The Building in the Text

Renaissance writers, Roy Eriksen argues, built their texts the way architects built palaces and churches: to a plan, with symmetry, proportion and a clear sense of how the whole holds together. Words we now use without thinking, such as plot, topos, stanza and the Latin fabrica, once carried that spatial meaning. Eriksen follows them from the architectural writing of Alberti and Vasari, including their celebrated descriptions of buildings, into the poetry and drama of Ariosto, Shakespeare and Milton.

What emerges is a tradition of literary architecture reaching back to antiquity, grounded in the belief that correspondences of number and form were the ordering principles of the cosmos itself. It is a scholarly but rewarding study for anyone drawn to the meeting point of literature, art history, rhetoric and music, and for those who suspect a great poem has rooms as well as lines.