgestalterin’); Cf. also Ulrich Müller, Raum, Bewegung und Zeit im Werk von Walter
Gropius und Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004). This mode of
having a house in the mind is thus not an invention of the late nineteenth century, and
is not limited to a certain period.
6 See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition,
5th edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Cf. also Müller, Raum,
Bewegung und Zeit.
is, as it were, not only about being in a certain room but also about
getting to this room. Le Corbusier engaged with the space-time aspect
of architecture explicitly, rejecting a conception of architecture that puts
a more or less mathematical and abstract understanding of space at its
centre, or one that derives from a primarily visual approach.7 Like many
standard works of modern architectural theory, Le Corbusier focuses on
the visual experience of space in time.8 This entails a topological under-
standing of space where the place of the observer of architecture becomes
important. Le Corbusier reflects on this point as follows:
An architectur[al structure] must be walked through and traversed. It is by

no means that entirely graphic illusion certain schools of thought would
like us to believe in, organized around some abstract point that pretends
to be a man […]. Instead, our own man has two eyes set in the front of
his head […]. Thus, equipped with his own two eyes and looking straight
ahead, our man walks about and changes position, applies himself to his
pursuits, moving in the midst of a succession of architectural realities. He
re-experiences the intense feeling that has come from that sequence of
movements. This is so true that architecture can be judged as dead or
living by the degree to which the rule of movement has been disregarded
or brilliantly exploited.9
Interestingly, this view is inspired by the neoclassical analysis of the Acrop-

olis by Auguste Choisy from 1899, from which Le Corbusier ‘stole’
two illustrations without mentioning his source.10 Choisy described the
7 See Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, 1986),
pp. 213ff. Le Corbusier acknowledges and stresses the importance of the plan, but at the
same time he warns against what he calls the ‘illusion of the plan’, which he sees in its
formalistic usage.
8 Examples of other architects or artists who emphasised the importance of experiencing
spaces in motion or speed include Adolf Loos and Filippo Marinetti. Cf. Adolf Loos,
‘Architektur’ (1909), in Trotzdem. Adolf Loos Gesammelte Schriften 1900–1930, ed. by
Adolf Opel (Vienna: Prachner, 1997), pp. 90–104.
9 Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier Talks with Students, trans. by Pierre Chase (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), pp. 44–45. The first words of the quotation in the
original text read: ‘An architecture must be walked through and traversed […]’.
10 See Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l´Architecture (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899). The
famous sketch combining a plan of the Acropolis with the visitors’ view appears on
p. 415. Le Corbusier uses this drawing in his Towards an Architecture twice: first
on p. 115 as a sort of frontispiece to the chapter ‘Three Reminders to Architects:
Acropolis as an ensemble, which was designed to be experienced while

walking through. In his own view, Le Corbusier re-establishes a space-
time conception of architecture that underlies the greatest buildings of
antiquity. Despite some hints and utterances pointing to the impor-
tance of other sensual experiences of architecture, Le Corbusier accords a
central role to the visual space-time experience. Therefore, his approach
to architecture might be fairly characterised as a four-dimensional one.
So far, we have outlined a ‘dimensional’ classification from the two-
dimensional to the four-dimensional: from buildings as a picture to a
visual space-time-experience of architecture. This can be supplemented
with yet another dimension: that of sense perceptions other than sight.
In this mode of thinking about buildings, the visual perception (and
understanding) of space in motion (i.e. in time) is supplemented by the
perceptions of all other senses. This might be characterised as a five-
dimensional way of having a building in the mind: a way of thinking
about buildings that is focused on the sensual and emotional experience
of atmospheres that affect people’s bodies and minds.11 Architects work
with each of these different modes of having a house in the mind. They
can think about (and design) a building by ‘seeing’ the facades as two-
dimensional pictures. But as soon as they think about the depth of a
windowsill they have to apply a three-dimensional way of thinking. And
as soon as they start to think about how the shadows will move over the
course of a day they start employing yet another dimension, which is time,
creating a four-dimensional house in the mind. And if architects start to
think about how the users experience certain atmospheres with all their
senses while moving around, they employ a five-dimensional approach.
It is this last—and almost exclusively this last approach—that comes into
play when we analyse the houses that are present in texts.
III: Plan’, and again on p. 222 to illustrate his thoughts in the chapter ‘Architec-
ture: II: The Illusion of the Plan’. Le Corbusier uses another of Choisy’s drawings on
p. 121: a drawing of the contemporary plan of the Acropolis (Choisy, p. 412). See
also Turit Fröbe, ‘Weg und Bewegung in der Architektur Le Corbusiers’, Wolkenkuckuck-
sheim 9 (2004), http://www.cloud-cuckoo.net/openarchive/wolke/deu/Themen/041/
Froebe/froebe.htm [accessed 12 February 2018].
11 Our understanding of the concept of ‘atmosphere’ is based upon Gernot Böhme,
Architektur und Atmosphäre, 2nd edn (Paderborn: Fink, 2013), published in English
translation as Atmospheric Architectures (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Also
Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre, 7th edn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013); Hermann
Schmitz, Atmosphären (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 2014).
Pliny the Younger and Peter

Zumthor: Perceiving, Remembering
and Communicating Houses in Five Dimensions
We now change our line of enquiry, turning from the way architects
plan—that is, conceive— not-yet-extant houses in their minds, to the way
authors communicate the features of real or imagined buildings by means
of words and texts. For authors, two-dimensional and three-dimensional
perspectives are impossible to use, because a text is a sequence of syllables
and words, rolling out over space on the page but, more significantly, over
time, leading the ‘inner eye’ of the reader. Sentence and text structures
are representations of time in the enfolding of text, following grammat-
ical rules and argumentative and narrative aims. Thus, any text about
architecture is necessarily at least four-dimensional—and yet, a purely
four-dimensional mode of having houses in the mind occurs very rarely
indeed. For, according to our previous definitions of two-dimensional to
five-dimensional modes of perception, four-dimensional representations
restrict themselves to combining the visual experience with the time expe-
rience, thus omitting, or rather excluding, all other sense perceptions.
This exclusion, however, would be unnatural to literature, for it would
restrict authors to the rendering of visual impressions and prevent them
from using any vocabulary that refers to other sense perceptions, to judg-
ments, or to sentiments. To put it the other way around: a ‘normal’
description of a house in a text communicates the five-dimensional expe-
rience it offers very effectively, and in very few syllables. The simple words
‘a cosy house’, for example, are full of multisensory resonances: they are
enough to evoke in the reader any number of associations, including
certain smells, sounds, feelings and emotions—yet, on the other hand,
they do not give any information which would be necessary for a two-
dimensional, three-dimensional, or four-dimensional ‘image’ of the house
in question.12
12 Besides the obvious reference to Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, one could point to
almost any outstanding book in the history of literature that contains a description of a
building. One obvious example, which deals specifically with architecture is Italo Calvino,
Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974);
Cf. Chapter 9 in this volume. For an introduction to the field of architecture in literature,
see Winfried Nerdinger and Hilde Strobl, Architektur wie sie im Buche steht: Fiktive Bauten
und Städte in der Literatur (Salzburg: Pustet, 2006).
This implies that any (literary) text about houses could be used as an
example of our hypothesis that texts create houses in the mind in five
dimensions. Why, then, do we focus on just two texts by two authors as
different and seemingly randomly chosen as the Roman senator Pliny and
the contemporary Swiss architect Peter Zumthor? Our choice was moti-
vated by three reasons. First, from a historical perspective, we wanted to
juxtapose the earliest extant extensive description of a real house—not
an imaginary or fictitious one—in (Western) literature with a contempo-
rary one, so as to demonstrate the surprising consonance between their
approaches, and thus to suggest that this consonance is due to the content
and focus of the text rather than to its genre, epoch, or socio-historical
background. Second, we were looking for texts which describe houses
or buildings and (almost) nothing else; this criterion excluded all clas-
sical texts before Pliny the Younger’s so-called ‘villa letters’. Third, we
wanted to have the opportunity to compare the description of the house
with a real-world experience of the building. This last can be achieved
by visiting the thermal baths Peter Zumthor built in Vals, Switzerland—
though unfortunately not in the case of Pliny’s villa, which could be
visited by his contemporary readers, but is lost to us.
Pliny (61/62–circa 112 CE) was a Roman senator who wrote the
first Western autobiography in the shape of Epistulae, a collection of
246 purportedly private letters intended for publication. As was common
among Roman aristocrats, he owned several villas in fashionable places
in Italy, in which he spent his leisure time far from busy Rome. Two of
those villas he describes in the so-called ‘villa letters’ (ep. 2.17 and 5.6),
the earlier of which, ep. 2.17, was probably published in the years between
97 and 100 CE. In this letter, he invites his friend Gallus to visit him in
his seaside villa at Laurentum, on the shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea south
of Rome, close to ancient and modern Ostia. In order to explain why he
cherishes this seaside-villa, and why Gallus should visit, Pliny gives him a
verbal guided tour through his estate. His letter leads its readers up the
same road as the approaching owner, seventeen miles out of the city of
Rome, on a road which ‘is partly sandy, making it rather too heavy and
long for a coach and pair, but short and soft on horseback’ (§2)13 —an
early hint that it is not the objective distance or route that matters, but
13 Unless otherwise stated, all English translations of Epistula 2.17 are quoted by para-
graph number from Pliny the Younger, Complete Letters, trans. by P. G. Walsh (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 47–51.
the sense impressions and their effects on the feelings and emotions of
the traveller. Thus we, as readers, are included in the narrator’s perspec-
tive. First we see the landscape changing, the road and view narrowing
and widening: ‘the view is varied at different points, for at one moment
woodland confronts you and the road narrows, and at the next it widens
and extends through the broadest meadows’ (§3). Only then does the
villa come into focus.
The same personal, emotional approach is present throughout the
letter. If anyone tried to draw a map of the villa from Pliny’s description,
they would soon get entirely lost.14 He neither refers to the positions and
sizes of the rooms in relation to others, nor does he describe what a room
looks like as if it were seen from a distance or from the outside. Instead
he leads his readers from one room to the next, linking his sentences
by temporal or local copula—such as ‘then’, ‘the next’, ‘after this’—and
presenting the rooms as if they were pearls on a string. He thus mirrors
in the text the progression of the visitor in space and time; in our termi-
nology, the villa is described using a four-dimensional approach from the
point of view of the (imagined) reader-visitor. Yet this four-dimensional
movement in space and time merely provides the framework for the fifth
dimension: in entering each new room, Pliny verbalises the special sensual
‘feeling’ to it. He draws particular attention to the effects of changing
daylight and seasons and weather phenomena, focusing especially on a
room’s warmth or cold, shadow or light, fresh air, silence or noise and
identifying different kinds of sense experience in different rooms: one
may be perfect for studying books in (§8), another’s ‘height renders it
a summer room, and its protective walls a winter room, for it is shel-
tered from all the winds’ (§10),15 while in another room he praises
the silence from household noise as well as from the murmuring sea
or growling tempest (§22). The sensual phenomena he emphasises are
extremely diverse, and—in some cases—incompatible with one another,
14 Scholars have expended much energy on the attempt; see for example Reinhard
Förtsch, Archäologischer Kommentar zu den Villenbriefen des jüngeren Plinius (Mainz:
Philipp von Zabern, 1993). But these attempts are doomed to be fruitless, because, as
the most recent commentary on ep. 2.17 points out: ‘Though we have no reason to
doubt that Pliny’s villa really existed, to read 2.17 purely for documentary value misses
much of its meaning: this is, above all, a textual villa’ (Christopher Whitton, Pliny the
Younger, Epistles, II [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], p. 218).
15 The translation is by Sabine Vogt.
yet all of them are presented as impacting upon the same individuals: the
explicit narrator Pliny and his implicit invited visitor.
What Pliny enables his readers to experience by narrative means is
exactly what the architect Peter Zumthor, in his essay on ‘atmospheres’
describes as his favourite approach to buildings: drifting, moving forward
in time and space in a leisurely manner, open to new sense experiences at
every new step:
I’d be standing there and might just stay a while, but then something
would be drawing me round the corner – it was the way the light falls, over
here, over there and so I saunter on – and I must say I find a great source
of pleasure. The feeling that I am not being directed but can stroll at will
– just drifting along, you know. And it’s a kind of voyage of discovery. As
an architect I have to make sure it isn’t like being in a labyrinth, however,
if that’s not what I want. So I’ll reintroduce the odd bit of orientation,
exceptions that prove the rule – you know the sort of thing. Direction,
seduction, letting go, granting freedom.16
Zumthor switches between the perspective of the ‘I’ who is experiencing

the sensual attractions of drifting and the perspective of the architect
as the director of this very experience. Aptly, he uses the metaphor of
cinema:
A place of great learning for me in this respect is the cinema, of course. The
camera team and directors assemble sequences in the same way. I try that
out in my buildings. So that appeals to me. So that it appeals to you, too,
and more specially, so that it supports the uses of the building. Guidance,
preparation, stimulation, the pleasant surprise, relaxation – all this, I must
add, without the slightest whiff of the lecture theatre. It should all seem
very natural.17
One of Peter Zumthor’s best-known buildings is his thermal baths in Vals,

Switzerland (Fig. 4.1). It was built from 1994 to 1996 in a remote valley
in the canton of Grisons. The design is inspired by the idea of having an
almost archaic bathing experience in the surroundings of the local stone:
16 Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006), p. 43.

17 Zumthor, Atmospheres, p. 45.
The beginning was easy. Going back in time, bathing as one might have a
thousand years ago, creating a building, a structure set into the slope with
an architectural attitude and aura older than anything already built around
it, inventing a building that could somehow always have been there, a
building that relates to the topography and geology of the location, that
responds to the stone masses of Vals Valley, pressed, faulted, folded and
sometimes broken into thousands of plates—these were the objectives of
our design.18
According to what Zumthor mentions as his initial ideas the built

structure is a labyrinth of different caves connected with open parts
Fig. 4.1 The main facade of the Therme Vals, Switzerland. Picture by Micha L.
Rieser, licensed under Wikimedia commons. Readers are invited to scroll through
more photographs of the Therme Vals on its official website www.7132.com and
on the Wikipedia article relating to it
18 Peter Zumthor, Sigrid Hauser, and Hélène Binet, Therme Vals (Zurich: Scheidegger
& Spiess, 2007), p. 18.
with surprising vistas. The whole building is thought to provide a

multisensorial experience and this idea starts from the very beginning. In
the official publication on the thermal baths in Vals, several earlier and
later sketches and drawings by Peter Zumthor document the design
process of the building. One of the early drawings shows what Zumthor
calls the ‘entrance-sequence’: In a series of eight miniatures he displays
different ‘atmospheric settings’ that a visitor experiences on her way down
from the entrance door via the galleries, passing the changing and shower
rooms and finally arriving at the level of the water basins. Format and
style of this drawing are very much reminiscent of a ‘story-board’ for a
film, thus implying an imaginary ‘motion-picture’ in front of the inner eye
of the architect. Zumthor’s later comments on this drawing demonstrate
how much he was thinking by means of sequences in motion:
The series of sketches on this page explores the sequence of spaces, from
entering the baths to the first point on the gallery that affords an overview.
Guided movement through masses of stone, changing light from above.19
One might object, though, that this drawing still shows nothing but
the neoclassical ‘promenade architecturale’ or, in our terms, the four-
dimensional architectural thinking associated with Le Corbusier and
Giedion. It focuses on a sequence of different spatial arrangements that
are meant to appeal to the visual sense by means of carefully staged light.
However, both Zumthor’s description of ‘guided movement through
masses of stone’, and the experience of the spaces as they were actu-
ally built, show that he very consciously sought to trigger or engage all
senses, not only the visual one. Anyone who walks down this passage,
past the carefully staged light, will experience the noise and the feeling of
water, the different surfaces of stone, concrete, leather, coloured lacquer
and so on. As Zumthor writes in the catalogue on the thermal baths in
Vals, from the very beginning of the project, he intended to address the
visitors in exactly such a holistic sensual way:
19 Zumthor, Atmospheres, p. 77.

From the beginning, our design philosophy was also a bathing philosophy.
In the earliest sketches, facilities and resources were already experimen-
tally embedded in the landscape of blocks: pools of water, warm and cold
gushing waters for contrast bathing in the slope at the back, waterfalls,
rivulets.20
Indeed, the five-dimensional design concept can be found (in an almost

obtrusive way) everywhere in the building, since there are areas for liter-
ally every sense. Besides hot and cold basins, for example, there is also
a sound-bath of ringing bells and a smell-bath of flowers. Zumthor’s
thermal baths in Vals can thus be considered as a perfect example for a
five-dimensional mise-en-scène in architecture, and it is a perfect example
for a structure that is conceived in the mind as such a five-dimensional
motion-triggering, sequential, sensual, atmosphere-creating architectural
structure.
These few examples out of Peter Zumthor’s and Pliny the Younger’s
writings show how both men perceive architecture neither in a two-,
three- nor a four-dimensional way, but in five dimensions—or, to be more
precise, in a combination of the fourth and the fifth dimensions. Both
their texts show the predominant narrative or argumentative aim of vividly
conveying the way a body might move in space and time through the
buildings they describe. This means that they consciously avoid ‘drawing’
a two-dimensional image from an external point of view into their read-
ers’ minds, or to create any distance between the narrator or reader and
the described object. On the contrary, they aim to enable their readers to
experience in their minds the atmosphere which can be perceived by all
senses in real-world visits to their respective buildings.
Thus, our cross-era comparison gives an indication of how architects
can profit from reading (and, in Zumthor’s case, themselves writing)
literary descriptions of buildings as models of ‘houses in the mind’ in
order to supplement their own perceptions, which may otherwise tend
to focus on the second and third dimensions rather than the fourth and
fifth. Finally, we hope to have indicated how literary critics might prof-
itably engage with architects, people who by the nature of their work
are attuned to the various uses and resonances of the built spaces that
appear in literary texts. The second and third dimensions, which convey
the issues an architect needs to know in order to construe a building (for
20 Zumthor et al., Therme Vals, p. 81.

example the exact measurements of a room and its ceiling, or the posi-
tions of its doors and windows) are, on the other hand, exactly those
which literary texts tend to omit, for these mere facts do not help to
create a vivid image of a ‘house in the mind’ and its atmosphere—as the
sensual, emotional, judgmental and semantic resonances of the fourth and
fifth dimensions do. Thus, we hope to have indicated how the dimen-
sional approach to literary descriptions of buildings offers a new tool for
literary critics not only to profitably engage with architects, but also to
understand and interpret literary ‘houses in the mind’.
PART II
Reading Literary Architectures
The essays in this section focus on ways in which imaginary architectures

have been deployed in a variety of texts to envisage and articulate the
experience of being in the world. Further, they bring to light how often
literary texts that depict architectural structures are preoccupied with the
intangible operations of the memory and the imagination.
CHAPTER 5
Behold the House of the Lord: Encountering

Architecture in the Codex Amiatinus
Meg Boulton
At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a

sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability—a being who
[…] even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time
to ‘suspend’ its flight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed
time. That is what space is for.1
The above quotation, taken from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space
(1958), seems a fitting place to begin this consideration of an imag-
ined ‘house’, which centres on the imaginary and imagined spaces of the
scripturally present(ed) but no-longer extant Tabernacle and Temple as
envisioned in both the physical and metaphysical contexts of a monu-
mental manuscript produced in Northumbria in Anglo-Saxon England,
1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas, 2nd edn (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1994), p. 8.
M. Boulton (B)
Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
e-mail: mboulton@ed.ac.uk

70 M. BOULTON
circa the early eighth century.2 Such a consideration entails a conflation

and collapse of both time and place and space and memory, as well as a
search for things past as they may be experienced in the present—and all
of these are (re)presented and (re)examined by Bachelard in a much later,
secular context in his elegiac and phenomenological consideration of the
‘house’. Bachelard suggests that personal and emotional responses to the
typological associations produced by the various spaces of the house are
prompted by both their physical and their metaphysical qualities. Yet his
primary interest is in the spaces of the actual (that is to say the architec-
tural) and the imaginary. His discussion is structured and contextualised
by the overarching agent of the house: a meta-architecture that functions
as both memory and monument to remembering. It is a paean to the
house-form itself.
Despite being generated in a very different context to Bachelard’s
work, a similar set of phenomenological, psychological responses to the
typological space of ‘house’, in this case representations of historical, phys-
ical manifestation/s of the house/s of God, could be said to produced
in the illuminated miniatures of the Codex Amiatinus, most succinctly
in its complex and multivalent diagram of the Tabernacle in the Wilder-
ness.3 The Codex is perhaps the most famous copy of the Bible surviving
2 Much of the discussion below relies on the understanding that the Old Testament
structures of Tabernacle and Temple and the New Testament structure of the Church
(and individual churches) were viewed as being typological ‘houses of God’: places where
God dwelt amongst his people in a physical space. For ways in which the Tabernacle
may have been understood in Anglo-Saxon England see Nicholas Howe, Migration and
Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), and
Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Flora Spiegel, ‘The Tabernacula of Gregory the Great
and the Conversion of Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England, 36 (2007), 1–13.
3 Important readings of the Codex Amiatinus include R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford, The
Art of the Codex Amiatinus (London: British Archaeological Association, 1967); J. J.
G. Alexander, Insular Manuscripts, 6th to the 9th Century (London: Harvey Miller,
1978), pp. 32–35; Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘The Library of Scripture: Views from Vivarium
and Wearmouth-Jarrow’, in New Offerings, Ancient Treasures: Studies in Medieval Art for
George Henderson, ed. by Paul Binski and William Noel (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), pp. 3–39,
and ‘“All That Peter Stands For”: The Romanitas of the Codex Amiatinus Reconsidered’,
in Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations Before the Vikings, ed. by James Graham-Campbell and
Michael Ryan (Oxford: British Academy, 2009), pp. 367–95; Celia Chazelle, ‘Ceolfrid’s
Gift to St. Peter: The First Quire of the Codex Amiatinus and the Evidence of Its Roman
Destination’, Early Medieval Europe, 12 (2003), 129–57; Christopher de Hamel, Meet-
ings with Remarkable Manuscripts (London: Penguin, 2016), pp. 54–95; Conor O’Brien,
5 BEHOLD THE HOUSE OF THE LORD … 71
in Western Europe, and remains both fascinating and elusive to scholars

encountering it today. It contains the entirety of the Bible, rendered in
precise and elegant uncial script, alongside a series of complex diagrams
explaining the various possible scriptural divisions put forward by a range
of Church Fathers. It also contains a set of elaborately decorated painted
miniatures, one of which is the Tabernacle diagram discussed here.
The Codex was made in Anglo-Saxon England at the twin monastic
foundation of Wearmouth and Jarrow: the centre of learning celebrated
in the work of the Venerable Bede (and indeed the foundation to which
he belonged). It was one of three such complete bibles created by the
monastery at this time. A vast and luxe manuscript, it seems to have been
intended as a gift to the Pope by the Northumbrian monks at the behest
of their Abbot. Sent from England in 716, it then disappeared from
historical view, leaving some uncertainty as to whether it ever reached
Rome as intended. After a period of some 900 years, the Codex resurfaced
at the monastery of San Salvatore on Monte Amiata in Tuscany, whence it
takes its name, and was donated to the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in
Florence in the eighteenth century. Despite this relatively obscure history,
the manuscript itself is full of complex and eloquent information, not
least the series of depicted spaces and events found within the miniatures
of this monumental book-object. These include the elaborate Tabernacle
diagram (Fig. 5.1), which presents a conflated image of the architectural
spaces of the Tabernacle and the Temple to its viewers, recalling those Old
Testament spaces understood to house God, but also (re)creating new
meta/physical understandings both of these spaces and of the overarching
structure of the Church.4 As this suggests, it is a complex image. Within
Bede’s Temple: An Image and Its Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),
and ‘Tabernacle, Temple or Something in Between? Architectural Representation in Codex
Amiatinus, fols. IIv –IIIr ’, Leeds Studies in English, 48 (2017/2018), 7–20; see also the
forthcoming volume All Roads Lead to Rome: The Codex Amiatinus in Context, ed. by
Jane Hawkes and Meg Boulton (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019). Although the manuscript
itself has not been available for general scholarly consultation for some years, the recent
production of excellent facsimiles (both the CD-ROM and the physical version by La
Meta Editore) now allow for close and detailed study of its pages.
4 This diagram has received much scholarly attention, with scholars divided between
those who identify it solely as an architectural replica or plan of the historic structure of
the Tabernacle in the Wilderness and those who consider it to be a multivalent composite
of several ecclesiastical structures and Old Testament spaces that represents a layered
amalgam of Tabernacle, Temple, Church, and the Heavenly City yet to come. For the
former, see for example O’Brien, Bede’s Temple. For the latter, see O’Reilly, ‘The Library
72 M. BOULTON
Fig. 5.1 Tabernacle diagram, Codex Amiatinus, pre-716, Wearmouth-Jarrow.

Florence, Laurentian Library, MS Amiatino 1, fols. 2v-3r. Image reproduced by
permission of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana
the space of the monumental Codex, it shows the past earthly architec-
ture of the Church, (re)presenting and (re)constructing the house of God
that was built to the divine measurements specified by God to Moses.5
Yet it also presents a shadowy and multivalent space akin to the lurking
memories which linger in the corners of Bachelard’s houses. The various
spaces of the Tabernacle image both present an architectural reality and
of Scripture’; Bianca Kühnel, ‘Jewish Symbolism of the Temple and the Tabernacle and
Christian Symbolism of the Holy Sepulchre and the Heavenly Tabernacle’, Jewish Art,
12–13 (1986–1987), 147–68, and From the Earthly to the Heavenly Jerusalem: Represen-
tations of the Holy City in Christian Art of the First Millennium (Freiburg im Breisgau:
Herder, 1987). In the reading of the Tabernacle Diagram given here, I follow the work
of O’Reilly. Thus, the bifolium is understood to function as a representation of the
Universal Church in all its earthly temporal guises and geographical places, also recalling
and representing the Heavenly Jerusalem to come.
5 See Exodus 25.
simultaneously foreshadow the envisioned space of the heavenly Kingdom

as it might be seen and experienced by the faithful at the end of earthly
time.
This chapter argues that Bachelard’s phenomenological approach to
space and architecture, particularly his consideration of architecture as
understood through lived experience, may suggest a new way of reading
the illuminated miniatures of the Codex Amiatinus.6 Bachelard’s focus on
experiential encounter/s, rather than on abstract rationales and relations,
is highly pertinent to the type of quasi-phenomenological, eschatologi-
cally driven encounter with visual space/s that prefigure and figure the
Church in the Codex Amiatinus. Arguably, in order to fully ‘under-
stand’ the depicted spaces of the manuscript, a viewer or reader must
conceptually enter and inhabit them—much as Bachelard suggests the
(memory) house is figuratively inhabited.7 From a twenty-first-century
perspective, medieval ecclesiastical objects, spaces, and images have wider
resonances than an author/audience binary, as they exist in contexts
outside the point of their making, reading or viewing, so that their orig-
inal, temporal intention/s are overlapped with our focused, present gaze.8
6 For the wider iconographic issues surrounding these miniatures, see Meg Boulton,
‘From Cover to Cover: (Re)Presentations of Ecclesia and Eschatology in the Codex
Amiatinus’, in All Roads Lead to Rome, ed. by Hawkes and Boulton.
7 It is important to note, however, that this mapping of a hypothetical, phenomeno-
logical viewpoint onto medieval material is intended as a framework: a suggestion of one
possible approach to such imagery, rather than a direct template for understanding all such
images and objects. For selected reading around this type of phenomenological approach
see E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. by J. N. Findlay, 2 vols. (London: Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,
trans. by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister (London: Rout-
ledge, 1995); Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. by Albert
Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Dermot Moran, Introduction
to Phenomenology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology
of Perception, trans. by Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012); and Dan Zahavi,
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012). See also Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
8 See further Meg Boulton, ‘“The End of the World as We Know It”: The Eschatology
of Symbolic Space/s in Insular Art’, in Making Histories: Proceedings of the Sixth Interna-
tional Insular Arts Conference, ed. by Jane Hawkes (Donington: Shaun Tyas Publishing,
2013), pp. 279–90; ‘(Re)Viewing “Iuxta Morem Romanorum”: Considering Perception,
Phenomenology and Anglo-Saxon Ecclesiastical Architecture’, in Sensory Perception in the
Medieval West: Manuscripts, Texts, and Other Material Matters, ed. by Simon Thomson
and Michael D. J. Bintley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 206–26, and ‘Art History in
74 M. BOULTON
Indeed, images such as those found on the pages of the Amiatinus possess
object-identities that transcend the lived experience of their making and
display or use; they outlast the finite knowledge and intentions of their
makers and viewers. By continuing to exist outside their socio-cultural
temporalities, they present a multifaceted encounter with both past and
future, rooted in the moment of their making, but surviving long beyond
it. They thus speak of places other than and beyond both then and now,
as well as of faith in things that are long gone or yet to come in a Chris-
tian eschatological setting. In this way, the Amiatinus miniatures have the
potential to offer an experiential encounter with the spaces they preserve
and present—albeit one that is more often actualised than actual.
Medieval artefacts as they are encountered today frequently exist as
decontextualised, anonymous objects, largely effaced and partially erased
by being (presented as) fragments or facsimiles that occlude the original
from view. Yet despite this distancing, such objects, images, and fragments
are still possessed of an object-oriented monumentality, even when viewed
across centuries and even, at times, in the absence of the original. In such
cases, it is difficult definitively to connect the locus of meaning with a
viewer’s response to, or encounter with, the original object. This clearly
applies to the Amiatinus manuscript, which, as part of the collection of
the Biblioteca Laurenziana, is almost entirely inaccessible in the orig-
inal.9 Instead, it is available as a digital image or as a facsimile. Both, in
different ways, provide invaluable access to the book—but with the conse-
quence that, for a modern viewer, to some extent the manuscript becomes
its copies: it is irrevocably associated with, and encountered through, its
simulacra.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the difficulty of encountering the
monumental and material presence of its original, the Codex—like much
ecclesiastical medieval material—is a dynamic object, suffused with a
visual eschatological ideology. Whether as original or simulacrum, it is
the Dark Ages: (Re)Considering Space, Stasis and Modern Viewing Practices in Relation
to Anglo-Saxon Imagery’, in Stasis in the Medieval West? Questioning Change and Conti-
nuity, ed. by Michael D. J. Bintley, Martin Locker, Victoria Symons, and Mary Wellesley
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 69–86.
9 The loan of the Codex to the British Library for the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms:
Art, Word, War exhibition, 19 October 2018–19 February 2019, did, however, offer
unprecedented access to the Codex.
informed and shaped by concerns that may seem alien to the modern
viewer. Eschatological artefacts from a medieval ecclesiastical context are
explicitly tied to a set of societally derived signifiers and symbolic under-
standings that may seem at variance to our own largely more secularised
age. In contrast, modern scholarship, with its very different epistemo-
logical framework, tends to shift attention from systemic structures of
belief towards the processes of meaning-making by author, audience, and
indeed object.10 This can result in a gap between medieval and modern
ways of understanding, articulating, and viewing images and objects. With
the Amiatinus, whose illuminated spaces are depicted in two dimensions
and are seemingly delineated and limited by the planar surface of the
page, differences between medieval and present-day perceptions of space,
plane, and surface come into play.11 These do not arise solely from
the inevitability of anachronistic viewing practices when encountering
the spaces of sculpture, panel, or page in a time and place far removed
from those in which they were made, but also stem from a fundamental
difference in the way space is depicted and conceived at different times.
That is to say, in looking at medieval spatial images, we are dealing with
different stylistic modes of depicting space, but also with perceptions of
the way our conceptualisations of space differ from those of other periods.
This spatial difference is thus at once both real and perceptual. Medieval
images, created before the Renaissance (re)discovery and implementation
of perspective as the overarching spatial system for visual representation,
are frequently defined in terms of what they are not. Because they lack
formal perspective, they are assumed also to lack spatial sophistication.
This, in turn, has led to a relative lack of attention to the complex rela-
tionalities of space and surface, viewer and viewed object, within early
medieval art. The presupposition exists that because the medieval method
of depicting space is planar rather than perspectival, the method of
conceptualising space is therefore also two-dimensional.12 Although the
spatial complexities of medieval imagery demonstrate that this is not the
10 See further Boulton, ‘Art History in the Dark Ages’.

11 See further Boulton, ‘The End of the World as We Know It’, ‘(Re)Viewing
“Iuxta Morem Romanorum”’, and ‘Bejewelling Jerusalem: Architectural Adornment and
Symbolic Significance in the Early Church in the Christian West’, in Islands in a Global
Context: Proceedings of the Seventh International Insular Arts Conference, ed. by Conor
Newman, Mags Mannion, and Fiona Gavin (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), pp. 15–23.
12 Boulton, ‘End of the World’.
76 M. BOULTON
case, it may require a degree of visual flexibility on the part of modern

viewers to recognise the complexities at play in this type of imagery,
and the types of meaning or encounter potentially contained within such
works. This is where Bachelard comes in. When combined with exegetical
understanding, a quasi-phenomenological approach which foregrounds
ideas of memory as well as experiential encounters with such modes of
depiction and constructed objects is useful in (re)negotiating our relation-
ship to medieval images. Bringing instinctive modern viewing practices
closer to possible medieval ones through the deliberate immersion of
self in (meta)physical space (body to object, thing to thing, modern
to medieval) may help facilitate a fuller exploration of the conceptual
potential exhibited by pre-perspectival imagery.
The Codex Amiatinus is a case in point. As an object, it is extraor-
dinary, composed of a staggering 1029 folios—each double page the
skin of one animal—and weighing, as one scholar memorably put it, as
much as a fully grown female Great Dane.13 Even among the elabo-
rate and sophisticated books that form the surviving corpus of insular
manuscripts, it is a rare book-object both in scale and articulation: indeed,
it was once suggested that the scale, sophistication, and complex Ital-
ianate ‘style’ of the manuscript decoration (particularly the Ezra page),
would disallow the possibility of its being a product of an insular scrip-
torium. Yet the monks of the wealthy, highly intellectual, and culturally
informed community of Wearmouth-Jarrow were surrounded by artistic
media in the forms of ecclesiastical images and objects, as they imported
large quantities of books, artworks, and other liturgical furnishings from
the Continent to improve and inform their own monastic environment.14
Moreover, because the Northumbrian Codex was intended as a papal gift,
the classical vocabulary employed within its pages can be seen as a highly
charged and overtly political attempt to equate the emergent iconographic
13 Bruce-Mitford, Art of the Codex Amiatinus, 2.

14 Jane Hawkes, ‘Stones of the North: Sculpture in Northumbria in the “Age of
Bede”’, in Newcastle and Northumberland: Roman and Medieval Architecture and Art,
ed. by Jeremy Ashbee and Julian Luxford (Leeds: British Archaeological Association,
2013), pp. 34–53, and ‘The Transformative Nature of Stone: Early Medieval Sculpture
of the Insular World and the “Graven Image”’, in Islands in a Global Context, ed. by C.
Newman, M. Mannion, and F. Gavin, pp. 104–10 (pp. 106–7); Peter Darby, ‘The Codex
Amiatinus Maiestas Domini and the Gospel Prefaces of Jerome’, Speculum, 92 (2017),
343–71 (p. 344).
vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxon Church with the established traditional

style of the Institution of the Church of Rome. Its ambition and
complexity thus have much to tell us of the institutional identity of both
the Northumbrian monastic foundation that produced it, and the wider
Church that inspired it.
The three illuminated miniatures of the Amiatinus are of particular
significance to discussions of both space and identity and memory and
monument as articulated through the book-object. The first and arguably
the most famous of these is the Ezra page. It depicts a scribe in his
scriptorium, and is, at first glance, the most straightforward of the three
images. The bookcase at the back of the image is one of the most iconic
features of the composition, and the primary structural aspect of the
scene. On the one hand, it is among the features of the image that
reveal the complexity of ‘antiquarian tastes and Romanising ideals of
the Wearmouth-Jarrow community’.15 On the other hand, as Jennifer
O’Reilly and Janina Ramirez have noted, it visually recalls and enacts—
both on the page and in the mind of the viewer—the symbolic structures
and ceremonies of Tabernacle, Temple, and Church, all of which were
understood to house and contain God just as the bookcase could be
said to house or contain Scripture. Thus, through the containment of
the Word, or Logos, the space or structure of the bookcase, too, might
be said symbolically to hold and/or house God.16 In this reading of
harmony through change or transition, these books (and their containing
super-structures of amarium, scriptorium and C/church) underscore the
change from Old to New Testament, from Old to New Covenant, and
thus also the change from the structures of Tabernacle and Temple to
the Church as the house of God.17 As Ramirez argues, this change is in
part effected by the amarium’s decoration—particularly the small cross
15 See further O’Reilly, ‘The Library of Scripture’; Chazelle, ‘Ceolfrid’s Gift to St.
Peter’, 149–56. The portrait can be identified as Ezra due to the verses just outside
the frame of the image, which refer directly to him: CODICIBVS SACRIS HOSTILI
CLADE PERVSTIS / ESDRA D[E]O FERVENS HOC REPARAVIT OPVS. See further
Paul Meyvaert, ‘Bede, Cassiodorus and the Codex Amiatinus’, Speculum, 71 (1996), 827–
83 (pp. 877–81); Ian N. Wood, The Most Holy Abbot Ceolfrid (Jarrow: Parish of Jarrow,
1995).
16 See John 1:1 for a scriptural paratext to this reading of Logos.
17 O’Reilly, ‘Library of Scripture’ and ‘All that Peter Stands For’; Janina Ramirez,
‘Sub culmine gazas: The Iconography of the Armarium on the Ezra Page of the Codex
Amiatinus’, Gesta, 48 (2009), 1–18.
78 M. BOULTON
depicted on the gable top, which, like that on the entrance to the Sanc-
tuary on the Tabernacle diagram, visually and conceptually transforms
the space of the architectural Tabernacle/Temple of the Old Testament
past (here recalled by the form of the bookcase) into the space of the
C/church of the present. This image could thus be suggested to present
a conceptual encounter with the history of the Church as understood
through its past sacred structures, crystalised through the iconic struc-
turing form of the amarium and the continuous, continuing role of
Scripture, and underlined by the presence of both scribe and the Word.
These symbolic understandings are called into being for the viewer by
the act of looking into the scriptorium as a space as it is placed on the
page: that is, effectively looking through the surface of the page into the
past (textual) history of the Institution, which is also connected to the
present and future through the scribal act of replicating the Word. The
Word is both implicitly and explicitly present: implicitly in the depiction
of text in the Scriptorium, explicitly in its adjacent presence in the Codex
itself, presented in and through a space which is inhabited by the over-
lapping and layered figures of Ezra (dressed as an Old Testament priest),
the scribes creating Amiatinus, and the embodied readers or viewers of
both the eighth century and the present day, all of whom also come to
cognitively inhabit the scriptorium, the page and the book.
Space and structure similarly shape the meaning of the next miniature:
the Tabernacle diagram. This is possibly the most structurally complex of
the three miniatures in Amiatinus. It is a double folio, something that
is rare in early manuscript art, and was originally not bound into the
manuscript, but left loose. Because it was capable of being lifted from the
body of the Codex and examined in a separate context to those images
confined within the book, it is the only miniature that might theoretically
have stood alone as an actualised space outside the supporting and autho-
rising confines of the book-container. Thus, alone among the miniatures,
it once constituted a space capable of ‘existing’ in the world. This should
be borne in mind when interpreting it. On the page, the space of the
Tabernacle in the Wilderness is rendered in plan and elevation: seen from
above, but simultaneously presenting the physical space of the Mosaic
structure as if it might be walked into, providing a notional experiential
encounter for its viewers. It thus takes relatively little effort on the part
of the viewer to actualise the representation of the space as the physical
complex of the Tabernacle, the house of God. It is depicted complete
with columns, altars and bronze laver (in which priests would ritually
wash their hands and feet), and with the Tabernacle, the Sanctuary, and
the Holy of Holies. This last is the space that was understood to house
God. It was a spatially distinct structure covered, as Bede tells us, in
layers of animal hide, and dyed linens and containing the Temple trea-
sures, including the Ark of the Covenant and the stone tablets inscribed
with the Commandments of God.
Like the symbolic fusion of scriptorium and Church on the Ezra page,
this diagram presents a physical and metaphysical articulation of both
Tabernacle and Temple. The architecture on the page conflates these
two Old Testament structures, resulting in a space rendered in both two
and three dimensions, full of complex foreshadowing. As in the Ezra
miniature, it is the presence of the salvific cross above the entryway to
the Sanctuary that ultimately transforms both these structures, explicitly
rendering the space/s of Tabernacle/Temple as Church, recast and repre-
sented within the space of the Codex. This itself may be interpreted as a
container for the Sacred or Divine, which in turn is foreshadowed by
the Holy of Holies as it was ritually (re)constructed and carried in the
Wilderness and later (re)presented in the permanent architectural space
of the Temple. Through the depiction of the past structures understood
to house and hold God/the Divine, which are themselves subsequently
transformed into the overarching, universalising identity of the Church
through the presence of the cross over the painted threshold to the Taber-
nacle, the page functions as a representation of the Universal Church.
These merged structures are all simultaneously understood to contain
and house the Sacred, and also to prefigure the Heavenly Jerusalem to
come for their viewers/readers who (meta)physically enter and inhabit
these spaces, encountering the Divine within as memory, presence and
prefiguration.
The last of the Amiatinus miniatures is the Maiestas image, historically
the most controversial of the three illustrations. Deemed to be stylistically
unlike its two preceding companion pages, with their marked romanitas,
proto-perspectival composition, and real space/s (albeit imagined and/or
envisioned ones from the Scriptural and ecclesiastical past), it presents an
eschatological vision of the future end of time to its viewer.18 This page
18 For recent discussions of this page, see Celia Chazelle, The Codex Amiatinus and
Its ‘Sister’ Bibles: Scripture, Liturgy, and Art in the Milieu of the Venerable Bede (Leiden:
Brill, 2019); Darby, ‘The Codex Amiatinus Maiestas Domini’, and ‘Sacred Geometry and
the Five Books of the Codex Amiatinus Maiestas Domini’, in Islands in a Global Context,
80 M. BOULTON
shows the enthroned Christ set in the cosmos, flanked by angels, the tradi-
tional attendants of the heavenly throne. These are placed within a set of
circles, surrounded by a rainbow-hued ribbon band, and a jewelled border
(which may symbolise the heavenly city as described in Revelation).19 The
circles float on red and blue apocalyptic clouds, and the evangelists with
their gospel books complete the composition, here—unusually—accom-
panied by their symbolic counterparts who (in an apocalyptic context)
could be seen to represent the winged creatures who adore the heavenly
throne as set out in Revelation and Ezekiel’s vision.20 Through the spatial
articulation of the page, and its monumental, structural iconographic
programme, the Maiestus image presents a quasi-architectural reality, with
the circular forms of the central motif of the design positioned at the
notional ‘top’ of the image. If read in this way, these layered circular
forms can be visualised as projecting up from the top of the frame of
the page, like domes and apses in ecclesiastical architecture. Breaking the
surface of the page, and thus also the perceived static two-dimensionality
of the image, they give direct access to the perceived heavens beyond the
page, stressing the vertical inter-relationality of Church and cosmos, and
presenting the viewer of Amiatinus with a vision of Christ in Majesty.
The three-layered circles of the Maiestas may thus be read as a quasi-
architectural, structuring device: they perform as a dome or oculus which,
when actualised by the reader or viewer, behave as a ‘window’ that realises
the heavenly space of the cosmos, in a mystic, fleeting revelatory vision.
In other words, for the duration of the vision prompted by the page, the
image, and thus the book, contain, house, and display Christ in Majesty,
both as he is and as he is to be, enthroned at the end of time—all of
which is experienced by the reader/viewer.
When read in conjunction with the detailed, apocalyptic iconography
of the miniature, and the commanding presence of the enthroned Christ,
ed. by C. Newman, M. Mannion, and F. Gavin, pp. 34–40. See also Per Jonas Nord-
hagen, The Codex Amiatinus and the Byzantine Element in the Northumbrian Renaissance
(Jarrow: Rector of Jarrow, 1977); O’Reilly, ‘Library of Scripture’, 11–13; Bianca Kühnel,
The End of Time in the Order of Things: Science and Eschatology in Early Medieval Art
(Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2003), pp. 41–45, 48–52; and Bruce-Mitford, Art of the
Codex Amiatinus, pp. 11–18.
19 For further discussion see Boulton, ‘End of the World as We Know It’, ‘(Re)Viewing
“Iuxta Morem Romanorum”’, and ‘Bejewelling Jerusalem’.
20 See Revelation 4:6, 9; Ezekiel 10.
the celestial, architectural structure of spheres presents a clear icono-

