How modern architectural language was invented to communicate with the divine—challenging a common narrative of European architectural history.
The architectural drawing might seem to be a quintessentially modern form, and indeed many histories of the genre begin in the early modern period with Italian Renaissance architects such as Alberti. Yet the Middle Ages also had a remarkably sophisticated way of drawing and writing about architecture. God’s Own Language takes us to twelfth-century Paris, where a Scottish monk named Richard of Saint Victor, along with his mentor Hugh, developed an innovative visual and textual architectural language. In the process, he devised techniques and terms that we still use today, from sectional elevations to the word “plan.”
Surprisingly, however, Richard’s detailed drawings appeared not in an architectural treatise but in a widely circulated set of biblical commentaries. Seeing architecture as a
