In Structuring Spaces: Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval
England, Lori Ann Garner illuminates the idiomatic and traditional
meanings invested in depictions of architecture within the vernacular
verse of early medieval England, portrayals that consistently
demonstrate a shared aesthetic between literary texts and physical
buildings. Through systematic exploration of the period's verbal and
material culture as complementary art forms, Garner argues that in
Anglo-Saxon England the arts of poetry and building emerged from the
same cultural matrix. Not only did Anglo-Saxon builders and poets draw
demonstrably from many of the same traditionally encoded motifs and
images, but so rhetorically powerful was the period's architectural
poetics that its expressive force continued in literature and
architecture produced long after the Norman Conquest.
Far from conceiving this inherited tradition as monolithic in nature,
Structuring Spaces foregrounds the complex interface of orality and
literacy as a nexus of varied and multivalent cultural traditions that
influenced the production of texts and buildings alike. After
establishing a model of architectural poetics based on oral theory and
vernacular architecture, Garner explores fictionalized buildings in such
works as Beowulf and the Ruin, architectural representation in Old
English adaptations of Greek and Latin works, uses of architectural
metaphor, and themes of buildings in Anglo-Saxon maxims, riddles,
elegies, hagiographies, and charms. Her book draws on scholarship from
art history, archaeology, anthropology, and architecture, as well as the
great wealth of studies addressing the literature itself.
