Department of Classics and Ancient History

For misconceptions about reconstruction and, particularly, vetustas: Curchin, 241; Frezouls, 46-8. Blagg, 27 is best, but refuses to concede the key point of non-denotative reference ('a phrase [vetustate collapsum] which should not always be taken too literally, since it may tactfully conceal the results of structural defects or enemy action'-our italics). "Cf. Waldherr, cil. (n. 7), 94: 'Die Wendung vetustate conlapsas ... kc'mnte an eine gewis.se wirtschaftliche Stagnation odersogarRegression... denken lassen'. 'S.H.A. Ant. Pi. 8.2 (instauratum ... templum Agrippae); cf. H. Bloch, / bolli lalerizi e la storia edilizia romana (Rome, 1947), 116 (two brickstamps), pace Guey, cil. (n. 4), 239 n. 1 (three).

This chapter considers the architecture of Durham Cathedral, begun at the end of the eleventh century, and of Lincoln Cathedral, designed in the thirteenth century, in relation to the geometrical cosmological substructure of Plato’s Timaeus and in the light of its subsequent interpretations. In the twelfth century, classical philosophical concepts coalesced with Christian theology in the same way that in architecture classical concepts intermingled with Christian traditions. According to Rudolf Wittkower, architecture in the Middle Ages belonged to an “unbroken tradition coming down from antiquity according
to which arithmetic, the study of numbers, geometry, the study of spatial
relationships, astronomy, the study of motion of celestial bodies, and music formed the Quadrivium of the mathematical ‘arts’” in the scholastic system. (1) As we have seen earlier in this volume, the cohesion of this body of mathematical sciences emerged through the Middle Platonist exegesis of Plato’s Timaeus. (2) For Wittkower, the “belief in the correspondence of microcosm and macrocosm, in the harmonic structure of the universe, in the comprehension of God through the mathematical symbols of centre, circle and sphere”, and the other mathematical symbols in the Timaeus, “had their roots in antiquity and belonged to the undisputed tenets of medieval philosophy and theology”. (3) According to Anna Somfai, the diagrams preserved in manuscripts containing the first part of Calcidius’ commentary relate to the four disciplines of the
quadrivium, the study of which “serves, in a Platonic fashion, as a path for
the mind to ascend from sense perception to abstract concepts”. (4) This chapter argues that the architecture of Durham Cathedral can be understood in a similarly metaphorical sense as having the same purpose. It will illustrate how by pervading a general visual and spatial culture philosophical concepts can reach a broader audience. It will elucidate the purpose of the ribs on the vaults of these two cathedral churches, which was not explained in medieval treatises and has not been fully expounded in modern scholarship. The clarification of these connections between the geometries of the philosophical treatises and those in the architecture is based on both contemporary written sources and visual observations.

1 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism [1949] (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971; reprint of 3rd rev. edn., London: Alec Tiranti, 1962), 117.
2 See Petrucci, above, Chapter 3.
3 Wittkower, Architectural Principles, 29.
4 Anna Somfai, “The Eleventh-Century Shift in the Reception of Plato’s Timaeus and Calcidius’s Commentary”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 65 (2002), 1–21, at 5.

Western Neo-Aramaic (WNA) is spoken as a minority language by less than 10.000 people in 3 villages of the Qalamūn plateau, 60 km to the north-east of Damascus (Syria). The whole populace of Baxʕā and Ǧubbʕadīn and about one-third of the inhabitants of Maʕlūla are Muslim, while the rest of the inhabitants of the third village are Christian, as is still a minority of the people of the region, since the parallel processes of religious Islamization and linguistic Arabization have followed diverse paths and different chronology. Since WNA has no native written tradition, the usual criteria defining an Islamic language put forward by Bausani (1981), namely allography in the Arabic/Persian script and a significant quota of Islamic religious vocabulary, cannot apply in this case. This paper discusses the possibility of laying down other parameters of linguistic Islamicity for part of WNA along the lines of the relevant debate in the fields of communal variation and Jewish interlinguistics, and opts in the end for a lexical/phraseological approach. We stress, however, that the linguistic situation portrayed in this paper is the pre-2010 one.