Description
Book SynopsisInvestigates how medieval urban planning and artistic programming worked together to form dynamic environments, demonstrating the agency of objects, styles, and spaces in mapping the late medieval city.
Trade Review“Riemenschneider in Rothenburg should be of great interest to art historians and others. It sheds light on a major figure of the Northern ‘Renaissance’ and also on issues of civic contextualization that are of current interest. The scholarship is thorough and careful. It is, in short, an excellent book.”
—Richard Kieckhefer,author of Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley
“Does the urban environment always aspire to formal wholeness, or is it best comprehended as an assemblage of forms, media, and styles integrated by the prevailing patterns of human praxis? Opening a vista onto the imperial German city of Rothenburg and its Gothic buildings, Katherine Boivin tackles this important question in provocative new ways, showing not least of all the power of one artist's signature style to weave together the real—and notional—spaces of town, church, and cult.”
—Mitchell B. Merback,author of Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria
“While the situation in late medieval Rothenburg itself was unique, the model of analysis set forth here by Boivin is one that will bear further study by medievalists in many disciplines beyond art and architectural history. Just as Riemenschneider in Rothenburg goes beyond a discussion of the famed sculptor and his workshop, Boivin’s book has much to offer in its exemplar of how intricate webs of significance could flexibly accommodate multiple patrons and works to create a meaningfully coherent network of spaces that made up a medieval town.”
—Charlotte A. Stanford The Medieval Review