graphic scheme. The Maiestas miniature makes the site of the Second
Coming, and thus the realm of the heavenly Jerusalem to come, viscerally
and materially present for the viewer of the image or reader of the Codex.
This vision works in harmony with the other miniatures of Amiatinus.
Like the foreshadowing presence of the book of Scripture in the amarium
on the Ezra page and the prefiguratory promise of the buildings of the
Tabernacle diagram, it too foreshadows the Church. The whole scheme
is underscored by the material presence of the vellum from which the
Codex is constructed, with its allusive material reference to animals, sacri-
ficed for the book, and to Christ, whose sacrifice on the cross as the Lamb
of God was the ultimate such sacrifical act, replacing the ritual Old Testa-
ment animal sacrifices with the new covenant.21 The page is thus a potent
eschatological simulation of the Parousia, the moment Christ will appear,
as it will manifest at the end of earthly time. It visually presents the future
of the Church, blurring the line between the earthly institution and the
heavenly kingdom, which is understood in light of the past and present of
the Church as viewed across the illustrations of the Amiatinus as a whole.
Fittingly, the Maiestas is placed in the book at the junction of the Old
and New Testaments, cementing and securing the harmony between the
past and the future as recognised through Christ.22
The images presented in Amiatinus are thus self-reflexive, serving
to strengthen and reinforce the multivalent messages found across the
Codex. Spatially, architecturally, and temporally, the images and the
Codex as a whole represent the C/church in a state of peregrination,
as it travelled through the world on its journey towards Rome, recalling
the greater journey of the Church towards Salvation, encompassing the
past, the present, and the future in its pages. Yet despite the intricacy
and multivalency of the Old and New Testament spaces and structures
that were understood to house God, to (pre)figure the Church on earth
and to foreshadow the heavenly Jerusalem to come, it remains the book-
object, encountered in the half-space between real and replicated, that
validates the spatial and temporal simulacra on its pages. For an exegeti-
cally aware viewer, the Codex itself functions as structure qua structure,
21 See, for example Sarah Kay, ‘Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Medieval
Reading’, Postmedieval, 2 (2011), 13–32, and Animal Skins and the Reading Self in
Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
22 See further Boulton, ‘From Cover to Cover’.
82 M. BOULTON
for it houses the Word, and thus contains the Logos that is God. In part,
it is the colossal monumentality of the manuscript that convinces that
these spaces, places, and events could be realistically actualised within the
space of the Codex, which enfolds and cements the Anglo-Saxon church
into the universalised understanding of the wider Christian eschatolog-
ical framework, setting it on equal footing with the Church of Rome.
But although such political and religious ambitions plausibly underlie its
creation, the Codex itself is focused on far greater truths. It reveals the last
events of Christianity alongside the foreshadowing totems of past struc-
tures and monuments—all articulated within the space of a book that
was designed to hold and house everything that was sacred in Christian
memory and theology: indeed, to house God as presented through the
Word. These revelations are portrayed through spaces and structures that
actualise encounters with the house/s of God (Ark, Tabernacle, Temple
and Church) across past, present and future for the viewer or reader, who
encounters and thus conceptually inhabits them.
In this way, the architectonic images of Amiatinus anticipate
Bachelard’s reading of the house as container, conductor and producer of
experiential memory, placing a similar emphasis on lived and emotional
experience in our relation to architectural place/s alongside the impor-
tance of the phenomenological encounter in locating identity and self
through the intimacy of structure/s. Rather than being understood to be
concrete representations of the architectural structure of the Tabernacle
in the Wilderness or the Temple in Jerusalem, they might best be under-
stood as metaphysical, multifaceted diagrams portraying the multiple
architectural structures housing God. Thus these illustrated miniatures
present a multi-layered iteration of all the house/s of God, past and
present (in both historical architectural actualities and future eschato-
logical incarnations), as experienced through a notional (meta)physical
encounter with these spaces, and an emotional and cognitive response
to them. Such a reading actively allows for the creation and concep-
tualisation of metaphysical spaces and places beyond those which were
experienced and understood in terms of the earthly and the actual for
the viewers and readers of Amiatinus. This occurs through a performative
interplay of physical and metaphysical space/s and a dynamic exchange
between the mind and its imagined and/or actualised archi-textual
surroundings—all encountered through the shifting subtleties of space,

place and architecture, housed within the painted pages of the Codex,
recalled and experienced through sensory emplacement in space and a
visceral engagement with cultural and institutional memory and escha-
tology.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Dr. Nick Baker, Jenna Ross, Dr. Pete Sand-
berg and Dr. Carolyn Twomey for their comments on this chapter. Their insights
were appreciated, and any errors that remain are my own.
CHAPTER 6
Placing the Dead: Architectural Imagination

and Posthumous Identity in Medieval France
Helen Swift
‘Every body is in a place and in every place there is a body’.1 Thomas

Aquinas’s summary of the relationship between body and place in Book
IV of Aristotle’s Physics appears neat and tidy in its chiastic rhetorical
concision. There is clarity likewise in Aristotle’s own exposition of the
properties of place, in which he insists on the distinction between place
and body:
1 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, trans. by Richard J. Blackwell,

Richard J. Spath, and Edmund Thirlkel (Notre Dame: Dumb Ox Books, 1999), Book
IV, Lecture 2, para 421, p. 209. Aquinas’s ‘omne corpus est in loco, et in omni loco est
corpus’ (In octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis expositio, ed. by P. M. Maggiòlo [Rome/Turin:
Marietti, 1954], p. 207) echoes Aristotle’s ‘/Eτι ώσπερ άπαν σωμα εν τóπω, oυτω και
εν τóπω άπαντι σωμα’ (Physics, ed. and trans. by Francis M. Cornford and Philip H.
Wicksteed, Loeb Classical Library 228, 2 vols. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1957], I, IV.i. 209a, p. 284).
H. Swift (B)
St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: helen.swift@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk

86 H. SWIFT
The place of a thing is no part or factor of the thing itself, but is that
which embraces it […] The place where the thing is can be quitted by it,
and is therefore separable from it.2
Place is ‘the limiting surface of the body-continent’ (IV.iv. 212a, p. 313)

that ‘embraces its content after the fashion of a vessel’ (IV.iv. 212a,
p. 315). ‘If a body is encompassed by another body, external to it, it
is “in a place”; but if not, not’ (IV.v. 212a, p. 321). So whilst one aspect
of the body’s identity, its placedness (or otherwise), is determined by its
‘fixed environing surface’ (IV.iv. 212a, p. 315), and, in turn, that placing
qualifies the latter as place, both entities remain distinct, in the way that
a river is distinct from any boat that it contains. If, as Sarah Kay suggests,
place is that which circumscribes or defines the limits of a body, how does
the act of placing work in the case of dead human bodies which, by dint
of being dead, have themselves already exceeded a body’s normal limits?3
A corpse is not the person they were in life: there is absence in its tangible
presence and a potent presence in their absence.
In the present chapter, I use Aristotle’s Physics as a tool for exploring
what happens in medieval French literature when writers seek to house
the dead. In these fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century cemetery fictions,
bodies are, variously, scrambled bones, buried or uninterred corpses, or
sculptural representations. In the acting of framing their presentation, the
site that houses them may be seen to evoke the uncertain boundaries
of a body and to gesture towards absence rather than corporeal pres-
ence. In other words, ‘place’ can be seen itself to evoke how bodily limits
are exceeded and cannot—or, at least, not straightforwardly—be circum-
scribed. In this light, the familiar epitaphic formula ‘here lies [N.]’ (‘cy
gist [N.]’), which seems simply to designate deictically what lies where,
is immediately problematised, since it is an affirmation of absence, even
a negation, rather than statement of presence: ‘here does not lie [N.],
because [N.] is no longer’. I do not propose that authors such as Pierre
de Hauteville, Octovien de Saint-Gelais and Jean Bouchet were fashioning
their imaginary sepulchral structures in a way demonstrably informed by
Aristotelian thought. Rather, I wish to use the Classical philosopher’s
2 Physics, I, IV.iv. 211a, p. 303. Subsequent references to the Physics will be given in
parentheses in the text.
3 Sarah Kay, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French
Didactic Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 6.
6 PLACING THE DEAD: ARCHITECTURAL IMAGINATION … 87
reflections to shake up our understanding of what their architectural

commemoration of a dead body in a given place was intended to promote,
namely, an interrogation of the processes by which human identity is
constituted. The dead are not tidily packaged up; the act of placing them
is in some sense an ‘unplacing’ (IV.v.212a, p. 321), in that it does not
contain someone neatly, but is more apt to unfix their identity.
Late-medieval French literature generated a profusion of spatial struc-
tures—tombs, cemeteries, palaces and temples—designed to house the
dead in fictions commemorating deceased nobles, whether aristocratic
patrons or antecedent authors. Traditionally seen as frameworks intended
to fix, monumentalise and immortalise, these imagined architectures were
in fact devised by several writers as tools for exploring more flexibly
and interrogatively a set of questions raised by the act of placing the
dead.4 The first half of this chapter addresses several of the more signif-
icant of these. Firstly, what aspect of the person is being placed? Is it
their body, as implied by the phrase ‘ci gist’, here lies, or is it their
name? How does that aspect signify? Is it, for example, coherently as
a relic, or disjointedly as a jumble of bones? Secondly, what does the
act of placing imply about the deceased’s state of being, and how is
this formulated? Siting them seems to preserve identity, affirming life
after death, whilst at the same time recognising that they are dead and
gone; it asserts presence contained within a structure, but also affirms
absence. Thirdly, who is doing the placing? On the one hand, authority
will be claimed by the author for having founded the structure, but, on
the other, the very definition of whom it represents is entirely depen-
dent on its audience’s perception, within and without the fiction. The
familiar tombstone deixis ‘here lies’ is, after all, determined by the time
and place of its viewer: a further body implicated in the relationship
between the dead body and its place whose shaping gaze defines the
parameters of both.5 Responding to these questions with reference to
Octovien de Saint-Gelais and Jean Bouchet, the first half of this chapter
will demonstrate how these authors used verse and prose fiction as a site
4 Some of the material for the first half of this chapter derives from Helen J. Swift,
Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 2016), Chapter 4: ‘Placing the Dead’, and I am grateful to Boydell & Brewer
for permission to reproduce material here.
5 Neil Kenny, Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015).
88 H. SWIFT
of imaginative experimentation with the conceptual complexity of placing

the dead. The second half then turns to a particularly intriguing relation-
ship between body and place in Pierre de Hauteville’s poetic inventory
of a house formerly occupied by a deceased lover, which combines and
extends the implications of the questions probed in the first half by posing
a further question: how does a vacated place contain its departed body? In
sum, I show how these writers creatively exploited a sepulchral common-
place to explore how human identity is constituted, particularly with
regard to the means and mechanisms by which it is remembered—indeed,
posthumously re-membered.
(Un)Placing the Dead

Written under the sponsorship of Charles VIII, Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s
Sejour d’honneur (1489–94) is an allegorical dream-narrative in which the
narrator journeys across sea and land in pursuit of an emotional and moral
education. As is common in medieval literature, the narrator represents a
fictionalised projection of the author—a refraction rather than a reflec-
tion of his historical identity—and a character type operating as a means
to a didactic end. He learns at every turn from encounters with the dead
whom he sees across a range of cemetery terrains. The sense of ‘cy gist’
in this text is complicated by its application to corpses of varying degrees
of physical coherence floating at sea: mobile in the waves between several
‘here’s, they are not fixed in a single location.6 What precisely is seen
is a productively messy mix of cadavers, sculptures and accoutrements; I
say ‘productively’ because the evocative richness of the Sejour’s descrip-
tions invites the reader to question what aspects of someone’s remains
constitute their remembered identity, and how that identity is shaped.
For example, the ‘corps humains’ (II.vi.19: ‘human bodies’) that are seen
are referred to by terms that one would normally expect to find desig-
nating an effigy, such as ‘la figure’, ‘vraye pourtraicture’ (II.vi.53–54: ‘the
figure’, ‘true image’).7 Here, however, they seem designed to make us
6 Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Sejour d’honneur, ed. by Frédéric Duval (Geneva: Droz,

2002), II.vi.
7 The phrase ‘corps humain’ prompts an interesting vocabulary conundrum: should
one render ‘corps’, which can designate both a living and a dead body, as ‘body’ or
‘corpse’? Medieval French writers had at their disposal alternative terms to specify a
cadaver: cadavre, depouille (‘physical remains’), mors, etc.; exigencies of metre may also
reflect on the dislocated relationship between a living human body and

its dead counterpart, the corpse being ‘always already an image’, to quote
Michael Camille.8
The floating body is sometimes accompanied by initially unclear or
puzzling accoutrements. For instance, a young duke of Albania is seen
drifting by with a wound to his face (II.vi.149); the narrator also observes
items bobbing near him:
Je vys le boys et la lance flotant

Par laquelle sa vie fut estaincte. (Sejour, II.vi.154–55)
(I saw, floating by, the stick and the lance by which his life was
extinguished.)
The narrator pieces together these elements to compose the narrative of

the duke’s death. Someone’s material traces are a cue for telling a story
which constructs their identity. Elsewhere in the Sejour, we find such
traces detached from any human body: these markers stimulate the filling
of absent space with storytelling that makes of that space a place. In the
Forest of Adventure (III.viii–ix), the narrator sees the locations, residue
and tokens of past events. Personified Sensuality shows him the blood-
stained field where Abraham defeated the Assyriens, in which shields still
hang from the trees; it is transformed from space into place through
Sensuality’s deixis: it is ‘ce champ ycy que pres de toy tu voys’ (III.ix.89:
‘this field here that you see nearby’). Other now-empty stages of notable
action are the sites of buildings, such as ‘la grant salle par Sanson demol-
lie’ (III.ix.171: ‘the great hall destroyed by Sampson’). If this means that
the narrator is seeing it in its demolished state, then Sensuality’s account
is constructing, dismantling and reconstructing what Sampson destroyed.
In each case, whilst human actors are absent from the scene, their absence
is compensated for by a narrative account that names them:
Si me print lors la dame [= Sensualité] a racompter

Quelz gens jadis la prindrent habitude
[…]
have influenced a writer’s choice in verse passages. Does ‘corps’ retain a useful existential
ambiguity?
8 Michael Camille, ‘The Corpse in the Garden: mumia in Medieval Herbal Illustrations’,
Il Cadavere/The Corpse, Micrologus, 7 (1999), 297–318 (p. 318).
90 H. SWIFT
‘Compter te vueil par manière d’estude

Qui ceulx furent dont en doubte remains’. (Sejour, III.viii.47–48, ix.3–4)
(Then the lady [= Sensuality] started to tell me which people used to be
there […]. ‘I want to tell you by way of a lesson who they were about
whom you remain unsure’.)
Sensuality’s repeated verbs of storytelling underscore the role of narrative

in, if not restoring lost integrity, at least substituting absence with a kind
of imagined textual presence. This is encapsulated early on in the Sejour
when the narrator finds himself on the path of Flowering Youth, along
which, he is told, everyone has passed, but on which no-one remains. A
conventional transience motif is transformed into something more inter-
esting by the narrator’s attempts to imprint identities onto the blank
canvas of the path through negation:
Je n’y vy Dido ne Lucresse

Ne Sabba, […]
D’Yseux ne vy ne de Medee.
[…]
N’y parut ne Penelopé
Ja estoyt leur bruyt decoppé. (Sejour, I.viii, 41–42, 45, 47–48)
(I didn’t see there Dido or Lucretia or Sheba, […] I didn’t see anything of
Iseut or Medea. […] Nor did Penelope appear there. The sound of them
was already muted.)
By noting whom he did not see, whose ‘trace’ (I.viii.16) was not there,
he supplies these characters nonetheless with a presence of personhood in
his narrative: a textual echo, even a negative one, substituting for absence.
Such play of presence and absence leads into my second main ques-
tion, as to what the act of placing implies about the deceased’s state of
being. Siting them seems to preserve identity, asserting life after death
through commemoration, whilst at the same time recognising that they
are dead and gone; it asserts presence contained within a structure, but
also affirms absence. Le Temple de Bonne Renommee (1517), a 5077-line
poem by the Poitiers-born jurist Jean Bouchet, is an interesting case in
point, in that it brings out the plurality of an individual’s posthumous
being in respect of body, name and soul. The relationship between these
elements is spatialised in the poem’s plot, which itself is motivated by the
protagonist’s desire to locate his deceased lord, Charles de la Trémoille:
he asks ‘en quel lieu l’auroit on emporté?’ (line 571: ‘to what place would
they have taken him?’).9 His search concludes in the eponymous temple
of Good Renown, where it becomes clear that the answer to his question
is not univocal or straightforward. Personified Good Renown formulates
a conceptual schema of three lives lived by the virtuous:
Considerons aussi que triplement

Vit l’omme ou femme, et tout premierement
De celle vie humaine surnommee
Que mort deffait, voire totallement,
Et puis après on vit secondement
Par grans vertuz en bonne renommee;
La tierce vie, eternelle nommee,
Les aultres deux passe pour verité,
Car il n’y a fin en eternité. (Temple, lines 4576–84)
(Let us consider also that man or woman lives three-fold: first, that life
known as human that death destroys, indeed totally; then afterwards one
lives secondly through great virtues in good renown; the third life, called
eternal, truly surpasses the other two, for there is no end in eternity.)
These three lives of body, name and soul seem to correspond to three
spatial structures: the tomb, effigy and heaven. The protagonist arrives at
the Temple just in time for the obsequies of his late lord’s ‘noble corps,
duquel l’ame est là mont’ (line 4473: ‘noble body, whose soul is there on
high’). In terms of Charles’s ‘three lives’, his soul is thus accounted for
as having risen to heaven; the end of his first life is being dealt with by
the funeral ceremony, in which intercessory prayers are said over his body
before it is transported elsewhere for burial, to the church of Our Lady in
Thouars, Charles’s place of birth. For the second life, before departure for
Thouars, an effigy is presented, and personified virtues who command the
different tabernacles of the temple compete to claim it, each composing
an epitaph to be affixed to the tomb, commending what it contains in
various terms of renown—for example:
Cy gist le coeur d’un prince tresnotable (Public Faith, line 4898)

Cy gist celuy qui tant ama la guerre (Military Discipline, line 4906)
Cy gist en cendre ung corps dessoubz la lame. (Prudence, line 4938)
(Here lies the heart of a most notable prince; Here lies the one who so
loved warfare; Here lies in ashes a corpse beneath a tombstone.)
9 Jean Bouchet, Le Temple de Bonne Renommee, ed. by Giovanna Bellati (Milan: Vita e
Pensiero, 1992).
92 H. SWIFT
Meanwhile, we are, by the powers of fiction, transported together with

the protagonist to Thouars, to witness a final epitaph apparently uttered
by deceased Charles himself in the first person:
Charles je suis de La Tremouille dict,

Que Mort a mis par son tremoul edict
Tout à l’envers at converty en terre
Icy dessoubz où les miens on enterre. (Temple, lines 4998–5001)
(Charles I am, called of La Trémoille, whom Death has, by its fearful
edict, set on my back and in the ground here beneath, where my kinsmen
are buried.)
‘Icy dessoubz’ thus evokes the specific location of the church at

Thouars—a circumscribed architectural place in which he is now buried
alongside his relatives. Having recounted his life in his epitaph, he details
his circumstances of death on 16 September 1515, and then reveals
metaleptic knowledge of the posthumous translation of his body:
Et puis en mars après fut à Thouars

Porté mon corps: voz vouloirs soient tous ars
Par charité, priez Jhesus pour l’ame
Du noble corps qui cy gist soubz la lame. (Temple, lines 5056–59)
(And then, the following March, my body was conveyed to Thouars: may
your wills all be moved by charity, pray to Jesus for the soul of the noble
body which lies here beneath the tombstone.)
The final section of the Temple thus offers particularly intensive atten-
tion to matters of placement. The epitaphs composed by the virtues are
couched in the formula ‘cy gist’, which only acquires its full ‘here and
now’ sense once they have been attached to the new place of rest in
Thouars, matching the ‘cy gist’ at the end of Charles’s own epitaph.
And the protagonist, by the end of the narrative, has found his lord in
respect of body, name and soul: he attends his burial, he witnesses his
commemorative effigy being installed in the Temple, and he is able to
join in intercessory prayer for his salvation. However, surely a key irony
of this search is that he does not find Charles, at least not in any fixed
or restrictive sense, since the point of renown is not to be contained but
to be disseminated; his placement is simultaneously an unplacing. Hence
the protagonist’s request, at the very end, that the epitaphs be transcribed
and published in honour of his master’s valiance, memory and glorious
soul. All three of his lives, in other words, are to be conveyed through
textual transmission.
Such attention to communication and mediation brings us to my third
main question: who does the placing of the dead? Whatever authority is
attributed with having founded a particular architectural structure, such
as Good Renown’s temple, the definition of whomever that structure
commemorates is entirely dependent on its audience’s perception, within
and without the fiction: the deixis ‘here lies’ is determined by the time and
place of the reader-viewer, whose judgment and account of the deceased
constitutes the establishment of their identity. We have already inferred
from the example of the marine grave in the Sejour that the act of seeing
in these works is no simple ocular witness. Indeed, Saint-Gelais plays up
the extent to which his narrator’s view is complicated by circumstantial
disruption: the motion of the sea determines what the narrator is able to
see and when:
Puys ça, puys la, l’ung contre l’autre hurtans,

Selon que l’eau et les undes les mainent. (Sejour, II.vi.26–27)
(This way then that, one thing colliding with another, as the movement of
the water and the waves carries them.)
It thus also determines what he cannot see:
Et toutesfoys assés peu j’en congneuz,

Car les vagues de Mondaine Plaisance
M’en osterent pour lors la congnoissance. (Sejour, II.vi.46–48)
(But I could make out very little, because the waves of Worldly Pleasure
denied me knowledge of them for the time being.)
The sea as uncircumscribed space imposes its vagaries on the narrator’s

attempts to establish order. His experience at the time is a disorderly
vision, in several senses. What he sees is a scattered array of corpses
(‘Je vys sur l’eau ung tas de corps humains | […] | Ainsy entr’eulx sans
ordre se demainent’, II.vi.19, 28: ‘I saw floating on the water a load of
human bodies […] tossing about in a disorderly way’), as well as open
and closed coffins and floating objects detached from the people whom
they signify (‘seaulx et lectres, | Dÿademes, couronnes et grans septres’,
II.vi.43–44: ‘seals and documents, diadems, crowns and large sceptres’).
94 H. SWIFT
How he sees is chaotic, rendered through disrupted syntax and repetition

of ‘Et maintenant’ (II.vi.75, 204: ‘and now’) to introduce his present-
tense observations without clear linear, chronological progression. The
significance of what he sees is also disorderly, in a moral sense: this is
the Mer Mondaine, the Sea of the World, whose strewn bodies represent
people who dedicated themselves to worldly affairs to their detriment.
Alongside the narrator’s reported disarray, we are made aware of the
ordering impulse injected by his act of retrospective narration: in the act
of recounting his past voyage, he rescues the dead from being ‘a la mercy
| Des grans undes […] | Comme chose gectee a l’advanture’ (II.vi.76–78:
‘at the mercy of the great waves […] Like a thing tossed haphazardly’).
In other words, his narration effects a kind of interment that accords
each recognised individual an epitaph through the very act of posthumous
naming. A self-conscious use of versification and word order as ordering
tools is evident in the narrator’s lament over a duke of Savoy:
O Mort mordant et destinee a mordre,

Qui mors a mort sans mesure et sans ordre. (Sejour, II.vi.221–22)
(O biting Death destined to strike, you who gnaw to death without
measure and without order!)
Such an apostrophe of hypostasised death, accompanied by paronomasia

on the homonyms ‘mort’ (from mourir) and ‘mort’ (from mordre), might
simply appear a bit of highly conventional late-medieval funereal lament.
However, I think that Saint-Gelais uses the binomial pair emphasising
lack of order (‘sans mesure et sans ordre’) in an ironic way to invite us to
reflect on how the very mise en vers of this apostrophe takes control of it
through the ‘measure’ and ‘order’ of verse form. When he first sights the
duke’s body, the narrator draws attention to its lack of resting place: ‘je
vy ung corps troter sans nul sejour’ (II.vi.194: ‘I saw a body rushing by
without any shelter’), and thereby flags up how, by granting him inclusion
in his work, and specifically through framing him in a complaint, the text
of the Sejour affords the duke a place of rest: a literary cemetery. The
narrator’s account of his encounters with the dead and the places in which
they occur in the Sejour dramatises the relationship between dead bodies,
space and storytelling that we have started to see to be so prominent in
late-medieval epitaph fictions. We see the narrator not so much visiting as
creating a cemetery out of a given space by making it a site of identity
narratives pieced together from diverse material traces of the dead.
Placing the dead in architectural fictions thus emerges as a complex

reflection on the nature of human identity. The spatial frameworks
enlisted as tools for this exploration are malleable entities mobilised to
probe the processes through which posthumous identity is constructed,
dismantled and recomposed, rather than simply to present identity as a
product. In the medieval mind, death is a ‘passing over’ (passaige, passer le
pas,…) into another mode of being that is not straightforwardly depicted
through binaries of life/death or presence/absence.10 Spatialisation of
the dead helps to examine that mode in its different aspects.
An Unbodied Place
The absence of the dead from the place that spatially frames their identity
strikingly draws attention to this act of framing. Amidst the mid-fifteenth-
century popularity for mock wills and for propagation of scenarios of
martyrdom for love inspired by Alain Chartier’s polemical poem La Belle
Dame sans Mercy,11 Pierre de Hauteville composed a suite of three
poems between 1441 and 1447 tracing the decline, death and post-
mortem affairs of a wretched bereaved lover-narrator: La Confession et
Testament de l’amant trespassé de dueil, La Complainte de l’amant tres-
passé de dueil and L’Inventaire des biens demourez du decés de l’amant
trespassé de dueil.12 The most remarkable of these poems is the third,
for its innovative approach to constructing posthumous identity through
10 On death not as an end, but as a transition, see, for example, Fabienne Pomel, Les
Voies de l’au-delà et l’essor de l’allégorie au moyen âge (Paris: Champion, 2001), p. 11.
11 On the sub-genre of mock wills, whose best-known proponent remains François
Villon, see Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, L’Écriture testamentaire à la fin du moyen
âge: identité, dispersion, trace (Oxford: Legenda, 1999). The reception and influence
of Chartier’s Belle Dame has received increasing attention in recent years; see Joan E.
McRae, ‘A Community of Readers: The Quarrel of the Belle Dame sans Mercy’, in A
Companion to Alain Chartier (c.1385–1430): Father of French Eloquence, ed. by Daisy
Delogu, Emma Cayley, and Joan E. McRae (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 200–22.
12 On de Hauteville himself, who presided over a literary circle in Tournai, and on his
Confession’s place in the so-called ‘quarrel of the Belle Dame sans Mercy’, see Emma J.
Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in His Cultural Context (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), p. 145. On the attribution of all three works to de Hauteville,
see Mary Beth Winn and Richard Wexler, ‘“L’Amant trespassé de dueil” and Music: A
Note on Pierre de Hauteville’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 52.1 (1990),
89–96.
96 H. SWIFT
a pastiche of contemporary probate inventory practice.13 The 612-line

poem traces movement through the deceased’s house room by room,
from bottom to top, by his friends who act as clerk and witnesses of the
inventory’s compilation.14 Katherine Wilson has stressed the importance
of conceiving of historical household inventory-taking as a performative
act, and de Hauteville’s literary counterpart is no less a theatre of iden-
tity construction.15 Bringing together questions from the first half of this
chapter, the most interesting aspects of the Inventaire in respect of its
architectural placement of the dead are precisely what is being placed and
by whom.
L’Inventaire’s house is a place which lacks any corpse, but, as a vacated
place, it at the same time contains not one, but two dead bodies. The
Lover as an absent presence is emphasised by recurrent reference to him
as ‘le Defunct’ (‘the Deceased’: e.g. lines 297, 339, 386) and as someone
who is mourned, since his still-living birds ‘chantoient en leur patois
vigiles | Pour la mort de leur feu bon Maistre’ (lines 71–72: ‘sang in
their own language a Vigil for the death of their late good Master’).16
The absence of specifically his body is spotlighted in the inventory of his
bedroom, but is already evoked suggestively downstairs, in anticipation
of that moment of discovery, through markers of discontinued occupa-
tion: in the stables, harnesses lacking the emblems of their owner (lines
34–36); in ground-floor rooms, empty chairs and couches (lines 46–48).
His bedroom is introduced as a vacated place: ‘la chambre d’amont, | Ou
le dit Amant trespassa’ (lines 109–10: ‘the upstairs bedroom, where the
aforesaid Lover died’), in which focus falls on the unoccupied bed:
Le lit ou il estoit couché

Estoit moult bel, spacieux, gent. (Inventaire, vv. 117–18)
(The bed where he had lain was very handsome, spacious and elegant.)
13 On which, see Probate Inventories: A New Source for the Historical Study of Wealth,
Material Culture and Agricultural Development, ed. by Ad van der Woude and Anton
Schuurman (Wageningen: Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis, Landbouwhogeschool, 1980).
Fresh conceptualisation of such documentary material is provided by Katherine Anne
Wilson, ‘The Household Inventory as Urban Theatre in Late Medieval Burgundy’, Social
History, 40 (2015), 335–59.
14 See Micheline Baulant, ‘Typologie des inventaires après décès’, in Probate Inventories,
pp. 33–42.
15 ‘The Household Inventory’, p. 339.
16 In La Complainte de l’amant trespassé de deuil; L’Inventaire des biens demourez du
decés de l’amant trespassé de deuil, ed. by Rose Bidler (Montreal: CERES, 1986).
Jarring contrast between the item of furniture’s spatial substantiality and

its former occupant’s departure is accentuated by detailed itemisation of
decoration and fabric, such as the delicate pillows (line 126) on which
a head no longer lies. The bed, now forever empty of the deceased, is
thus in some sense vacated of its very function according to the mutually
informing definition of body and place. Description of the bedroom draws
attention to the fact that it is not just the Lover’s body that has gone, but
also his deceased lady’s. The bereaved lover set up the room as a ‘chambre
noire’ (line 115: ‘black chamber’) in which to grieve her. In the Testa-
ment, the Lover longed to be buried wrapped in the sheet in which she
died to effect a ghostly corporeal reunion.17 In L’Inventaire, his physical
souvenirs of her are found in a black chest: ‘La en ce coffre estoient les
dons | Qu’euz avoit de sa feue Maistresse’ (lines 193–94: ‘There in this
chest were the gifts that he had had from his late Mistress’). This reposi-
tory of flower-decorated trinkets, gifts from her, becomes, relic-like in its
careful curation, a betokening of her, the small chest figuring the larger
casket in which she was buried.18 It would thus be incorrect to state that
the house of the Inventaire is a place without bodies; it is an unbodied
place which contains its dead as perceptible absent bodies—such as the
multi-sensory evocation of the lover’s whistles no longer played or his
scent-soaked clothing (lines 326, 385).
Maintaining absence is an effortful process, which brings us to the
question of who is doing the placing of the dead in the Inventaire: who
is constructing a whom? The answer is multilayered and reveals a keen
interest by de Hauteville in agency and identity creation. The verb ‘com-
piler’ (compile) is used twice within sixty lines, not in respect of the
inventory itself and its agents, but with reference to fabric, and in relation
to the lady recollected by the lover and the Lover whom the poem recalls.
The first instance concerns a splendid shirt that she made for him which
was admired by all who saw him in it: ‘O noble ouvraige compilee | De
tous biens et plaisirs humains’ (lines 233–34: ‘O noble handiwork made
up of every human good and pleasure’); what remains to us is written
17 La Confession et Testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil, ed. by Rose Bidler (Montreal:

CERES, 1982), lines 1200–16.
18 On the figure of the ‘coffre’ in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century literature, see
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, La Couleur de la mélancolie: la fréquentation des livres
au XIVè siècle, 1300–1415 (Paris: Hatier, 1993), p. 67.
98 H. SWIFT
record of the shirt without a body to wear it. The second case pertains to
a tapestry that he made to decorate a certain room:
Le Defunct par grant excellence

La tapisserie compila
Et ce fait après l’appella
La chambre verte de plaisance. (Inventaire, lines 297–300)
(The Deceased wove the tapestry with most excellent skill and, having
done this, then called [this room] the green chamber of pleasure.)
Through literary reflexive metaphor, the lovers are shown to embroider

the fabric of their love story, which is in turn evoked through the
inventory-compilers’ itemisation of objects that prompt storytelling.19 By
dint of the deceased’s friends’ movement through the house’s rooms,
material traces are linked together as narrative as well as triggering narra-
tion of the tales that accorded the items their significance—such as the
tale of the Lover’s splendid shirt: how it was made and how it was
received. We recall the Sejour narrator’s similar (re)creation through
storytelling
It is the first-person narrator of L’Inventaire who takes in charge this
narrative extrapolation from the inventory’s descriptive enumeration; the
speaker’s identity is unknown and unmarked, apart from explicit first-
person expression at the opening and close of poem where he offers
intercessory prayer for the Lover—‘Dont l’ame ait glorieux repas | Ainsi
que je desire et vueil ’ (lines 3–4: ‘May his soul have glorious passage,
as I desire and wish’); ‘Si prie a la tres doulce Dame’ (line 609: ‘So I
pray to the most gentle Lady’)—and except for an abrupt first-person
intervention that concludes his account of the inventory-taking: ‘De la
prisee parler n’en ose | Car c’est une matiere a part’ (lines 603–4: ‘I dare
not speak of the valuation, for that is a separate matter’). Such demur
frequently ends late-medieval narrative poems, with deferral of judgment
potentially inviting further literary response.20 Of more specific perti-
nence to L’Inventaire is the issue of valuation (‘prisee’), since the primary
task of its clerk and witnesses, the Lover’s friends, is to determine the
19 For the metaphor of literary creation as weaving, see David J. Cowling, ‘Verbal
and Visual Metaphors in the Cambridge Manuscript of the Douze Dames de Rhétorique
(1463)’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 3 (2000), 94–118.
20 Adrian Armstrong, ‘The Deferred Verdict: A Topos in Late-Medieval Poetic Debates?’
French Studies Bulletin, 64 (autumn 1997), 12–14.
value of his estate. In that light, the narrator’s disclaimer functions ironi-
cally to signal the importance of this judgment as a theme in the text and
the difficulty of determining it.
The narrator presents the tour of the house and the assessment of
goods in markedly objective and impersonal terms: ‘fu fait l’inventaire et
monstree’ (line 5: ‘the inventory and inspection were made’), ‘l’en trouva’
(line 7: ‘one found’), ‘A tant fut l’inventaire close’ (line 601: ‘then was
the inventory concluded’). This is more than mere intimation of offi-
cial administrative process; it is, I think, parodic, with the irony lying in
suggestion that neither the Lover’s friends nor this narrator is necessarily
competent to weigh the items appropriately in fashioning the story that
constitutes his posthumous identity. As they move from room to room,
their acts of assessment prove abortive or uncertain: some of the friends
are overcome with grief when inspecting his shirts in order to price them
(lines 345–48); elsewhere, they debate whether or not to include a letter
written by his lady because the date has been partially obscured, and their
conclusion offers a rather vague sense of the value they ascribe to it: ‘Mais
il fut inventorié | Pour servir ce qu’il peut valoir’ (lines 496–97: ‘But it
was inventoried to be of use according to its worth’). How is worth to be
determined? Various, competing criteria are implied—sentimental value,
retail price (‘vauldroit bien en plain marché | Sans surfaire.X. mars d’ar-
gent’ (lines 119–20: ‘it would certainly, without risk of overration, be
worth ten silver marks on the open market’)—but none is made explicit
or methodically pursued. De Hauteville also creates irony by having his
narrator note bathetically how they encounter on the third floor ‘grant
quantité de biens’ (line 590: ‘a great quantity of possessions’), ‘mais l’en
ne inventoria riens’ (line 592: ‘but they were not inventoried’), with no
reason given, such that the very statement that these items were excluded
sparks a narratively frustrating tension: they were not included in the
inventory, but mention of them has been included in the Inventaire,
though this mention does not itself disclose what the items were!
What is dramatised through the Inventaire’s accumulation of material
objects is the process of posthumous identity construction in its precar-
ities and pitfalls. Enumerated in the house’s study is the Lover’s book
collection: Lancelot du Lac, Guillaume de Lorris’ and Jean de Meun’s
Le Roman de la rose, Le Livre des joies et douleurs , Du Jenne amoureux
sans soucy, Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans Mercy, Achille Caulier’s
L’Ospital d’amour, Michault Taillevent’s Passe temps, L’Amant rendu
cordelier a l’observance d’amours (vv. 429–44). The series of volumes,
100 H. SWIFT
listed by title only, delineates a trajectory of amorous adventure, frus-

tration, suffering and withdrawal that itself makes the Lover a lover—it
casts him in that role, aligning him with a literary type, assimilating his
individual narrative into those of established models. But does this role
necessarily fit with his identity? Is it a false imposition? We should be
careful that appearances do not deceive: we are told that, in life, he
used some of his clothes for different kinds of disguise and play-acting,
‘pour jouer au vif une farce’ (line 380: ‘to play a lively comedy’). What
if the inventory-takers and/or the narrator have misread some of his
disembodied costume in their performative act of identity compilation?
What if they are engaged in posthumous misrepresentation? To apply
to our household inventory an adapted version of a famous gameshow
catchphrase: ‘Who died in a house like this? Audience, it’s over to you!’21
Epilogue
To return to the tidy statement by Aquinas with which we began, we have
come to see that it in fact holds good, as it admits significant complexity:
‘every body is in a place and in every place there is a body’, even when that
body is no longer there. However, in medieval epitaph fictions, the ‘body’
and the ‘there’ exist in a mutually defining relationship that blurs Aris-
totle’s insistent distinction between ‘the thing’ and ‘that which embraces
it’, especially in cases where the conjured presence of that thing as a
deceased body is absent from ‘the body-continent’, which, in the very
act of not containing the corpse, defines the identities of both body and
place.
21 The catchphrase concluding the tour of the house of the mystery celebrity on the
popular television gameshow Through the Keyhole: ‘Who lives in a house like this? [Studio
host’s name], it’s over to you’.
CHAPTER 7
Domestic Devotion: Representing Household

Space in Late Medieval Religious Writing
Aparna Chaudhuri
Close engagement with domestic life is a distinctive feature of late

medieval spirituality. The period of the mid-fourteenth to the mid-
fifteenth century sees a new pastoral emphasis on instructing the lay
devout, a proliferation of extra-claustral religious associations (para-
monastic groups, fraternities, and colleges), and of votive objects and
books of hours to aid worship in the home. All these indicate a desire
to accommodate spiritual aspiration within the space of ordinary life in
the world, a large part of which was lived within the spaces, activities
and relationships of the household.1 The scope and significance of the
medieval household is suggested by the word’s semantic range: ‘house-
hold’ encompasses family and servants, houses and landholdings, wealth
1 Vincent Gillespie analyses these developments in ‘1412–1534: Culture and History’,

in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed. by Samuel Fanous and
Vincent Gillespie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 163–194.
A. Chaudhuri (B)
Ashoka University, New Delhi, India

