The Gothic Image: Religious Art In France Of The Thirteenth Century (Icon Editions Series)

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First up, you’ll need to wrap up warm. There aren’t many tropical beaches in gothic fiction. Expect wind, rain and thunderstorms and things that go bump in the night. Night time settings appeal to reader’s instinctive fear of the dark - and under the cover of darkness things often aren’t quite as they seem. Rekindling elements from the greatest medieval cathedrals in Europe, such as London’s Westminster Abbey and Paris’s Notre Dame, Gothic Revival architecture defined the imperial might of Victorian England. But from early in the 19th century, these contributions were forgotten, and Gothic became celebrated as an intrinsically Northern European style. In Britain, it was only in the revival of this medieval style of architecture that it started to be called “Gothic.” The Revivalists no longer dismissed the Gothic as a crude or barbarous form, and instead repurposed it as a national, patriotic style. Director of Gothic Image Tours, Jamie George, left his native Scotland for London in the early 1960s to pursue a career in television and media. “After a while, I took a year off to study areas that had always interested me – the myths and legends of Britain, the sacred landscape and folklore. As the year went by, I decided to live in Glastonbury and in some ways it felt like coming home.”

Saracen” was the term used in medieval Europe to group together Arab Muslims. Wren supposed that it was during the Crusades (from 1096 to 1291) that Western Europeans fighting against the expansion of Islamic states in the Middle East first glimpsed the pointed arches, ribbed roofs, domes, rose windows, and minaret towers that were typical of religious buildings and palace complexes across large swaths of the Islamic East. Once the crusaders returned home, what Wren called the “sharp-heeled arch” began to appear over new church doorways, and minarets became models for cathedral bell towers and spires. These blog posts on Global Spiritual Studies give you more insight into the Gothic Image travel experience. By knowing this deeper history of some of Europe’s most iconic buildings, travelers can approach these well-known attractions with new eyes and can appreciate that the “East-West divide” isn’t as deep as we are often led to think. Reviving the Gothic in EnglandGothic literature often contrasts different types of characters: victims and predators, good and evil. They are full of strange and often supernatural characters like ghosts, vampires and werewolves. Or sometimes it’s humans that seem to have something different about them, they might have special senses or abilities. To help them explore this, Gothic writers use motifs of change, like changing between the past and the modern day in Celia Rees’ Blood Sinister . Islamic influence surfaced in other design elements as well. The interior of London’s Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition in 1851 in celebration of the British Empire’s global reach, was actually painted in bold colors that the designer Owen Jones had taken from the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. He considered the Islamic palace the finest form of architectural expression in the world. Jones’s choices were initially controversial, but his celebration of Moorish styles and polychromatic buildings of the East meant these became fully incorporated into English architecture. In the late 1970s, I began offering guided journeys around Glastonbury, which then grew to include Scotland, Ireland and Wales,” says Jamie George. “At the same time, Gothic Image began publishing well known authors such as John Michell, Geoffrey Ashe and John Matthews. The next logical step was to invite our authors as guests on the sacred journeys. So, in a nutshell, that’s the story of how Gothic Image tours started.” Jamie was a major influence in the inspiration for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s best-selling book The Mists of Avalon. As a token of her appreciation, Marion gave Jamie a first edition copy of the book with the inscription “ For Jamie George who helped it all happen – affectionately” Marion Bradley.

During the long building campaigns of the Middle Ages, the style evolved from simple pointed forms, with plain windows, to the highly elaborate vaults and decorative tracery seen from the 14th century. In gothic fiction certain characters are considered archetypal. These characters have a recurring place in many stories, and while they should not be relied upon, they should also not be shunned. Just because a character is archetypal, does not mean they are necessarily cliché. In most gothic fiction the hero is virtuous, ambitious, and self-sacrificing; they are motivated to return to or pursue a relationship, either in love, lust, or kinship; and they are separated from their goal by circumstances arising either from the antagonist of the fiction, or the horror of the fiction, or both.

Gothic novels tend to create a feeling of uncertainty, by making the characters and the reader question what they believe and what is real. These settings, themes and characters combine to create creepy worlds and nasty narratives that send a shiver down the reader’s spine. I have mentioned previously that the supernatural is closely related to the gothic, but I want to expand on that. In gothic literature the supernatural can be replaced with the sensational. It is not necessary that some monster be the threat, but rather a community's tradition, the beating heart beneath the floorboards, or a murderer on the loose might be the source of danger. In every case there must be danger. This is why I use the word sensational. The subject matter of gothic literature does not deal with mundane events, but rather acts as an exploration of supernatural or sensational events, so that by the end of the reading we better understand the source of these phenomena.

Yet elsewhere, even at the height of the Victorian Gothic Revival, it was clear to many that the Gothic had traveled from the East. Islamic influence on the Gothic Just like many Gothic stories are set in isolated locations, the motif of strange places puts characters somewhere strange and mysterious. In early Gothic stories, this character was often a young girl, like Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho .Widespread throughout western Europe during the Middle Ages, this architectural movement lasted from the 12th to the early 17th century. Gothic is the architecture of the pointed arch, the rib vault, the flying buttress, window tracery, pinnacles, and spires. By the 15th century walls are reduced to a minimum by large arcades, huge windows, with an emphasis on verticality. Writers typically set their stories in abandoned or isolated locations like crumbling castles, windswept moors, places of decay and death. Places with seemingly no escape. But where there are also plenty of secrets with underground passages and hidden doors. This all adds to the sense of mystery and danger.