UC Riverside

“The Poetics of Embodied Architecture in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” examines how Vitruvian embodiment materializes in literary descriptions of corporeal and material form from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. I demonstrate how medieval and early modern European writers creatively engage Vitruvian embodiment, an architectural discourse that pairs the care, design, and preservation of bodies and of buildings, to complicate the boundaries around human and built form. Each of the following chapters applies traditional categories of Vitruvian being—stability, use, and beauty—in their explorations of embodied discourse, yet they also show the subtle and, as Wim Verbaal calls them, “subsidiary,” technologies of the Vitruvian body/building dynamic. These subtle modes of authorial care are about structure, use, and beauty, but they are also about humoralism, affective response, and medicinal health.Beginning with the preservation of a body and a city, my first chapter considers how Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s 'Le Roman de Troie' constructs an enduring Roman identity through the medicinal and architectural care of one character, Hector, and his symbolic representation of Troy. Following this first chapter, a short coda analyzes how Vitruvian regularizing schemes materialize in depictions of racialized and disabled bodies in the fourteenth-century poem 'Sir Orfeo,' arguing that architectural concepts actively participate in fraught conceptions of embodiment. Building from here, the second chapter discusses the humoral, affective, and architectural subtleties of Geoffrey Chaucer’s 'Troilus and Criseyde,' considering how the poem uses porous boundaries to characterize both its built features and its title characters. Drawing from the work of Patricia Akhimie and Mark Wigley, my third chapter analyzes the relationship between moderate being—as a medical enterprise—and measured design—as a feature of Vitruvian philosophy—in John Lydgate’s 'Dietary' and in Leon Battista Alberti’s 'De re aedificatoria.' Informed by the work of Rebecca Davis and David Quint, my final chapter explores architectural foundations and human pillars in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 'The House of Fame' and in Ludovico Ariosto’s /Orlando Furioso,/ suggesting that Vitruvian design becomes a medium through which to negotiate concepts of cultural identity. Together, these chapters demonstrate how architecture becomes a form of embodied expression in the premodern literary imaginary.