102 A. CHAUDHURI
and possessions as well as the activity of managing domestic affairs.2 When

Walter Hilton warns the reader of his Mixed Life (c.1390) that he violates
the ‘order of charite’ if he leaves ‘the world, [his] children and seruantes’,
he implicitly equates active life in the world with household relationships
and responsibilities.3
But ‘domestic devotion’ has two valid senses in the late medieval
context. The first has to do with shaping literal households into
supportive environments for flourishing spiritual economies; the second
with creating and curating metaphorical houses of the mind. The house-
hold is an idea as well as a space, group or practice. Medieval Domesticity
(2008) speaks of the fourteenth-century rise of a ‘concept of “domestici-
ty”’: ‘“a state of mind” defined by privacy and comfort within the physical
structure of a house’.4 This state of mind is invoked when imaginary
domiciles are used as religious metaphors, for religious life can profitably
be made to take on the household’s emergent qualities of familiarity and
consolation. Simultaneously, the configuration of the heart as a home
can mount an outward-facing critique of defects in church and society
that prevent the reformed and radically holy heart from being at home
anywhere but in itself.
This chapter studies the imagery and ideology of domesticity in
three Middle English texts written between 1350 and 1450. The
late fourteenth-century Abbey of the Holy Ghost , translated from the
thirteenth-century L’Abbaye du Saint Esprit , and The Doctrine of
the Hert, an early fifteenth-century revision of a thirteenth-century
Latin text, De Doctrina Cordis , are domestic allegories.5 Recalling the
2 ‘hous-hold’, n., Middle English Dictionary (MED). See also Sarah Rees Jones, ‘The
Public Household and Political Power: Preface’, in The Medieval Household in Christian
Europe c.850–c.1550: Managing Power, Wealth and the Body, ed. by Cordelia Beattie, Anna
Maslakovic, and Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 11–18.
3 Walter Hilton, Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life Edited from Lambeth Palace MS 472, ed.
by S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen, 1985), p. 9.
4 Maryanne Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg (eds.), Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing
and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008),
p. 4, referring to Felicity Riddy, ‘“Burgeis” Domesticity in Late-Medieval England’, in
Medieval Domesticity, pp. 14–36.
5 The Abbey of the Holy Ghost in Middle English Religious Prose, ed. by N. F. Blake
(London: Edward Arnold, 1972), pp. 88–102; The Doctrine of the Hert, ed. by Chris-
tiania Whitehead, Denis Renevey, and Anne Mouron (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
2010). I examine only the first part of Book I of the Doctrine as most illustrative of the
7 DOMESTIC DEVOTION: REPRESENTING HOUSEHOLD SPACE … 103
tradition of monastic architectural mnemonics, in which quantities of

scriptural text and their many-layered exegeses are ‘placed’ in the rooms
of an imaginary building, these allegories represent the soul as a religious
or secular household, and key spiritual dispositions or duties as household
spaces, goods, activities or officers.6 My third text, The Book of Margery
Kempe, composed c.1430 by the eponymous Norwich mystic, house-
wife and mother, near–systematically undoes the pastoral scheme of the
previous two texts, bringing the symbolic space of the home out of the
purview of clerical control.7 The representation of domesticity in the Book
realises polemical possibilities that the earlier texts indicate but do not
pursue, translating ‘homeliness’ into a visionary habitus that instantiates
late medieval vernacular theology in an advanced and sophisticated form.8
Economy and Excess in Domestic Allegory

If the proliferation of methods and objects to facilitate private devotion
in this period bespeaks a desire to bring religion into the home, so too
is there evidence of a desire to export domesticity to the discourses of
institutional religion—to configure Christians as a family and the ideal
Church as a reformed economy of spiritual wealth and material modest
sufficiency. Economy is, after all, oikos nomos, ‘household law’, which, D.
Vance Smith contends, is meant to tackle the ethical problem of surplus:
of living in a world where one has more than one needs.9 The household
regulates possession, establishing limits beyond which all is superfluity and
fatal excess. From William Langland to the anonymous author of the late
allegorisation of household spaces, objects and activities. On the remainder, see Vincent
Gillespie in ‘Meat, Metaphor and Mysticism: Cooking the Books in The Doctrine of the
Hert ’, in A Companion to the Doctrine of the Hert, ed. by Denis Renevey and Christiania
Whitehead (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010), pp. 131–58.
6 On architectural mnemonics, see Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation,
Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 238.
7 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Barry Windeatt (Harlow: Pearson Education,
2000). Page references for all three primary texts are given parenthetically.
8 An illuminating account of the same shift, based on Bridget of Sweden’s Liber Celestis,
is found in Catherine Batt, Denis Renevey, and Christiania Whitehead, ‘Domesticity and
Medieval Devotional Literature’, Leeds Studies in English, 36 (2005), 195–250.
9 D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 46.
104 A. CHAUDHURI
fourteenth-century Book to a Mother, reformist writers strive to define

an ‘art of possession’ for the Church: to determine the correct balance
of spiritual and material capital, or how souls and bodies might both
be fed. The Book to a Mother, for instance, makes polemical use of the
‘simple household’ of Mary and Joseph. The Holy Family possesses no
‘gaye coverleites ne testres, curtyns, docers, quischines, calabre, miniver,
ne non oþir pelure ne panter, ne boteler, ne curious cokes’ (no gay cover-
lets, canopies, curtains, tapestry covers, cushions, furs, nor pantry keepers,
cellarers, or fine cooks).10 They have ‘bot simple cloþis at home, and so
simple here’ (only simple clothes at home, and such simple ones here),
unlike the nuns of the present day, whose ‘garlondis of golde’, ‘perlis’,
‘filettis’, ‘bonettis’ and other ‘maumetrie’ (garlands of gold, pearls, fillets,
bonnets and other finery) mark them as daughters of Eve, taught to desire
improperly and immoderately by the serpent in Paradise.11
The excesses of professional religious such as these false and foolish
nuns form an important theme of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost . The
‘abbey’s’ very foundations encode anti-monastic comment: they are dug
by Poverty and Meekness, prompting the author to point out the contrast
between those who hold to the ‘relygyon of the hert’ and the many literal
‘relygyouce that ben covetous and proude’ (professional religious who
are covetous and proud: Abbey, p. 89). The use of claustral architec-
ture as allegorical vehicle suggests the continued attachment of at least
a symbolic sanctity to monastic life and space, yet the location of the
imaginary abbey within the human heart, and the accompanying criticism
of actual religious orders, is obviously intended to assure a lay or para-
monastic audience that formal profession and enclosure are redundant,
even counteractive, to true holiness.
This separation of allegorised from actual monastic space asks to be
situated within an evolving tradition of architectural metaphor. For its
attribution of a spiritual value to each part of an imagined monastery,
Christiania Whitehead places the Abbey in the tradition of claustral alle-
gory inaugurated by the Augustinian canon Hugh of Fouilloy (c.1100–
1172) in his De Claustro Animae.12 Addressed to an audience of
monks and regular canons, and born out of twelfth-century attempts to
10 Book to a Mother, ed. by Adrian James McCarthy (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik
und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1981), pp. 48–49.
11 Book to a Mother, pp. 48–49.
12 Christiania Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister of the Soul in Medieval Religious
Treatises’, Medium Aevum, 67 (1998), 1–29 (p. 14).
reconfigure the vast, expensive, formalistic edifice of Benedictine monas-

ticism, Hugh’s claustral allegory ‘equips every moment in the daily
monastic regime with an additional meditative dimension by linking each
of the habitual spaces of operation with a moral idea or attitude’.13 But
by the fourteenth century, such moralisations of monastic space or regu-
lation are transferred from the reform of professional religion to the use
of a devout laity, whom they assure that sacred space exists only to be
sublimated within the sanctity of the heart.
The Abbey adjusts the tenor of its allegory to suit the needs of lay
readers, construing poverty as mental detachment from worldly posses-
sions, not the literal abandonment of property, and including the acts
most associated with mercantile spirituality—almsgiving and ‘dede[s] of
charite’—in its definition of mercy (Abbey, p. 90). But it also adapts
the vehicle—claustral architecture—to extra-monastic use, infusing the
profoundest spiritual significance into activities and areas common to
both monastery and lay household. This modification warrants reading
the Abbey as both domestic and claustral allegory.14 Monasteries them-
selves might count as uniquely domestic spaces for the intense significance
they cause to be attached to the act of inhabitation; the Abbey furthers the
domestic quality of its allegory by fixing spiritual values to the imaginary
monastery’s people, places, goods and activities—all the elements of that
complex and amorphous thing, the ‘household’—and not just to its archi-
tecture. The allegory centres on an Amazonian band of personified female
virtues (Righteousness, Love of Cleanness, Poverty, Meekness, Sufferance
and Fortitude), who build the abbey. Another set of qualities serves as
staff: Charity is abbess and Wisdom prioress. Penance is the cook who
prepares ‘gode metes’ of ‘many bittere sorwes’ (sustaining meats from
many bitter sorrows), while Devotion, the cellarer, ‘kepeth the wynes,
bothe whyte and rede, wyt depe thowtes of the goodnesse of God, and
of the peynes and of the anguisches that he soffred’ (keeps the wines, both
white and red, with deep thoughts of the goodness of God, and of the
pains and anguish he suffered: Abbey, p. 95). The ‘gerneter’ or granary
keeper is Meditacioun, identified with similar reflections on the sorrows
of Christ: ‘Meditacioun is good thowtes of God and of hys werkes […]
13 Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister’, 4.

14 On the domesticity of claustral space, see Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister’, 23; Marilyn
Olivia, ‘Nuns at Home: the Domesticity of Sacred Space’, in Medieval Domesticity,
pp. 145–61.
106 A. CHAUDHURI
of hys peynes that he suffrede and of his herte-love that he hadde and
hath to us’ (Meditation is good thoughts of God and his works […] of
the pains that he suffered and his heart’s-love that he had and has for us:
Abbey, p. 96).
The strikingly domestic roles of cellarer and granary keeper are played
by two key contemplative dispositions, meditation and devotion. House-
hold life, so painstakingly fitted around contemplative life by Hilton, is
here the means whereby contemplation is represented. Moreover, the
object of contemplation—the suffering body of Christ—resurfaces in the
contents of the granary ‘kept’ by Meditation: ‘whete, that is red witouten
and whyt witinne and hath the syde cloven, of which men maken good
bred, thet is Jesu Crist thet was witouten reed of hys oune blode and
was whyte wytinne thorow mekenesse and tholemodeness and al maner
clennesse of lyghf and hade hys syde cloven wyt speres dynt’ (Wheat,
that is red outside and white within, and cleft in the side, of which
men make good bread: that is Jesus Christ who was outwardly red with
his own blood and white within through meekness and humility and
all manner of clean living, and who had his side cleft by spear-thrust:
Abbey, p. 97). This wheat does not just resemble Christ’s body, but, used
to make Eucharistic bread, is transubstantiated into it. The contents of
Devotion’s cellar are similarly associated with communion wine awaiting
transubstantiation into the blood of Christ.
The allegorical granary is the site of a complex intersection of real
and imagined, sacred and secular spaces. The Eucharistic associations of
its wheat and wine suggest that, despite the Abbey’s anticlerical orien-
tation, the lay reader must maintain sufficient contact with the Church
to be able to receive regular communion.15 Meditation’s granary opens
on to formally consecrated space, as the allegorical wheat materialises
into the ‘bred we reseiven and seen in the sacrament of the auter’ (the
bread we receive and see in the sacrament of the altar; Abbey, p. 97).
Yet the connection only serves to extend the household into the church,
bringing the granary to subtend the altar as the powerful symbol of
a salvific economy that supplies God to its members in the form of
food. Although sacred architecture itself, the metaphorical abbey is able
to project a household image of startling alterity on to the space of
the literal church because, in its own ‘representational space’, the limits
15 See Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister’, 17.

between places of work and places of worship are blurred and their hier-
archy inverted.16 Its granary, not its altar or oratory, is the domain of
Meditation, who stands for the highest point of contemplative experi-
ence indicated in the text: such immersion in thoughts of God that one
knows not what one ‘doth, hereth or sayeth’ (does, hears or says), and
communes only with God in the wordless language of mystical desire
(Abbey, p. 97). The infusion of contemplative energy into the work of
overseeing stocks of grain—a householder’s quotidian chore—argues the
adequacy of the domestic interior as a map or mnemonic serving the
increasingly ambitious spirituality of its bourgeois inhabitants.17
The plenitude of ‘good wheat’ and other grains in Meditation’s granary
suggests another kind of adequacy. Household law may indeed serve to
manage surplus, yet the representations of domesticity considered here
understand surplus in varying ways. The Abbey dwells lovingly on the
picture of a large, bustling, rich household: abundance is the constitutive
principle of its economy, and stands for spiritual well-being. Indeed, even
outside the allegorical frame, the author describes himself as managing
a surplus, this time of devotional energy in the laity, which professional
religion cannot absorb and life in the world is strained to accommodate.
‘My dere brother and sister,’ he begins, ‘I see weel that many wolde ben
in religioun but they mowe nowt for poverte, or for awe, or for drede of
her kyn or for bond of maryage.’ (My dear brothers and sisters, I see well
that many wish to enter religious life but are unable owing to poverty or
intimidation or fear of their relatives or the marital bond: Abbey, p. 89.) So
that it should not adopt heterodox forms, the author contains this excess
of piety within the repertoire of meditative methods and self-regulatory
techniques presented in the guise of the ‘abbey’.18 Yet, even when
placed within a framework implying clerical supervision and control, the
acts and attitudes that translate into the abbey’s architectural amplitude,
16 The term ‘representational space’ is drawn from Henri Lefebvre, The Production of
Space, trans. by D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 33, 39, 50–51.
17 These modifications bring the Abbey into proximity with late fourteenth and early
fifteenth-century texts such as Instructions for a Devout and Literate Layman and The
Holy Book Gratia Dei, which reinterpret secular spaces and activities as opportunities for
meditation and prayer.
18 See further Nicole R. Rice, ‘Spiritual Ambition and the Translation of the Cloister:
The Abbey and Charter of the Holy Ghost’, Viator, 33 (2002), 222–60.
108 A. CHAUDHURI
energetic inhabitants and sufficiency of food, shelter and care add up to

an impressive devotional competency on the part of the lay subject. This
competency realises the spiritual ambition that the author attributes to
his readers in his opening. Like other spiritualising and laicising inter-
pretations of monastic rules or architecture, notably those intended for
France’s flourishing beguine communities, the Abbey bears the marks of
its author’s respect for the forms of lay or paramonastic piety he seeks to
regulate.19
Surplus is rather differently construed in the Doctrine of the Hert. In
the prologue of the English text, the author/translator declares that he is
writing for novices unlearned in religion:
Such symple soules it is charite to enforme, namly seth oure Lord yivyth us
in charge, seiying be the prophete Ysaye thus: Loquamini ad cor Jersusalem.
That is, ‘spekith to the hert of Jerusalem’. This word, ‘Jerusalem’, is
nothing ellis to mene in this place but symple chosyn soules, to the
hertis of whom oure lord wolde that we spake. O, ho durst be recheles
in enformyng of such symple soules, which oure lord bought with his
precious blode and therto also hathe chosyn to his spouses, as ben thoo
that dwellyn in religioun? Many, I wote wel, ther ben that speken to the
body outward, but few to the hert inward of symple soules, and that is
pite. (Doctrine, p. 3)
It is charity to inform such simple souls, especially since the Lord gives
us charge of them, saying, through the prophet Isaiah, ‘Loquamini ad cor
Jerusalem,’ that is, ‘Speak to the heart of Jerusalem.’ This word Jerusalem
means nothing in this place but simple chosen souls, to the hearts of whom
our Lord wishes us to speak. O, who can dare to be reckless in the work
of informing such simple souls, which our dear Lord bought with His
precious blood, and has further chosen to be his spouses, as those are
chosen that dwell in religion? There are many, I know, who speak to the
outward body, but few to the inward heart of simple souls, and that is a
pity.
A minimalist, essentialist logic structures the author’s purpose here: he

wants his ministry to touch those ‘simple souls’ whose religiosity is based
19 For the comparable case of French beguines, see Tanya Stabler Miller, ‘Love Is
Beguine: Labelling Lay Religiosity in Thirteenth-Century Paris’, in Labels and Libels:
Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe, ed. by Letha Böhringer, Jennifer
Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 135–50.
on faith alone. The church, figured as the eternal city, Jerusalem, is

‘nothing else […] but’ these souls: pastoral energy must focus on them.
And it must inform their hearts without bothering about external obser-
vances and regulations. As a steward of simple souls, entrusted with
their care by a lord who won them through arduous battle, the priest
cannot afford to overwhelm or alienate them with an excess of discipline
and doctrine. The oikos nomos of the Church must consist in excluding
such excess and tending the living essence—the ‘hert inward’—of the
unsophisticated believer.
A similar logic of reduction and simplification informs the structure of
the ‘litel hous of [the] hert’ (Doctrine, p. 9) that the reader is advised to
imagine as a template for piety. This allegorical house is no vast abbey,
but a small, single-roomed dwelling: its Biblical model is the ‘little house’
that the rich woman makes for the prophet Elisha in the Book of Kings.
Tellingly, the Biblical mulier magna appears as a ‘devoute womman’ in
the Doctrine (p. 8): there is no trace of wealth in the house of the heart.
It contains four simple pieces of furniture: a ‘litel bedde’, a ‘met-table’, a
‘stole’ and ‘a candilstik with light’ (a little bed, a meal-table, a stool, and
a lit candlestick: Doctrine, p. 9). These represent, respectively, tranquillity
of conscience, sincere penance, self-judgment and self-knowledge. Elisha
figures Christ, the honoured visitor who will come to this little house to
rest after the labours of the Passion. He is an aristocratic guest, but in
a wounded and vulnerable condition, and his tastes run to simple fare.
Sincere penance is enough ‘meat’ for him, prompting the author’s admo-
nition: ‘serve hym not with many disches, for he is homly enow’ (serve
him not with many dishes, for he is homely enough: Doctrine, p. 12). The
use of the other symbolic objects in the room is also strictly controlled:
one must not rest in judgment of others on the ‘stool’ of self-deeming,
nor waste the ‘candle’ of self-knowledge by looking into others’ affairs
(Doctrine, pp. 11–16).
Does this domestic economy of bare sufficiency stand for a self-
limiting, self-censoring kind of religiosity, one that perpetuates in its
subjects’ minds an understanding of themselves as ‘simple’, unfit for theo-
logical instruction of any real complexity and wholly dependent on clerical
guidance? The answer is a qualified ‘yes’. Heavily patronising, the author’s
opening expressions of pastoral anxiety also contain plain criticism of his
audience, whom he characterises as likely, in their ignorance, to follow
the example of ‘seculer folk’ rather than ‘sad goostly relygyous folk’
(sober, spiritual, religious people). His particular deployment of domestic
110 A. CHAUDHURI
allegory seems to shore up these worries: though the home seems initially
to figure as a map of the ‘hert inward’—a ‘topography of our intimate
being’, in Gaston Bachelard’s phrase—it is soon evident that the ‘house
of the heart’ is constructed not to shelter but to regulate feeling, thought
and affect.20 Rather than serve as the protective enclosure of subjectivity,
the allegorical house must be cleared of its psychic contents by peniten-
tial sweeping and washing. In this process, the clerical ‘auditoure’—a
term that puns on the functions of listening and account keeping on
God’s behalf—is crucial, for only spoken confession counts as proper
housecleaning:
Knowleche of the synnes by the mouth in confession is no thing ellis but

puttyng out filthes of the hous of our hert by the dore of the mouth with
the brome of the tonge. (Doctrine, p. 7)
Acknowledging sins in spoken confession is nothing but expelling the filth

of the house of our heart through the door of the mouth with the broom
of the tongue.
With its careful simplicity and inbuilt configurations of clerical control,

the Doctrine’s house of the heart appears the symbolic site of a practice
of penitential humility and submissive interaction with the church. Like its
Latin original, the De Doctrina Cordis (variously attributed to the Cister-
cian abbot of Val-Saint-Lambert, Gerard of Liege, and the Dominican
cardinal, Hugh of St. Cher), the English Doctrine addresses a mixed audi-
ence of cloistered and non-enclosed lay readers.21 Its use of domestic
allegory might encourage a secular bourgeoisie to structure their house-
holders’ lives through a set of orthodox, clerically supervised devotional
practices; for women in nunneries, anchorholds or beguinages, on the
other hand, household imagery itself might exercise a ‘grounding’ effect
on spirituality, repressively domesticating their devotions.
Yet the Doctrine’s images of the ‘little house’ of the heart, evocative
as they are of limited spiritual capital, also furnish the ground of the
reader’s contemplative union with God. Unlike the allegorical abbey,
20 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press,
1994), p. xxxvi.
21 See Whitehead, ‘De Doctrina Cordis: Catechesis or Contemplation’, in A Companion
to the Doctrine, pp. 57–82; Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 76.
which, though occasionally visited by the Holy Spirit in the person of

its ‘warden’, basically shelters a highly elaborated and idealised human
inner self, the Doctrine’s psychic house is built to shelter Christ. The
meanings of its furniture are activated when the aristocratic but ‘homely’
guest arrives on the scene. Moreover, Christ brings his own salvific contri-
butions to the apparatus of the inner household. For every morsel of
penitential bread that the nun can serve up, he offers the overflowing
sauce boat of his Passion–suffering, saying: ‘Dowter, wete thi mossel in
myn ayselle’ (Daughter, wet your morsel in this vinegar of mine; Doctrine,
p. 13).22
The imaginary inner house thus evolves from a site of penitential self-
discipline, figured as strenuous housework, to one of informal intimacy
with the divine, described repeatedly as ‘homely’ in the terms of a newly
available affective conception of domesticity. Anchoritic literature notably
constructs piety through the topoi of romance, exhorting the anchoress
to welcome Christ into the bridal chamber of her heart, or depicting the
divine lover–knight as stationed outside the ‘castle’ of her being, pleading
for entry.23 Household allegories reveal themselves to be unfolding in
the secret rooms of romance when a ‘homely’ Christ joins the human
subject in cultivating intimacy—specifically the closeness and comfort of
the domestic scene. When the pastoral scaffolding of allegory falls away,
as it does on our moving to The Book of Margery Kempe, such intimacy
can grow into a particular form of experiential, self-sufficient authority for
the female mystic.
Radical Domesticity in The

Book of Margery Kempe
The Book of Margery Kempe is a spiritual bildungsroman that details the
visions of and meditations on Christ and the Godhead through which
a married middle-class woman develops into a mystic and fiery critic of
22 Several writers refer to the bitter drink given to Christ on the cross as ‘aisel and
galle.’ See ‘aisel’, n, MED.
23 Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Robert Hasenfratz (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2000) offers
a striking instance of this trope in Book 7. See also Christopher Cannon, ‘The Form of
the Self: Ancrene Wisse and Romance’, Medium Aevum, 70 (2001), 47–65; Sarah Mary
Chewning, ‘Intersections of Courtly Romance and the Anchoritic Tradition: Chevelere
Assigne and Ancrene Wisse’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 42 (2016), 79–101.
112 A. CHAUDHURI
contemporary ecclesiastical corruption.24 It does not develop sustained

domestic allegories of the sort earlier discussed, though Margery may well
have encountered them among the many religious texts that she evidently
knew despite her avowed illiteracy. It is tempting to speculate that she
deliberately avoided configuring her spirituality by means of such alle-
gories, associating them with ‘simple souls’ and spiritual beginners. But
not only does this thesis develop dangerously ex silentio, it cannot account
for Christ’s own use of the idiom of family relationships and domestic
cohabitation to construct an unmediated intimacy between himself and
Margery. The radical implications of Christ’s ‘homeliness’ in the Doctrine
are advanced several stages in the Book by the fact that his domesticity
is not designed and moralised by a male cleric for the instruction of a
predominantly female audience, but operates under the aegis of his own
divine authority.
Domestic allegories bring household and heart into a correspondence
which functions not just at the level of literary analogy but also that of
the cultural history of the late medieval home as a place of cleanliness,
privacy and good order. But an orderly home and a well-regulated devout
heart are exactly what Margery does not possess at the time of her first
vision. Delirious from a post-partum illness aggravated by the guilt of an
unconfessed sin, she appears to have lost control over both herself and her
household. Tormented by visions of devils on the one hand, she abuses
friends and relations on the other. Likewise, her household—including
her confessor or spiritual father—cannot control her. Or rather, its regu-
latory power has been perverted to a form of tyranny, a strongly negative
version of the discipline to which the clerical authors of household alle-
gory might seek to subject their readers. Instead of offering absolution for
the sin torturing Margery’s conscience, her confessor rebukes her sharply.
24 On the authorship, genre and theology of The Book, see among others Sarah Beck-
with, ‘A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe’, in
Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. by David Aers (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 34–57; John C. Hirsch, ‘Author and Scribe in The Book of
Margery Kempe’, Medium Aevum, 44 (1975), 145–50; Susan Dickman, ‘Margery Kempe
and the English Devotional Tradition’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England:
Papers Read at the Exeter Symposium, July 1980, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: Exeter
University Press, 1980), pp. 156–72; Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); and Nicholas Watson, ‘The
Making of The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the
Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 395–434.
Her family resorts to physically restraining her from self-harm: ‘sche was
bowndyn and kept wyth strength bothe day and nygth that sche mygth
not have hir wylle’ (she was bound and forcibly restrained day and night,
so that she might not exercise her will: Book, p. 55).
Just when human care and control both fail, Christ appears, not
in a tidy allegorical guest–room of the heart, but in Margery’s actual
bedroom, not as an honoured guest carefully prepared for, but in his most
appealing incarnate form to offer the comfort that Margery’s household
fails to provide:
as sche lay aloone and hir kepars wer fro hir, owyr mercyful Lord Crist
Jhesu, evyr to be trostyd, worshypd be hys name […] aperyd to hys
creatur whych had forsakyn hym in lyknesse of a man, most semly, most
bewtyvows, and most amyable that evyr mygth be seen wyth mannys eye,
clad in a mantyl of purpyl sylke, syttyng upon hir beddys syde. (Book, p. 55)
As she lay alone, her minders being away, our merciful Lord Jesus Christ,
ever to be trusted, worshipped be his name […] appeared to his creature
which had forsaken him in the likeness of a man, the most pleasing, hand-
some, and amiable that human eyes might ever behold, clad in a mantle
of purple silk, sitting on the side of her bed.
Christ appropriates the language of intimate family relationships,

addressing Margery as ‘dowtyr’ (daughter). Sitting at her bedside, he
takes the place of the human attendants who have abandoned it. The
description of his faithfulness subtly underlines the defection of the
human household: Christ is ‘ever to be trusted’ and tells Margery that
he never forsook her. Of course, as this assurance is addressed as a
reproach to Margery herself for having ‘forsaken’ him, the domestic
critique remains implicit and Margery is identified as the primary deserter.
While her literal household is often cast as the oppressive, or at least
limiting, space that Margery’s mystical career demands that she ignore
or leave, in order to go on pilgrimage, or visit holy men or women, the
home remains a powerful symbol of intimacy, affection and unfettered
114 A. CHAUDHURI
agency in the Book.25 Christ deploys it in order to convince Margery of

his special love for her:
Therfor most I nedys be homli with the, and lyn in thy bed with the.
Dowtyr, thu desyrest gretly to se me, and thu mayst boldly, whan thu art
in thy bed, take me to the as for thi weddyd husbonde, as thy derworthy
derlynge, and as thy swete son, for I wyl be lovyd as a sone schuld be loved
with the modyr, and wil that thu love me, dowtyr, as a good wyf owyth to
her husbonde. And therfor thu mayst boldly take me in the armys of thy
sowle and kyssen my mouth, myn hed and my fete as swetly as thu wylt.
(Book, p. 196)
Therefore I must be homely with you, and lie in your bed with you.
Daughter, you desire greatly to see me, and you may boldly, when you are
in your bed, take me to you as your wedded husband, your dear darling,
and your sweet son, for I will be loved as a son should be loved by the
mother, and wish you to love me, daughter, as a good wife ought to love
her husband. And therefore you may boldly take me in the arms of your
soul and kiss my mouth, my hands, my head and my feet as sweetly as you
will.
In giving himself to Margery as spouse, son and intimate, Christ draws

upon the resources that the human world—Margery’s world—makes
available for the expression of intimacy: the non-verbal language of shared
domestic spaces and familial ties. Moreover, it is unambiguously Margery’s
bed (witness the possessives: ‘lyn in thy bed’; ‘whan thu art in thy bed’)
in which the projected scene of lovemaking takes place. She can be in
charge there, initiating the triple kiss that recalls Bernard’s explanation
of the three stages in the ascent to contemplative perfection: the kiss
to Christ’s feet, symbolising purgation from sins; the kiss to his hands,
symbolising moral growth through good works; and the final ‘kiss of the
mouth’, the symbol of total mystical union yearned for by the Bride in the
Song of Songs.26 Margery’s Book reconstitutes that ordered and cautious
25 On the negative value of literal domesticity in Margery’s life, see Sarah Salih, ‘At
Home; Out of the House’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing,
ed. by Caroline Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), pp. 124–140.
26 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 3, On the Song of Songs, trans. Killian Walsh, 4 vols.
(Spenser, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971–80), I (1971), pp. 16–24.
ascent as a ripple of kisses: a long, roving caress that moves suggestively

down rather than up the body, exceeding the register of maternal and
even spousal embraces to build on the ‘bold’, undomesticated eroticism
between a lover and her ‘derworthy derlynge’.
Christ’s ‘homeliness’ is the sign of his operation within the field of
Margery’s linguistic and spiritual competency or, as she would say, ‘skylle’.
This may suggest divinity stooping to the level of the human intelli-
gence, the intelligence of an unlearned laywoman at that. Yet Christ
himself banishes ‘homely’s’ connotations of unsophistication by defining
the home as a place where hierarchies cannot exist. ‘It is convenyent the
wyf to be homly with her husband’, he tells Margery. ‘Be he nevyr so
gret a lord, and sche so powr a woman whan he weddyth her, yet thei
must ly togedyr and rest togedyr in joy and pes.’ (It is suitable for a wife
to be homely with her husband…Be he never so great a lord and she
so poor a woman when he weds her, yet they must lie together and rest
together in joy and peace: Book, p. 196.) This rosy picture of domestic
equality, ‘joy’ and ‘peace’ might not be the reality of many medieval—or
modern—households (before her conversion, Margery herself snubs her
husband, John Kempe, by talking of her wealthy kindred: Book, p. 57).
But the valence of Margery’s mystical union with Christ, so frequently
and evocatively described by the word ‘homely’, rests on seeing the home
as the shape of its resident’s agency—here, Margery’s agency, returned to
her by Christ as many times as she rejects or relinquishes it.
And this agency operates far beyond the literal boundaries of the
home. The Book records Margery moving restlessly through England
and Europe, chastising erring churchmen and uncharitable folk, and
displaying her gift of tearful devotion in obedience to God’s will: ‘Dowtyr,
I wyl not han my grace hyd that I given the, for the more besy that the
pepil is to hyndryn yt and lette it, the mor schal I spredyn it abrood
and makyn it knowyn to all the world’ (Daughter, I will not have my
grace that I give you hidden, for the more busy people are to hinder and
obstruct it, the more shall I spread it abroad and make it known to all
the world: Book, p. 273). In an age affording many forms of lay devotion
to be practiced within the home, including the introspective devotions
troped through ‘the house of the heart’, it is Margery’s lot—or her reso-
lution—to be a profoundly unheimlich figure, a woman travelling through
Christendom, persistently and provocatively exposing her ‘homely’ God’s
private workings in her heart.
116 A. CHAUDHURI
Conclusion
‘Our homes are anecdotes’, Vance Smith observes, ‘singular edifices that
exist for us without necessarily edifying others’.27 Domestic allegories
create houses of the mind, mental places for readers to withdraw to
through reflection and meditation. In the aftermath of the 1409 publi-
cation of Thomas Arundel’s draconian Constitutions forbidding Bible
translation and the unlicensed transmission of theological knowledge in
the vernacular, both the Abbey and the Doctrine continue to be read and
circulated among both enclosed and lay audiences.28 One probable reason
is that their prominent household allegories were seen as promoting a
personal and anecdotal piety incapable of posing a serious threat to the
hierarchies of the Church. But the Book of Margery Kempe is almost inca-
pable of camouflage: in that novel-like text, the reformist power of the
anecdote is unmistakable and uncontainable, and so is the power of the
home to symbolise female spiritual self-construction in defiance of the
world, whether lay or ecclesiastical, of fifteenth-century England.
27 Smith, Arts of Possession, p. xvi.

28 See Rice, ‘Spiritual Ambition’; Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister’; and Catherine Innes-
Parker, ‘The Doctrine of the Hert and Its Manuscript Context’, in A Companion to the
Doctrine, pp. 159–81.
CHAPTER 8
‘Drawd Too Architectooralooral’: Charles

Dickens, the Bildungsroman and the Spatial
Imagination
Ushashi Dasgupta
In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), the sentimental Miss Mills,

who acts as David and Dora’s intermediary before they get engaged, is
greatly taken with the idea of ‘poetical affinity’. This is in evidence in
the extracts from her journal. She provides extracts for David to read:
‘Much alarmed. Fainting of [Dora] and glass of water from public-house.
(Poetical affinity. Chequered sign on door-post; chequered human life.
Alas! J. M.)’.1 Miss Mills and her tendency to grasp for analogies—
‘chequered sign on door-post; chequered human life’—are undoubtedly
silly, but Dickens himself draws ‘poetical affinities’ throughout his own
career. He uses metaphors from the built environment to describe life’s
major events, employing them to put forward certain arguments about
his conception of selfhood and to weigh up different models of personal
1 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. by Jeremy Tambling (London: Penguin,

2004), p. 567. Subsequent references appear in the text.
U. Dasgupta (B)
Pembroke College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: ushashi.dasgupta@ell.ox.ac.uk

118 U. DASGUPTA
identity and development against one another. Robert Alter suggests that
Dickens’s metaphors ‘give the impression of having been struck off in
the white heat of improvisation’. When he uses unifying or extended
metaphors, Alter argues, Dickens does not necessarily plan them—instead,
he finds himself ‘carried along by the powerful momentum of his inte-
grative imagination’.2 The same might hold true of his architectural and
spatial metaphors, but they appear across several novels, deployed and
redeployed as if Dickens is testing the possibility of a consistent vision
and vocabulary: the vocabulary of growing up. This chapter begins by
discussing the various metaphors Dickens proposes for describing an indi-
vidual’s progress from youth to maturity—a coming-of-age process that
is, unavoidably, male and middle-class. It then offers a case study of one
set of metaphors that particularly fascinated Dickens, drawn from the
world of tenancy, lodging and rented space, before asking what this says
about the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman as a genre.
Basement Stories Paved with Butter

Nineteenth-century scientists, novelists and poets alike attempted both to
understand what the mind was, and to formulate a vocabulary appropriate
to its processes; as Karen Chase reminds us, ‘we tend to forget that these
novelists did not inherit a supple and illuminating picture of the mind, but
that they had to construct it for themselves’.3 This burgeoning discourse
was liberal in its use of metaphor, and architectural and spatial metaphors
were a significant subset.4 In Sam Weller’s unique mental compendium
2 Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 48.
3 Karen Chase, Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë,
Charles Dickens, and George Eliot (New York: Methuen, 1984), pp. 54–55. On the
‘openness’ and ‘fertility’ of Victorian psychology as a discourse and discipline, attracting
‘economists, imaginative writers, philosophers, clerics, literary critics, policy-makers, as
well as biomedical students’, see Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture,
1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
4 On metaphor and nineteenth-century psychology, see, for example, Michael Davis,
George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2006); Suzanne Juhasz, The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and
the Space of the Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); Michael S. Kearns,
Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1987); and Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
8 ‘DRAWD TOO ARCHITECTOORALOORAL’ … 119
of idioms, set forth in The Pickwick Papers (1836–7), to have ‘bought

houses’ is ‘delicate English for goin’ mad’ and to ‘[take] to buildin’’ is
‘a medical term for bein’ incurable’; meanwhile, Lauren Cameron argues
that Dickens was drawn to the notion of the mind as a room and, more
specifically, the memory as an attic or warehouse.5 She identifies this
as a prevailing and ‘intuitive’ metaphor in nineteenth-century literature
and psychology, citing examples from Elizabeth Gaskell, Arthur Conan
Doyle, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the scientists
Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Carpenter.6
Cameron’s focus is on Hard Times (1854), but Dickens also hints at
the idea during a fleeting, evocative scene in Little Dorrit (1855–7), when
Arthur Clennam returns from China. Stepping into his ‘large garret bed-
room’, he finds that it has been used for storage in his absence. It is
now ‘the place of banishment for the worn out furniture’, from ‘ugly
old chairs with worn out seats’ to ‘ugly old chairs without any seats’, ‘a
maimed table, a crippled wardrobe, a lean set of fire-irons like the skeleton
of a set deceased’, and a ‘bedstead with four bare atomies of posts, each
terminating in a spike, as if for the dismal accommodation of lodgers
who might prefer to impale themselves’.7 With its repeated words and
grammatical structures, the passage reflects Arthur’s own spinning mind.
It is as if he has entered his memory, made all the more obvious by the
fact that this is a garret at the top of the house. In confronting piles of
broken, anthropomorphised furniture, he must also confront something
infinitely more damaged: this room is a visible manifestation of both his
childhood trauma and his wasted hopes.
Although this scene represents a moment of midlife crisis, Dickens’s
tales of the young are equally steeped in such images, especially at
moments of transition. The Bildungsroman takes those themes—self-
reflection, change, the movement from youth to experience—and brings
5 Sam’s words appear in Dickens, The Pickwick Papers , ed. by Mark Wormald (London:
Penguin, 2003), p. 587. Subsequent references appear in the text.
6 Lauren Cameron, ‘Interiors and Interiorities: Architectural Understandings of the
Mind in Hard Times ’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 35 (2013), 65–79 (p. 66). In 1796,
Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue listed the ‘Garret, or Upper Story, the
head. His garret, or upper story, is empty, or unfurnished; i.e. he has no brains, he is a
fool’. ‘garret’, n.1 , 3.a., b., in the OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016),
www.oed.com/view/Entry/76861 [accessed 29 March 2017].
7 Dickens, Little Dorrit , ed. by Helen Small and Stephen Wall (London: Penguin,
2003), p. 53.
120 U. DASGUPTA
them front and centre. In David Copperfield and Great Expectations

(1860–1), Dickens uses architectural and spatial metaphors to explore
different paradigms for personal development. The first of these is the
idea of the foundation; it could be argued that ‘having foundations’ has
been reduced to a dead metaphor, but in the Bildungsroman, it has
some semblance of its meaning restored.8 Do people and societies have
unshakeable foundations? Do lives have cornerstones and keystones? Both
novels suggest the contrary. Mr. Dick, who never changes and seems to
exist out of time, ‘appear[s] to have settled into his original foundation,
like a building’, and David ‘confess[es] that his faith in [Dick’s] ever
moving, was not much greater than if he had been a building’ (p. 658).
Dick is David’s negative image—no member of the up-and-coming gener-
ation. Though Dr. Strong reassures David that he should not worry about
his career prospects—he has ‘laid a foundation that any edifice may be
raised upon’—things are less fixed outside his professional life (p. 528).
Miss Lavinia questions whether David and Dora’s love can ‘have any real
foundation’, and, in the cottage they are renting in Highgate, David is
disconcerted by the amount of butter his wife is ordering: ‘It appeared to
me’, he confesses, ‘as if we might have kept the basement story paved with
butter, such was the extensive scale of our consumption of that article’
(pp. 604, 647). In speaking about these buttery foundations, he is voicing
his wider insecurity about the slipperiness of his home and marriage.
Dickens, then, argues for the impossibility of laying down a truly reli-
able foundation on which subsequently to build one’s entire life. Lives
and selves cannot be constructed painstakingly and lovingly, brick by
brick. This suggestion makes the conviction of Pip’s words to Estella all
the more arresting in Great Expectations :
The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not
more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your
presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will
8 ‘THEORIES (AND ARGUMENTS) ARE BUILDINGS’ is just one of the countless

metaphors that ‘partially structure our everyday concepts […] this structure is reflected
in our literal language’. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 46, 52–55.
be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part
of my character.9
It is fitting that, at the end of the novel, Satis House has its furniture and
effects auctioned off and its very bricks and mortar ‘sold as old building
materials and pulled down’ (p. 473). Pip’s relationship with Satis House,
the home of Miss Havisham, is long-standing and complex: Pip has been
visiting Miss Havisham in her self-imposed isolation since childhood, falls
in love with her ward and is convinced that she is his benefactor. A visible
symbol of Pip’s hopes, dreams and obsessions, the freehold of Satis House
is owned by two equally life-changing women: Miss Havisham and, finally,
Estella. When Pip returns from Egypt, Estella reveals that this freehold
is ‘the only possession [she has] not relinquished’, and that the deso-
late ground will be built upon at last (p. 483). Estella does not give any
details about the kind of development she has sanctioned, but as this plan
emerges, and as the old bricks are dispersed to lay new foundations, we
come to a moment of simultaneous closure, renewal and continuity—
because new dreams will undoubtedly cluster around each new edifice,
marked with a trace of Satis House. A marriage between Pip and Estella—
a resolution not quite delivered by the end of the novel—would add an
extra layer of complexity; according to the laws of coverture, women had
no control over their real property following marriage until the Married
Women’s Property Acts were introduced in 1870 and 1882. Thus, were
Estella to become a femme coverte, the freehold would be Pip’s to all
intents and purposes. This sign of Estella’s loss of independence is also a
sign that Pip is taking ownership, in more ways than one.10
Sometime after his declaration to Estella, Pip deploys a similar, albeit
stranger, image in his narrative. In his delirium after Magwitch’s capture,
he ‘confound[s] impossible existences with [his] own identity’, halluci-
nating that he is a ‘brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be
released from the giddy place where the builders [have] set him’ (p. 462).
9 Dickens, Great Expectations , ed. by Charlotte Mitchell and David Trotter (London:
Penguin, 2003), p. 364. Subsequent references appear in the text.
10 On coverture and women’s property rights, see, for example, Deborah Wynne,
Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 6–7,
34–35. On Dickens’s deeply ambivalent portrayal of ‘forceful women of property’, whose
real estate is ‘vulnerable to loss or destruction’, see p. 58. On the way Satis House is
‘dismantled and converted into moveable property’, see pp. 84–85.
122 U. DASGUPTA
Fixed in place alongside countless other identical bricks, he begs to be set

loose from the edifice that constitutes his society. He pushes against the
pressures and expectations placed on him by those he neither respects
nor feels beholden to. He uses another image to emphasise his antipathy
towards such scrutiny: this is the ground plan or survey, and Dickens
seems to find it equally alive with imaginative potential. Remembering the
eve of his change in fortune, Pip describes being fitted for clothes. ‘Mr
Trabb’, he says, ‘measured and calculated me […] as if I were an estate
and he the finest species of surveyor’ (p. 152). Pumblechook ‘sit[s] super-
vising [him] with a depreciatory eye, like the architect of [his] fortunes
who thought himself engaged on a very unremunerative job’ (p. 97).
Meanwhile, in Dickens’s last, unfinished, novel, The Mystery of Edwin
Drood (1870), Edwin reveals a comparable resentment for those who
wish to plot out his life. When talking to Jasper about his engagement
to Rosa, he bursts out:
Yes, Jack, it’s all very well for you […] Your life is not laid down to
scale, and lined and dotted out for you, like a surveyor’s plan. You have
no uncomfortable suspicion that you are forced upon anybody, nor has
anybody an uncomfortable suspicion that she is forced upon you, or that
you are forced upon her. You can choose for yourself. Life, for you, is a
plum with the natural bloom on; it hasn’t been over-carefully wiped off
for you–11
As Edwin moves from one metaphor to another, setting up his future

against Jasper’s, Jasper cuts him off. For both Edwin and Pip, a ground
plan means claustrophobia and stultifying predictability; there is little
space for an individual to dream. To use this language, meanwhile, is
to find a way to articulate their anxiety in the face of oppressive power.
Dickens’s thinking, here, anticipates Michel de Certeau’s: if the ‘space
planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer’ is a Foucauldian figure
who possesses a ‘totalising’ vision, a ‘scopic and gnostic drive’, Dickens’s
protagonists are more inclined to experience life as a journey. They want
to stroll, wander, accelerate, slow down and get lost: they are de Certeau’s
walkers. For de Certeau, the act of walking is essentially resistant to the
panoptic power of the planner: his walkers are irrepressibly individual in
11 Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. by David Paroissien (London: Penguin,
2002), p. 18. Subsequent references appear in the text.
their uses of space. Dickens’s protagonists anticipate this idea, expressing

their desire to take a wayward course through his novels.12
Edwin’s rise is violently interrupted before he is forced to follow the
plan set out for him. But some of Dickens’s youngsters are surveyors
themselves, and make ground plans of their own. In Oliver Twist (1837–
9), the Artful Dodger ‘proceed[s] to amuse himself by sketching a
ground-plan of Newgate on the table with [a] piece of chalk […]
whistling meantime with peculiar shrillness’.13 This doodle, made in
an idle moment, may actually be a more sententious flash of self-
consciousness; the Dodger is mapping out a certain fate for himself,
confronting it and consigning himself to it. Further up the class ladder
and in a novel explicitly about architects, Martin Chuzzlewit must eventu-
ally learn that identity is not about building or envisioning lasting edifices.
No matter how many promises he makes (‘I’d build [your fortune] up,
Tom […] on such a strong foundation, that it should last your life –
aye, and your children’s lives too’), no matter how many ground plans
he perfects, or how many pristine renderings of the settlement of Eden
he sees on American walls, his own life cannot be drawn using a pair
of compasses.14 It is something that Phiz, Dickens’s illustrator, seems to
latch on to; there are maps and plans dotted through Martin Chuzzlewit ’s
pictures.
The most sustained use of the concept comes, yet again, in David
Copperfield, originally entitled ‘The Copperfield Survey of the World as it
Rolled’.15 David reaches for it whenever he describes his love for Dora.
His mind drifting in Traddles’s company, his ‘selfish thoughts’ make ‘a
ground-plan of Mr Spenlow’s house and garden at the same moment’.
Ironically, Traddles himself is doing a similar thing during this conversa-
tion, showing David the prospect of a Devonshire church on an inkstand,
12 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), pp. 92–93.
13 Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. by Philip Horne (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 199.
14 Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit , ed. by Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 2004),
p. 190. Subsequent references appear in the text. For readings of architecture in Martin
Chuzzlewit, see, for example, Nancy Aycock Metz, ‘Dickens and “The Quack Architec-
tural”’, Dickens Quarterly, 11 (1994), 59–68; Jeremy Tambling, ‘Martin Chuzzlewit :
Dickens and Architecture’, English, 48 (1999), 147–68.
15 Dickens to John Forster, 26 February 1849, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by
Graham Storey et al., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–2002), V, p. 502.
124 U. DASGUPTA
where Sophy’s father is curate; he is ‘tracing his finger along the inkstand’
to indicate the location of his fiancée’s house (pp. 412–13). David is
finally able to put together his groundplans on a real page, rather than in
his mind. Sitting with Dora, he draws ‘a picture of [their] frugal home,
made independent by [his] labour – sketching-in the little house [he] had
seen at Highgate’ (p. 547). It is a document that concentrates all of his
misplaced optimism; the ‘little house’ witnesses domestic missteps and
Dora’s death. Ground plans are a neat way to bring expectations, aspi-
rations and realities into contact. They are visionary spaces, empty and
unpeopled, full of potential but little tangible matter. These young men,
who are trying to make sense of their futures, ultimately must learn a
severe lesson: that such things cannot be mapped.
An Apartment for a Single Gentleman

If these concepts from architecture—laying foundations, sketching
ground plans—are ultimately found wanting when figuring the develop-
ment of the middle-class self, then perhaps an alternative approach is more
authentic to the experience of growing and being. Dickens finds this alter-
native in a set of images drawn from the world of tenancy: as Sharon
Marcus has demonstrated, the everyday realities of the property market
saw most Victorians renting private houses, or lodging in rooms in other
people’s houses, rather than buying homes of their own.16 Rented spaces
surface time and time again in Dickens’s work, and they make themselves
felt in the very textures of his writing about youth.
At the most fundamental level, rented spaces provide a shorthand for
talking about life, death and eternity. When Mrs. Bloss marries Mr. Gobler
in ‘The Boarding-House’, one of Dickens’s earliest pieces of writing
collected in Sketches by Boz (1833–6), the couple moves to Newington
Butts, ‘far removed from the noisy strife of that great boarding-house,
the world’.17 The Pickwick Papers ’s Gabriel Grub, meanwhile, gleefully
describes the grave as ‘brave lodgings for one’ (p. 382). In a novel
that celebrates the bachelor’s lifestyle, Grub reminds readers that death
will bring an enforced solitude. Pecksniff, the compelling villain—and
16 See Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris
and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 83–132.
17 Dickens, ‘The Boarding-House: Chapter the Second’, in Sketches by Boz, ed. by
Dennis Walder (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 338–61 (p. 360).
professional architect—in Martin Chuzzlewit , uses one of his character-

istic rhetorical flourishes to liken life to a stagecoach journey. ‘Virtue’,
he fancies, ‘is the drag. We start from The Mother’s Arms,’ a tavern,
‘and we run to The Dust Shovel’ (p. 122); similarly, in A Tale of Two
Cities (1859), the Old Bailey is compared to a ‘deadly inn-yard, from
which pale travellers set out continually […] on a violent passage into the
other world’.18 It is an unsurprising analogy to make, particularly deep-
rooted in religious discourse, because it emphasises the transience of the
physical world in the face of the next—Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146, for
instance, compares the body to a ‘fading mansion’ for the soul with ‘so
short a lease’. Marcus Waithe identifies further ‘notable examples’ from
John Donne, Walter Ralegh and Thomas Browne, comparing ‘the world,
and by extension the body […] to mere stopping places, or hostelries, for
the soul’. In 1856, John Ruskin published the third volume of Modern
Painters, in which he states: ‘We look upon the world too much as our
own, too much as if we had possessed it and should possess it for ever, and
forget that it is a mere hostelry, of which we occupy the apartments for a
time, which others better than we have sojourned in before’.19 The same
sentiment is echoed in Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
(1859). Though many of these examples make a religious point, Dick-
ens’s emphasis is slightly different, as there is nothing in his images about
looking forward to heaven’s eternal joys. Instead, he is talking about
mortality, and using dark humour to do so.
The comedy gives way in Dombey and Son (1846–8). It is a poignantly
appropriate point of reference as Dickens relates the story of Paul
Dombey, a sickly little boy fated to die at the age of six. Left abandoned
at Dr. Blimber’s school, Paul ‘[sits] as if he had taken life unfurnished,
and the upholsterer were never coming’.20 He has invested in empty
apartments, but without furniture or portable property they remain
uncomfortable and de-individualised, a shell that cannot be used, full
18 Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. by Richard Maxwell (London: Penguin, 2003),
p. 63.
19 These examples are drawn from Marcus Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers:
Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006),
pp. 10, 22. On the established use of architectural metaphors to describe society, especially
in the eighteenth century, see F. S. Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City (London: Athlone
Press, 1979), p. 83.
20 Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. by Andrew Sanders (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 171.
126 U. DASGUPTA
of echoing noises that emphasise his own isolation. Paul himself would
be too young to understand this simile, heightening his aura of prema-
ture agedness. This frustrated and defeated child has the shape of a life,
but nothing to fill it with. Sam Weller—for whom to ‘buy houses’ is, we
remember, ‘delicate English for going mad’—seems much happier with
images from the ‘lodger world’. He wields them of his own accord and
with exuberance, accepting Pickwick’s offer of work by exclaiming, ‘take
the bill down […] I’m let to a single gentleman, and the terms is agreed
upon’ (p. 164). He compares himself to an apartment to let because he
houses successive selves and relationships; his identity is not a permanent
entity, and so he never feels lived-in. He is the ultimate urban scrapper,
happy to play host to whichever whim seems most profitable at the
time. His statement constitutes a spontaneous moment of self-reflection.
Neither The Pickwick Papers nor Dombey and Son is a Bildungsroman, of
course, but these are strands, in Dickens’s knotted, densely plotted novels,
about how we grow up.
This is picked up in two Bildungsromans that appeared on the Victo-
rian literary scene at the same time, written by a pair of novelists
in constant imaginative dialogue: as David Copperfield was being seri-
alised, William Makepeace Thackeray was charting similar adventures in
Pendennis (1848–50). David uses related similes to describe both his early
love for Little Emily and his impression of the odd, closed Rosa Dartle,
who loves an unavailable man. Returning from Yarmouth as a child, David
promises to write to Emily: ‘I redeemed that promise afterwards’, the
adult David recalls, ‘in characters larger than those in which apartments
are usually announced in manuscript, as being to let’ (pp. 52–53). Rosa
Dartle, meanwhile, is unwanted and waiting, ‘a little dilapidated – like
a house – with having been so long to let’; like buildings, people are
there to be inhabited by those who love them, for however long or short
a period (p. 301). Unlike Pip, who thinks of his love for Estella as a
kind of existential foundation, David sees love as something that comes
and goes. Human relationships—infatuations, passions, friendships—are
fleeting. People move on. Thackeray makes the point in a particularly
striking way. When Pen’s first, totally unsuitable love, an actress, leaves
the neighbourhood, Pen charges over to her old lodgings:
They were gone indeed. A card of ‘Lodgings to let’ was placed in the dear
little familiar window. He rushed up into the room and viewed it over
[…] He walked, with a sort of terror, into her little empty bedroom. It
was swept out and prepared for new comers. The glass which had reflected
her fair face was shining ready for her successor. The curtains lay square
folded on the little bed: he flung himself down and buried his head on the
vacant pillow.21
A mirror’s function is to inspire moments of self-reflection. In a rented

apartment like this one, a bedroom mirror will take in dozens of faces over
the years, the faces of people passing through. It will not reflect or absorb
the traces of one person’s slow, steady ageing process. As Pen looks into
Emily’s old mirror, it signals that there will be other loves. ‘It is pleasant,
perhaps’, the narrator muses later, ‘but it is humiliating to own that you
love no more’ (p. 548). For Pen, this moment of realisation is bittersweet,
even tinged with embarrassment; for Sam, however, it is psychologically
buoying, rather than paralysing, to know that life involves change. This
state of uncertainty stimulates the imagination.
Having Some Foundation for Believing That

Nature and Accident Had Made Me an Author…
As David puts together his ‘written memory’, there is one thing of which
he is quite sure. He has ‘some foundation’, he writes, ‘for believing […]
that nature and accident [have] made [him] an author’ (p. 696). David
Copperfield is both a reconstruction of a middle-class Victorian life and,
more particularly, of an author’s life, though David is famously coy about
his career and fame. As a genre, the Bildungsroman, we might assume,
proselytises for a certain kind of domestic ideology.22 It equates literal
and social mobility, turning itinerance into a rite of passage for the central
character, who may move into a private house when he finds himself and
his place in society. He is rewarded for his unflagging sense of aspira-
tion with a stable and private home. Indeed, this is the ideology quietly
underlying John Dickens’s fabled conversation with his son, explaining
that he can live in a place like Gad’s Hill if he works hard enough,
and Charles Dickens’s triumphant purchase of his ‘little Kentish freehold’
21 William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis, ed. by Donald Hawes and J. I. M. Stewart

(London: Penguin, 1986), p. 188. Subsequent references appear in the text.
22 On the kinds of ideas that had currency in the nineteenth century and helped shape
this genre, see, for example, Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman
in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987).
128 U. DASGUPTA
many decades later.23 In life and in fiction, the dream house acts as a moti-
vator; the Bildungsroman ends with a sense of financial, geographical and
psychological stability—of peace of mind.
But David proves himself to be a narrator and writer who, sitting in
the comfort of his home with Agnes, is still using rented space as a point
of reference. Even if, in Beth Herst’s words, ‘finding his rightful home
[…] is David’s life project’, and this home is ‘both the refuge and the
source of selfhood’, he is susceptible to the memory of lodging and of
seeking accommodation.24 The older David reveals the extent to which
his past pulls upon him, and shows that the experience of tenancy has a
truth and vividness to it. It is not simply something he has done, a mere
purgatory he has endured before settling into a home of his own, but is
something that has created him and informed the way he thinks. After
all, the metaphors we use say something about the kinds of immediate,
involuntary associations our minds make. The Bildungsroman presents
its metaphors as the products of one mind, rather than as spontaneous
bursts of Dickensian inventiveness. Dickens is commenting on individual
modes of logging the world, on the structures of individual memories,
and, crucially, on individual methods of expression. David, a professional
writer, is engaged in converting his lived experience into a logical memoir;
he has a degree of control over and awareness of his craft, and so he exer-
cises his language consciously. He uses these metaphors to make himself
understood and to engage with an audience—to create some kind of
meaningful affective relationship with those who read his words.
Architectural language and the language of tenancy are used to make
sense of the self. When characters—and indeed, readers—are forced to
confront ideas that are almost too big to grasp, these languages are a
cognitive tool, used to clarify the abstract and ineffable. They render
death, love, disappointment, ruin and transition both accessible and
slightly bathetic, defined against an essentially economic relationship. This
assumes that tenancy belongs to the comprehensible world, one that
author, narrator, character and reader can safely be expected to share. As
the vehicle for metaphor, it is painted as one of the most fundamental facts
of everyday experience that unites everyone, no matter their age, standing
23 Dickens to W. W. F. de Cerjat, 7 July 1858, in Letters, VIII, p. 597.

24 Beth F. Herst, The Dickens Hero: Selfhood and Alienation in the Dickens World
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), pp. 53–54.
or moral tendencies: it belongs within the collective consciousness. (Peck-

sniff is as innovative, linguistically, as Sam; their language use and the bent
of their imaginations align them in ways we might not initially expect.)
At the same time, tenancy is malleable enough to describe a huge range
of situations, and is somehow equally appropriate to all of them. Therein
lies the paradox: as an idea, tenancy is simultaneously concrete and capa-
cious. Everyone understands what it means, but it can also mean almost
anything.
Both David Copperfield and Great Expectations contain references to
Warren’s Blacking warehouse; Dickens was forced to toil here as a child,
and it played a crucial part in his own coming-of-age story. Weaving
fragments of memory into his fiction was, perhaps, a way for him to
work through enduring trauma. In Great Expectations , Joe Gargery passes
Warren’s and is disappointed to find that the appearance of the building
falls far short of the picture on the posters. The picture, he remarks, has
been ‘drawd too architectooralooral’—grander and more ornate than it
actually is. There is a reproach in his words, a suggestion that people
make more of buildings than they should (p. 222). Dickens’s own fiction
is also ‘drawd architectooralooral’, embellished with metaphors taken
from the built environment and from domestic space; however, his use
of metaphors amounts to far more than a simple act of indulgent pret-
tification. Rather, it is vital to his conceptions of selfhood, and reveals
something both about his narrative vision and his profoundly spatial imag-
ination. He sees great value in using ‘architectooralooral’ metaphors to
describe life’s most serious events. By using these metaphors at moments
of reflection and transition, he gives us a language for talking about
growing up.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jane Griffiths and Adam Hanna for

bringing us all together at The House in the Mind, to my fellow panellists
Leah Edens and Iain McMaster, and to those who attended our session. Their
comments were extremely helpful and illuminating. This work is drawn from my
doctoral research; my heartfelt thanks to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Clare Pettitt
and Sophie Ratcliffe for their guidance and support of the project.
CHAPTER 9
Spaces of the A-Temporal: Italo Calvino’s

Invisible Cities and the Early Modern
Imagination
Jelena Todorović
If a man of genius, or one only of ordinary discernment, could view the

interior of the world, he would feel indignant at himself even for living
with so much degradation; he could not prevent himself from pitying or
despising those who are attached to it, and who allow themselves to be
deceived by its seductions and artifices. […] These reflections occurred to
me while walking in my garden; I entered into a summer house […] and
[…] fell asleep. During my repose, I fancied myself in the midst of the
great city, called Hypocrisy. They informed me that it was the capital of
the Internal world, and bore the same relation to it, that Rome did to the
external world, in the time of the Emperors. It was here that the king of
the internal world usually resided[.]
A longer version of this chapter was published in the book Jelena Todorović,
The Hidden Legacies of Baroque Culture in Contemporary Literature: The
Realms of Eternal Present (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2017).
J. Todorović (B)
University of the Arts, Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia

132 J. TODOROVIĆ
The speaker here enters a city, an allegorical realm composed of real and
imaginary pasts. It seems to be not a city proper, but a realm of dreams.
It might easily be one of the Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino. And indeed,
it is a city metaphor, but a much older one: it comes from the notable
book of Visions written by de Quevedo in 1627.1 This comparison is not
intended to present de Quevedo as Calvino’s direct and immediate prede-
cessor, but to shed light on a more profound phenomenon: the hidden
legacies that the Baroque age bestowed upon our world.2 Calvino’s and
de Quevedo’s works inhabit a common space, a liminal domain between
reality and unreality, between the palpable world and a dream, between
certainty and deception. Furthermore, they share the same models of
thought: Baroque models that went underground for centuries, only to
reappear in our age and claim an important place in our vision of the
world, in our understanding of space and time, and ultimately in the
perception of ourselves.
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, published in 1972, is a complex narra-
tive devoted to the fabric of the city. Realised in a dialogue between
Marco Polo and the Great Khan, Calvino’s story of the cities of imagina-
tion unravels in front of the reader. In a series of poetic descriptions, and
a variety of languages, Marco Polo describes to the Khan the forgotten
cities of his Empire. They are organised in several imaginary categories:
Cities and Desires, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities
and the Dead, Cities and the Sky, each with its unique sense of place.3
Travelling through fifty-five invisible cities Calvino creates an elaborate
architecture of imagination where every city is a portrait of an invisible
realm and an allegory of our relationship with the urban space. But in the
end, all these delicate allegories come to represent the one truly invisible
city, Marco Polo’s lost home of Venice. Composed as a melancholic elegy
1 The quotation is taken from Francisco de Quevedo, Visions, trans. by William Elliot
(Philadelphia: Literary Rooms, 1832), pp. 84–85.
2 For the purpose of this research I have deliberately not used any secondary sources
concerning Calvino nor consulted contemporary criticism. My aim was to observe, as an
art historian rather than a literary critic, the presence of Baroque models of thought in
Calvino’s book. For the same reason the majority of references deal either with primary
Baroque sources or theoretical explorations of the Baroque.
3 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace
& Company, 1974). All references will be given in parentheses in the text.
9 SPACES OF THE A-TEMPORAL: ITALO CALVINO’S INVISIBLE CITIES … 133
to the City of San Marco, these accounts collect diverse feelings, memo-
ries and longings that together define the idea of the city, the city as a
homeland. This chapter will argue that the structure of Invisible Cities
depends on underlying concepts that it shares with Baroque writers and
artists: the intertwining of utopia and dystopia, the art of illusion and the
pervasive idea of the world as a dream.
A Shadowed World of Imperfect Arcadias

Calvino’s work has been variously classified as pure fiction, a travelogue,
an allegory of urban thought and an ideal example of postmodernism.
As a hybrid book that defies categorisation, it becomes a metaphor for
the world itself. As both a utopia and a dystopia it is as paradoxical in
its worldview as many products of Baroque culture. The atmospheres
of immeasurable utopian worlds, often palpable in Calvino’s cities, are
inseparable from the fear of transience, annihilation and decay. The anti-
thetical nature of his sources is reflected in the way his cities are frequently
provided with doubles, their own distorted reflections in the mirror of
time:
They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the
dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that
in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and
who is dead. (p. 110)
Just as Calvino here blurs the boundaries between life and death, in the
Baroque era there was no great chasm between the two polarities; they
coexisted simultaneously as two opposite, but complementary, sides of
the same coin. The culture of the age produced dichotomous worlds:
one that partook of both the dazzling limitlessness of the heavens and of
the sombre finitude of human life on earth.4
The embattled Counter-Reformation Catholicism of the Baroque era
brought with it a renewed sense of brevity and precariousness of human
existence. Only through meditation on life’s brevity could the faithful
4 For the dichotomous quality of Baroque culture see Joy Kenseth, The Age of the
Marvelous (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); José Antonio Maravall, Culture
of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1986); and Jelena Todorović, Of Mirrors, Roses and Nothingness: The Concept of
Time and Transience in the Culture of the Baroque (Belgrade: Clio, 2012).
134 J. TODOROVIĆ
properly prepare themselves for their inevitable demise. Religious and

political wars, together with the weakening of the earthly and cosmolog-
ical hierarchies, further intensified this feeling of immeasurable insecurity.
Yet this obsession with transience coexisted with a belief in perfect worlds,
in spaces beyond our existence, beyond time itself. The following lines by
the German physician and poet Paul Fleming (1609–40) encapsulate both
this awareness of the unstoppable progress of time, and the desire to be
beyond its grasp:
You live in time yet know not any time;

Nor do grasp of what, in what you are.
You only know that one time you were born
And that one time you also will be lost.
[…]
Man lives in time, and likewise time in man,

But man must yield, while time continues on.
Time’s what you are, and you are what time is,
Except that you are less than what time is.
Oh! let the other time, which has no time,
Come take us from this time to its own times[.]5
Such conflicting perceptions are also tellingly exemplified in those

elaborate Dutch flower still life that fuse a portrayal of unquestionable
perfection with the recognition that such glory is as fleeting as a life itself.
One of the masterpieces of this genre is a small but awe-inspiring still
life by Clara Peeters from 1642 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). On a dark
depthless background, a vase with flowers representing all seasons and
meridians attests to the glory of Nature and God’s creation. Carnations,
poppies, peonies, roses and tulips depict a floral equivalent of Fleming’s
‘time… without time’. Rendered in the most dazzling of colours, and
with unsurpassable draughtsmanship, the flowers seem to shimmer on the
edge of the picture plane, appearing more real and more present to the
beholder than reality itself. Every drop of dew on the petals and soft,
5 Paul Fleming, in The Baroque Poem, ed. by Harold B. Segel (New York: Dutton,
1974), p. 246.
hairy, tendrils of the poppy buds, together with the almost imperceptible
air bubbles caught in the glass of the vase, give us a false hope in the
solidity of our world and our existence. But this brightness and vitality of
nature in its prime is only a fine layer of deception. The same flowers that
overwhelm us with their lush richness conceal in their core a message
of departure. Their existence is as brief and fleeting as ours is. In his
‘Allegory of Brevity’ the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora (1561–
1627) used the metaphor of flowers as if describing this painting by Clara
Peeters:
What most consoles me from my fleetness

is the carnation fresh with dew
since that which gave me one day’s sweetness,
to her conceded scarcely two.
Ephemerids in briefness vie,
My scarlet and her crimson die.
Learn flowers from me what parts we play,

from dawn to dusk. Last noon the boast
and marvel of the fields, today
I am not even my own ghost.6
In the lower part of Peeters’ painting, a detail pictured on the ledge on

which the vase resides elaborates further this message of vanitas. On
the left hand side of the vase a small, almost insignificant flower has
fallen. It is still lush and full of sap, but its existence in this state is
destined to be as short as that of the drop of dew meticulously depicted
beside it. Furthermore, it is not any ordinary flower, but the nightshade
(belladonna): a deadly poisonous plant. The fallen flower is therefore not
only a warning of the life’s brevity, but a symbol of death itself. It is
the corollary of the figure Peeters has depicted on the right of the vase:
a perfectly painted, contented rat that nibbles peacefully at a few grains
of wheat. The painting reveals not only a dystopia in a utopian vision,
but the quintessence of disillusionment. It exemplifies how, unlike Renais-
sance visions of harmony, Baroque art inaugurated a shadowed world of
imperfect Arcadias.
6 Luis de Góngora, ‘Allegory of Brevity’, trans. by Roy Campbell, in The Baroque Poem,
p. 201.
136 J. TODOROVIĆ
In the same way, in Calvino’s book, utopian and dystopian projections

follow and complement each other, each necessary for the great harmony
of the Khan’s world and the world of ourselves:
And to feel sure of itself, the living Laudomia has to seek in the Laudomia
of the Dead the explanation of itself, even at the risk of finding more there,
or less: explanations for more than one Laudomia, for different cities that
could have been and were not, or reasons that are incomplete[.] (pp. 140–
41)
Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath,
shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary
and dead. (pp. 107–108)
And then, the shards of the original splendour that had been saved, by
adapting them to more obscure needs, were again shifted. They were now
preserved under glass bells, locked in display cases, set on velvet cushions,
and not because they might still be used for anything, but because people
wanted to reconstruct through them a city of which no one knew anything
now. (p. 107)
There is no profound understanding of life without death, of an ideal

world without one of transience and inevitable loss. Calvino uses this
curious intertwining of fundamental opposites, of creation and oblitera-
tion, not in order to purposefully evoke the Baroque perception of things,
but to show how fundamental they still are for the understanding of our
own time.
Everything Conceals Something Else

The exploration of conflicting visions in Calvino, of ‘cities that could have
been and were not’ (pp. 140–141) is inseparable from the general sense
of illusion that envelops every page in the book. Almost every city that
the traveller visits carries its own particular form of deceit, which he is
first drawn into, and subsequently completely immersed in. ‘There is no
language without deceit’ (p. 48), Marco Polo states, offering us a shifting
paradoxical image of the Khan’s Empire. It is a realm that escapes any
definition, like the book itself. But above all, it is curiously Baroque. If
we were to select one quality that defines the great majority of Baroque
works of art whether in visual arts, theatre or literature, it would undoubt-

edly be that of illusion.7 This period opened a new epoch of virtuality
in the history of European culture. It was a turning point towards the
way we understand and perceive the world today. To an unprecedented
extent, reality was criticised, analysed and even annihilated. Trompe l’oeil
effects, anamorphoses, metamorphoses, visual riddles, textual riddles and
labyrinthine poetry are only some of the elaborate conceits that Baroque
art developed during its quest for those virtual domains that defied the
established modes of depicting reality.
Initially, this changed approach to the depiction of reality followed the
spirit of the reforms of the Council of Trent (1545–63).8 As established in
the final thirty-third session of the Council, the visual arts were endowed
with a crucial new role in propaganda and communication. They were to
amaze, instruct and convince, and the concepts and forms of the visual
arts were to follow these instructions. Authenticity, as such, took second
place. Consequently, the accent was placed on persuasio, the persuasive
quality of art, and on those subjects that carried transformative power for
the beholder. These might be visions of Heaven as in Andrea Pozzo’s in
the ceiling of the church of San Ignazio; alternatively, they might be alle-
gorical projections of great political dreams like Barberini’s Apotheosis of
Divine Wisdom (1639) in his family palace in Rome. Since the role of the
image was to act on and influence the viewer, the barrier between real and
virtual spaces was broken, and in some cases completely abolished. Total
immersion was thus achieved, allowing the spectator to become part of
a world beyond the confines of certainty. Images that were intended to
deceive and bewilder, and to offer a highly ambiguous view of the world,
became more common in art. There was always more than one strand to
unravel, and a different image to confront. When Calvino’s Marco Polo
speaks of how ‘places exchange their form, order, distances’ (p. 137), he
reveals the kind of doubt characteristic of the Baroque period as to the
solidity of the space he inhabits, and ultimately of his own identity. Archi-
tecture and theatre, painting and poetry all contained unprecedented
imaginary spaces, where none of their elements could be taken at face
7 For illusion in the Baroque age, see Maravall, Culture of the Baroque; Giovanni Careri,
Baroques (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
8 See further Maravall, Culture of the Baroque.
138 J. TODOROVIĆ
value. Painting often resembled marble, while marble took on the quali-
ties of human flesh; light sources and viewpoints were so manipulated that
one could not truly discern where reality ended and illusion began. Calvi-
no’s cities, like many Baroque spaces, are places of such duality. They too
present limitless, ever-changing images, so that certainties and illusions
are fused into one and form an inseparable part of their identities. Like
Baroque works of art, Calvino’s cities strive to astonish, but also to remain
a perpetual riddle to their beholders:
Travelling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resem-
bling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless
dust cloud invades the continents. (p. 137)
Through his description of the city of Isaura, Calvino explores mirroring

in both actual and metaphorical senses. In this imaginary city it is not
certain whether reality preceded appearances, or whether reality is in fact
the product of appearances.
Because the Baroque quest for the art of virtuality was widespread—
arguably, almost universal—a feeling of uncertainty and perpetual decep-
tion could be found in seventeenth-century art in Protestant as well
as Catholic domains. Dutch art in particular developed an entire genre
devoted to the trompe l’oeil paintings. The mid-seventeenth century
witnessed the pinnacle of these works, and they were sought by collec-
tors and antiquarians for the skill of their execution and the mastery of
their optical trickery. A painting that combines a seemingly simple subject
with a striking degree of illusion, Open Cabinet by Franciscus Gijsbrechts,
reveals to the spectator the same world of paradox that is epitomised by
Calvino’s cities. Painted in 1675, Gijsbrechts’ work depicts the doors of
a wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, where each object has been
chosen specifically to present a riddle for the eye; even the dimensions
of the painting itself resemble those of real cabinet doors, thus achieving
total deception. It shows the glass-covered doors slightly ajar, which both
permits the viewer to see the contents of the cabinet and also enables
the painter to explore the intricate interplay of virtual spaces. Gijsbrechts’
masterful treatment of different surfaces further enhances the sense of
spatial plurality. Many of the objects have been selected to enhance a
feeling of depth, and thus to further the sense of mystery that pervades
the painting. A letter with a red wax seal stands precariously on the edge
of the door, displaying both in its front and reverse side. A crumpled
map is carelessly tucked in and seems to deny the existence of the picture
plane. Its coiled edges catch the light and the gaze of the beholder, each
seeming closer than the last. On the top of the map stands a ruffled quill
which casts a shadow on the cabinet. The shadow that does not exist
enhances the depth which is not. Both the cabinet and the quill are only
the echoes or shadows of an imaginary world. Nothing in this painting
is real, and everything possesses a heightened sense of reality. However,
for the beholder of the painting, as for the reader of Calvino’s invisible
domains, there is only one irrefutable truth:
Cities like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their
discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and
everything conceals something else. (p. 44)
Composed as witty and decorative objects, paintings such as Gijsbrechts’

were small essays in virtuality in themselves. They were meant to attract
the attention of the viewer and to make them question the reliability of
their surroundings. In Baroque art one of the chief aims of illusion was
to abolish all certainties except spiritual ones. Its main purpose was to
deceive the eye and cast doubt on the credibility of the entire visible
world. For Baroque artists, as for Baroque poets, the world of things was
no more than a vanity of vanities: ‘a wisp in time’s wilderness’.9
A comparable sense that appearances cannot be trusted imbues many
of the cities visited by Calvino’s narrator. In his city of Argia, the city of
contradictions, every known principle is questioned and, as in Baroque
art, replaced by its shadow:
What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of
air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the
ceiling, and on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs
of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. (p. 126)
The same uncertainty of vision is made the principal quality in the city of
Tamara where the traveller is never sure what he exactly sees, and even
less what he remembers:
9 Andreas Gryphius, The Baroque Poem, ‘Human Misery’, trans. by George C.

Schoolfield, p. 217.
140 J. TODOROVIĆ
The city says everything you must think, […] and while you believe you are
visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines
herself and all her parts. (p. 14)
Images of movement and unexpected occurrences like those associated

with the city of Argia and Tamara were thoroughly explored in the
Baroque visual repertoire. The Baroque artist Andrea Pozzo asserted in
his 1690s treatise on perspective that there is no true illusion without the
semblance of movement, and his work exemplifies some of the period’s
most daring experiments in illusion.10 In contrast to the object-based type
of illusion characterised by Gijsbrechts’ trompe l‘oeil, Pozzo contributes to
an alternative type of illusion: one that is centred on movement. Theatre
technology and design contributed to this illusion-filled world of art as
highly sophisticated festival apparati, previously confined only to theatres
and spectacles of state, became a part of religious and secular visual
culture throughout the seventeenth-century Europe. This truly marvel-
lous combination of visual arts and theatre technology reached one of its
most curious manifestations in Pozzo’s altar apparato of San Ignatius in
the main church of the Jesuit order Il Gesu in Rome.
Situated near the entrance into the church, the chapel and the altar of
San Ignatius at first resembles other similar spaces designed during the
Baroque era. The chapel, commissioned in 1695, is decorated with lavish
polychrome marble and gilded bronze that reflect the riches of heaven
and the divine light that suffuses the sacred space. Above the altar, two
victorious angels made in whitest Cararra marble flank the monogram of
Christ, a symbol of the Jesuits. Impressive in its combination of lapis lazuli
and gilded bronze, it testifies to the all-encompassing power of the Order
that facilitated the triumph of the ecclesia militans, or Church militant.
The altarpiece, composed as an edifying image, depicts Ignatius Loyola in
the pivotal scene from his vitae. Amidst the glory of Heavenly vision he
receives his mandate from Christ—namely, a banner that is embroidered
10 Pozzo’s treatise was first published in Rome in 1693, and translated as: Andrea
Pozzo, Rules and examples of perspective proper for painters and architects, etc., in English
and Latin: containing a most easie and expeditious method to delineate in perspective all
designs relating to architecture, after a new manner, wholly free from the confusion of occult
lines, trans. by John James of Greenwich (London: J. Senex and R. Gosling, c.1724–
32), see Archivbe.net, https://archive.org/details/rulesexamplesofp00pozz/page/n9. For
the Baroque concept of movement and transition, see Maravall, Culture of the Baroque,
pp. 175–80; Todorović, Of Mirrors, Roses and Nothingness, pp. 95–122.
with the same monogram that embellishes the apex of the altar vault,
and that represents the mission of the Jesuit Order that Ignatius Loyola
founded and spread to the very edges of the known world.
But this is merely the first level of perception. Pozzo‘s painting serves
only as a cover to a marvel that is greater than the one achieved by
the chapel and altarpiece. The chapel conceals a sophisticated mechanism
(restored only recently, in 2008) that lowers the painting into a specially
created recess and reveals a full-length statue of San Ignatius, standing
triumphantly in the niche behind it. Covered in the same combination
of gold and lapis lazuli, the statue by Baroque sculptor Pierre Legros
shimmers as an ethereal vision in front of the beholder. The miraculous
appearance of San Ignatius to the pious is meant to further enhance the
divine lustre of the founder of the Jesuits. Here Baroque deception is at its
most complete. Painting and statue follow and complement each other,
allowing the figure of Loyola to enter the space of the church, and share
it with his faithful. The illusion employed here not only tricks the eye
through perspectival devices, but thoroughly explores the power of move-
ment. Thus combined, these visual trappings create a near miraculous
sensory experience.
Like Pozzo’s painting and religious apparato, the beholder of invis-
ible cities confronts the unexpected proliferation of perspectives and
prospects:
From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective,
multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it
consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on
either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other. (p. 105)
There is truly no barrier between the space of vision and the space
of the beholder. Both Pozzo’s and Calvino’s audiences are immediate
and privileged witnesses to transformations so marvellous that their own
perception ceases to be credible, as if their own eyes could not be trusted.
This effect is characteristic of many Baroque works of art. As the contem-
porary poet Baltasar Gracian poignantly wrote: ‘One requires eyes on the
very eyes, eyes to see how they see’.11
11 Baltasar Gracian, Obras Completas, ed. by Arturo del Hoyo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1967),
p. 672. Translation by R. Rosini.
142 J. TODOROVIĆ
The uncertainty of one’s gaze and the fallibility of one’s senses are as
much a preoccupation of Calvino’s as they were of his Baroque predeces-
sors. The city of Phyllis carries the same ambiguity of presence as Pozzo’s
apparato. It is the place that makes unreliable witnesses of our eyes:
Millions of eyes lookup at windows, bridges, capers, and they might be

scanning a blank page. Many are the cities like Phyllis, which elude the
gaze of all, except the man who catches them by surprise. (p. 91)
Challenging the established verities is one of the principles in Calvino’s

Invisible Cities. With his travels Marco Polo defies the reality of measured
spaces, and questions the existence of the cities themselves. He promises
the Great Khan that he will visit even those cities which do not exist; he
will continue his quest until the ‘shapeless dust cloud invades all conti-
nents’ (p. 137) and obliterates everything. Real and unreal overlap and
complement each other, as they did for centuries. Naturalia and arti-
ficielia stand side by side as they did in every Baroque wunderkammer,
since only in this unity of the visible and invisible can the universe itself
be appropriately contained.
Cities and Chimeras

One of the most peculiar elements of the invisible cities described by
Calvino is their extreme fluidity. It is often perceptible in their constant
changes and in the almost endless pluralities they contain in themselves.
It is not only the sense of illusion, already described, but a more encom-
passing image of inconstancy of the world. In his dialogue with the Great
Khan Marco Polo claims that the cities he travels through closely resemble
ashes ‘he gathers along the way’ (p. 126). Although his narrative renders
visited cities solid and real, these cities are mainly chimeras:
On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for
the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because
they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. (p. 32)
In this passage Calvino touches on another important aspect of the

Baroque legacy that defined and defied the very structure of the world.
This is the understanding that the world was no more than a shadow, a
mere apparition, a dream:
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed,

but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or,
its reverse, a fear. (p. 44)
For Calvino, as for Baroque artists, the visible world was not a fixed cate-
gory. It was a liminal realm constructed from diverse assumptions; it was
entirely fluid. Therefore, the metaphor of dream perfectly encapsulated it.
One of the great Baroque scholars, Antonio Maravall, justly recognised
the dream as one of the defining forms of the arts of the period.12 Dream,
indeed, was far from being another version of reality, it was reality itself.
This ambiguity of existence deeply influenced the entire culture of this
age, and left lasting models that persists into our time. Thus, the words of
Prospero from Shakespeare’s Tempest capture the perceived ephemerality
of the fabric of the world and ultimately of our ‘little life’, which:
Like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave[s] not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.13
The same dreamlike and fluid quality Calvino incorporates in the city of
Irene, the ultimate metamorphic city, a place that changes its appearance
according to the viewpoint of the traveller. One could never trust one’s
observations in this city. Even its names are perpetually altering:
He has not succeeded in discovering which is the city, that those of the
plateau call Irene. For that matter, it is of slight importance […] Irene is
a name for a city in a distance, and if you approach, it changes.
For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is
another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is a city
where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city that you leave
never to return. Each deserves a different name[.] (pp. 124–25)
Although they were collected in the Atlas of Khan’s Empire, some places
refuse to be fixed, they remain ethereal and slippery as visions and dreams.
Like Baroque spaces they escape firm categories, always existing on that
almost imperceptible border of presence and absence. This sense of the
12 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, pp. 180–87.

13 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV:i:155–8.
144 J. TODOROVIĆ
fluidity of place, of space in constant movement, is one of the obsessions

of Baroque art that informs a work by the seventeenth-century Spanish
poet Luis de Góngora, Soledades (in English, The Solitudes ). In his imag-
ination he, not unlike Calvino, creates places that are always on the verge
of change, and constructs spaces caught in the perpetual metamorphoses:
The morning, then, sees these trees

feigning forests, emulating avenues
enwalled in liquid crystal[.]14
The concepts of absence and vanishing, both conveying the ephemer-

ality of the world, are crucial for Calvino and Baroque artists as they are
for de Góngora. The Baroque concern with these concepts is strikingly
apparent in the mother of pearl paintings that circulated throughout the
seventeenth century and were particularly popular in the Spanish Amer-
icas. The mother of pearl screen with the Battle of Belgrade (1688), now
in the European collection of the Brooklyn museum, is a rather singular
example.
This image went on a voyage as torturous as any undergone by
Calvino’s narrator. Commissioned for the Viceroy of New Spain this
sumptuous screen was used as a subtle but effective display of Habsburg
power in the New World. Depicting one of the celebrated battles between
the Most Catholic Monarch and the Infidel under the walls of Belgrade,
the screen presented an unusual rendering of the historical scene. It was
the work of Mexican artists from the Gonzales family who used the Dutch
print of this renowned battle and translated it into a completely new
medium. The use of the mother of pearl background gave it a flickering
and otherworldly quality not usually associated with pictorial records of
great historical events. From the imposing city walls through the whirl-
wind of the battle to the heroic figures that scale the battlements, the
entire scene seems to glimmer on the verge of disappearance. Although
it was hardly the main aim of the state commission, the finished screen
conveyed a feeling of impermanence so akin to the spirit of the age. This
vanishing battle was as fluid as the world that created it, confirming the
ultimate vanity of all earthly matters.
14 Luis de Góngora, The Solitudes, trans. by Edith Grossman (London: Penguin, 2013),
p. 92. Ebook.
The places Marco Polo visits in Khan’s Empire, like the image of
Belgrade in this screen, seem to evaporate in front of his very eyes.
Throughout the novel the feeling of vanishing deepens, as if with every
city visited Calvino’s narrator distances himself even further from the place
of his longing. His city metaphorically retreats, thus becoming more and
more invisible. As Marco Polo confesses to the Great Khan: ‘memory’s
images, once they are fixed in words, are erased’ (p. 87). They have the
same insubstantiality as those feathery apparitions in de Góngora’s sky:
With audacity my thought

scaled the heights, clad in feathers,
whose daring incautious flight
– if it has not given thy foam its name –
of its well-feathered raiment
the diaphanous annals of the wind
will preserve the vanishment.15
Ideas of vanishing, of slipping beneath perception, gaze and existence,

were profoundly connected with the general Baroque sense of the fluidity
and momentariness of the world. Of all the artists of the Baroque age,
it is the artist formerly known as Monsu Desiderio who most precisely
captured the sense of ambiguity of things that Calvino evokes in his novel,
both in his life and work. Even the identity of this artist has evaded the
quests of researchers: although it is possible that he may be identified with
François de Nomé (c.1593–after 1644), his own biography and origins
are as much of a riddle as his surviving work. Although not much of
his oeuvre remains, it is mainly centred on cities of imagination, curious
apparitions, images of destruction and decay that appear to be only loosely
connected to his ostensible subject matter.
A work that comes close to personifying the Baroque notion of invis-
ible cities is his small canvas A Martyrdom of a Female Saint (date
unknown) presently in the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. As with many
of his paintings, the title only provides a pretext for the true subject
that occupied the artist, namely the fading worlds of our mind’s eye. A
minute figure of the saint, kneeling in front of an executioner, is removed
to the far left corner of the painting and is on the point of exiting the
picture plane. She seems barely a footnote, an afterthought of the artist.
15 Luis de Góngora, The Solitudes, p. 138.

146 J. TODOROVIĆ
The entire space of the canvas is dominated by a paradoxically transient

image of a fortified city. It is not the town of great Biblical narratives so
common to the Baroque painting. There are no imposing battlements,
nor gleaming turrets with martyrs as their focal protagonists. Instead, the
city denies its own presence; it appears to be disintegrating in front of
our very eyes. All the laws of architecture and gravity are denied here,
harmony and symmetry are replaced by their opposites, and filled with
vestiges of memories and longings. Like Calvino’s cities, it is created
through processes of negation and discontinuity. Turrets flanking the gate
are overgrown with ivy and trees spring from the roofs, while sculptural
decoration and windows appear in the most unexpected of places. Instead
of solid battements and monumental walls, melancholy remnants of the
past are the real substance of this metropolis. It is a phantasm, a hallu-
cinatory dream that evokes the Baroque disbelief in the solidity of our
realities. Disconcertingly anticipating Calvino, this is a city of forgotten
spaces and its presence is, like the Khan’s empire, ‘an endless formless
ruin’ (p. 11) which once was a sum of all wonders. It encapsulates the
sense that Calvino shared with the Baroque artists that: ‘Elsewhere is a
negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering
the much he has not had and will never have’ (p. 29).
PART III
Architectures of the Literary Imagination
The essays in this part turn to the various relationships between archi-
tectural space and writers’ own imaginations, whether that space takes
the form of the houses they lived in, the structure of their work, or
the source of their images of making. It comprises five essays on built
space in art and literature from early modern to contemporary times.
Whereas the chapters thus far suggest ways in which Bachelard’s and
Heidegger’s understanding of the house might profitably be extended
through engagements with imaginary architectures, those in the final part
of the volume indicate ways in which house, mind, and literary production
become co-terminous.
CHAPTER 10
‘His Midas Touch’: Building and Writing

in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser and Seamus
Heaney
Archie Cornish
Introduction
Edmund Spenser (1552–99) and Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) have
seldom been compared, perhaps because what they have in common is
also what divides them. Spenser lived for the last twenty years of his
life in Ireland, as a government official and colonial administrator of the
Munster Plantation, a project initiated by Elizabeth I’s government to
confiscate land in Ireland’s southernmost province and ‘plant’ it with
English and Welsh settlers. Heaney was born in County Derry, one of
the six counties that remain part of the United Kingdom as Northern
Ireland; his upbringing, however, was Catholic and his primary identity
Irish. For Heaney, Spenser personifies British imperialism in Ireland and
its associated wrongs. ‘Perhaps I just make out | Edmund Spenser’, says
the speaker of ‘Bog Oak’ in Wintering Out (1972), imagining the Eliza-
bethan poet ‘dreaming sunlight’ while starving Irish peasants ‘creep […]
towards watercress and carrion’. In the introduction to his translation
A. Cornish (B)
Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

150 A. CORNISH
of Beowulf (2000), Heaney defends his translation of Heorot, Hroth-

gar’s hall, as a ‘bawn’1 : encountering Heorot, he ‘cannot help thinking
of Edmund Spenser in Kilcolman Castle, reading the early cantos of The
Faerie Queene […] before the Irish would burn the castle and drive
Spenser out of Munster’.2 Despite this rather compassionate compar-
ison of Spenser with the minstrel in Heorot, Kilcolman—Spenser’s home
on the Munster Plantation from 1588 to 98—remains a symbol of the
patterns ‘of conquest and colony, absorption and resistance, integrity and
antagonism’ that have long characterised relations between and within the
islands of Britain and Ireland.3
Contested places matter to these poets. Spenser engages both directly
and obliquely with his colonial Irish experience, in his epic romance The
Faerie Queene (1590–96) as well as in his shorter and more occasional
poems. Heaney’s early work opens the ground of his rural childhood
in the divided north, while his critical prose reflects deeply on how an
Irish writer faces his or her homeland. By extension, both poets are inter-
ested in the connections between poetic composition and other kinds of
construction—specifically here, the crafts of homemaking and building.
This chapter compares the building of houses with the writing of poems,
and outlines how differently the two relate in the work and world of either
poet. For Spenser, building is antecedent to writing, subject to contingen-
cies of time and place which the most ambitious poetry can transcend.
For Heaney, whose modern post-Romantic poetics might be described
as ‘artisan’, crafts such as building emerge as viable metaphors for poetic
composition.
Colin Clout at Home

In 1595 Spenser published Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, a pastoral
dialogue in rhyming pentameters. Colin, a persona Spenser had previ-
ously adopted in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), arrives home to a
1 Derived from the Irish word bó-dhún, ‘bawn’ in Elizabethan English denoted ‘a
fortified enclosure, enceinte, or circumvallation’ (Oxford English Dictionary, s. v. ‘bawn’).
2 Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), ‘Introduction’, p. xxx.
Heaney’s chronology of the composition of The Faerie Queene is a little impressionistic:
the ‘early cantos’ were probably composed in the mid-1580s, while Kilcolman was burnt
in 1598.
3 Heaney, Beowulf , p. xxx.
10 ‘HIS MIDAS TOUCH’: BUILDING AND WRITING IN THE POETRY … 151
desolate Ireland; he tells his fellow shepherds of his journey over the Irish
Sea to the court of Cynthia where ‘vaunted vanitie’ (line 719) is rife. The
poem is dedicated to Sir Walter Ralegh, to whom Spenser acknowledges
himself ‘bounden’ for the hospitality shown him ‘at my late being in
England’. The implied self-positioning away from ‘England’ is confirmed
in the dedication’s parting words—‘from my house of Kilcolman the
27. of December 1591’.4 Kilcolman is written into Spenser’s career for
the first time, as he presents himself as an outlier, a marginal figure,
even though his role on the nominal margin is to uphold the centre’s
imperial authority. Spenser also implies a link between his house and his
work, and encourages the reader overhearing his dedication to ponder it.
‘1591’ as a date seems curious, as the poem was published in 1595; the
dedication appears to be out of time, a relic of the text’s compositional
history. Halfway through the poem, Colin lists the shepherd-poets among
Cynthia’s court:
There also is (ah no, he is not now)

But since I said he is, he quite is gone,
Amyntas quite is gone and lies full low…
(lines 432–34)
‘Amyntas’ is usually interpreted as Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange,

who died in 1594.5 His death interrupts Colin, who records his second
thoughts in the parentheses and the self-reflexive ‘since I said he is’. With
this instance of correctio, trope of self-revision, the poem preserves the
traces of its own process of creation. The dedication suggests that it was
begun in 1591 and adapted according to shifts of circumstance over the
next four years. Colin Clouts Come Home Againe was published between
the two instalments (1590, 1596) of Spenser’s allegorical epic romance,
The Faerie Queene. Like Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, The Faerie
Queene evolved over many years; however, where Spenser’s occasional
poem highlights traces of its compositional history, his masterpiece mostly
4 ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Againe’, in The Shorter Poems, ed. by Richard McCabe
(London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 343–71 (p. 344).
5 Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 655; The Minor Poems I, ed. by Charles Grosvenor Osgood
and others, The Works of Edmund Spenser, A Variorum Edition, ed. by Edwin Greenlaw
et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), vol. VII, p. 472.
152 A. CORNISH
tries to conceal them. The 1590 text, for example, ends with the happy
union of two reunited lovers, Amoret and Scudamour, into a single body.
In 1596, the plot requires that Scudamour is alone once again; accord-
ingly, the original ending is altered, but silently. The Faerie Queene, unlike
Spenser’s poem about Colin Clout, makes no equivalent explicit reference
to Kilcolman.
I want to suggest a connection between Spenser’s reference to his
house and his decision—in a poem concerned with the ebb and flow of
circumstance—to preserve traces of a poem’s accidental evolution. Occa-
sional writing of this kind, the poem’s dialogue with its dedication implies,
is like making a house. In Spenser’s Ireland, housebuilding required the
harnessing of chances as they presented themselves, and the exploitation
of occasion. Spenser’s acquisition and renovation of Kilcolman display an
openness to an acknowledgment of contingency which his masterpiece
strongly resists. The builder of a house must exploit contingency; the epic
poet must not allow contingencies to blight the prosecution of original
intention. Renaissance poetry is often as occasional as housemaking, but
aims in its most serious instances for a higher pitch of coherence; in its
most exalted forms, that is, it attempts to appear to transcend occasion,
to exist outside time.
Kilcolman
Spenser acquired Kilcolman Castle and its estate in 1588, after eight years
living in Ireland. The castle, now in ruins, comprised four buildings under
his ownership, of which only its Tower House remains. Standing on a hill
overlooking a seasonal lake, it is to be found just north of the towns of
Buttevant and Doneraile in Co. Cork. The river Awbeg, prominent in
Spenser’s poetry, flows close by. A patent (or ‘fiant’) of 1590 proclaims
Spenser’s entitlement to the land ‘for ever, in fee farm, by the name
of Hap Hazard’.6 It seems plausible that with ‘Hap Hazard’ Spenser
is wittily acknowledging the chancy and underhand means by which he
got his house. ‘Haphazard’ in sixteenth century English was a noun as
well as an adjective, denoting ‘simple chance or accident; fortuitousness,
6 See Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), p. 205.
luck’.7 A hazard itself could refer both to a chance outcome or to a risk;

both senses apply here.8 He acquired the estate probably in September
of 1588, shortly after the defeat of the Armada. Spenser was no stranger
to Munster, the surrounding province. In 1584, following the quashing
of the second Desmond Rebellion (1579–83), he had been appointed
deputy to the chief clerk of the newly established Council. The escheat-
ment of the Kilcolman estate was disputed by local aristocrat Thomas
Roche; Spenser possibly took on ownership from Andrew Reade, another
English settler, because his governmental position gave him greater heft in
the dispute.9 His renovations of the castle—as recently as the mid-1580s
the property of a rebel—show the same willingness to act opportunisti-
cally. A systematic remodelling of the castle ab initio was not possible:
Spenser’s budget was probably modest and local skilled masons were
lacking.10 His changes therefore were adaptations.11 Spenser did not
build a house systematically from scratch; he renovated a haphazard.
English building in the late sixteenth-century Ireland was often, as in
Spenser’s experience, subject to contingency. In parts of Ireland beyond
the ‘Pale’, stability depended on the co-operation of the so-called ‘Old
English’ landowners, and was rarely prolonged. Building, therefore, was
typically constrained by the imperative of security. After the rebellion in
the 1580s, the English settlers in Munster attempted to improve the forti-
fications on the province’s towns, such as Cork and Youghal, where their
authority was more solid than in the countryside.12 Yet their plans were
severely hampered, once again, by the lack of available skilled labour. Only
7 OED, s.v. ‘haphazard, n.’, sense A1.

8 OED, s.v. ‘hazard, n.’, senses A2, A3.
9 Ray Heffner, ‘Spenser’s Acquisition of Kilcolman’, Modern Language Notes, 46 (1931),
493–98 (p. 495).
10 Hadfield, Edmund Spenser, p. 220.
11 Kilcolman’s archaeology suggests that the great hall above the staircase was modified
to create a parlour—the small private room whose popularity in the sixteenth century
shows the increasing importance of privacy. On the trend towards privacy, see Mark
Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Architecture of the Elizabethan Era (London: Country
Life Limited, 1966); Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture
and Court Life, 1460–1547 (London: Yale University Press, 1993); and Felicity Heal,
Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
12 In some cases, they planned and built new towns, such as Ballybeg and Mallow.
See Thomas Herron, Spenser’s Irish Work: Poetry, Plantation and Colonial Reformation
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 40.
154 A. CORNISH
settlers nobler and richer than Spenser could afford to be more system-
atic: The Myrtles, Walter Ralegh’s house near Youghal, while unusual
for its lack of surviving fortification, possesses impressive solidity and
symmetry; just south of Spenser’s estate, his neighbour Thomas Norris
built Mallow Castle according to a polygonal plan. Systematic castles
like these resemble contemporaneous structures in England, yet with an
important difference. For the English manor houses of the later sixteenth
century castellation was a decorative feature, a quotation of an imag-
ined chivalric past. Montacute, for example, a Somerset manor house
completed for Sir Edward Phelips in 1601, is surrounded by an intricate
balustraded wall never intended for defensive use.13 In Ireland’s fledgling
Plantations, crenulation and machicolation were functional necessities. At
home, fortification was a matter of style; on the imperial frontier, it was
function.
Architecture: Art and Craft

In sixteenth-century England architecture had not yet achieved the status
of an art form. Despite the rehabilitation of Vitruvius, and the theo-
retical interventions of Alberti and others in the fifteenth century, the
construction of buildings during Elizabeth’s reign remained the remit of
craftspeople—masons, carvers, limners—who worked according to prac-
tised skill rather than theoretical or scientific knowledge. The innovative
and ambitious work of Robert Smythson, master mason for several of the
‘prodigy houses’ built in the sixteenth century, helped to elevate architec-
ture, which in the seventeenth century began to claim the dignity of high
art, as it had earlier in certain Italian cultures. Keen to avoid comparison
with her father, Elizabeth had encouraged very little royal or ecclesias-
tical building. Architectural innovation was accordingly confined to the
private sector—ambitious houses such as Longleat and Wollaton, both
built under Smythson’s supervision—and was thus open to accusations of
frivolity. As late as 1615, Sir George Buck affirms that:
There be in this citie [London] cunning masters, for either shadowing,

pourtraying, counterfetting, tricking, painting, enlumining, or limming.
But this is now an art […] much fallen from the reputation which it had
13 Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation

Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 70.
aunciently… sure I am, it is now accounted base and mechanicall, and a

mere mestier [remit] of an artificer, and handy craftsman.14
Architecture anywhere in the British Isles was closely associated with the
‘handy craftsman’. (For Buck, this is a problem; his anxiety belies a keen-
ness to uphold a social superiority of arts over crafts.) In Ireland, on the
margins of the Queen’s imperial authority, this association was amplified.
Architecture on the precarious Plantations could rarely afford a status
loftier than that of craft.
The haphazard nature of life on the Munster Plantation, and to a
lesser extent of English building in general, fostered powerful fantasies
of systematic construction, both architectural and political. In the 1590s
Spenser circulated A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), a trea-
tise in which he argues for the imposition by force of English law and
civilisation throughout Ireland. It takes the form of an Erasmian dialogue
between Eudoxus, who is holding a ‘mappe of Irelande’, and Irenius,
who has first-hand experience of the country. Irenius’s proposals for the
division of Ireland into new zones reflects his desire ‘to make all plaine’,
to turn the real country into something as clean as the map.15 As Julia
Lupton puts it, Spenser expresses through Irenius ‘a structuring fantasy
[…] a fantasy of structure, which informs the text’s colonising desire for
spatial mastery’.16 Recent criticism of Spenser’s treatise has recognised its
impatience with Ireland’s definition as an imperial subject, and a desire to
remodel it as a colony like Virginia, subjected directly to the Queen’s
authority.17 Experience of acting haphazardly engendered fantasies of
acting ab initio, from first principles, according to system.
14 George Buck, quoted in Girouard, Robert Smythson, ‘Introduction’, p. 19.

15 Spenser, ‘A View of the Present State of Ireland’ [1596], in The Prose Works,
Variorum, vol. X, p. 59, l. 487.
16 Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Mapping Mutability: or, Spenser’s Irish Plot’, in Representing
Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. by Brendan Bradshaw,
Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, pp. 93–115 (p. 101).
17 Richard McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics
of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 17–20. The Irish aristocrats
had recognised Henry VIII as their ‘lord’ in 1541, without directly submitting to his
monarchical authority.
156 A. CORNISH
Building in The Faerie Queene

Such fantasies of structure are also realised in The Faerie Queene. The
poem’s imaginary landscape is dotted with buildings; their architecture, in
many cases, seems obsessively systematic. It would be naive to assume that
each of the castles in Faeryland is an image, in negative, of Kilcolman. Yet
in general there is a striking difference between the renovated haphazard
where Spenser lived, and the programmatically designed castles which
he wrote. The poem’s most vivid allegorical building is the House of
Temperance, a castle that represents the human body. Its systematic
division is minute, and its building was accordingly methodical:
And all so faire, and fensible withall,

Not built of bricke, ne yet of stone and lime,
But of thing like to that Aegytian slime
Whereof King Nine whilome built Babell towre […]
(II.ix.21.3–6)
This is building ab initio in the extreme. The castle’s geometric perfec-

tion, its absolute clarity of meaning, is inversely proportional to the traces
of its construction. Disdaining ‘bricke […] stone and lime’, the imaginary
castle seems to shrug off association with the process of building and the
‘mechanicall’ skills associated with it. Its ‘Aegyptian slime’ alludes to the
common identification of Cairo with Babylon, and to the superior matter
with which Babel was built. ‘Babell towre’, however, famously came to
ruin; if this castle of perfect material represents the human body, then
the stanza sets two dwelling places—the building and the body—against
each other in a contest of durability, while also making an oblique biblical
observation that both houses and bodies are made of earth and slime,
and will perish. ‘Nine’, Spenser’s variation on King Ninus, also estab-
lishes a parallel between building up lines of a wall and constructing the
lines of a stanza, which in The Faerie Queene is nine lines long. Although
Faeryland features many buildings of a humbler aspect (in Book III, for
example, Florimell takes refuge in a witch’s hovel) such lowly, haphazard
buildings are less crammed with allegorical significance than the palaces.
Buildings whose construction and form transcended haphazard were, in
Spenser’s world, mostly imaginary. Requiring imaginary buildings to be
allegorical—to manifest meaning spatially—also required them to disavow
their materiality, their links to earthly craft.
The projects of construction in which Spenser was simultaneously

involved in the last two decades of the sixteenth century—on the one
hand, his home on the Munster Plantation, on the other his magnum
opus—were clearly not unrelated. As Spenser’s biographer Andrew
Hadfield argues, ‘Spenser’s desire for an estate underpinned his literary
ambitions’: Kilcolman provided ‘the material base for the epic poetry,
though his quest also compromised his lofty ideals’.18 The acquisition
and renovation of Kilcolman, which may well have involved the sly abuse
of office, and exemplified a general exclusion of the native Irish from
their land, was clearly not ethically ‘lofty’. Yet even apart from a dubious
context of colonial imposition, housebuilding in the sixteenth century
was not a high kind of making. Unlike the creation of epic, it lacked the
cultural heft of an art form, and was therefore subject to the contingencies
of place and time. As the systematically built castles of The Faerie Queene
show, Spenser attempted in his epic art to transcend the constraints of
occasion. His frontier housebuilding could afford no such luxury.
Seamus Heaney’s Places

When Seamus Heaney died in August 2013, Harvard University
constructed a domestic memorial. Suite I-12 of Adams House, where
Heaney had stayed as visiting professor and poet in residence, has become
the Heaney Suite. Designed to reflect Heaney’s long involvement with
Harvard as a visiting professor and poet, the suite provides a medita-
tive space for students to read and work.19 ‘Perhaps they’ll be moved’,
speculates an article in Harvard Magazine, ‘in a way described by
Heaney in his poem “The Master”, [whose] narrator visits the quarters
of a revered elder who “dwelt in himself | like a rook in an unroofed
tower”’.20 Harvard’s Heaney Suite has a counterpart in the Old World: in
Bellaghy, Co. Derry, the poet’s home town, the Seamus Heaney Home-
Place opened in 2016. A museum and arts centre dedicated to Heaney,
it features a reconstruction of the writing room in the Dublin house
18 Hadfield, Edmund Spenser, p. 204.

19 Heaney first visited Harvard in 1979. From 1984 to 1995 he was Boylston Professor
of Poetry and Rhetoric. He was Poet in Residence until 2006.
20 Sophia Nguyen, ‘A New Life for Heaney’s Home at Harvard’, Harvard Magazine, 31
March 2015, https://harvardmagazine.com/2015/03/heaney-suite-dedication [accessed
5 November 2018].
158 A. CORNISH
where he lived from 1976, including the skylight described in an epony-

mous poem (Seeing Things, 1991). Part of the attraction of both spaces
is an accompanying intuition that a trace of Heaney might linger in
them—in the Harvard rooms where he slept and lived, and in the study
reconstructed using his own books and possessions.
Sense of place, both macroscopic and domestic, remained a preoc-
cupation of Heaney’s throughout his career. His first four collections,
on which I will concentrate here, vividly depict the dwelling places of
his childhood in Co. Derry, and their rich atmospheres. The attempts
of these early volumes to mythologise contemporary Northern Irish
Catholic culture have been widely discussed. The Jungian flavour of that
mythology, and Heaney’s abiding interest in Jung, are well known.21 For
him, the personal strife of the spirit has roots in unmastered conflicts
inherited from a collective past. (Landscape is one of the chief means by
which such cultural inheritances are preserved.) Poetry accesses collective
consciousness—though Heaney celebrates in Jung not only his sense of
art’s ancientness, but also the notion of ‘a new level of consciousness’
that poetry might provide, on which the self becomes detached from
the trauma preserved within it as the ‘affect’ becomes an ‘object’.22 Yet
less prominent in critical treatments of Heaney’s early work are the many
craftspeople it portrays. Many are farmers, of course, but they also include
builders and maintainers of houses. The crafts of construction and main-
tenance, I will argue in this section, are available to Heaney as suitable
models for poetic composition; however, craft is characterised not as an
organic response to the earth but a controlling of the earth through skill.
Of course, Heaney demonstrates awareness of the differences between the
art of writing and the craft of building, especially in his later work. Yet
despite its limitations, craft remains for Heaney an adequate metaphor for
writing; it is never, as for Spenser, its opposite and marked inferior.
21 Heaney described himself to Frank Kinahan in 1982 as ‘Jungian in Religion’ in

‘An Interview with Seamus Heaney’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1982), 405–14 (p. 409). See
also Neil Corcoran, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber, 1986); Fran Brearton,
‘Heaney and the Feminine’, in The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. by
Bernard O’Donoghue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 73–91.
22 Seamus Heaney, ‘Place and Displacement: Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland’, in
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 112–33
(p. 112).
Dark Dwellings
The built dwelling places of Heaney’s early collections often possess the
same mysterious and immersive darkness as the ground itself. Door into
the Dark begins with two stable poems: ‘Night-Piece’ depicts a close and
closed place where the horse is ‘bundled under the roof’; in ‘Gone’, the
stable is ‘old in his must’.23 The speaker of ‘The Outlaw’ recalls taking
a heifer to be ‘serviced’ by an unlicensed bull belonging to ‘Old Kelly’,
who ‘whooped and prodded his outlaw | Who, in his own time, resumed
the dark, the straw’.24 These lines imply a similarity between Kelly and
his bull: they live nestled in the dark, too deep to be flushed out by the
law. The ‘door into the dark’ to which the collection’s title refers is that
of ‘The Forge’, where a blacksmith ‘grunts’ at passing traffic ‘and goes in,
with a slam and flick’ to a seemingly more authentic, grounded place.25
‘In Gallarus Oratory’ compares a religious building in Kerry to ‘a turf-
stack | A core of old dark walled up with stone’, where a crowd seeks
communion with God by experiencing intimacy with the earth. Such inti-
macy can be found even momentarily, as in ‘Oracle’ from Wintering Out,
in which a sprite-like ‘you’ hides ‘in the hollow | of the willow tree’ and
becomes ‘lobe and larynx | of the mossy places’.26 The willow tree, like
many spaces in Heaney’s work, evokes the womb. To dwell, Heaney’s
early work implies, is to go deep into the ground, or far back to a uterine
darkness.
Dwellings as dark and marginal as these have political significance.
Houses, especially those built on contested land, stand as symbols of
the dwelling of a particular people, and the manner of their dwelling.
In ‘Frontiers of Writing’, the last of the Oxford lectures collected as
The Redress of Poetry (1995), Heaney imagines a ‘quincunx’ of Irish
houses, four totemic dwellings on Ireland’s coasts surrounding a central
stone tower. The southern point of this ‘diamond shape’ is Kilcolman:
‘Edmund Spenser’s tower, as it were, the tower of English conquest and
the Anglicization of Ireland, linguistically, culturally, institutionally’.27
23 Heaney, Door into the Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 3–4.
24 Heaney, Door into the Dark, p. 7.
26 Heaney, Wintering Out (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 18.
27 ‘Frontiers of Writing’, in The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber and
Faber, 1995), pp. 186–204 (p. 199).
160 A. CORNISH
Redressing the conquest gathered in and symbolised by Kilcolman is

Yeats’s tower at Ballylee in Co. Galway, mythologised in 1928 as The
Tower. Thoor Ballylee restores ‘the spiritual values and magical world-
view that Spenser’s armies and language had destroyed’.28 Alongside
the inheritance of Yeats’s mythology of Irish dwelling, the Northern
Irish poets beginning their career in the 1960s had another reason,
more prosaic and painful, to appreciate the socio-political inflections of
houses and dwellings. Adam Hanna makes the sharp point that for the
Catholic minority during the civil rights campaign of the 1960s, injus-
tice had become encapsulated in ‘the discriminatory allocation of council
accommodation in some areas in favour of the Protestant majority’.29
Participating in a Yeatsian mythology of landscape, the dwelling places of
Heaney’s early collections also claim centrality for themselves in a climate
of marginalisation.
Heaney’s sense of what it is to dwell might initially seem, on this
evidence, in close sympathy with Martin Heidegger’s. The German
philosopher’s ‘Poetically Man Dwells’, a short essay which takes its title
from a line of Hölderlin, suggests an ancient affinity between poetry
and dwelling. Heidegger imagines building as only the subsequence of
dwelling, and a kind of appendix to cultivation: building ‘in the sense of
aedificare’ means ‘erecting things that cannot come into being and subsist
by growing’.30 Another essay, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, elevates
building somewhat, but even here Heidegger argues that true building
can only occur after dwelling; in fact, true building is a kind of dwelling.
Buildings are understood as ‘locations’—points in space which release ‘the
fourfold’ of earth and sky, man and gods. Releasing the fourfold, effec-
tive locations provide a ‘site’ for close and organic connections between
man and his environment. Heidegger provides an archetype of this kind
of dwelt building:
28 ‘Frontiers of Writing’, p. 199. The eastern point of Heaney’s diamond is the Martello
Tower in Dublin Bay, where Joyce’s Ulysses begins, which represents the attempt to
Hellenize the island. Carrickfergus Castle in Co. Antrim, meanwhile, puts Heaney in
mind of Louis MacNeice and his ability to combine in a single thought the British and
Irish parts of his identity. The four look inwards to ‘the tower of prior Irelandness’, of
Ireland’s ancient, pre-colonial past, in the centre of the island at Clonmacnoise.
29 Adam Hanna, Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), p. 3.
30 Martin Heidegger, ‘Poetically Man Dwells’, in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in
Cultural Theory, ed. by Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 109–19 (p. 118).
[A] farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred
years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power
to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into
things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered moun-
tain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring […] It
did not forget the altar corner behind the community table […]31
It is easy to see this farmhouse as a Black Forest variant on Heaney’s

Mossbawn; it is ‘close to the spring’ and the ‘meadows’, just as the houses
at Mossbawn are close to the bog. Heidegger’s imagined ‘spring’ might
put us in mind of the courtyard pump Heaney remembers in a short
recollection of childhood images, and whose repeated sound he hears as
‘omphalos’, Ancient Greek for ‘navel’.32 Yet Heaney’s vision of dwelling
is, from his earliest work onwards, more cautious and ironic—and thus far
more politically savoury—than Heidegger’s. Considering Heaney’s work
from an ecocritical perspective, Greg Garrard argues that even while in
North, where he mythologises the landscape, his poetry ‘thinks dwelling
through to the truth of its ambiguity’.33 Underneath Heidegger’s vener-
ation of pure, responsive building-by-dwelling lies a sense of place that
is terrifyingly singular. As Northern Ireland’s recently violent history
demonstrates, houses must have the right to choose what to place ‘in
the altar corner’. There is no single Northern Irish identity, or form
of dwelling, more authentic than another; the only civilised dwelling is
co-dwelling.
Building as Corrective Craft

Given this persistent alienation from his original dwelling place, we might
think that for Heaney the writing of poems is different from the building
of houses—as different as the ‘squat pen’ from the spade in ‘Digging’. Yet
his early collections present housebuilding, and a host of related crafts, as
light and airy opposites to the seductive but frightening darkness of the
31 Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by

Albert Hofstadter (London: Perennial Library, 1975), pp. 141–59 (p. 157).
32 ‘Mossbawn’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber and Faber,
1980), pp. 17–21 (p. 17).
33 Greg Garrard, ‘Heidegger, Heaney and the Problem of Dwelling’, in Writing the
Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, ed. by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells
(London: Zed Books, 1998), pp. 167–81 (p. 172).
162 A. CORNISH
dwelling places themselves. ‘Thatcher’, from Door into the Dark, is a good
example:
Couchant for days on sods above the rafters,

He shaved and flushed the butts, stitched all together
Into a sloped honeycomb, a stubble patch,
And left them gaping at his Midas touch.34
Here is a local builder and repairer of roofs, a twentieth-century Northern

Irish answer to the imagined ‘peasants’ of Heidegger’s Black Forest who
build ‘by dwelling’. Yet Heaney’s portrait of thatching is striking for its
total lack of Heidegger’s mysticism, or mystification. Rather than welling
up organically from the ground, the thatcher arrives casually (‘some
morning’), deftly, on a bicycle whose poise and balance echoes in the
chiastic vowels of ‘a light ladder and a bag of knives’. His touch, like
his ladder, is ‘light’: the eaves are ‘poked’ and the rods of hazel and
willow are ‘flicked’. His attitude is not that of a slow releaser of latent
earthly energy, but of a professional adroitly ‘warming up’. Lying above
the rafters, he is ‘couchant’, a term drawn not from a mythology of
organic building but from the Anglo-French language of heraldry.35 Like
a sixteenth-century housebuilder, he works not according to an overar-
ching design, but ‘handful by handful’. The thatcher’s work, like the half
rhyme of ‘patch’ and ‘touch’, combines the skill of artistic finish with the
magic of unobtrusiveness.
The thatcher is in distinguished company in Heaney’s early collections,
which are populated by a host of similarly skilled, professional and decid-
edly demythologised craftsmen.36 Even the most mysterious of artisans,
‘The Diviner’ in Death of a Naturalist, is ‘professionally | unfussed’.37
The masons of ‘Scaffolding’ work not only by instinct but also by cautious
skill: they ‘Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, | Secure all
ladders, tighten bolted joints’.38 Once more, craft is a corrective to the

35 OED, s.v. ‘couchant, adj.’, sense 2.
36 Women in Heaney’s work, as feminist criticism has pointed out, are confined narrowly
to archetypal or mythic roles. A related restriction of women in his early work is their
exclusion from craft.
37 Heaney, Death of a Naturalist, p. 23.
dark energies of the ground on which the house is built. The majority
of the craftsmen of Heaney’s early books are farmers; though their work
might be imagined as a more intimate communion with the earth than
housebuilding, Heaney’s farmers exhibit the same artisan professionalism.
At work at the plough in ‘Follower’, Heaney’s father can ‘set the wing
| and fit the bright steel-pointed sock’ like ‘an expert’.39 Of this poem
Elmer Andrews comments that ‘the poet recalls his father’s expertise as
a ploughman, his almost mystical oneness with the natural world’.40 The
farmer’s close union with his earth, compensating for a lack (for Catholics,
particularly pronounced) of representation in the polis, certainly features
in Heaney’s work, as in Wintering Out ’s ‘Gifts of Rain’, in which a farmer
reaches through water to grasp a potato drill, so that ‘sky and ground | are
running naturally among his arms’.41 Yet this poem’s circumstances are
exceptional: the field is flooded, the drills sunken. On a farm unravaged
by the elements, like the one evoked in ‘Follower’, the farmer’s mystical
union is not so much with the earth, as Andrews suggests, as with the
craft of farming.
An Artisan Poetics
Heaney implies an artisan poetics: he imagines the crafts of thatching
and vernacular building (and, more generally, farming) as the salutary
antithesis, rather than the passive accommodation and release, of dark and
ancient energy in the ground. It is worth pausing to trace the develop-
ment of this poetics, and to relate it to Heaney’s thinking on architecture
itself. Heaney was emboldened to write poems about the farms of his
childhood through an encounter with the work of Patrick Kavanagh; yet
Kavanagh’s poetry thinks of farming less as a profession than as an atti-
tude, a setting in life. Heaney’s instinctive connection of (male) artisan
craft to the writing of poetry stems more directly from Robert Frost.
Rachel Buxton’s study of Frost’s influence on Heaney notes the impor-
tance of the American poet’s thinking on the poetic craft. Of central
importance for Buxton is Frost’s assertion that the good poet should

40 Elmer Andrews, The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper (London:
Macmillan, 1988), p. 40.
41 Heaney, Wintering Out, p. 14.
164 A. CORNISH
write the way ‘the Canadian wood-choppers whittle their axe-handles,

following the curve of the grain’.42 The poet is a craftsman who must
be able not only to execute his will, but also to submit to the intentions
inherent, like grain in a wood, in language. As Buxton argues, this associa-
tion of poet and craftsman is a key underlying metaphor in Heaney’s early
collections, where ‘blacksmiths, carpenters, thatchers [are] […] models
for the developing poet’.43 Frost’s remarks on craft are also one source
of Heaney’s distinction, in the essay ‘Feeling Into Words’, between two
skills necessary for the composition of good poetry:
I think technique is different from craft. Craft is what you can learn from
other verse. Craft is the skill of making […] It can be deployed without
reference to the feelings or the self.44
It is striking that for Heaney ‘the skill of making’ is executive and judi-
cious, rather than the attunement to mysterious forces required for good
‘technique’. If he understands poetry to be made partly by craft, and is
able to compare it genuinely to the artisan crafts of his home ground, it
is thanks to Frost as well as his poetic apprenticeship under Philip Hobs-
baum at Queen’s University in Belfast. Yet it is also due to the nature of
such crafts, as the speakers of his poems perceive them: not the Heideg-
gerian accommodation of the earth’s energy, but a precise skilful control
that answers back.
Charles Prince, in a thesis on architecture in the poetry of Heaney
and Derek Walcott, identifies in both poets a ‘search for poetic form that
is intuitively occurring’ and ‘a competing awareness of the inescapable
artificiality of forms’.45 That ‘artificiality’ might easily seem an impo-
sition, an architectural or poetic tradition imposing its norms. Prince
identifies a conservative streak in Heaney’s thinking on architecture, of
which the most sustained example is ‘From Maecenas to MacAlpine’, a
42 Rachel Buxton, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2003), pp. 89–90.
43 Buxton, Robert Frost, p. 95.
44 ‘Feeling Into Words’, Preoccupations, pp. 41–60 (p. 47).
45 Charles Weston Prince, ‘Resonant Forms: Architecture in the Poetry of Seamus
Heaney and Derek Walcott’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Toronto, 2000),
p. 23.
lecture Heaney delivered to a conference of the Royal Institute of Archi-

tects in Ireland (RIAI) in 1986. Heaney considers Coole Park, ancestral
house of Lady Gregory, and its neoclassical bust of the Roman aristocrat
Maecenas, ‘a white cropped head of carved marble’.46 Maecenas in Coole
Park represents for Heaney a ‘covenant’ between ‘the Protestant north of
Europe and the warm south’, but also between modern architects and
their inheritance of ‘classical achievements’ and ‘images of order’.47 He
stands for an elevated skill of making that produces monumental build-
ings of forceful beauty. Heaney proposes as the antithesis of Maecenas
‘the MacAlpine principle’, an attitude to building exemplified by the
Scottish commercial builder and civil engineer Sir Robert McAlpine.48
‘MacAlpine builders are sappers’, who ‘demolish in order to clear the
way’; they signify ‘building as a secular, economic, democratic, utilitarian,
wellington-booted, hard-hatted enterprise’.49 Rural craft in Heaney’s
early collections is not mystical; but neither is it as ‘secular’ as the enter-
prising and industrial building which Heaney deems ‘MacAlpine’. It does
not ‘demolish’. The thatcher’s craft possesses the aesthetic sensitivity of
the Maecenan architecture of Coole Park (and therefore, Heaney goes
on to argue, an openness to the sacred), but none of its aristocratic
dominance. Democratic but not utilitarian, aesthetically sensitive but not
monumental, rural craft evades Heaney’s dichotomy of ‘Maecenas’ and
‘MacAlpine’ and emerges as a viable model for poetry in the twentieth
century.
Conclusion
Spenser and Heaney, whose lives and work were shaped by the island of
Ireland, wrote poems that differ not only in content, but also in what
they imply about the writing process. Spenser’s shorter poems admit
the pressures and demands of occasion, but in The Faerie Queene he
attempts to transcend or at least disguise them. Heaney’s work, on the
other hand, is a continual response to occasion; it proceeds not by a
46 Heaney, ‘From Maecenas to MacAlpine’, in 150 Years of Architecture in Ireland: The

Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland 1839–1989, ed. by John Graby (Dublin: RIAI,
1989), pp. 69–72 (p. 69).
47 Heaney, ‘From Maecenas to MacAlpine’, p. 69.
166 A. CORNISH
prefigured system, but by reacting to the world as it presents itself. Their

difference reflects fundamental shifts in aesthetics between the sixteenth
century and the twentieth and twenty-first. Spenser’s self-fashioning as
a subject of the Queen is as Colin Clout, swept this way and that on
the seas of fortune. Yet the sense of the ideal poet that underpins The
Faerie Queene is of a moral guide more accessible and general than both
philosopher and historian. Allegorical epic, in his poetics, should strive
to organise the world in its entirety, achieving the comprehensiveness
of an atlas. Heaney’s post-Romantic poetics has different priorities. Like
Spenser, he writes within the living tradition of English poetic form,
working extensively with a flexible pentameter and unobtrusive rhymes.
Yet Heaney does not attempt the comprehensiveness Spenser pursued in
The Faerie Queene. Responding continually to contingency and occasion,
his poems depict small parts of the world with visionary clarity. Heaney’s
poetry is attuned to a modern aesthetic sensibility that prioritises detail
over comprehensiveness, and occasional specificity over system.
These differing senses of what poetry can do, I have argued here, might
be understood in terms of the relationship of either poet’s work to the
activity of housebuilding. The systematic approach Spenser pursued in
The Faerie Queene was absent from the manner in which he acquired and
renovated his Irish castle. Consequently, there is an inverse relationship in
the buildings of The Faerie Queene between organised meaning and mate-
riality: the House of Temperance is able to mean so much by disdaining
its material construction. For Heaney, writing and housemaking are much
more closely related. The distance from the ground of his childhood that
Heaney explores in his late work is not absent from his first collections.
Yet his poetry continually derives assurance from comparisons with the
craftsmen of its remembered landscape. Heaney’s sense of the poet as
craftsman is less mystical, I have argued, than some of his critics have
implied. The builders and makers of his early world are emphatically not
Heidegger’s peasants. Like the thatcher in Door into the Dark, their work
is a modest, light imposition of skill and order on the bottomless land.
Though less definite and more far-reaching than artisanal craft, Heaney’s
poetry constantly aspires to its condition.
CHAPTER 11
Yeats’s Stanzas, Yeats’s Rooms
Adam Hanna
In 1919, after lengthy renovations, W. B. Yeats and his wife Georgie

‘George’ Yeats finally moved into Thoor Ballylee, a tower in the west
of Ireland that was most likely built some time between the fourteenth
and sixteenth centuries.1 It was, and is, a square-built tower-house of a
kind that is seen all over the Irish countryside. Beneath its bulky stone
battlements, arrowslits dot its mottled, pale grey walls; alongside them
larger, later, windows look over a stream, a bridge, a lane, and the castle
garden. If the setting for much of Yeats’s mature life and work seems
somehow Tennysonian, it is perhaps because modern readers have been
habituated to viewing medieval spaces through nineteenth-century eyes.
Indeed, Yeats’s inhabitation of the tower brought distinctly Victorian
design influences into its formidable half-ruined walls.
In his enthusiastic letters from the summer he moved into the tower,
Yeats recorded how his bedroom ceiling was painted in ‘blue and black
1 Much of the information about the tower in this chapter comes from Mary Hanley
and Liam Miller’s pamphlet, Thoor Ballylee: Home of William Butler Yeats (Dublin: The
Dolmen Press, 1977).
A. Hanna (B)
School of English and Digital Humanities, University College Cork, Cork,
Ireland

168 A. HANNA
and gold’, and that the tower’s window-frames were painted ‘brilliant
blue’ and the windows hung with orange curtains.2 The architect William
Scott designed massive wooden furniture for it, and Yeats’s long-time
collaborator Charles Ricketts supplied ‘medieval’ candlesticks. The thor-
oughgoing Arts and Crafts nature of the tower’s restoration, and its gaudy
pseudo-medievalism, might have been to the taste of Yeats’s erstwhile
mentor William Morris. The interior of this tower, which was restored in
the years following the First World War, is redolent of nowhere so much
as the rackety London artists’ colony of Bedford Park that Yeats knew
during the 1880s and 1890s. As such, the physical form of the restored
tower is suggestive of the tensions between the ancient and the more
recent that are such a feature of Yeats’s poems from the years around its
restoration.
Yeats bought the tower in 1916, and wrote half a dozen poems set in
and around it before he had even moved into it.3 In a letter to his father
dated 16 July 1919, Yeats’s exhilaration at moving into the tower at last
is palpable. This is evident as much from his keen-eyed descriptions of the
building and its contents, as from his repetition of the adjective ‘great’ no
fewer than five times in a short letter:
I am writing in the great ground floor room of the castle — pleasantest

room I have yet seen, a great wide window opening over the river & a
round arched door leading to the thatched hall[.]
At this point in his letter, Yeats breaks off writing to attempt a sketch,
before belatedly realising that his talents do not lie in this direction:
A very bad drawing […] I mean to represent a great door, then a stone
floor & stone roofed entrance hall with door & winding stair to left, &
then a larger thatched hall, beyond which is cottage & kitchen. In the
thatched hall imagine a great copper hanging lanthorn (which is however
2 The way the cottage is remodelled is set out in Yeats’s own letters, including a letter
to Ezra Pound dated 16 July 1919, available at http://pm.nlx.com [accessed 15 August
2018]. Further information comes from R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-
Poet, 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 131; Hanley and Miller,
Thoor Ballylee, p. 20.
3 Theodore Ziolkowski, The View from the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 53–54.
11 YEATS’S STANZAS, YEATS’S ROOMS 169
not yet there but will be I hope next week). I am writing at a great trestle
table which George keeps covered with wild flowers.4
This vivid evocation of the place and the life that is lived in it communi-
cates an excitement that might be linked to the possibilities Yeats saw in
this house to change and renew his work. His recognition of the tower’s
transformative potential is reflected in the titles of two of his subsequent
volumes, The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933). The change
that the tower brought to his work was not only one of imagery, but
also one of form. His first forays into the grand, ancient, octave stanzas
that did so much to characterise his late work were coterminous with
the tower’s entry as an image into his imagination. Indeed, the first long
poem in the octave stanza that forms such a notable part of his output in
the years from 1918 to the early 1930s is also one of the first in which
the tower is mentioned.5
The tower is present, albeit in a shadowy way, when Yeats put his ideas
on poetic forms down in his late credo, ‘A General Introduction to my
Work’ (1937), many years later. In the subsection ‘Style and Attitude’,
Yeats writes a dense passage on his decision to ‘use a traditional stanza’,
which suggests that his choice of poetic form and his thoughts on the
restoration of the tower are linked:
If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that

left it unchanged, amid all its accidence, I would be full of self-contempt
because of my egotism and indiscretion, and foresee the boredom of my
reader. I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem
traditional. I commit my emotion to shepherds, herdsmen, camel-drivers,
learned men, Milton or Shelley’s Platonist, that tower Palmer drew […]’6
4 Letter from W. B. Yeats to J. B. Yeats, 16 July 1919, available at http://pm.nlx.com

[accessed on 15 August 2018].
5 Yeats, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, first published in 1918 and collected
in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). This poem is available in Collected Poems, edited and
introduced by Augustine Martin (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 130. Subsequent references
to Yeats’s poetry will be taken from this edition unless otherwise specified, with page
references parenthesised in the text.
6 Yeats, ‘A General Introduction to my Work’, in Later Essays: The Collected Works of
W. B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. by William H. O’Donnell (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1994), p. 213.
170 A. HANNA
Yeats’s assertion that free verse would leave his accounts of love and
sorrow ‘unchanged, amid [their] accidence’ carries the significant sugges-
tion that the character of his subject matter is altered by the imposition
of metrical constraints on its expression. What is more, he portrays this
change as a positive and salutary one, as he sees it as helping to rid his
poetry of the ‘egotism and indiscretion’ that would otherwise mar it.7
His statement that ‘even what I alter must seem traditional’ next to refer-
ences to Milton’s and Shelley’s tower-dwelling Platonists, and to Samuel
Palmer’s woodcut The Lonely Tower (1879), reminds us that the aesthetic
he applied to his poetry was strongly linked to the one he brought to his
project of architectural restoration.
The form in which a poem is written shapes and refines its content:
this was a lesson that Yeats took into many other areas of his thinking,
and not only to do with houses. A version of this idea can be seen in a
harsh 1936 letter Yeats wrote to his fellow-poet Margot Collis, in which
he criticises her recent work for its lack of form:
When your technic [sic] is sloppy your matter grows second-hand – there
is no difficulty to force you down under the surface – difficulty is our
plough.8
The idea that poetic form is necessary to intensify a poet’s engagement

with their subject matter occurs elsewhere in Yeats’s writings. In a letter to
another poet, Dorothy Wellesley, he writes that ‘your son wants a frame-
work of action much as a man who feels that his poetry is vague and
loose will take to writing sonnets’.9 In another letter to Wellesley, he
7 Yeats, ‘A General Introduction to my Work’, p. 213. This was the personality flaw
that Yeats identified as his worst. After a record of a conversation in a journal of 1909
he records disconsolately ‘Thought I had cured myself of this kind of boasting’ (W. B.
Yeats, Memoirs: Autobiography and First Draft Journal, ed. by Denis Donoghue [Dublin:
Macmillan, 1972], p. 210). The fact he believed that his stanza forms helped expunge
‘egotism and indiscretion’ from his work attributes a strong power to them.
8 Yeats quoted in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, II , p. 543.
9 Yeats, Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, ed. by Kathleen Raine
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), p 131. This is not the only time in which the
use of verse form is expressed in terms of psychological necessity. In another essay he
describes a mad woman he saw talking to herself in a slum before writing ‘I compel
myself to accept those traditional metres that have developed with the language. Ezra
Pound, Turner, Lawrence, wrote admirable free verse. I could not. I would lose myself,
maintains that ‘the correction of prose, because it has no fixed laws, is

endless, [whereas] a poem comes right with a click like a closing box’.10
Yeats’s opinion seems to be that, just as it is difficult for an individual
to fully realise their potential without the containing structure of a ‘frame-
work of action’, it is difficult to adequately express an emotion in poetry
without the containing power of defined, squared-off, formal limits. The
equivalence between the necessity of form in life and in poetry that Yeats
writes of in his letter to Wellesley indicates that he viewed the constraints
of poetic form, paradoxically, as crucial for the freeing of potential. At
Coole Park, which stood hard by Thoor Ballylee, he again recognised the
power of that containing form—in this case the house itself—could have
in adding to and shaping the life of its inhabitants.
A far grander house than Yeats’s restored tower, Coole Park was a
large eighteenth-century mansion that, until its demolition in the 1940s,
stood amidst its walls and woodlands deep in the County Galway coun-
tryside. It had an equivalent role to the tower in Yeats’s imagination as
a symbol of what life and writing might be. It belonged to Yeats’s friend
and collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory, and operated in his imagination
as the embodiment of a renaissance ideal of decorum and generosity.11
He wrote in his diary, ‘this house has enriched my soul out of measure
because here life moves within restraint through gracious forms’.12 The
example that Coole Park provided of the achievement of an aesthetically
satisfying way of life clearly had a deep effect on Yeats’s life and work. In
his Memoirs , he wrote of the change that he perceived in Lady Gregory’s
daughter-in-law Margaret after she moved into the house:
It was impossible to be excitable and unrestrained in Lady Gregory’s pres-

ence and Mrs. [Margaret] Gregory herself had been remoulded by her and
by the house. [my italics]13
become joyless like those mad old women.’ (‘A General Introduction for My Work’, in
W. B. Yeats, Later Essays, pp. 212–13).
10 Yeats, Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 24.
11 Daniel Harris writes about the role of Coole Park in Yeats’s imagination in Yeats:
Coole Park and Ballylee (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 51–86.
12 Yeats, cited in A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats
(London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 93.
13 Yeats, Memoirs , quoted in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, II , p. 438.
172 A. HANNA
There seems to be an extraordinary congruence in Yeats’s thought

between the ability of traditional stanzas, through their limits, to refine
the defects of personality from poetry, and the ability of houses to refine
the defects of personality from life. To Yeats, the inhabitant of a house
like Coole Park could, with luck, find their thoughts more elevated and
graceful, like the creating mind as it negotiated with the many-levelled
complexities and demanding architectures of large, regular stanza forms.
However, engagement with grand stanzas, and with grand houses
like Coole Park, carried risks. An awareness of the enervating potential
of traditional stanza forms seems to be subtextually present in Yeats’s
ottava rima poem ‘Ancestral Houses’, which is the first section of his
sequence ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (written 1923, collected in
The Tower, 1928). In this poem, Yeats projects the bitterness and discon-
tent of the warring country around him back to earlier centuries, onto the
first builders of great houses like Coole Park. These emotions, which are
typically conceived of as destructive ones, are far from antithetical to his
idea of house-building. In the final three lines of the stanza, Yeats broods
on what might become of the house once its inhabitants lack a sufficient
level of emotional turbulence to maintain it:
Some violent bitter man, some powerful man

Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known;
But when the master’s buried mice can play,
And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.
(p. 207)
In this complex stanza, the violence and bitterness of the original owner,
architect and artist are imagined as providing the impetus that made
possible the architectural ‘sweetness’ that its owners had lacked in their
own lives. There is a strange paradox here: the ‘sweetness’ and ‘gentleness’
that the house’s designers lack can only be created because of their unful-
filled desires to experience these emotions. This idea, that only entrenched
bitterness could goad and provoke those who suffered it into dreaming of
its opposite with sufficient intensity as to give it shape and form in reality,
would accord with Yeats’s Blakean belief that ‘without contraries there
is no progression’.14 To Yeats, there was a causal relationship between

internal turmoil and the creation of beauty.15
The final three lines of the stanza raise the unwelcome possibility that,
once this original, generative, discontented power is gone, those who
inherit the ‘bronze and marble’ of the house might become mere ‘mice’,
unworthy of the grandeur of their surroundings. The awkward-looking
contraction in the final line of the stanza (‘For all its bronze and marble,
’s but a mouse’) appears nowhere else in Yeats’s poetry and, as well as
appearing perhaps archaic to a modern reader, has the effect of drawing
attention to the metrical demands of the ottava rima form. The contrac-
tion was a deliberate change by Yeats, as the Variorum edition of his
works shows that the line was originally the more usual-looking ‘For all
its bronze and marble’s but a mouse’.16 At the moment Yeats introduces
the possibility that great forms can be inherited by unworthy successors,
he simultaneously draws attention to how the inflexible pentameter of
the ottava rima form can have trouble accommodating the ideas that are
expressed in it.17
A central feature of ‘Ancestral Houses’ is the drama of whether the
ancient form of a house can become a mere a shell if it lacks a suffi-
ciently active, or turbulent, inner life to sustain it. Yeats’s deliberations at
the beginning of the poem over the value and function of architecture
become subtextually linked to deliberations over the ottava rima form in
which the poem is written. The final stanza of ‘Ancestral Houses’ repeats
the trope that too prolonged an association with ancient, noble forms
can have a debilitating effect on those who inhabit them by removing
the discontents which, to Yeats, are among the chief sources of creative
power. In this stanza, he writes in grandiloquent language of the dazzling
14 William Blake, quoted in Jeffares, A New Commentary, p. 300.

15 Yeats famously stated that poetry was made ‘of the quarrel with ourselves’; see ‘Per
Amica Silentia Lunae’ (1917), collected in The Major Works, ed. by Edward Larrissy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 410–22 (p. 411).
16 Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Peter Allt and Russell
K. Alspach (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957), p. 418.
17 Yeats, Variorum, p. 524. The Variorum reveals that in another octave-stanza poem
centring on an ancient house, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, Yeats substituted
‘Beside a fire of turf in the ancient tower’ for ‘Beside a fire of turf in th’ ancient tower’
(p. 130) [my italics]. Whether the contraction is intended to look displeasingly awkward
or pleasingly archaic (or both), its effect is to draw attention to the poetic form in which
it is housed.
174 A. HANNA
glories of great houses before stopping himself mid-flight to ask whether

all those things that might be considered to ‘magnify, or to bless, | But
take our greatness with our bitterness?’ (p. 207).
Is it possible to read Yeats’s meditations on the subject of ancestral
houses as meditations on the potential pitfalls of inherited verse forms?
The stanza is shot through with indications of metapoetic intent. The
ottava rima in which the lines are written are indeed the invention of a
‘haughtier age’; the words ‘pacing to and fro’ are an activity are perhaps
reminiscent of stress-measured composition and also the turn, or verse,
that occurs at the end of each line. (As Eleanor Cook points out, ‘“turn”
is what verse means etymologically’.)18 ‘Polished’, which appears in the
stanza, is a word that is just as appropriate for the criticism of poetry as for
the description of well-maintained buildings. Finally, the ‘great chambers
and long galleries’ are reminiscent of the longer stanzas which Yeats’s
ideas often inhabit at this point in his writing. Occupying these grand
stanzaic forms was not without its risks; these structures could not just be
lived in, they had to be lived up to.
After ‘Ancestral Houses’ comes the next section of ‘Meditations in
Time of Civil War’, entitled ‘My House’. As the sequence turns towards
the personal, the tower is presented not as a symbol of grandeur and
dominance, but as something improvised and provisional: almost an
emanation of the rain, wind and river-water that flow around it. This
change of tone from ‘Ancestral Houses’ is also reflected in the form of
‘My House’: the regular, stately iambs of the ‘inherited’ ottava rima of
‘Ancestral Houses’ seem all the more regular when contrasted against the
more wavering, innovated, rhythms of ‘My House’19 :
An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,

A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
The sound of the rain or sound
Of every wind that blows[.]
(p. 208)
18 Eleanor Cook, Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998), p. 176.
19 The importance to Yeats of a ‘wavering’ rhythm in poetry is set out in his 1900 essay
‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, in Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961).
After the stately isometric iambs and neat couplet-endings of the ottava
rima of ‘Ancestral Houses’, the verse form of ‘My House’ seems both less
ceremonious and more supple. The longer lines of ‘Ancestral Houses’,
which preceded it, contain a more complex syntax, against which the
shorter sentences and simpler imagery of ‘My House’ are thrown into
relief. The sense of flexibility and flux which inhere in the heterometric
form and the quicker rhythms of ‘My House’ also communicate that
the tower is the living workplace of a poet rather than an inherited
house ‘where’, to quote the earlier section, ‘Ancestral Houses’, ‘slippered
Contemplation finds his ease’ (p. 207).
The ten-line stanza of ‘My House’, which shifts between trimeter
and tetrameter, appears to have been invented by Yeats himself.20 Helen
Vendler has labelled it the ‘labyrinthine’ stanza, after the lines ‘A man
in his own secret meditation | Is lost amid the labyrinth that the mind
has made’ in Section III of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, which is
written in the same form. In this poem, Yeats has been true to the desire
he expressed in the ‘General Introduction for my Work’: in what he has
written, as in the tower itself, even what he has altered seems traditional.
A further analogy can be drawn between Yeats’s ideas of houses and verse
forms from the fact that ‘Ancestral Houses’ is in an inherited verse form
whereas ‘My House’ (about a tower he renovated using, in the words
of an epitaph that he had carved on the tower itself, ‘old mill boards and
sea-green slates’ [p. 187]), is in an innovated verse form. The splashing of
cows and the literary work of ‘My House’ contrasts with the pacing and
to and fro in galleries that occurs in ‘Ancestral Houses’. In dramatising
the contrast between the human experience of two types of architecture
(a great house and a restored one), Yeats simultaneously dramatises the
contrast between different types of verse form. For ‘Ancestral Houses’
and ‘My House’, one might read ‘Ancestral Stanzas’ and ‘My Stanza’.
Some critics have contextualised Yeats’s devotion to established poetic
forms as being connected to his sometime admiration for authoritarian
politics. Critics Seamus Deane and David Lloyd have posited that Yeats’s
use of time-honoured stanzas is the poetic counterpart to his desire for
great houses to stand at the top of a conservative social hierarchy.21
20 Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), p. 69.
21 See, for example, David Lloyd, ‘The Poetics of Politics: Yeats and the Founding
of the State’, Qui Parle, 3 (fall 1989), 76–114; Seamus Deane, ‘Yeats and the Idea of
176 A. HANNA
Although it is impossible to come to definitive conclusions about the

motivation of any poet for using any form, it is worth complicating a
too-close identification between Yeats’s late stanza forms and his undeni-
ably reactionary late politics, if only because Yeats’s own writings present
so much complicated and conflicting information. The contrast between
‘Ancestral Houses’ and ‘My House’ suggests that Yeats was, at least in
part, communicating the possibility that something there is something
enervating in the inherited hierarchies of which Deane and Lloyd see him
as a champion.
‘Coole Park, 1929’ anticipates the death of the owner of a big house,
Yeats’s friend and collaborator Augusta Gregory. Its framing in the ottava
rima form of ‘Ancestral Houses’ indicates the link between Coole Park
and the place he described in the earlier work. This stanza form had
kept its Renaissance associations for Yeats, and made it suitable for this
premonitory elegy for Gregory, whom he always imagined in terms
that were more redolent of Renaissance Florence than twentieth-century
Ireland.22 This form helps to shape the content of the poem by enabling
a narrative structure for its stanzas. Helen Vendler has written that ‘the
expected way to fill up the asymmetrical 6 + 2 formal shell of the ottava
rima would be to offer a sustained six-line description followed by an
epigrammatic couplet’.23 In this case, the epigram with which Yeats ends
the first stanza explores, once again, the generative, enlivening, influence
architecture can have on human life:
I meditate upon a swallow’s flight,

Upon an aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
Great works constructed there in nature’s spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
Revolution’, in Yeats’s Political Identities, ed. by Jonathan Allison (Ann Arbor: Michigan
University Press, 1996), pp. 133–44. For a counter-opinion, see Peter McDonald’s ‘Yeats’s
Poetic Structures’, in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 138–66.
22 This trope is evident in Yeats’s poetry from 1907 onwards, the year she took him
on a trip to northern Italy, as R. F. Foster observes in ‘Yeats and the Death of Lady
Gregory’, Irish University Review, 34 (spring–summer, 2004), 109–21.
23 Vendler, Our Secret Discipline, p. 263.
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.

(p. 250)
The sixain begins with a physical description of the locale in which the
house is situated, but there is no description of the house itself. Instead,
the solid house is drawn into association with the evanescence of nature
through images of the swallows, trees that are ‘lost in night’, and a briefly
luminous cloud. In the couplet that ends the stanza, Yeats returns to
the image of the house by commending the ‘dance-like glory that those
walls begot’. While this describes the creative and influential group who
congregated in the house during Lady Gregory’s occupancy, the word
‘begot’ suggests a generative relationship between the solid form of the
house and the ephemeral ‘dance’ within it. The link between ‘walls’ and
‘dance’ is causal: one could not exist without the other.
By the late 1920s, Yeats was not only contemplating Lady Gregory’s
absence from the Galway landscape, but his own. By then, the upkeep
of the tower, which was remote and prone to flooding, had become
too onerous, and the Yeats family left it to fall into disrepair. In the
poet’s last years, Yeats and his wife rented ‘Riversdale’, an eighteenth-
century farmhouse around four miles from the centre of Dublin. This
house, as Caroline Walsh points out, was a more sedate and less romantic
choice than the remote tower, with its ‘apple and cherry trees, herbaceous
border, bowling-green, croquet and tennis lawns’.24 Although critics have
not paid it as much attention as his tower and Coole Park, the more
modest house at Riversdale in County Dublin features recognisably in
his poetry, in particular in the volume New Poems (1938)—the tower no
longer featuring in the titles of his books after 1933. Rather than poems
about Coole Park, this volume contains ‘An Acre of Grass’, a poem in a
less vaulting stanzaic form than ottava rima:
Picture and book remain,

An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.
(p. 316)
24 Caroline Walsh, The Homes of Irish Writers (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1977), p. 174.
178 A. HANNA
The line ‘Picture and book remain’ is mysterious, though the fact that
they ‘remain’ suggests that they are vestiges from another place. Yeats’s
letters from this period confirm this, revealing that his study was filled
with books and pictures that he had inherited after the death of Lady
Gregory and the break-up of Coole Park.25 Read with this knowledge,
the ‘picture and book’ of Yeats’s poem become kindred to the ‘Clocks and
carpets and chairs’ in Thomas Hardy’s ‘During Wind and Rain’. Memo-
ries of the downfall of the house they once furnished lie like a patina on
them.26 Just as his study was full of reminders of this loved former house,
it appears that the form of ‘An Acre of Grass’ is in dialogue with his earlier
poems about Coole Park.
The stanza form Yeats uses in ‘An Acre of Grass’ approximates the
‘stave of six’ used in, for example, Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely As
a Cloud’. This is traditionally tetrameter and rhymes ababcc.27 However,
the form Yeats uses here is a more modest measure than this, as it rhymes
xaxabb, and contains shorter trimeter lines. In addition to this, Yeats’s
rhyming of ‘house’ and ‘mouse’ seems almost bathetic. Rather than the
iambs and complex structure of the ottava rima, ‘An Acre of Grass’ is in
a shorter-winded form, and its images are contained within more modest
line-lengths. However, there is the echo of a reference to the grander
forms that the poet had once stood, both physically and in poetry. The
final two lines of the opening stanza, ‘Midnight, an old house | Where
nothing stirs but a mouse (my italics)’ recall the stanza of ‘Ancestral
Houses’, quoted above, which ends ‘And maybe the great-grandson of
that house, | For all its bronze and marble,’s but a mouse’ (my italics).
It is as if the poet is simultaneously drawing attention to the decreased
grandeur of his stanza forms and his domestic surrounds.
The more modest setting of Yeats’s last years adds a claustrophobic
intensity to the appeal contained in the third stanza. The impression
created by this poem is one of pressure, where midnight and confined
25 Foster, W. B. Yeats , A Life, II , p. 447; B. L. Reid, ‘The House of Yeats’, The Hudson
Review, 18 (autumn, 1965), 331–50 (p. 346).
26 Thomas Hardy, ‘During Wind and Rain’, in Selected Poems, ed. by Harry Thomas
(London: Penguin, 1993), p. 122.
27 Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum, A Prosody Handbook (New York: Harper and Row
Publishers, 1965); Jack Elliott Myers and Don C. Wukasch, Dictionary of Poetic Terms
(Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2003), s.v. ‘Sestet’.
space are reflected in the poem’s tightly packed, short-lined stanzas. This
is a representation of architecture as testing ground:
Grant me an old man’s frenzy.

Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till truth obeyed his call[.]
(p. 316)
The critic B. L. Reid said that, in these lines, ‘we can watch the house itself
erupt into grand romantic passion’, but what is interesting about it is how
the confined nature of its stanza form matches the image of Blake beating
upon the wall.28 The confinement of the ‘old house’, dramatised in the
confinement of the stanza form, comes to be associated in this poem with
Yeats’s project of remaking himself within the confinements of old age. It
seems Yeats envisages the house, with its reminders of Coole Park, as the
setting for his famously contrarian public persona in his final years.
In an essay on Yeats’s tower, Seamus Heaney focuses on the sense of
strength and solidity that the octave stanza form lends to much of the
older poet’s mature poetry. Playing on the root of the word ‘stanza’,
Heaney writes ‘the place of writing is essentially the stanza form itself,
that strong-arched room of eight iambic pentameters rhyming abababcc
which serves as a redoubt for the resurgent spirit’.29 However, for all his
adherence to traditional stanza forms, Yeats did not preclude the possi-
bility of formal innovation, as ‘My House’ and ‘An Acre of Grass’ show.
His poetry demonstrates as much of a willingness to innovate as it does
a desire to adopt the redoubtable forms of the past. In this, his poetry
reflects the restoration work he carried out on his tower.
28 Reid, ‘The House of Yeats’, p. 346.

29 Seamus Heaney, The Place of Writing (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1989), p. 29.
CHAPTER 12
Nature’s Cabinets Unlocked: Cognition,

Cabinets, and Philosophy in Margaret
Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies
Sarah Cawthorne
Nothing [is] esteem’d in this lunatique age, but what is kept in Cabinets.1
In 1657, a book called Nature’s Cabinet Unlock’d promised to open up

the secrets of the natural world and explain everything from metallurgy
to human gestation to its reader.2 The premise of the titular metaphor
transcends historical specificity: the locked box has been a leitmotif for
the allure of curiosity from Pandora to Schrödinger. But this eye-catching
title overreached. Among criticism of the text’s fraudulent misattribution
to well-known physician writer Thomas Browne, particular outrage was
1 Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion (London: printed for M. Lownes, I. Browne, I. Helme,

I. Busbie, 1612), sig. A[1r ].
2 [Anon.], Natures Cabinet Unlock’d (London: printed for Edw. Farnham, 1657).
S. Cawthorne (B)
Independent Scholar, York, UK

182 S. CAWTHORNE
reserved for the ‘arrogant and fanciful Title’ of this ill-informed ‘Scrib-
ble’.3 The book’s bold eponymous promise to reveal the secret inner
workings of nature was regarded as provocatively ambitious and resolutely
unfulfilled: the audacity of the claim was taken to signal both the moral
and intellectual failings of the actual and unidentified author.
Though the trope of the locked box has a long history, the metaphor of
nature’s cabinet, in which the natural world was imagined as the contents
of a locked cabinet or closet belonging to the anthropomorphised goddess
Nature, caught the zeitgeist in the mid-seventeenth century. After first
appearing in print in the late sixteenth century, use of the metaphor of
nature’s cabinet increased steadily across the early seventeenth century,
peaking sharply in the 1650s before declining again across the latter
half of the century.4 The trope’s growing popularity seems to corre-
spond, in part at least, to the proliferation of cabinetry during this era.
Cabinets became ubiquitous in seventeenth-century households as the
early modern trend for collecting and the growth of mercantile trade
resulted in an avalanche of stuff that needed to be stored somewhere.
The architecture and storage capacities of early modern homes developed
accordingly. Closets, small intimate rooms which provided space for a
range of private activities such as reading, business, and prayer, and for
storing valuable items such as books, accounts, textiles, or silver plate,
were built into upper- and middle-class homes, and freestanding cabinets
3 Thomas Tenison, ‘An Account of All the Lord Bacon’s Works’, in Baconiana, or,
Certain Genuine Remains of Sr. Francis Bacon (London: printed by J. D. for Richard
Chiswell, 1679), p. 77. Though Tenison had vested interests—he was a relative of Browne,
and later edited his posthumous papers—the repeat of his misattribution complaint, iron-
ically almost word for word, by Anthony Wood lends credence to the severity of the
unknown author’s abuse of title. See Anthony Wood, Athanæ Oxonienses (London: printed
for Thomas Bennet, 1692), p. 536. Browne’s stationers explicitly denied his authorship of
Natures Cabinet Unlock’d in his next book; see ‘The Stationer to the Reader’, in Thomas
Browne, Hydriotaphia (London: Henry Brome, 1658), [sigs. O6r -O6v ].
4 This analysis of use was primarily undertaken using EEBO keyword search and the
EEBO-TCP Key Words in Context function of the Early Modern Print project, authored
by Anupam Basu and the Digital Humanities Workshop at Washington University in St.
Louis: https://earlyprint.wustl.edu/toolwebgrok.html [accessed 1 May 2019]. Though
there are limitations to such an approach (including texts not yet digitised or translated
into searchable html text, as well as the multiple permutations of metaphor) it does offer
enough evidence to give a clear sense of usage over time.
12 NATURE’S CABINETS UNLOCKED: COGNITION, CABINETS … 183
performed analogous functions on a smaller scale.5 The two terms were

used interchangeably to describe a range of places and things that enabled
the secure storage, organisation, and display of objects; united by decora-
tive and functional continuities, a variety of versatile and intimate spaces
and objects, from trinket boxes to studies and book chests to galleries,
were imagined on a functional and aesthetic continuum.6
The most obviously significant type of cabinet in the development of
the metaphor of nature’s cabinet was the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of
curiosities, which attempted to recreate the natural world on a micro-
cosmic scale.7 Some of the grandest examples displayed natural specimens
alongside human-made objects in a manner intended to replicate natural
hierarchies and puzzle out taxonomies. Coral, for example, might be
positioned in between plants and rocks, indicating its apparently ‘hybrid’
nature, while a crocodile on the ceiling might mediate between reptiles
and fish. Amid this trend for cabinets which recreated the world in minia-
ture, it was perhaps instinctive for scientific practitioners to comprehend
and envision the natural world as a collection of objects kept in a cabinet.
But reflecting Lena Cowen Orlin’s assessment that closets and cabinets
were fundamentally defined by their ‘secure storage of valuable goods’
and their ability to be ‘safely kept locked’, the notion that the inner work-
ings of nature were a guarded but valuable treasure was equally central to
the metaphor of nature’s cabinet.8 The treasures inside nature’s cabinet
were not just things —her trees, plants, or creatures—but, more abstractly,
5 See Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), pp. 296–326; Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and
Experience in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); and Glenn
Adamson, ‘The Labor of Division: Cabinetmaking and the Production of Knowledge’,
in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, ed. by
Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2014), pp. 243–79.
6 Thornton, Scholar in His Study, p. 74.
7 On Wunderkammer, see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and
Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); and Daniela Bleichmar, ‘Seeing the
World in a Room: Looking at Exotica in Early Modern Collections’, in Collecting Across
Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic, ed. by Daniela Bleichmar and
Peter Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
8 Orlin, Locating Privacy, p. 8.
184 S. CAWTHORNE
natural knowledge; the sought-after understanding of how natural things,

processes and relationships worked.
In an era where the very nature of knowledge was under debate,
the metaphor of nature’s cabinet could be adapted to suit a variety
of epistemological positions. Natural knowledge, even when presumed
obtainable, was considered prone to misinterpretation, and accordingly,
nature’s closet was often invoked as an opaque and mysterious container,
difficult or impossible to access. Descriptions frequently stressed philoso-
phers’ pursuit of nature’s ‘Inscrutable Secrets’ in ‘abstruse’ cabinets, a
word with an indicative double sense: the ‘contents’ of Nature’s cabinet
might be inaccessible, both in the sense that they are, by virtue of their
position in the metaphorical closet, ‘[c]oncealed, hidden; secret’; but also
because they are ‘[d]ifficult to understand; obscure, recondite’.9 Few
authors were bold enough to make such forthright claims of access to
nature’s cabinet as Browne’s plagiarist; instead, for most, the contents of
nature’s cabinet were unobtainable, or to be pursued with considerable
difficulty and virtuous diligence.
Like its physical counterparts, the metaphorical cabinet could vary in
scale, function, and accessibility. It reflected the personal views of its
keyholders, but also the diverse and plural spaces in and through which
they moved. Perhaps more than any other work, Margaret Cavendish’s
eclectic early collection Poems and Fancies (1653)—a work which is
rarely taken seriously and which includes an atomistic theory rendered in
heroic couplets, allegorical moral dialogues, and poems on nature, fairies,
and the cruelty of hunting—used the metaphor of nature’s cabinet to
explore the links between space, language, and cognition, building on
a metaphorical tradition that had fetishised natural knowledge in order
9 Edward Reynoldes, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man
(London: printed by R. H[earne and John Norton] for Robert Bostock, 1640), p. 499;
‘Abstruse, adj.’, Oxford English Dictionary, https://oed.com [accessed 1 May 2019]. For
similar examples, see: Henry Nollius, Hermetical Physick: Or, the Right Way to Preserve,
and to Restore Health, trans. by Henry Vaughan (London: printed by Humphrey Moseley,
1655), p. 3; Renodaeus, A Medicinal Dispensatory, Containing the Whole Body of Physick,
trans. and rev. by Richard Tomlinson (London: printed by Jo. Streater and Ja. Cottrel,
1657), pp. 674–75; James Hart, Klinike, or the Diet of the Diseased (London: printed by
John Beale for Robert Allot, 1633), p. 19; Massarius, De Morbis Foemineis, the Womans
Counsellour: Or, the Feminine Physitian, trans. by R. T. Philomathes (London: printed for
John Streater, 1657), p. 3; and Nathaniel Wanley, The Wonders of the Little World, or,
a General History of Man in Six Books (London: printed for T. Basset, R. Cheswel, J.
Wright, and T. Sawbridge, 1673), pp. 16–17.
to interrogate the nature of knowledge itself. This chapter will examine

how Cavendish energetically co-opts the plural semantics of the cabinet,
drawing on a range of spaces that she would have encountered in her
everyday life—not only the Wunderkammer, but also the housewife’s
closet, the jewellery box, and the closet study—to produce a coherent
epistemology that stresses both the interconnectedness of body and mind
within the natural world and the validity of using the poetic imagination
as a tool for natural philosophical investigation.
Nature Reimagined
In a notable departure from the dry theological treatises and zealous
philosophical reflections in which the metaphor of nature’s cabinet most
often appeared during the seventeenth century, Cavendish first invokes
nature’s cabinet in a lively series of narrative poems which imagine Nature
as a housewife. ‘The Severall Keyes of Nature, which unlock her Severall
Cabinets’ and ‘Natures Cabinet ’, poems which appear approximately
halfway through Poems and Fancies , provide us with a framework from
which we can begin to comprehend the work as a whole, opening up a
structural paradigm, that, by mirroring the contents, spatial arrangements,
and associations of cabinets, provides a way of understanding the world it
seeks to depict.10
Cavendish is clearly fascinated by the motions, structures, and produc-
tions of thought in Poems and Fancies , and her cognitive model, outlined
partly through the metaphor of nature’s cabinet, lies at the heart of her
natural philosophy. In the first of the poems describing the anthropo-
morphised Nature’s household arrangements, her cabinets play the lead
role:
A Bunch of Keyes which hung by Natures Side,

Nature to unlock these her *Boxes try’d.
The first was Wit, that Key unlockt the Ear,
Opened the Brain, to see what things were there.
The next was Beauties Key, unlockt the Eyes
Opened the Heart, to see what therein lyes.
10 Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies Written by the Right Honourable, the Lady
Margaret Newcastle (London: printed by T. R. for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653),
p. 126. Hereafter: PaF . All subsequent references to this edition will be given in the text
in parentheses. Italics are as printed in the original.
186 S. CAWTHORNE
The third was Appetite, that Key was quick,

Opens the Stomack, meat to put in it.
The Key of Sent opens the Braine, though hard,
For of a Stink the Nose is much afeard.
The Key of Paine unlocked Touch, but slow,
Nature is loath Diseases for to shew.
(PaF , p. 126)
Cavendish describes Nature as a housemistress with a bunch of keys

dangling from her belt, which can be used to unlock five different boxes
symbolising the five senses. The reader is provided their own key to the
poem in the form of a marginal note specifying: ‘*The five Senses are
Natures Boxes, Cabinets: The Braine her chiefe Cabinet’ (PaF , p. 126).
Privileging the brain as the most important cabinet of nature, Cavendish
positions the human mind as a space in which nature’s secrets might be
both contained and explored. But for Cavendish, the contents of nature’s
cabinets cannot be understood by the brain, or the wit of the words
that open it, alone. Instead, Cavendish depicts a number of aesthetic and
sensory keys external to, or on the periphery of, the human body. These
work in tandem to provide access to the full contents of nature’s cabinets,
which are comprised of an interconnected set of bodily boxes.
According to Cavendish, we experience and understand nature not
only in the cabinet of the brain, but also through our hearts, stom-
achs, and our ability to feel pain. The totality of nature can only be
accessed by unlocking the eyes, the nose, the ears, the appetite, and
our sense of touch; it demands that we broach the barriers between
the interior self and exterior world. Cavendish’s cabinets disrupt the
boundary between body and environment, suggesting that knowledge
occurs through being in and of the world; these cabinets of nature are
metaphorically opened when external stimuli are integrated within the
human body, with the unlockable conduits of the eyes and ears suggesting
the osmotic transference that might occur between bodies, minds, and
their environs.
For Cavendish, the distinctly corporeal nature of thought and this
porousness of cognition across the boundaries of the body, environ-
ment, and page, are recurring concerns. In a poem called ‘The Motion
of Thoughts ’, for example, she describes her thoughts as an extension of
her body: ‘My Feet did walke without Directions Guide, | My Thoughts
did travel farre, and wander wide’ (PaF , pp. 40–41). In ‘The Clasp’, she
describes her writing process, pacing furiously until her ‘Thoughts run
out of Breath’, and placing them on a ‘strict dyet ’ of ‘Ease, and Rest, and
Quiet ’ until ‘they might run agen with swifter speed’. But though these
thoughts are managed corporeally, they are also separate material enti-
ties which can be expelled from the body and onto the page: Cavendish
concludes that ‘now they’re out, my Braine is more at ease’ (PaF , p. 47).
Defining cognition not simply as rational, but also as an affective and
embodied process, Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton have proposed that
cognition occurs not simply within the individual but across a wider ‘cog-
nitive ecology’ which includes social and cultural structures and material
environments.11 They argue that ‘[b]odies, spaces, artifacts, and environ-
ments are all co-ordinated in a cognitive ecological model, and agents
both shape and are in turn shaped by their manipulation of objects’.12
Cavendish’s metaphorically blurred boundaries between the cabinet self,
the human anatomy, and its cognitive and sensory powers, anticipate such
a formulation, with the metaphorical cabinet clearly acting as a ‘cogni-
tive artifact’, at once shaped by and shaping its environment, but also
providing a structure for Cavendish’s perceptions of both the world and
how we understand it.13 Her cabinets may appear to be constructed of
whimsical verse, but they frame serious questions about how cognition
occurs. Situating the contents of the brain as the most valued objects,
or ‘treasures’, of nature’s cabinets, she designates cognition as a topic
deserving of intellectual investigation, while self-reflexively recognising
11 Tribble and Sutton build on the work of Edwin Hutchins and Andy Clark on cogni-
tive ecologies and embodied mind theory. See Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton, ‘Cognitive
Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean Studies’, Shakespeare Studies, 39 (2011), 96;
Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); and Andy
Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1997).
12 Tribble and Sutton, ‘Cognitive Ecology’, 99.
13 Evelyn Tribble, ‘“The Chain of Memory”: Distributed Cognition in Early Modern
England’, Scan, 2 (2005), http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=53
[accessed 1 January 2019]. Though the application of cognitive science in early modern
studies has been critiqued for its anachronism, there have been some compelling accounts
of how we might use these modern theoretical paradigms to highlight similar (and some-
times neglected) early modern modes of understanding the world. See, for example, Bruce
Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 5; Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Illicit Privacy and Outdoor
Spaces in Early Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 9 (2009),
4–22 (p. 17), and especially the discussion of Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed:
Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993), p. 13.
188 S. CAWTHORNE
that this can only be achieved through the use of the very same tools
that she seeks to understand. Human emotion, psychology, and phys-
iology are simultaneously opened up for inspection and configured as
instruments for understanding nature. Nature’s cabinet, for Cavendish, is
not an empty metaphor, but illuminates the complexities of what natural
knowledge can be, and how we might grasp it.
The Poetics of Housewifery

If Cavendish’s frameworks for thought rely on established analogies
between the body and the microcosmic Wunderkammer, she also draws
on more quotidian types of closet that would have populated her everyday
existence. Aligning the creations of the housewife Nature and her own
poetic making by using parallel terminology throughout the volume,
Cavendish figures her writing as a substitute for domestic duties: without
children, and in exile with no estate to run, she sombrely declares that
she writes because there is ‘nothing for Huswifery, or thrifty Industry
to imploy my selfe in’ (PaF , [sig. A7r ]). Instead, her compulsive poetic
making becomes a form of traditional women’s work: a ‘Spinning with
the Braine’ (PaF , sig. A2[r ]). Departing from her contemporaries’
all-too-often misogynistic depictions of Nature as a classical goddess
requiring subjugation, Cavendish’s Nature is instead the defiantly modern
mistress of a substantial estate, with her own agency, responsibilities, and
power. Conflating the poetic, domestic, and world-making endeavours of
Cavendish and Nature by rendering them in the same language of house-
wifery, we are encouraged to read their acts of creation interchangeably; if
Nature is joyously making worlds, then Cavendish re-creates those worlds
in words.
To many of Cavendish’s male contemporaries, nature’s cabinet was
touted as an object to be rapaciously forced open, or an attractive but
dangerous temptation; recalling Eve’s apple or Pandora’s box, it was a
reminder of the threat posed by women promising access to unlimited
knowledge. Cavendish reverses the gendered subtexts of the metaphor,
presenting a figurative household ecology in which holding the key to
nature’s cabinet was just another duty in the daily work of a woman.
This subtle metaphorical power shift, reaffirming the everyday, even banal,
control of a woman over her own closet, perhaps reflected the reality
of gender dynamics both in the production of natural knowledge and
the control of cabinets and closets (scientific or otherwise) at this time,
which have been shown to be much more flexible than patriarchal insti-
tutions were willing to admit.14 But it also enabled Cavendish to exploit
associations reserved specifically for women’s cabinets. As the plethora of
recipe books for women titled ‘closet’ or ‘cabinet’ suggests, these were
often designated spaces for domestic work. But in wealthy households
especially, women’s cabinets were also conceived as private spaces closely
linked with writing, reading, and poetry.15
Cavendish’s detailed imagining of the keys to nature’s cabinet suggests
how her poetics interweave with her natural philosophy, emphasising the
importance of wit and beauty as keys to our cognitive centres: wit acts
on the brain through the ears, and the key of beauty unlocks the eyes
to enter the heart. Crucially, both wit and beauty are qualities prized in
Cavendish’s self-conscious and explicitly gendered poetics, and her insis-
tence that wit and beauty might open nature’s cabinets poses poetry,
alongside sensory perception, as a legitimate mode of accessing both the
human mind and natural knowledge. Furthermore, the ability of these
qualities to open the heart as well as the brain suggests the emotional,
affective form of knowledge that poetic effects might create.16 Helping
to rationalise the coexistence of moral, allegorical, and philosophical
topics in Poems and Fancies , this bold model situates emotion as a key
element of cognition in Nature’s cabinet. By utilising these keys, the
poem suggests, we can construct a model of knowing in which nature
14 See Paula Findlen, ‘Masculine Prerogatives: Gender, Space and Knowledge in the
Early Modern Museum’, in The Architecture of Science, ed. by Peter Galison and Emily
Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 29–57; Orlin, Locating Privacy,
p. 312.
15 See Thornton, Scholar in His Study, pp. 96–97; Stephen J. Campbell, The Cabinet of
Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella D’Este (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2004), p. 59; Carolyn Sargentson, ‘Looking at Furniture Inside
Out: Strategies of Secrecy and Security in Eighteenth-Century French Furniture’, in
Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European
and American Past, ed. by Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge,
2007), pp. 205–36; Bernadette Andrea, ‘Pamphilia’s Cabinet: Gendered Authorship and
Empire in Lady Mary Wroth’s “Urania”’, ELH , 68 (2001), 335–58; Katherine R. Larson,
‘Reading the Space of the Closet in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, Early
Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2 (2007), 73–93; and Mary Ellen Lamb,
Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1990).
16 On affective knowledge as a form of cognition, see Tribble and Sutton, ‘Cognitive
Ecology’, 96.
190 S. CAWTHORNE
is not only contained and displayed through logic and sense, but also
elucidated by a feminine poetics.
Using the umbrella terms ‘cabinet’ and ‘closet’, Cavendish gestures
towards a slippery and diverse range of spaces, experiences, and associa-
tions that become contiguous and fluid; the multiplicity of cabinets she
imagines and implies allows her to operate, at different times, according
to the various logics or cultural expectations they individually employ, or
to stitch them all together. Henri Lefebvre has described ‘representational
space’ as ‘the domain of everyday intimate experience where space is acti-
vated by memory and imagination’ which ‘overlays physical space, making
symbolic use of its objects’.17 Cavendish’s cabinets of nature unveil a simi-
larly plural and multi-layered mode of thought. Both the cabinet and the
world that Cavendish describes involve observations of real space trans-
formed and mediated by imagination and fancy. The realities of everyday
spatial and sensory experience are integrated with associative structures of
knowing and poetic fancy to present a powerful and enhanced model of
understanding.
Nature’s Trinket Box

While the series of boxes described in Cavendish’s first poem about
nature’s cabinets are relatively generic in form, in ‘Natures Cabinet ’, the
poem which immediately follows, the brain is described as a jewellery box.
Alongside narratives of interiority, the emergent self of the cabinet has
been connected to the proliferation and display of things.18 But while
Cavendish describes, in her prefaces, ‘how I busie my Thoughts, when
I thinke upon the Objects of the World’ (PaF , sig. A4[v ]), the world
is also recreated for Cavendish in and by the imagined objects of the
mind, with the powers of cognition imagined as fashion accessories. ‘In
Natures Cabinet, the Braine, you’l find | Many a fine Knack, which doth
delight the Mind’, Cavendish writes, before listing the contents of her
cognitive haberdashery: ‘Colour’d Ribbons of Fancies new’, ‘Masques of
Imaginations ’, ‘Fans of Opinion’, ‘Gloves of Remembrance’, and ‘Veiles of
Forgetfulness ’ (PaF , p. 126). Despite the proliferation of these accessories
17 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 38–46.
18 Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Balti-
more: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 255.
of the mind, Cavendish warns that the ‘Pendants of Understanding ’ are

not available to everyone; some can only adorn themselves with ‘Black
Patches of Ignorance’ (PaF , p. 126).19 Nevertheless, in this cognitive
model, the whole treasure chest of the brain’s faculties plays a part in
understanding Nature: no discrimination is made between the creative
powers of fancy and imagination and other more rational cognitive
attributes.
Using similar language to defend the ‘garments’ of her poetry,
Cavendish indicates how she might make, through verse, forms of
cognition equally capable of comprehending nature:
Poetry, which is built upon Fancy, Women may claime, as a worke belonging
most properly to themselves: for I have observ’d, that their Braines work
usually in a Fantasticall motion: as in their severall, and various dresses, in
their many and singular choices of Cloaths, and Ribbons, and the like.
(PaF , sig. A4[r ])
Cavendish stresses the fanciful and idiosyncratic nature of women’s

craft and women’s thought. But this is no denigration or trivialisa-
tion of women’s philosophical powers: comparing her poems to the
‘many Curious things [women] make, as Flowers, Boxes, Baskets with
Beads, Shells, Silke, Straw or any thing else’ (PaF , sig. A3[r ]), Cavendish
imagines her poems in the same terms as the powers of (anyone’s) under-
standing. According to Cavendish’s figurative logic, though the material
or literary products of women’s making might be inherently fanciful,
they all belong in the dressing room of the brain, the chief cabinet of
nature which is so crucial to comprehending the world around it. The
pendants of understanding, themselves a product of Cavendish’s fanciful
poetry, illustrate the lack of prejudice with which Cavendish integrates
the imagination into her cabinet’s collection of cognitive faculties. Taking
objects such as beads, shells, and straw, and transforming them, through
poetry, into the flowers, boxes, and baskets which accompany such fash-
ionable attire, Cavendish illustrates that women’s creative interactions
19 Ironically Cavendish was famous for wearing black silk or velvet patches, often shaped
as stars or hearts, on her face—a trend used by women to hide blemished skin. See Katie
Whitaker, Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and
Romantic (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 297.
192 S. CAWTHORNE
with natural objects can stock the cabinet of nature with new forms of
knowledge. The power of poetry to comprehend nature is demonstrated
in Poems and Fancies itself, which contains a number of verses exploring
anatomical and epidemiological subjects related to the keys, locks, and
boxes that Cavendish identifies among the parts of nature’s cabinets.20
Lisa T. Sarasohn has suggested that, in her later work, ‘Cavendish mate-
rialized the faculties of the intellect and will and then transformed them
into a stylistic aesthetic’, but this is more than an aesthetic—it is also a
radical cognitive model.21
Worlds Within Worlds

In ‘Natures Cabinet ’, Cavendish warns of the heavy pendant earrings
of ‘understanding’ that ‘Nature hangs them not in every Eare’ (PaF ,
p. 126). The choice of jewellery is significant, alluding back to a vivid
image from an earlier poem, which considers how understanding might be
connected to poetical world-making through the conceit of ‘A World in
an Eare-Ring’.22 Referring to the earrings as ‘Pendents’, Cavendish imag-
ines each jewel as a microcosmic world replete with its own agriculture,
gardens, animals, weather, and zodiac (PaF , pp. 45–46). Insisting that the
sound and fury of the earring world would be indiscernible to the wearer,
Cavendish instead shows how otherwise imperceptible worlds might be
accessed through poetic imagination. Imagining a dizzying, matryoshka
doll-style proliferation of worlds within worlds in ‘Of many Worlds in this
20 PaF : on the brain and eye, see ‘Nature Calls a Councell ’, pp. 1–4; on disease:
‘What Atomes Cause Sicknesse’, ‘What Atomes make a Dropsie’, ‘What Atomes Make
a Consumption’, ‘What Atomes Make the wind Collick’, ‘What Atomes Make a Palsey,
or Apoplexy’, and ‘In All Other Diseases They Are Mixed, Taking Parts, and Factions’,
pp. 15–16; on sensory perception, cognition and the passions: ‘Of Light, and Sight’,
‘The Objects of Every Sense, Are According to Their Motions in the Braine’, ‘According
as the Notes in Musicke Agree with the Motions of the Heart, or Braine, such Passions
Are Produced Thereby’, ‘The Motion of Thoughts’, and ‘The Reason Why the Thoughts
Are Onely in the Head’, pp. 39–42; on the organs: ‘A Heart Drest ’, ‘Head, and Braines’,
‘Similizing the Braine to a Garden’, and ‘Of Two Hearts’, pp. 131, 136, 140–41; on wit
and beauty: ‘A Dialogue Betwixt Wit, and Beauty’, and ‘The Mine of Wit’, pp. 81–82,
153–54.
21 Lisa T. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy
During the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 18.
22 See Claire Jowitt, ‘Imperial Dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the Cult of Elizabeth’,
Women’s Writing, 4 (1997), 383–99.
World’—the logical extension, perhaps, of the Wunderkammer’s micro-

cosmic logic and threat of information overload—she conceives of them
as nesting boxes, a popular form of contemporary carpentry:
[j]ust like unto a Nest of Boxes round,

Degrees of Size, within each Boxe are found.
So in this World, may many Worlds more be.
(PaF , pp. [44]–45)23
Gesturing forward to the multiple, interconnected boxes that she imag-

ines as constituting nature’s cabinet, Cavendish suggests the potential
infinitude of worlds we might explore and highlights the important place
of imagination and logic in discovering them.
This was a timely philosophical point. The evolution of optical instru-
ments, in particular microscopes, was alerting people to worlds that lay
beyond the perception of the human eye.24 In ‘Of many Worlds in this
World’, Cavendish extrapolates from this notion to theorise the potential
existence of worlds imperceptible even to optical prostheses, knowable
through the powers of the mind alone:
Nature is curious, and such worke may make,

That our dull sense can never finde, but scape.
For Creatures, small as Atomes, may be there.
(PaF , p. [44])
These microscopically imperceptible worlds might be invisible to our eyes,

Cavendish hypothesises, but they need not be to our minds:
If foure Atomes a World can make,* then see,

What severall Worlds might in an Eare-ring bee.
For Millions of these Atomes may bee in
The Head of one small, little, single Pin.
23 On information overload and Wunderkammern, see: Bleichmar, ‘Seeing the World’,

p. 28.
24 See, for example, Robert Hooke’s famous later claim that through the microscope ‘a
new visible World [is] discovered to the understanding’: Micrographia (London: printed
by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), p. [5]. Cavendish would critique Hooke’s work
in her later books, including Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy and The Blazing
World (1666).
194 S. CAWTHORNE
And if thus small, the Ladies well may weare

A World of Worlds, as Pendents in each Eare.
(PaF , p. 45)
Using a marginal note, reading ‘As I have before shewed they do, in
my Atomes’, to explicitly tie this proposition to the atomic theory she
has already propounded, Cavendish shows the philosophical utility—
and perhaps necessity—of this imaginative approach to knowledge (PaF ,
p. 45). The same powers of thought which enable her to fancifully
imagine a world in an earring also enable her to theorise and articulate a
fundamentally coherent, if ultimately flawed, atomic model for the world
that she inhabits. After all, how could this imperceptibly minute realm
ever be discovered, if not through the powers of cognition? The nesting-
box model of worlds within worlds—like the purest form of the cabinet
metaphor, the locked box—invites us to imagine the invisible contents
inside it, compelling the viewer or reader to re-make them anew in the
mind through logic and fancy. In exposing the important role that imag-
ination has to play in our understanding of the natural world, Cavendish
throws the box open, revealing the complex tangle of bodily, material,
and cognitive faculties that make up the contents of nature’s manifold
cabinets.
Elizabeth Spiller has offered a model of poeisis as ‘worldmaking’ which
spans both poetics and natural philosophy in the Renaissance. For Spiller,
worldmaking is not ‘hypothetical or counterfactual’, and ‘not an escape
but a more powerful and more meaningful engagement with reality than
can be found in the world at large’.25 In Poems and Fancies , Cavendish
advocates a similar approach, producing an imaginative cognitive poetics
that makes a credible claim for the power of philosophical inquiry
produced through literary craft.26 The plural semantics of the metaphor-
ical cabinet, which can be traced throughout the volume, provide the
25 Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making
Literature, 1560–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 16.
26 A compelling strain of scholarship has started to consider how natural knowledge
is ‘made’, particularly through artistic representation. See, for example, Spiller, Science,
Reading and Renaissance Literature; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, ‘The Age of
the New’, in The Cambridge History of Science, ed. by Katharine Park and Lorraine
Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–18; Howard Marchitello,
The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Galileo (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011); and Frédérique Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and
essential associative structures that underpin this epistemology. Devel-

oping the more straightforward metaphor used by her peers, Cavendish
refits the metaphorical cabinet to suit her own purposes and reflect her
own reality, filling it with poetic treasures of her own making that allow
her to display and explore the nature of knowledge itself.
Literature in the Seventeenth Century, trans. by Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2011).
CHAPTER 13
Elizabeth Bishop’s House in the Mind:

Memory, Imagination, and Interior Space
in ‘The End of March’
Jane Griffiths
It has long been recognised that houses—whether architectural exteriors

or domestic interiors—play a significant role in Elizabeth Bishop’s writing.
They are frequently sites of memory; the meticulously realised house in
‘Sestina’, for example, is both a real, remembered habitation and a figure
of traumatic childhood experience.1 Elsewhere, they are signs of potential
or of resilience: places where a miracle might happen or where a person
profoundly adrift in the world might imagine finding shelter.2 They thus
seem to be consonant with the theory advanced in Gaston Bachelard’s
Poetics of Space, that the house (whether real or remembered) is a symbol
1 ‘Sestina’, in Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927 –1979 (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1983). All quotations from Bishop’s poems will be taken from this
edition, with page numbers given in the text in parentheses.
2 See for example, ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’ and ‘Jerónimo’s House’, in Complete Poems,
pp. 18, 34.
J. Griffiths (B)
Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: jane.griffiths@ell.ox.ac.uk

198 J. GRIFFITHS
of safety and security, and hence a site for day-dreaming.3 Focusing on

Bishop’s unreachable ‘proto-dream-house’ in ‘The End of March’, first
published in her 1976 collection Geography III , this chapter will argue
that, for her, the house is yet more intimately connected with the poet’s
mental processes. Analogies between Bishop’s house and the architectural
spaces of classical and medieval memory arts, as well as between it and the
work of the artist Joseph Cornell, suggest that her house ultimately comes
to stand for the poetic imagination itself.
The epigraph to ‘The End of March’—‘For John Malcolm Brinnin and
Bill Read: Duxbury’—gives the poem a local habitation and two names,
as if it were purely the record of a long, cold beach-walk which Brinnin,
Read, and Bishop took together. This, however, is the first of many red
herrings in a poem that is full of misdirections. The Canada geese that
fly overhead may know where they are going, but the wind disrupts
their formation; the dog-prints on the beach apparently lead nowhere;
even when some flotsam lengths of string are tentatively identified as a
kite string, the kite itself is not forthcoming.4 In its absence, the string
lacks purpose, and the terms Bishop uses to describe it only emphasise its
flightlessness. It is:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,

rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost….
(p. 179)
The repetitions of ‘sodden’ and ‘ghost’ give the lines themselves a tenta-
tive quality, while the pun on different senses of ‘ghost’ confirms the
impression that this is a landscape of lost causes. The first use of the word
follows on from the physical description of the string: evidently, it is white,
adrift, a form without substance. Like an abandoned ghost-costume, it
3 Bachelard’s Poetics of Space was first published as La poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses
Universitaire de France, 1958). The English translation cited in this chapter is The
Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas, 2nd edn (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Joelle
Bielle acknowledges the relevance of Bachelard to Bishop’s work in passing in ‘Swinging
Through the Years: Elizabeth Bishop and “The End of March”’, The American Poetry
Review, 38.6 (2009), 55–62 (p. 55).
4 Cf. Heather Cass White, ‘Teasing the Lion’, Harvard Review, 16 (1999), 61–70
(pp. 66–67).
13 ELIZABETH BISHOP’S HOUSE IN THE MIND … 199
lacks what the OED defines as ‘the soul or spirit as the principle of life’.5
The second use of the word, in the phrase ‘giving up the ghost’, carries
the same sense—but because Bishop has previously observed, near the
beginning of the poem, that ‘Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
| indrawn’, it also puns on another, now obsolete sense: ‘Used as the
conventional equivalent for Latin spiritus, in contexts where the sense
is breath or a blast ’.6 The word ‘indrawn’ brings to mind the common
collocation ‘breath’, and since the ultimate root of ‘inspiration’ is the
Latin inspirare, to breathe into, an indrawn breath signals its opposite:
the absence of inspiration.7 The string that is giving up the ghost, or
spirit, is a tangible reminder of that absence. All indications are that, like
the kite and the paw prints, the walk and the poem are going nowhere.8
Yet in this unpromising landscape, there is a house that contains great
potential. Bishop’s vision of it is worth quoting in full:
I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,

my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of – are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I’d like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, grog à l’américaine.
I’d blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
5 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ghost, n., sense 1.

6 OED, s.v. ghost, n., sense 2.
7 OED, s.v. inspiration, n.
8 The images of paw prints and kite were significant ones for Bishop; Bielle has identified
five earlier unpublished poems in which Bishop attempted to use them (‘Revise, Revise:
Elizabeth Bishop Writing “The End of March”’, in ‘In Worcester, Massachusetts’: Essays
on Elizabeth Bishop, ed. by Laura Menides and Angela G. Dorenkamp (New York: Peter
Lang, 1999), pp. 129–38.
200 J. GRIFFITHS
would waver, doubled in the window.

There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
–at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by–perfect! But–impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.
(pp. 179–80)
As Bishop imagines it, the house is a contradiction in terms: vividly

realised, but also dubious and inaccessible. The aside—‘impossible’—that
concludes her description of it suggests that it is not so much the cold
wind and boarding-up that render the house out of reach, but rather a
failure of nerve or imagination. Yet although the walkers turn back, in
her mind Bishop crosses the threshold; she pictures herself on the inside,
reading, drinking, observing—in fact, emblematising Bachelard’s theory
that the house is ‘a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining’.9
By imagining her life in the house, Bishop revisits and revises the
subject of her poem ‘The Monument’, from her first collection, North
& South (1946). Here, as in ‘The End of March’, the poet’s focus is on
a shabby wooden structure in a coastal setting. She gives a description of
its exterior that is scrupulously exact, yet it is her inability to imagine the
interior space, and her restless mental prowling about it, that make the
poem. She is unable to determine whether it is solid or hollow:
But roughly but adequately it can shelter

what is within (which after all
cannot have been intended to be seen).
It is the beginning of a painting,
9 John Stillgoe, ‘Foreword to the 1994 Edition’, Poetics of Space, p. viii. Discussions of
Bishop’s work that stress the role of the house as sanctuary include Cass, ‘Teasing the
Lion’; Marit J. MacArthur, The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop and
Ashbery: The House Abandoned (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); conversely, Susan
McCabe argues that: ‘Bishop rejects the house as a symbol of permanence and wholeness’
(Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994),
p. 195).
a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument,

and all of wood. Watch it closely.
(pp. 24–25)
The command to watch exhorts the reader to replicate the act of obser-
vation that the poet has already performed, of which the poem itself is a
witness. It even suggests the impossible: that the poem itself is a response
to that command. Just as the monument is also the beginning of a monu-
ment, the poem and its making fall together; neither has an identifiable
point of entry.10 In contrast, it is the successful process of imagining the
house that gives meaning to ‘The End of March’.11 Like the monument,
its exterior creates opportunities for ostentatiously playful descriptions,
(‘a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener’), but it is Bishop’s imagina-
tive realisation of its interior that signals a metaphorical as well as a literal
reversal in the poem. As the walkers return along the beach, the grey land-
scape is transformed as the sun comes out for a moment, making jewels
of the stones, and Bishop concludes by likening the sun to a lion who
might have made the paw prints and ‘who perhaps had batted a kite out
of the sky to play with’ (p. 180). She thus successfully weaves the loose
ends of paw prints and kite string into a narrative.
What, then, does this say about the relationship between Bishop’s
‘proto-dream-house’ and the act of writing? In the loosest possible terms,
there is an analogy between her description of its interior and the free
play of mind in a confined space that is a finished poem; she is obliquely
revisiting the centuries-old pun on ‘stanza’ and ‘room’. More specifically,
although the activities (or rather, non-activities) that Bishop imagines
herself performing in the house do not include writing, they are like-
nesses of it. Each constitutes some kind of mediation between internal
and external realities. Bishop’s reference to looking through binoculars
suggests that the house is a vantage point for observation of the outside
world, yet her mention of talking to herself implies that it is also a retreat
from the outside. Her imaginary reading and annotation of old books
10 Cf. Jonathan Ellis, Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006), pp. 67–71; Linda Anderson, ‘The Story of the Eye: Elizabeth Bishop
and the Limits of the Visual’, in Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, ed. by Linda
Anderson and Jo Shapcott (Newcastle: University of Newcastle and Bloodaxe Books,
2002), p. 163.
11 Cf. White, ‘Teasing the Lion’, 68–70.
202 J. GRIFFITHS
and observation of rain on the windows sit somewhere between the two,
on the threshold between exterior and interior. The rain prevents the
windows from fulfilling their normal purpose of allowing images of the
outside to enter, while—conversely—the contents of the books are inter-
nalised through her note-taking. Both the house and its inhabitant are
in a state of liminality: caught between engaging in exchange with the
outside world and turning in on themselves.12
The terms in which Bishop imagines inhabiting her proto-dream-house
thus appear to be the archetypal ones identified by Bachelard. In The
Poetics of Space, Bachelard argues that the house is an image that comes
‘before thought’: one that has such a deep-rooted psychological impor-
tance that it is universally communicable, opening up a day-dream ‘of a
home beyond man’s earliest memory’.13 It ‘shelters day-dreaming […]
protects the dreamer […] allows one to dream in peace’, and it does
so most effectively when it is most primitive, reduced to its most basic
form.14 Sounding remarkably like Bishop, Bachelard states that:
I […] often said to myself that I should like to live in a house such as one
sees in old prints. I was most attracted by the bold outlines of the houses
in woodcuts which, it seemed to me, demanded simplicity. Through them,
my daydreams inhabited the essential house.15
The significance this basic kind of house held for Bishop, and the extent to
which she associates it with the writing process, are confirmed by a short
story written decades before ‘The End of March’: ‘The Sea & Its Shore’
(1937).16 Its protagonist, Edwin Boomer—whose initials, EB, suggest
that he may be a fictional alter ego of Bishop herself—is employed to
keep a beach free from paper. What he collects is not simply wastepaper,
but all printed matter that finds its way to the shore; Boomer is meant
to burn it, but instead keeps, classifies, and studies many of the scraps.
12 Cf. Bonnie Costello, Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 79.
13 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. xx, 5.
16 The resemblance between ‘The End of March’ and ‘The Sea & Its Shore’ has also
been noted by Anne Colwell, Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of
Elizabeth Bishop (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), p. 188.
Like Bishop’s in ‘The End of March’, his reading occurs in a house that
stands on the shore: one that is so primitive in nature that it might more
accurately be described as a shack or shelter. The narrator observes that:
As a house, it was more like an idea of a house than a real one. It could
have stood at either end of a scale of ideas of houses. It could have been a
child’s perfect playhouse, or an adult’s ideal house – since everything that
makes most houses nuisances had been done away with.
It was a shelter, but not for living in, for thinking in. It was to the ordinary
house, what the ceremonial thinking cap is to the ordinary hat.17
The consonances between Boomer’s house and that in ‘The End of

March’ are clear: each is a fantastically simple physical shelter for the
life of the mind. Just as Bishop imagines herself reading in her dream-
house, Boomer is constantly focused on print. There are significant
differences, of course. Boomer’s life is presented as one of compulsive and
pointless repetition. His scraps of text signal the possibility of meaning,
but—because they are divorced from their sources—a meaning that is
not retrievable. In contrast, although Bishop’s assertion in ‘The End of
March’ that she will read boring books, and that her notes will be useless,
raises the possibility that life in her proto-dreamhouse will be a reprise of
Boomer’s, her proposed reading consists of entire books, which have the
potential to form a narrative that makes sense of the world. Moreover—
unlike Boomer—Bishop would not be employed to read; her presence
in the house would be from choice, and rather than constantly being
visited by irreducible fragments of the past, she would be free either
to read or to stare out of the window.18 Yet while Bishop’s reading of
books, unlike Boomer’s compulsive puzzling over fragments, is an image
of liberty of mind, both Boomer’s and Bishop’s houses are the setting for
their engagement with written records—the physical stuff of memory—
and for processes of retrieving, re-ordering, and re-making. They are the
sites where thought occurs.
It is here that analogies between Bishop’s writing and classical and
medieval conceptions of memory come into play. For Aristotle and his
17 Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), pp. 171–
72. All quotations will be taken from this edition.
18 Cf. Ellis, Art and Memory, p. 4.
204 J. GRIFFITHS
successors, memory was in the first instance considered as the mental

faculty responsible for housing images created by the faculty of the fantasy,
which were based on sense impressions of the outside world.19 It was a
storage system that enabled recollection; common medieval metaphors
used for the memory were ones that emphasised its ordering capacity:
‘book’ was one, but others included ‘cell’, ‘dovecote’, ‘treasury’, and
‘storage-room’.20 The appropriateness of such specifically architectural
metaphors for the memory was both reflected in and consolidated by one
of the most popular artificial memory systems formulated in classical and
medieval rhetorical treatises. Designed to assist orators in remembering
the material for their speeches in the correct order, it depended on the
ability to hold in mind complex architectural structures, as is shown by
the description in the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium:
The artificial memory includes backgrounds and images. By backgrounds

I mean such scenes as are naturally or artificially set off on a small scale,
complete and conspicuous, so that we can grasp and embrace them easily
by the natural memory – for example, a house, an intercolumnar space, a
recess, an arch, or the like. An image is […] a figure, mark, or portrait of
the object we wish to remember; for example, if we wish to recall a horse, a
lion, or an eagle, we must place its image in a definite background […] We
should therefore, if we desire to memorise a large number of items, equip
ourselves with a large number of backgrounds, so that in these we may
set a large number of images. I likewise think it obligatory to have these
backgrounds in a series, so that we may never by confusion in their order
be prevented from following the images […] If [the backgrounds] have
been arranged in order, the result will be that, reminded by the images, we
can repeat orally what we have committed to the backgrounds, proceeding
in either direction from any background we please.21
In this architectural mnemonic, the imaginary house is a space which the

orator or writer uses as the basis for the generation of new material;
19 For an introduction to faculty psychology, see E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits:
Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute,
1975). For discussion focused specifically on the memory, see Mary Carruthers, The Book
of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 60–68.
20 See Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 18–55.
21 Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. by Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1954), III.xvi.29–III.xviii.30.
as Mary Carruthers has demonstrated, by providing cues for a writer’s

invention, a well-stocked and well-ordered memory fulfilled the role in
composition that we would now consider to be the province of the
imagination.22 By extension, because the memory, like the other mental
faculties, was thought to occupy a physical space (a chamber or cell) in
the mind, and because mental activity was understood to take the form of
movement between these chambers, the architectural mnemonic might
be understood not only as virtual finding aid, but also as image of the
remembering and creating mind itself.
This kind of memory system is clearly very different from the personal
acts (and traumatic failures) of recollection that have been traced in
Bishop’s writing.23 Yet without attempting to suggest that architectural
mnemonics directly influenced Bishop across a gap of centuries, it is
nonetheless possible to use them as a tool for thinking about the nature
of the relationship between her houses and the processes of memory and
imagination. In a letter to Marianne Moore, Bishop seems to echo (or
rediscover) their conflation of house and mind when she expresses a wish
for:
A junk-room, a store-room, or attic, where I could keep and had kept, all
my life the odds and ends that took my fancy […] If one had such a place
to throw things into, like a sort of extra brain, and a chair in the middle
of it to go and sit on once in a while, it might be a great help.24
Unlike the well-designed ‘backgrounds’ recommended in memory arts,

Bishop’s store-room is essentially disorderly. Yet it shares with them an
image of the writer’s mind as containing a chamber that the writer herself
22 See further Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 89–98, and ‘The Poet as Master-Builder:
Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages’, New Literary History, 24
(1993), 881–904.
23 See for example Colwell, Inscrutable Houses; Ellis, Art and Memory; Herbert Marks,
‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Memory’, Literary Imagination, 7 (2005), 197–224; and Brett
C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993).
24 Letter of 11 September 1940, quoted in Marilyn May Lombardi, The Body and the
Song: Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995),
p. 171. The italics are mine. For nineteenth-century references to the mind as attic
or warehouse, which similarly indicate the persistence of the metaphor, see Ushashi
Dasgupta’s chapter in this volume, especially note 6.
206 J. GRIFFITHS
might enter, and although Bishop does not specify what kind of ‘help’ it
would provide, her description of it as a place where the past is encoun-
tered in the form of physical entities suggests that it provides raw material
for the writer: the imagistic stuff of which she makes narrative, or art.
By extension, the houses in ‘The Sea & Its Shore’ and ‘The End of
March’ where Boomer and Bishop store and contemplate material from
the outside world might be read in a similar way: not just as Bachelardian
shelters, contemplation of which prompts a day-dream of the life of the
mind, but—like the memory chambers of faculty psychology—as images
of the mind itself.
This reading is confirmed by the poem that immediately follows ‘The
End of March’ in Geography III . ‘Objects & Apparitions’ is an English-
language version of a poem by Octavio Paz; it is the only one of Bishop’s
translations to be included in any of her poetry collections, and its juxta-
position with ‘The End of March’ in a volume whose order was the
subject of careful consideration suggests that there is a strong connection
between the two.25 The poem is a response to the work of Joseph Cornell
(1903–1972), the solitary New York-based artist famous for his box-
constructions, in which collections of significant objects were gathered
together. Bishop writes of them as:
Hexahedrons of wood and glass,

scarcely bigger than a shoebox,
with room in them for night and all its lights.
(p. 275) 26
25 For the structure of Geography III , see Eleanor Cook, Elizabeth Bishop at Work
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 208–48; for ‘The End of March’
and ‘Objects & Apparitions’, see pp. 241–46.
26 After a long period of relative neglect, there has recently been renewed interest
in Cornell. Good selections of his work may be found in Joseph Cornell: Shadow-
play … Eterniday (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003); Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust
(London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2015); and Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway: The
Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997) provides biographically
contextualised discussion.
There are striking correspondences between Bishop’s work and Cornell’s:

several of Bishop’s own surviving visual art-works show Cornell’s influ-
ence.27 Still more suggestive as a way of tracing the three-way corre-
spondence between Bishop, Cornell, and memory arts is Bishop’s short
story ‘In Prison’, in which her protagonist compares her life in a hotel
to prison life. Describing the hotel rooms as cellular and comparing her
own room to a bird cage, she eagerly looks forward to leaving the hotel’s
metaphorical imprisonment in order to be literally imprisoned in a room
that strikingly foreshadows the houses of ‘The Sea & Its Shore’ and ‘The
End of March’: small, almost unfurnished, with rough, unfinished walls,
where she will have a single book to read, ideally the second volume of
a series on a topic of which she knows nothing.28 Her fondness for her
hotel room is because it anticipates this confinement. When she likens her
hotel wallpaper to the bars of a cage, she is imagining how full imprison-
ment will free her from all concern with the outside world and thus give
her complete mental freedom.
Cornell, too, links cages and hotels, using them to explore ideas of
restraint and liberty. Many of his boxes take the form of ‘aviaries’, and
many—often equally cage-like—are titled for hotels that invoke a highly
romantic idea of travel, proposing them as gateways to the heavens:
Grand Hotel de l’Observatoire, for example, and Hotel de l’Etoile. Another
‘aviary’, The Caliph of Bagdad, makes explicit the connection between
hotel and cage motifs; it shows two parakeets on a perch behind a vesti-
gial wire grille alongside a pasted-up sign for the ‘Gd Hotel du Vesuve’ in
Naples; a scorched advert for another hotel (the Grand Hotel Fontaine)
appears on the back wall, while an open drawer in the bottom of the box
contains numerous maps. Beneath the perch there is a round ball with the
number eight on it, whose resemblance to a die suggests that the birds are
27 William Benton identifies Bishop’s art-works ‘Feather Box’ and ‘Anjinhos’ as showing
Cornell’s influence (Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop: Paintings [New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1996], pp. 48–49, 50–51); in view of his fondness for the slot machine
motif, and Bishop’s reference to his ‘slotmachine of visions’ in ‘Objects & Apparitions’, ‘E.
Bishop’s Patented Slot-Machine’ (Exchanging Hats, pp. 76–77) should probably also be
included in that category. Consonances between Bishop and Cornell have also been noted
by Costello, Planets, p. 106; Ernesto Suárez-Toste, ‘“Telling It Slant”: The “Healthier”
Surrealism of Elizabeth Bishop and Joseph Cornell’, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses,
42 (2001), 279–88.
28 Bishop, Collected Prose, pp. 182, 185, 187.
208 J. GRIFFITHS
simply between moves in some unspecified game.29 Cornell’s Caliph box

thus presents vistas of opportunity that are also images of confinement;
it is the visual equivalent of the combination of wonder and weariness
expressed by Bishop’s travellers in her poems ‘Questions of Travel’ or
‘Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’. But other boxes,
such as Toward the Blue Peninsula and Observatory Corona Borealis Case-
ment , have a window in place of the advert for a second hotel. Open to
the night sky or to a clear sky blue, and combined with partial wire grilles
identical to that in the Caliph as well as with empty perches or pigeon-
holes, the windows strongly suggest that these are cages from which the
birds have flown.30
Cornell’s wooden ‘rooms’ with their glimpsed representations of the
sky not only recall Bishop’s beach houses, but—like Bishop’s houses—
they recall memory arts as well. During the decade when he created
most of his ‘hotels’ and ‘aviaries’, Cornell also created a series of ‘dove-
cotes’. One of the best-known of these is his Untitled [Dovecote American
Gothic]. This is a rectangular wooden structure fronted by a white lattice
resembling pigeonholes; behind it, a series of small white balls roll to
and fro, appearing now at one aperture, now at another.31 The dove-
cote was a commonly used classical model of mind, while in classical as
well as in Christian philosophy birds were a yet more common image
for memories and thoughts; as Walter Hopps observes, for Cornell too
‘the dove was a spiritual carrier’ and his dovecotes are habitats for the
spirit.32 Viewed in this light, the movement of the spheres in Untitled
[Dovecote American Gothic] reflects processes of thought or recollection:
the movement of the mind through its own chambers. And this, in turn,
invites a fresh look at those boxes of Cornell’s in which eclectic objects
are juxtaposed in a series of small compartments, whose structure echoes
that of the dovecote.33 They are the correlative of the elaborate storage
systems in Cornell’s basement studio; with both, the resemblance to a
structure closely associated with mental process suggests that they do not
just frame or evoke memories, but represent the interior of the maker’s
29 Shadowplay, p. 136.
30 Shadowplay, p. 152; Wanderlust, pp. 204–5.
31 Shadowplay, pp. 144–45.
32 Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 42–44; Shadowplay, p. 144.
33 See for example L’Humeur Vagabonde (Shadowplay, pp. 146–47).
mind. For Cornell, as for Bishop in ‘In Prison’, the containing architec-
ture enables the transformative work of memory and imagination that
occurs there. The birds in Untitled [Aviary with Cockatoo and Corks]
and Untitled [Aviary with Parrot and Drawers], snugly housed among
neat compartments that hold miscellaneous yet carefully ordered objects,
represent both the artist in the confines of his underground studio and the
thought-processes by which he makes its contents meaningful, collapsing
the distinction between the two.34
Bishop’s house in ‘The End of March’ is similarly both product and
emblem of the writer’s mind, and it is not surprising that her imagined
inhabitation of it contains a memory of Cornell. This occurs at the point
where she pictures herself in the house after dark:
At night, grog à l’américaine.

I’d blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
(p. 180)
The image she conjures here again seems to speak directly to Bachelard,
who observes that:
The lamp in the window is the house’s eye and, in the kingdom of the
imagination, it is never lighted out-of-doors, but is enclosed light, which
can only filter to the outside […] It will always symbolize solitude.35
He goes on to argue that a large number of ‘pertinent literary documents’

demonstrate how the house is a universal symbol of safety and solitude
that ‘must always set the waves of the imagination radiating’.36 ‘The End
of March’ might be read as one of those documents—but here, the flame
is the radiation of the imagination, not just the image that inspires it.
This is despite the element of uncertainty in Bishop’s depiction of it.
Like so much about the house, the flame is dubious: rather than shining
out boldly, it appears only indirectly, through the image of its reflection
hovering uncertainly in—or the other side—of the glass.37 Doubled and
34 See Wanderlust, pp. 21, 178–79, 186–87.

35 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. 34–36.
36 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. 37, 36.
37 Cf. Costello, Planets, p. 83.
210 J. GRIFFITHS
dispersed, the reflected image of the flame connects Bishop in her dream-
house with her description of Cornell contemplating his boxes in ‘Objects
& Apparitions’:
The reflector of the inner eye

scatters the spectacle:
God all alone above an extinct world.
(p. 276)
These lines particularly emphasise the isolation of the artist, not only
through the comparison to an all-creating God, but also through refer-
ence to the ‘inner eye’. In an earlier poem in Geography III , ‘Crusoe in
England’, Bishop’s Crusoe recalls how, on his island, there were gaps in
his memory of the books he had read before he was cast away. He gives
as an example his inability to complete a line of Wordsworth’s:
‘They flash upon that inward eye,

which is the bliss …’ The bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
when I got back was look it up.
(p. 164)
The missing word is ‘solitude’, of course, and Crusoe’s inability to

remember it reflects the near-unbearable loneliness that he suffers before
Friday’s arrival. In ‘Objects & Apparitions’, there is no such direct
literary allusion, but the echo of ‘inward eye’ in ‘inner eye’ means that
Bishop’s description of Cornell recalls Crusoe’s isolation—and because
the reference to the ‘reflector’ of Cornell’s inner eye links him to
Bishop, contemplating the window (or wind-eye) of her dream-house,
that intense isolation is associated with her experience there as well.
So far, so Bachelardian. Yet Bishop’s image of flame shining out into
the night does not just conform to the romantic image of the lone
visionary, but also confirms that, as for Cornell, her architectures of the
mind not only excite the imagination, but are also the site of its activity.
Although it wavers, the flame is also the only source of illumination in
the poem. As appears from a comparison with Bishop’s painting, ‘Interior
with Extension Cord’, it forms a striking contrast to the rather feeble elec-
tricity line that ‘limply leashes the whole affair | to something off behind
the dunes’ (p. 180). With its sketchy furniture and rough wooden walls,
the room in the painting could almost be the interior of the proto-dream-
house; its dominant feature is a long extension cord that leads from the
table lamp up one wall, across the ceiling, and out through a hole in
the opposite wall.38 In the poem, as in the painting, the wire (at least
in principle) connects the house to the outside world. By observing it, it
seems that Bishop is undercutting her own picture of idealised isolation,
just as Henri Lefebvre undercut Bachelard’s vision of the night-lit house
as emblem of solitude when he argued that the house may be imagined
as permeated from every direction by ‘streams of energy which run in
and out of it […] water, gas, electricity, telephone lines […] and so on’,
rendering it ‘a complex of mobilities, a nexus of in and out conduits’.39
Yet for Bishop it is mentioning the wire that prompts her to dismiss the
whole fantasy of living there. Just as the surprisingly small lamp in ‘Inte-
rior’ is dominated entirely by the ropey length of cord that will allow it to
function, the limp wire in ‘The End of March’ implies that outside sources
of illumination must be laboriously contrived, and may be unreliable.
In contrast, the light that Bishop imagines in the window is one that
needs no wiring: it is not artificial, but a living, breathing flame. As some-
thing that could not exist without oxygen, it recalls and counters the
indrawn landscape of the beginning of the poem; whereas the limp leash
of electricity line recalls the flightless string that was giving up the ghost,
the flame signals the resurgence of inspiration and metaphorical as well as
literal illumination. Again, the image is only dubiously confident: burning
off the alcohol in Bishop’s rum, the flame ominously brings to mind
Boomer’s alcoholism and his repeated burning of his papers in ‘The Sea
& Its Shore’, and thus calls into question the writer’s ability to make sense
of her material. Yet it appears as the culmination of the poet’s negotiations
between inner and outer worlds in her dream-house, and it too is liminal:
being ‘diaphanous’, or translucent, it allows the things of the world to
show through. It thus anticipates the technique by which Bishop gives
38 Bishop, Exchanging Hats, pp. 42–43; for discussion of the painting as an unofficial
poetics, see Lavinia Greenlaw, ‘Interior with Extension Cord’, in Strong Words: Modern
Poets on Modern Poetry, ed. by W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis (Tarset: Bloodaxe
Books, 2000), pp. 274–76. Cf. also Anderson’s analysis of Bishop’s depiction of wires
and cables (‘Story of the Eye’, pp. 171–72). For a wider discussion of Bishop’s poetry in
relation to her paintings, see Costello, Planets, pp. 79–106; she also considers Cornell’s
work (pp. 107–41).
39 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), p. 93.
212 J. GRIFFITHS
significance to incidental remembered things (such as a cold beach and a

kite string), shining the light of the mind on them and transforming them
into a playful but coherent narrative. Like the books she imagines herself
reading, these things of the world are memorised or internalised, made
her own—and then returned to the world again, reflectively. Framing
the flame, the house achieves an effect equivalent to that which Bishop
identifies when she writes: ‘Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes | my words
become visible for a moment’ (p. 276).
Like Cornell’s boxes, Bishop’s house implicitly becomes the kind of
mental space that Bishop referred to in her letter to Moore: a sort of
extra brain. For Bachelard, houses in poems demonstrate the archetypal
importance of the house as symbol and the capacity for images or descrip-
tions of it to excite the imagination; it is something that is rather than
something that does. In contrast, comparison with classical and medieval
models of mind and with Cornell’s memory boxes reveals how Bishop’s
proto-dream-house both enables the moment of poetic creation and also,
like the mind, contains it. It is not so much an image in her mind as an
image of her mind. When she breathes life into its imagined interior, she
is writing from rather than about the house.
CHAPTER 14
‘The Mind in the House’ or the ‘House

in the Mind’: Poetic Composition
and Reclaimed Memory
Stephanie Norgate
On re-reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, I am startled to

discover how frequently the poems in my second collection, The Blue
Den, cohere with his thoughts on the miniaturising effects of distance
(‘Man Walking, after Giacometti’), intimate immensity (‘Stream to Ice’,
‘Tidal Road to Traveller’, ‘Ant to Sky’), and the power of the fragmented
and old to resurrect and contain memory in ‘Fallen House to Final
Owner’.1 In the case of a later poem, not included in The Blue Den, I
see a further example of consonance with Bachelard, in relation to fire
and lamp-light in the home’s interior. It is as if an invisible Bachelard
1 Stephanie Norgate, The Blue Den (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2012), pp. 9, 11, 12, 15,
57. Cf. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas, 2nd edn (New York:
Penguin, 2014), Chapter 7 ‘Miniature’ and Chapter 8 ‘Intimate Immensity’ (pp. 167–99
and 202–26 respectively).
S. Norgate (B)
University of Chichester, Chichester, UK

214 S. NORGATE
came with me on my walks, which is disconcerting, given that I hadn’t

read his work until after The Blue Den was published. But Bachelard’s
discussion of a poet’s dream relationship to houses, huts, nests, frag-
ments, and memories is uncannily pertinent to my concerns while I
was writing these poems. Houses—like days, as Larkin says—‘are where
we live’.2 But the houses that have so far occurred in my poetry are
uninhabitable, flooded, ruined, fallen, or—when positive—illusory. In my
imagination, I am drawn, perhaps under the influence of the Romantic
poets, to the makeshift, to the shack and the den, to flooded houses,
and furniture abandoned outside, to a broken-down folly that failed to
grow into a house as intended. In reality of course, there is little that
is romantic about such dwellings. Yet, when I see makeshift structures,
I am pulled with a child-like instinct towards them. Bachelard ascribes
the word ‘refuge’ to the hut that the dreamer-poet conjures from within
the comfort of their home. My political guilt at a luxurious fascination
with the temporary or ruined shelter is eased somewhat by Bachelard’s
acknowledgement of the shack’s imaginative hook for the dreamer:
For instance, in the house itself, in the family sitting-room, a dreamer of

refuges dreams of a hut, of a nest […] in which he would like to hide
away, like an animal in its hole.3
Bachelard’s example coheres with the mindset of the protagonist in my

poem ‘The Blue Den’; perhaps, as for Bachelard’s dreamer, the ‘den’ is
the refuge in which the nameless character always dreamt of taking cover,
on the edge of land and society. For the purposes of the following discus-
sion, I will quote the whole poem.4
The Blue Den
He can choose from several horizons.

The electricity lines. The sea.
This is him now.

A bunch of old doors for walls.
2 Philip Larkin, ‘Days’, in The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber, 1983), p. 27.
4 Norgate, Blue Den, p. 50.
14 ‘THE MIND IN THE HOUSE’ OR THE ‘HOUSE IN THE MIND’ … 215
A knocker, like a shrunken head,

nailed to the one door that opens.
He’s painted all the doors blue with the old paint
he found, the day the girls turned from him.
The sea scuds through the pallets.

The wind rattles the blue tarpaulin.
At night, behind the dredged doors,

his skull fills with the sea’s battering.
If anyone should wash up here, they’ll know

the territory by the ragged flags.
His blue coat flaps up the shingle.

He has become the flag of his own outpost,
a blur almost merging with the cloud.

He wants to be to the air, what the seal is to the water.
A drop of deeper, darker blue, a patch of stone,

of weed, a camouflaged shadow.
It’s harder to fade into the sky than into the sea,
however many blue coats he puts on.
The initial impetus for writing ‘The Blue Den’ was a photograph. I choose
not to name the photograph because the poem has diverged from its
source to become its own entity; I don’t wish to impose the poem’s
unsettling implications onto the photographer’s work. Though, in order
to trace the making of this particular ‘house in the mind’, I do need to
describe some of the imagery present in the original artwork. The pho-
tograph depicts a shack made of doors and pallets, painted in various
shades of blue and roofed by a blue tarpaulin. The shack stands on a
shingle shore, near the tide line. The horizon, electricity wires, and tide
line seem to offer a choice of differing perspectives, as if subjective inter-
pretations are embedded in the protagonist’s mindset. Ragged flags fly
from flagpoles around the shack, as if someone has claimed territory in
this sea-rattled location. The wild setting of the blue den conjured King
216 S. NORGATE
Lear, exposed on the stormy heath or stumbling to an imaginary fall in

the illusory Dover beach scene.
From what may, in fact, be a playful den, constructed with a sense of
ecological responsibility out of recycled products, I saw the shadow of
Lear in need of refuge. In my rough notes, there emerged the compos-
ite character of Lear and Gloucester, the tyrant and the tyrant’s hench-
man and near double, manipulators and favouritisers of their children,
willing to believe lies to assuage their inner gnawing of unworthiness,
their belated understanding of their tyrannical natures and loves enforced
rather than earned. I imagined that this composite character was the con-
temporary maker and inhabitant of the blue den (though I should apolo-
gise for this interpretation to the real maker), desperately trying to mark
out his unearned territory yet paradoxically wanting his dwelling to inte-
grate with sea and sky. The differing blues of the den suggested a longing
to be camouflaged, perhaps to fade away or be washed away, to be one
again with nature.
In a recent documentary, Paula Rego described making paintings of
the Portuguese dictator, Salazar, and how, as she painted, she felt pity
for him, even as she objected to his rule.5 When I watch King Lear on
stage, pity, albeit at first with some resistance, is often the emotion evoked
as the play progresses. When Lear’s blindness is enacted dramatically on
Gloucester, his alter ego and lesser self, there is a growing sympathy for
the suffering of both men. From these reclaimed doors and pallets in
‘The Blue Den’, I sensed a man who had once been powerful and now
looked for shelter on the metaphorical heath. The possessive nationalism
of the flags on a beach, where the sea holds the real power, suggested
to me Lear’s territorial nature—his kingdom divided by civil war and on
the brink of invasion—and also a more pitiable cry of ‘I exist, I am here’,
like the stars and stripes hanging outside lonely homesteads in the vast
emptiness of parts of America. Doors are opportunities, ways of entering
the world, but the doors are also the walls of the blue den shutting in
and shutting out emotion. Which door opens in this dwelling made of
thresholds and liminal space? The blue den came to represent the man
himself, as a makeshift dwelling on the shore, where ‘his skull fills with
the sea’s battering’. I envisaged him as a modern man rejected by his
family, ‘the day the girls turned from him’. A focus on this makeshift
5 Nick Willing (director), Paula Rego: Secrets and Stories, BBC 4, 25 March 2017.
shack, the domestic equivalent of ‘a thing of rags and patches’ transmitted

some of Rego’s and Shakespeare’s grudging pity for the dictator, whether
of families or countries: isolated, destructive, yet ultimately humanised by
the painful realisation of their loss of connection. I became aware that the
space of the blue den was the head-space of the unnamed father, and that
the blue den also related to the sky, the sea, and the wider natural world
with which the alienated protagonist now wishes to find consonance. The
temporary refuge of the blue den is a ‘house in the mind’ as well as ‘the
mind as a house’. I pursued this idea in subsequent compositions.
During the writing of The Blue Den, I worked with artist Jayne Sandys-
Renton to produce a sequence of poems entitled The Fallen House and
Other Voices (Otter Gallery 2010). Our desire to collaborate began with
a mutual serendipitous interest in Francesca Woodman’s photographs
(Townend 2007) and the body’s relationship to the house. Neil Astley,
editor of Bloodaxe Books, had suggested a Woodman photograph for the
cover of my collection Hidden River.6 Jayne had used Woodman’s work
as an inspirational source behind a recent exhibition.
As Jayne and I walked and talked, a shared meditation on Woodman’s
haunting and metaphoric images became a natural part of our conver-
sation. In her Providence Island photograph, Woodman’s leg (she is her
own model) appears to emerge from the wall; the woman’s dress merges
with the wallpaper, and finally when the viewer leans in, the face of
the subject can be seen. Though it’s a trick of light and camouflage,
the imagery is uncannily Ovidian, as if we have caught the subject in
a moment of metamorphosis, part-wall, part-woman. The broken tiles,
scraps of plaster and paper in the house suggest dereliction. The woman
could be escaping into the wall or coming out of hiding. The pho-
tograph’s power is in the close physical association of the woman with
the house, as if she is its spirit, giving it life but conversely trapped by it.
Space 2 similarly suggested to us elisions of buildings, bodies, and voices.
Here the woman merges with the wall of the room or hides behind strips
of wallpaper, depending on the viewer’s interpretation. The unsettling
glimpses of her nakedness imply a woman’s urgent need for escape, again
recalling Ovid. We speculated on the spirit of the past living on in build-
ings and manifesting in human form. Perhaps the houses seen on our
walks and the buildings we visited and about which we speculated, such as
6 Stephanie Norgate, Hidden River (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2008).

218 S. NORGATE
Racton Tower (an eighteenth-century hilltop folly that overlooks Chich-

ester Harbour), would evoke a past inhabitant or summon them from the
walls as in Woodman’s photographs, where figures tread an ambiguous
line between apparition and escape.
In our collaboration, Jayne and I chose not to illustrate one another’s
writing and painting. Instead, we aimed to produce complementary work
from shared sources. Jayne wanted to paint a body in relation to the land-
scape or a building. It became apparent, on our exploratory walks, that
we were searching for an emotional site as much as an actual one, for both
‘the house in the mind’, and ‘the mind in the house’. The project culmi-
nated for Jayne in a series of paintings, and for me, in a sonnet sequence
of dramatic monologues evolved from buildings and landscapes. The air
talks to a tower, a tower talks to ivy; flints talk to the cliffs, and so on.
We recorded the sonnet sequence in different voices which played on a
loop in the gallery. The key poem was the ‘Fallen House to Final Owner’.
(In The Blue Den, this poem is unsonneted and rewritten in tercets; the
change to the longer form allowed the fallen house to develop its narra-
tive in more revealing stages.)
One important visit was to Birling Gap in East Sussex, a hamlet
perched on one of the chalk cliffs that overlook the English Channel.
A 1969 photograph displayed on the cliff edge showed a terrace before
some of its houses had fallen into the sea in 1994.7 Walking under the
cliff, we noticed fragments of brick and of timber. These fragments could
have been washed up from anywhere, given the sixteen years since the
house fell. But the dreamer’s mind, as Bachelard might see it, connected
this flotsam to the house that once stood on the cliff. The falling of the
house conjured a human relationship that had decayed through neglect,
just as the house was allowed to succumb to erosion. The National Trust
had made a decision to remove the houses when they became unsta-
ble, using a managed demolition in answer to subsidence and erosion,
to which locals objected, given that the cliffs could have been shored
up. Therefore, the bereft wall of the terrace spoke of loss, and of dam-
aged relationships between individuals, and between man and nature. The
poem found its voice in the voice of the fallen house, aware of its current
fragmentation, its past solid architecture and relationship with the land-
scape. The fragments we saw under the cliff contributed to the notion of
7 Another house was removed in 2014, further diminishing the terrace of cottages we
saw in 2010.
the physical as an archive of memory. It was a short leap imaginatively

to invest those physical objects with inner life, the human longing for
the past, a transference of state of mind that can be seen in Woodman’s
female figures eliding into walls. Would the house that fell at Birling Gap
reproach humanity or more specifically its final owner for not resisting the
linked erosions of love and of place? Emotional and ecological concerns
shadow a series of mutual dependencies between environment, place, and
character. As the house reassembles itself in the former owner’s mind, a
vision of the once-beloved emerges from its walls. Fragments and traces
rise again to refract the memory of a fractured mind.
The poem also identifies a home within the lost home, the wasps’
nest that is lobbed in the sea and prefigures the house’s destruction.
For Bachelard, the bird’s nest is a more accessible emblem of home to
humans:
A nest-house is never young. […] We dream of coming back to it, the way
a bird comes back to its nest. […] This sign of return marks an infinite
number of daydreams, for the reason that human returning takes place in
the great rhythm of human life, a rhythm that reaches back across the years
and, through the dream, combats all absence. An intimate component of
faithful loyalty reacts upon the related images of nest and house.8
I was interested to discover, though, that the rejection of the wasps’ nest
in my poem’s house becomes a rejection of intimacy and return:
Remember the wasps that stung the nape

of her neck? Remember the nest I grew
in the rafters? Its huge head layered with paper?
A home that you speared with a pole,

lobbed into the sea, its lantern globe
blotting up the tide, then drowning.
(‘Fallen House to Final Owner’)
Despite carrying fewer positive connotations than a birds’ nest, a wasps’

nest is a beautiful and delicate structure. Here its careless destruction (and
caring destruction, for the beloved has been stung) prefigures the frag-
mentation of both house and relationship. But Bachelard’s comment that

220 S. NORGATE
‘the houses that were lost forever continue to live in us’ can be applied to
the addressee, the house’s final owner on the beach.9 The couple’s love
relationship forms the overarching dream, without which the constituent
parts of the house cannot live. Bachelard says:
If we have retained an element of dream in our memories, if we have gone

beyond merely assembling exact recollection bit by bit, the home that was
lost in the mists of time will reappear from out of the shadow.10
Later in the poem, the house suggests that the lover reassemble its struc-
ture piece by piece in order to regain his remembered contact with the
beloved:
To see her, you’ll need

to dredge for battens, to sift through sand
for shatterings. Shake off the beach
and gather me up: hearths, lintels, stairs.

Oil the iron latch of the bedroom door
that stuck over time. Rebuild the sill.
Hang the nets in the window,

where she stood naked, the sash rattling,
her blurred hair full of static.
Pile the driftwood in the grate. Strike

the match for the kindling. Undrown the songs
she sang. Let my salt walls
flicker the light back to you – and here

she’ll be, on an afternoon of thunder,
the lines of her body, uneroded, clear.
As the imperatives and direct address reveal, the house invites the
reader/lover to reconstitute the house in the imagination but, without
the overarching dream of love, this reconstruction would be impossible.

In the ‘The Fallen House’, reconstructed details of the interior even-

tually lead to the image of the lost beloved that gave life to the house. In
writing this chapter, I discovered that I rarely create an interior scene in
poetry or even in fiction. Only in one poem, ‘Three Definitions of Vol-
ume’, do I hint at interiors through a school classroom and the props
of a home, including a radio, a book, a voice—and that poem is such
a howl of pain that I must have quickly put aside indoor scenes, prefer-
ring a deafness to their volume.11 In writing ‘Three Definitions of Vol-
ume’, I discovered that the interior setting of the home or school can be
suggested by objects rather than by lengthy descriptions. Thomas Hardy
excels in this kind of economical suggestion. Hardy’s ‘The Self Unseeing’
is one of my touchstone poems.12 Here, Hardy’s sense of the interior’s
enactment of his childhood acknowledges the attrition of time passing
because ‘The ancient floor’ is described as ‘footworn and hollowed and
thin’. The architecture conjures the past through the worn stone and the
remembrance that ‘here was the former door, where the dead feet walked
in’. Yet though Hardy enters the house again in memory, the threshold
of the past has been moved by the blocking of the former door ‘where
the dead feet walked in’. In three quatrains, the poet dreams the house,
in memory, and summons the inhabitants who caused the floor to be
‘footworn’ back to the ‘chair’, ‘the fire’ and the music of a higher, more
content domestic state. These emotionally warm qualities are at the cen-
tre of the poem. The harmony of Hardy’s parents, the ‘she’ and ‘he’ is
expressed by her rhyme of ‘fire’ chiming with his rhyme of ‘higher’. In
the third part of the triptych, we see the child who ‘danced in a dream’
unaware of the happiness that can be appreciated only in retrospect. Past
and present meet in anchoring but changed architecture. In the vignette,
constructed through the synecdoche of ‘chair’ and ‘fire’, Hardy resurrects
his childhood and suggests a strong sense of interior without any need to
write the house in detail. Hardy’s poem conveys a sense of the unheim-
lich which the ensuing sense of the heimlich banishes—the feet are dead,
and there is a haunting, but it is of warmth and music, and of harmony
between male and female. The blessings that ‘emblazoned that day’ her-
ald not wealth or class but a nobility of emotion. The fact that Hardy
11 Norgate, Hidden River, p. 23.

12 Thomas Hardy, Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. by T. R. M. Creighton (London:
Macmillan, 1977), pp. 90–91.
222 S. NORGATE
‘danced in a dream’ coheres with Bachelard’s theories about the poet’s

dreams stemming from the childhood house which is always within our
memory.
Hardy shows in ‘The Self Unseeing’ that little detail is needed to
conjure the domestic interior as an intense state of mind or mood.
Bachelard talks of the power of the solitary ‘house in the night’, of
the ‘lamp in the window’, and the lamp as ‘the symbol of prolonged
waiting’.13 Lamps and fires had no place in the ruined houses, buildings,
and broken selves of ‘The Fallen House’ sequence, except in the far from
cosy case of a burnt out fire-pit of disaffected youths. But in a later poem,
‘The House’, I assay both an exterior and interior and evoke the lamp in
the night as it shines through a curtain, ‘hiding its gold behind gauze or
linen’.14 I tried to suggest that curious sensation particularly potent in
the evening, when the light from strangers’ windows promises a sense of
comfort or friendship to the excluded outsider. It is a curiously enjoyable
and universal feeling to wish we were in the house with those strangers
even though we don’t know them. The unknown house becomes almost
supernatural, manifesting itself at times of isolation. Does our loneli-
ness conjure the magical house under whose windows we lurk? This
positive view of houses is still linked to exclusion or loneliness. In a
wish-fulfilment ending, I imagine the house is the house of friendship.
The House
Don’t tell me that you’ve never lingered

under the eaves of the mystery house,
wondering who lives there, conjuring their lives.
Don’t tell me the house has never appeared to you

in the town’s street or along a woodland lane,
where its windows throw out long squares of light.
It must be a cold night after a short day,

salt and grit glinting on pavements, ice thickening
on pot holes. You will feel a little lonely,

14 Stephanie Norgate, ‘The House’, The London Magazine (August/September 2015),
78.
between the now and the then, with the old life heard
away in the hills, a faint singing of owls.
Then the house will appear, grown in the gap,

hiding its gold behind gauze or linen
until a figure opens the curtains, sees you standing there.
If you’re brave, you’ll step onto the night path,

leave your prints on thin snow and climb the steps
to the porch. At your knock, the door will open
to a room of talk, where last year’s logs
hiss and silver in the blackening stove.
The old friends will be there saying, ‘You’re late.

We waited. Where were you?’
They’ll take your coat, forgive you anything.
In contrast, Bachelard records an exhibition of drawings of houses by

children who had suffered the German occupation. The traumatised chil-
dren drew ‘“motionless” houses’, where the smoke, the curtains, and the
surrounding trees are rigid. Whereas the path to ‘a live house […] pos-
sesses certain kinaesthetic features’, for instance integrating, ‘the move-
ments by means of which one accedes to the door [so that, for example]
the path that leads to the house is often a climbing one’.15 In my poem,
the path of the magical house is reached by steps under snow, offers light
and warmth in a time between ‘the now and the then’. The house is
not simply a stranger’s house but contains old friends, the gold of light
and the silver of logs in the fire, and so perhaps I have achieved at last a
happy uncomplicated interior with all the features that Bachelard claims
enable us to enjoy a sense of animal refuge—the cold outside, the interior
light shining out into the darkness, the kinaesthetic features of the happy
child’s house. But still there’s a lurking sensation in my mind that this
magical apparition is an impossible vision, and that the old friends who
say ‘you are late, we waited, where were you…’ and who ‘will forgive you
anything’ are those who have gone before. So even my positive house
with its warm interior has an uncanny side to it, manifesting itself, only
as the past life can be heard receding to the singing of owls. The house
in my mind remains on the edge of a road, hill, or lane, and I am still

224 S. NORGATE
the outsider walking by wishing I could go in, though perhaps becoming

bolder about knocking on the door and joining the group round the fire.
House Painting
The first thing is the curve of the horizon, drawn

round three sides of the sheet of paper and tied
tight as a bow.
Then the thick of the hills, like cumulus, sloping

off as the ink runs into furrows under the strong
black H of the water tower.
On middle ground, a bad wobble in the fence stands

for the sound of the railway, the trains shunting or
pulling in to Exeter, Exeter St Davids –
Yellow is for the sun, and the dog down the hill
quick in its kennel behind the blackthorn
and barking diffusely.
Close up, silver is the pear’s knotty mass, the flipped

undersides of eucalyptus leaves, and the five
stone steps that run between them
to the dead end where moss is for green channels

of fern and undergrowth like fur the texture
of rabbit’s ears, a pad of paper.
The terrace underfoot is concrete, a sketchy affair.

As for the house, you have your back to it:
it is where you start from.
First published as part of the sequence ‘House Painting’, in Jane

Griffiths, Another Country: New & Selected Poems (Tarset: Bloodaxe
Books, 2008), pp. 51–52. The editors are grateful to Bloodaxe Books
for permission to reproduce the poem here.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 225
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
and the Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2
Index
A 70, 72, 73, 76, 82, 110, 197,

Abbey of the Holy Ghost , 11, 102, 104 198, 200, 202, 209, 211–214,
absence, 50, 74, 86, 87, 89, 90, 218–220, 222, 223
95–97, 119, 143, 144, 177, 198, Bannan, John F., 4
199, 219 Baroque, 12, 132, 133, 135–146
allegory, 104, 105, 111, 112, 132, Battle of Belgrade (screen), 144
133 bawn, 150
architectural, 104, 105, 132 beauty, 9, 43, 165, 173, 189
domestic, 103, 105, 110 Bede, 71, 79
Allen, Woody, 46 Bedford Park, 168
anatomy, human, 187. See also body bedroom, 21, 24, 96, 97, 113, 126,
Aquinas, Thomas, 85, 100 127, 167
architecture (real), 8 Bell, Kirsty, 3
architectures (imagined), 3, 8–10, 12,
Bible, 10, 70, 71, 116
87. See also house (imaginary)
Book of Kings, 109
Aristotle, 85, 86, 100, 203
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 71
Arts and Crafts, 155, 168
Bildungsroman, 12, 111, 118–120,
Astley, Neil, 217
atmospheres, 9, 35, 40, 44, 45, 48, 126–128
50, 53, 57, 61, 64, 65, 133, 158 Birling Gap, 218, 219
Bishop, Elizabeth, 14, 15, 197–203,
205–208, 210–212
B books
Bachelard, Gaston, 3–5, 7, 10–12, Geography III , 198, 206, 210
14–16, 40, 48, 54, 58, 69, North & South, 200
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 227
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
and the Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2
228 INDEX
painting capital
‘Interior with Extension Cord’, material, 104
210 spiritual, 104, 110
poems Carruthers, Mary, 8, 103, 204, 205,
‘Crusoe in England’, 210 208
‘Objects & Apparitions’, 206, Cassiodorus, 8
207, 210 Caulier, Achille, 99
‘Sestina’, 197 Cavendish, Lady Margaret, 13–15,
‘The End of March’, 14, 184–195
198–203, 206, 207, 209, Poems, and Fancies , 184, 185, 189,
211 192, 194
‘The Monument’, 200
Certeau, Michel de, 42, 44, 45, 122,
story
123
‘The Sea & Its Shore’, 202,
Chartier, Alain, 95, 99
206, 207, 211
Christ, 80, 81, 105, 106, 109,
Blake, William, 173, 179
111–115, 140
Bloodaxe Books, 16, 201, 211, 213,
217 Church (as institution), 77, 81
body, 14, 19, 40, 64, 76, 78, 85–92, class, 4, 15, 123, 221. See also social
94, 96–98, 100, 106, 108, 115, class
125, 136, 152, 156, 185–188, closet, 182–185, 188–190
217 closet study, 185
human, 48, 86, 88, 89, 93, 156, Codex Amiatinus, 10, 70, 73, 76
186 cognitive ecology, 187
in relation to place, 85, 87–90, Collis, Margot, 170
94, 100, 217, 218. See also colonialism, 149, 150, 157
anatomy, human commemoration, 87, 90, 92, 93. See
Book of Margery Kempe, The, 11, 103, also memory
111, 112, 116 concealment, 24, 135, 141, 152
Book to a Mother, 104 confession, 110
Bouchet, Jean, 86, 87, 90, 91 Cook, Eleanor, 174, 206
brain (as cabinet), 13, 186, 191 Coole Park, 165, 171, 172, 176–179
bricolage, 13 Cornell, Joseph (works), 14, 15, 198,
Brideshead (fictional house), 3 206–208, 210, 212
Brinnin, John Malcolm, 198 Grand Hotel de l’Observatoire, 207
Brontë, Emily, 36
Hotel de l’Etoile, 207
Observatory Corona Borealis
C Casement , 208
cabinet, 13, 14, 138, 139, 182–195 The Caliph of Bagdad, 207
Calvino, Italo, 12, 58, 132, 133, Toward the Blue Peninsula, 208
136–139, 141–146 Untitled [Aviary with Cockatoo and
candle, 109 Corks], 209
INDEX 229
Untitled [Aviary with Parrot and electricity lines, 210, 211. See also
Drawers], 209 wires, electric
Untitled [Dovecote American epitaph, 86, 91, 92, 94, 100, 175
Gothic], 208 Eve, 104, 122, 188
corpse, 86, 88, 89, 93, 96, 100
Croft, Jo, 2, 4
F
fancy, 190, 191, 194
D feng-shui, 35, 38
Deane, Seamus, 175, 176 fire, 20, 31, 32, 43, 173, 213,
Debussy, Claude, 35 221–224
De Claustro Animae, 104 five-dimensionality, 54, 57, 58, 64, 65
De Doctrina Cordis , 102, 110 five senses, 186
den, 214–217 flags, 94, 215, 216
Desiderio, Monsu, 145 Fleming, Paul, 134
Dickens, Charles (works), 11, 12, 15, folly, 214, 218
117–129 Forster, E.M., 36, 40
David Copperfield, 12, 117, 120, Fouilloy, Hugh of, 104
123, 126, 127, 129 foundations, 5, 6, 9, 12, 71, 77, 104,
120, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127
Dombey and Son, 125, 126
free verse, 169, 170
Great Expectations , 12, 120, 121,
129
Hard Times , 119 G
Little Dorrit , 119 Garrard, Greg, 161
Martin Chuzzlewit , 123, 125 ghost, 36, 97, 198, 199, 211
Pickwick Papers , 119, 124, 126 Giedion, Sigfried, 55, 63
Doctrine of the Heart, The, 110 Gijsbrechts, Franciscus, 138–140
domesticity, 102, 103, 105, 107, 111, Gloucester, Duke of (character in
112, 114 Shakespeare’s King Lear), 216
doors, 11, 22, 24, 30, 65, 110, 138, Góngora, Luis de, 135, 144, 145
209, 215, 216, 221, 223, 224 granary, 106, 107
dovecote, 6–8, 13, 21, 208 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 165, 171,
dream, 4, 14, 40, 48, 49, 121, 176–178
122, 128, 132, 133, 137, 142, Gregory, Margaret, 171
143, 146, 172, 200, 202, 214, Gryphius, Andreas, 139
219–222
Du Jenne amoureux sans soucy, 99
H
Hadfield, Andrew, 152, 153, 155,
E 157
earring, 192, 194 Hap Hazard, 94, 152, 153, 155, 156.
economy, domestic, 109 See also Kilcolman Castle
230 INDEX
Hardy, Thomas, 178, 221, 222 house (as locus of emotion), 14, 23,
Harvard University, 7, 55, 85, 157, 40, 48, 58, 65, 70, 82, 172, 218,
204, 206 219, 221
Hauteville, Pierre de, 11, 86, 88, house (as metaphor for the
95–97, 99 imagination), 9, 11, 102, 201
Heaney, Seamus, 13, 149, 150, house (as refuge), 4, 14, 214, 217,
157–166, 179 223
essays house (drawings of), 223
‘From Maecenas to MacAlpine’, house (haunted), 33, 43, 48
164, 165 household, 11, 60, 96, 100–103,
‘Frontiers of Writing’, 159 105–107, 110–113, 115, 116,
poems 182, 185, 188, 189
‘Bog Oak’, 149 house (imaginary), 6, 12, 14, 26, 30,
59, 69, 70, 102, 111, 204. See
‘Digging’, 161
also architectures (imagined)
‘Follower’, 163
house (metaphor for the mind), 2, 5,
‘In Gallarus Oratory’, 159
9, 13, 15, 102, 119, 211
‘Night-Piece’, 159 housemistress, 186. See also housewife
‘Scaffolding’, 162 house (of God), 10, 70–72, 77, 79,
‘Thatcher’, 162 81, 82
‘The Diviner’, 162 housewife, 103, 185, 188. See also
‘The Forge’, 159 housemistress
‘The Gift of Rain’, 163
‘The Outlaw’, 159
heart, 104–106, 109–113, 115, 185, I
186, 189, 191 Il Gesu (church in Rome), 140
heart (as home), 11, 102, 109, 110, imagination, 2–5, 7, 9–16, 32, 54,
115 118, 127, 129, 132, 144, 145,
Heavenly City, 10, 71, 80 169, 171, 185, 190–194, 198,
Heidegger, Martin, 3–5, 12, 47, 73, 200, 205, 209, 210, 212, 214,
160–162, 166 220
heimlich, 221. See also unheimlich inspiration, 7, 51, 199, 211, 217
Hobsbaum, Philip, 164 interior, 107, 168, 186, 197,
200–202, 211–213, 221–223
Holmes, H.H., 34
inventiveness, 7, 19, 128
Holy Family, 104
Ireland, 13, 149–155, 159, 160, 165,
Holy of Holies, 79
167, 176
home (as symbol), 103, 113, 116
Ishiguro, Kazuo, 36
homeliness, 11, 103, 112, 115
Hopps, Walter, 208
hotels, 1, 34, 207, 208 J
house (as devotional space), 11 James, P.D., 36
house (as gendered space), 2, 3 Jerusalem, 10, 72, 79, 81, 82, 109
INDEX 231
jewellery box, 185, 190 Lloyd, David, 175, 176

locks, 192
logic, figurative, 191
K Logos, 77, 82. See also Word (of God)
Kavanagh, Patrick, 163 loneliness, 210, 222
Kenneally, Rhona Richman, 2 Lorris, Guillaume de, 99
keys, 24, 55, 92, 103, 106, 164, 186,
188, 189, 192, 218
Kierkegaard, Søren, 45 M
Kilcolman Castle, 13, 150–153, 156, Maecenas, 165
157, 159, 160 makeshift, 14, 214, 216
King Lear (character), 216 manuscript, 10, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76,
Krakow, 45 78, 82, 126
Maravall, Antonio, 133, 137, 140,
143
L Marzahn (district of Berlin), 40, 48
L’Abbaye du Saint Esprit , 102 McDiarmid, Lucy, 2
labyrinth, 62, 175 McEwan, Ian, 36
‘labyrinthine’ stanza, 175 memory, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 31, 54,
L’Amant rendu cordelier a l’observance 70, 73, 76, 77, 79, 82, 83,
d’amours , 99 92, 119, 127–129, 145, 190,
lamp, 209, 211, 213, 222 197, 198, 202–207, 210, 212,
Lancelot du Lac, 99 213, 219, 221, 222. See also
Lanyon, Andrew (works), 1–3, 5–9, commemoration
13–15 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 73
Bifurcated Thought , 5, 6, 19 Meun, Jean de, 99
The Daughters of Radon, 5, 19 mind (imagined as physical space), 82,
The Only Non-Slip Dodo-Mat in the 205
World, 1, 5, 19 mnemonics, 103, 107, 204, 205
Von Ribbentrop in St Ives , 5, 19 monuments, 70, 77, 82, 201
Larkin, Philip, 214 Moore, Marianne, 205, 212
Laurentum (villa of Pliny the Morris, William, 168
Younger), 9, 59 Mullholland, Terri, 2
Le Corbusier, 55–57, 63 Munster Plantation, 149, 150, 155,
Lefebvre, Henri, 107, 190, 211 157
Le Livre des joies et douleurs , 99
Liege, Gerard of, 110
life after death, 87, 90 N
light, 20, 24, 38, 45, 48, 54, 60, 63, narration, 9, 12, 94, 98. See also
81, 86, 99, 109, 132, 138–140, storytelling
161, 162, 166, 211, 212, 217, National Trust, 218
222, 223 natural philosophy, 13, 14, 185, 189,
Lipsedge, Karen, 2 194
232 INDEX
Nature (as goddess), 134, 182, 188 poetics, 10, 11, 13, 14, 54, 88,
Nature’s Cabinet Unlock’d, 181 132, 150, 158, 163, 164,
nest, 200, 214, 219 166, 169–171, 173, 175, 185,
New Testament, 70, 77, 81 188–190, 192, 194, 195, 198,
Nomè, François, de, 145 211, 212
Norgate, Stephanie (works), 14, 15, Pozzo, Andrea, 137, 140–142
213, 214, 222 promenade architecturale, 55, 63
‘Ant to Sky’, 213
‘Fallen House to Final Owner’,
213, 218
Hidden River, 217, 221 Q
‘Man Walking, after Giacometti’, Quevedo, Francisco de, 132
213 quincunx, 159
‘Stream to Ice’, 213 Quintilian, 7
‘Three Definitions of Volume’, 221
Northern Ireland, 149, 161
R
O Racton Tower, 218
object-identities, 74 Racz, Imogen, 2
Old Testament, 10, 70, 71, 78, 79, rain, 174, 202
81 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 125, 151, 154
O’Reilly, Jennifer, 70–72, 77, 80 Ramirez, Janina, 77
original (opposed to simulacrum), 74 Read, Bill, 198
Orlin, Lena Cowen, 183 refuge, 4, 14, 44, 128, 156, 214, 216,
ottava rima, 172–178 217, 223
Rego, Paula, 216, 217
Reid, B.L., 178, 179
P
Renaissance, 75, 135, 152, 171, 176,
Pandora’s box, 181, 188
194
Peeters, Clara, 134, 135
renovated dwellings, 13
Pemberley (fictional house), 3
renting, 120, 124. See also tenancy
perceptions, 40, 53–55, 57, 58, 64,
Rhetorica ad Herennium, 8, 204
75, 87, 93, 132, 134, 136, 141,
145, 187, 189, 192, 193 Richardson, Phyllis, 3
Perry, Gill, 2 Ricketts, Charles, 168
Phenomenology, 4, 9, 14, 38, 40, 70, Ricoeur, Paul, 41–43, 46, 47
73, 82 Riversdale, 177
photography, 2, 6, 215, 217, 218 Rome, 59, 71, 77, 81, 82, 137, 140
Piranesi, Giovanni, 35, 44 Rowley Hall, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32
Plato, 8 Rowley, Mervyn, 26, 29, 32
Pliny the Younger, 9, 54, 58, 59, 64 Rowley, Vera, 26
poeisis , 194 Rowley, Walter, 26, 29, 30, 32
INDEX 233
S spirituality, 105, 107, 110, 112

Saint-Gelais, Octovien de, 86–88, 93, stanza-forms, 13
94 St Cher, Hugh of, 110
San Salvatore, Tuscan monastery of, still life, 134
71 Storm, Theodor, 37, 44
Sanssouci, 40 storytelling, 89, 90, 94, 98. See also
Sarasohn, Lisa T., 192 narration
Scott, William, 168 Strawberry Hill (house), 3
sea, 15, 24, 37, 59, 60, 88, 93, 94, Sutton, John, 187, 189
151, 215–219
Seamus Heaney HomePlace, 157
seaside dwellings, 15 T
Second Coming, 81 Tabernacle, 10, 69–72, 77–79, 81,
senses. See five senses 82, 91
shack, 214, 215, 217 Taillevent, Michault, 99
Shakespeare, William, 125, 143, 217 temple, 10, 35, 39, 69–72, 77, 79,
King Lear, 216 82, 87, 91–93
Shandy Hall (fictional house), 3 tenancy, 12, 118, 124, 128, 129. See
also renting
shelter, 3, 4, 14, 60, 94, 108, 110,
Thoor Ballylee, 160, 167, 171
111, 197, 200, 202, 203, 206,
Thouars, 91, 92
214, 216
thought (corporeal), 186, 187
shore, 37, 59, 110, 202, 203, 215,
thought (likened to wind), 19
216
thought (women’s), 191
Sierra, Nicole, 2
thresholds, 200, 202, 216, 221
simulacrum (opposed to original), 74
tomb, 10, 35, 44, 87, 91
Smith, D. Vance, 103, 116
treasure chest, 191
Smyth, Gerry, 2, 4
Tribble, Evelyn, 187, 189
social class, 47. See also class
trompe l’oeil , 137, 138
space, medieval depiction of, 76
space, monastic, 104, 105
space, perception of, 57, 75, 132 U
space, sacred, 105, 106, 140 uncanny, 3, 5, 9, 45, 48, 223
Spenser, Edmund (works), 13, unheimlich, 115, 221. See also
149–160, 165, 166 heimlich; uncanny
A View of the Present State of
Ireland, 155
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, V
150, 151 Vals Valley, 62
Shepheardes Calender, 150 vellum, 81
The Faerie Queene, 150–152, 156, Vendler, Helen, 175, 176
157, 165, 166 verse form (as ordering principle), 94
Spiller, Elizabeth, 194 Villa Savoy, 55
234 INDEX
Virtuality, 137–139 Wordsworth, William, 178, 210

virtues (personified), 91, 105 Worldmaking, 194
W Y
warmth, 7, 60, 221, 223 Yeats, George, 167
wealth, 101, 103, 109, 221 Yeats, W.B. (works), 13, 160, 167–179
Wearmouth and Jarrow, monastery of, ‘A General Introduction to my
71, 76, 77 Work’, 169
Wellesley, Dorothy, 170, 171 ‘An Acre of Grass’, 177–179
wind (likened to thought), 19 ‘Coole Park, 1929’, 176
windows, 31, 32, 36, 40, 57, 65, 80, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’,
126, 142, 146, 167, 168, 202, 172, 174
203, 208, 209, 222 Memoirs , 171
wires, electric, 215 The Tower, 160, 169, 172
wit, 186, 189 The Winding Stair, 169
Woodman, Francesca (works),
217–219
Providence Island, 217 Z
Space 2, 217 Zapata, Carlos, 2, 3
Woolf, Virginia, 36 Zumthor, Peter, 9, 38, 54, 58, 59,
Word (of God), 82. See also Logos 61–64

Architectural Space and The Imagination Houses in Literature and Art From Classical To Contemporary by Jane Griffiths, Adam Hanna, 2020

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Architectural Space

and the Imagination

ISBN 978-3-030-36066-5 ISBN 978-3-030-36067-2 (eBook)

Cover illustration: ‘Fortescue’ by Carlos Zapata and ‘Statue’ by Will Schofield

2 Bifurcated Thought: Reflections on Inventive

3 Murmuring Houses for the Mythical Mind 33

4 The House of the Senses: Experiencing Buildings

Part II Reading Literary Architectures

5 Behold the House of the Lord: Encountering

6 Placing the Dead: Architectural Imagination

7 Domestic Devotion: Representing Household Space

8 ‘Drawd Too Architectooralooral’: Charles Dickens,

9 Spaces of the A-Temporal: Italo Calvino’s Invisible

Part III Architectures of the Literary Imagination

10 ‘His Midas Touch’: Building and Writing in the Poetry

11 Yeats’s Stanzas, Yeats’s Rooms 167

12 Nature’s Cabinets Unlocked: Cognition, Cabinets,

13 Elizabeth Bishop’s House in the Mind: Memory,

14 ‘The Mind in the House’ or the ‘House in the Mind’:

House Painting 225

If I paint the light, the way it catches each blade

First published in Jane Griffiths, Terrestrial Variations (Tarset: Bloodaxe

Meg Boulton is a Teaching Fellow in History of Art in the Edinburgh

She has published on Chaucer and medieval women’s religious writing,

Adam Hanna is Lecturer in Irish Literature at University College Cork.

Fig. 2.1 Having divided into sight and sound, a bifurcated

Fig. 4.1 The main facade of the Therme Vals, Switzerland 62

Jane Griffiths and Adam Hanna

In the artist Andrew Lanyon’s playful textual exploration of the creative

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Lanyon’s collaborator Carlos Zapata created a richly suggestive model of

attention has extended to the actual houses inhabited by writers and

ideas of the built dwelling place as a fundamental element of human expe-

‘introspection’.9 This turn inwards can readily be imagined in spatial

9 David R. Cerbone, ‘Phenomenological Method: Reflection, Introspection, and Skep-

12 Lanyon, Bifurcated Thought , p. 8.

obstacle, at first a formless mass, grew rapidly into a substantial structure,

If a speaker is swept away by warmth of feeling and genuine inspiration,

For Lanyon, however, such inspired free-association cannot work in a

14 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. by H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cam-

architectural space could be either real or invented; it could be ‘a house,

He describes the structured memory […] as a kind of inventoried set of

While we might now associate the orderliness implied by architectural

with thought to create new structures which themselves take architectural

By directly investigating relationships between built space and the

to fix, monumentalise, and immortalise, Swift reveals the limitations of

poems which were originally developed through collaboration with the

Bachelard’s position is extended and modified by the very diversity of

The opening section, ‘Foundations’, contains three essays that bring

Bifurcated Thought: Reflections on Inventive

This chapter is an extract from Bifurcated Thought , privately printed in

© The Author(s) 2020 19

Fig. 2.2 This obstacle,

There was not time to wonder how such an obstruction happened to

Having formed a shape in smoke, a flourish like the one described

Fig. 2.4 The maid’s room

Fig. 2.5 The stairs

Fig. 2.6 The wind goes in to play a tune

Fig. 2.7 Prototype model sea

Fig. 2.8 The

There are numerous claimants to the design of Rowley Hall. Even

Fig. 2.9 ‘Size differences’

Whenever a new element is introduced to this imaginary building, say a