Abstract
The various architectures that have emerged throughout the historic past have always had the ability to inspire and affect the passions, emotions, or feelings of those who encounter them. The means by which these places and spaces gain the power to influence emotion is through the atmospheres, or ambiences, that they house. Discussing the importance of architectural atmospheres for developing our knowledge of the emotional landscapes of the past, this essay argues that an atmospheric approach to exploring the relationship between past architectures and emotions has the potential to enhance our understanding of the ways in which individual architectures and wider built-up environments were affected by, and helped shape, the passions, emotions, and feelings of the historic past.
The architectural landscape known to Bishop Gregory of Tours (30 November 538–17 November 594), was filled with buildings capable of inspiring powerful emotions in those who encountered them. One such building was the episcopal church (cathedral) that was situated inside the walls of the city of Clermont.
Saint Namatius, after the death of the bishop Rusticius, was the eighth bishop at Auvergne [Clermont] in those days. Here, he built the church which now stands and is considered to be the oldest within the city walls, being 150 feet long, 60 feet wide; that is, inside the nave, and 50 feet high as far as the vaulting. In front it has a space with a rounded apse and elegantly constructed wings on both sides. In this way the whole building is laid out in the shape of a cross. It has 42 windows, 70 columns and 8 doorways. In that very place one witnesses the terror of God and a great brightness and, in truth, a most sweet odour, as if of spices, is sensed in that same place by religious people. The walls to the altar have been embellished, fashioned with various kinds of marble.1
Gregory’s description, written in the second of his Ten Books of Histories, marks an attempt by the bishop to immortalise the church that he had grown up attending and which continued to exert influence over him even after his career took him to the city of Tours. Gregory’s relationship with this church likely started during his infancy. His paternal uncle, Gallus, had been the bishop of Clermont for approximately eleven years by the time Gregory was born, and he remained in sede until his death in c.551.2 Gregory, who joined the clergy after receiving a miraculous cure at the tomb of St Illidius, seems to have split his time between the ecclesiastical communities at Clermont and Lyon, the latter of which was overseen by his maternal great-uncle, Bishop Nicetius, who helped Gregory learn to read and speak publicly.3 In the years after Gallus’s death, Gregory continued to maintain a close relationship with Avitus, the archdeacon who had served under Gallus and later became the bishop of Clermont from 571/2.4 The two men maintained their friendship in the years that followed and Gregory mentions that they travelled together either just prior to or after he was appointed to his own episcopal see at Tours in 573.5 The thirty-five years that Gregory spent either working alongside or being under the care of the ecclesiastical community at Clermont enabled him to develop an intimate familiarity with the region and its episcopal church.
Originally built in the fifth century, Namatius’s church at Clermont evidently left a lasting imprint on the man who would later become the nineteenth bishop of one of the most important metropolitan dioceses in Merovingian Gaul.6 Such was this church’s power that not only did it influence the scale and shape of the episcopal church that Gregory ordered to be rebuilt at Tours, but it also received the honour of a detailed description in his Histories.7 The record Gregory provides is far from the only architectural description to appear in the Histories.8 The Basilica of St Martin that bishop Perpetuus (d. 490) built at Tours (and which Gregory would later repair, oversee, and write about the many miracles that happened there) receives similar attention.9 While not as architecturally detailed, the church of St Stephen, whose decoration Namatius’s wife is said to have supervised, was also documented by Gregory, as were the various basilicas and churches that each of the bishops of Tours built during their careers.10 What distinguishes the account of the episcopal church at Clermont is that it is the only architectural description in the Histories to offer an explicit testimony about the feelings that it inspired. The words: ‘in that very place one witnesses the terror of God (terror … Dei) and a great brightness’ indicate that the fear of God was the core feeling that Gregory either experienced, witnessed others experiencing, or intended his readers to believe was experienced in this church.
The use of terror (terror), as opposed to the standard fear (timor), in this context is interesting because it indicates that Gregory wanted to suggest that this church was capable of provoking a response that went beyond the standard call to discipline and self-control that typically underpins his references to the fear of God.11 Taken together, Gregory’s writings show that he wielded one of the most extensive Latin vocabularies for fear to have survived from late antique Gaul.12 The application of terror instead of fear is unlikely to have been accidental. Terror is more potent than fear. Then as now, it signifies the presence of a fear with a much stronger intensity. The use of terror thus suggests that Gregory wanted to communicate that the church at Clermont provided a setting that sparked more than a call to discipline and self-control. This was a place in which one witnessed the ‘raw’ terror that the prospect of facing God and divine justice in heaven could entail.
The significance behind Gregory’s decision to associate Clermont’s episcopal church with the terror of God has been discussed at length elsewhere.13 For the purposes of the present essay, it is the contextualisation of this terror within a detailed breakdown of the church’s architectural form that merits special attention. This is because Gregory’s decision to position the terror both within a wider account of the church’s architecture and after a detailed breakdown of its structural form, inadvertently provides scholars with an invaluable window through which to access the working relationship that existed between the architectures and powerful feelings of the late antique past. It also provides the foundations for a future approach to studying past emotions that uses the recovery and reconstruction of past architectural atmospheres as the primary means through which to access and analyse the feelings that were inspired, shaped by, and intentionally built into past architectures.
1 Previous Approaches to past Emotions and Architecture
The importance of architecture as a medium through which to develop our historical understanding of the various emotions and emotional landscapes of the past has not gone unnoticed. There is no space here for a blow-by-blow evaluation of the vast and varied body of scholarship that examines the architectures, places, and spaces of late antiquity (and other historical periods).14 But within the ever-growing field of the History of Emotions, Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi’s suggestion that the hospital architectures designed by Christian missionaries in Persia and north-western British India between 1865 and 1914 should be approached as ‘emotional set-ups’ represents one of the most recent and significant developments to have occurred in studies of the relationship between historic architecture and emotions.15 Springing out of a combination of Monique Scheer’s theory of emotional practices with Barbara Rosenwein’s model of emotional communities, Ebrahimi’s emotional set-ups are centred upon the argument that Christian missionaries deliberately used the architectural design, spatial layout, and occupational practices of the hospitals that they created as a means to build bonds of trust that could be exploited for various purposes including conversion.16 As emotional set-ups, the missionary hospitals worked to create bridges between the emotional communities of the locals and those of the missionaries. They also became material expressions of the desire to integrate the emotional and colonial regimes that were central to the missionary ethic with those of the local communities.
In blending and developing Scheer’s theory of emotional practices with Rosenwein’s model of emotional communities and William Reddy’s emotional regimes, Ebrahimi’s emotional set-ups represent an important step forward in the histories of architecture and emotions.17 Although the focus lies predominantly on intention, the categorisation of architectures as set-ups introduces a degree of flexibility through its recognition that there exists a gap between intent and its realisation.18 Architectures might be ‘set up’ to cater to or control the feelings of those who encountered them, but such intentions do not always translate into lived experience.19 Understanding the reasons for this and navigating the consequences constitute the next step for advancing our historical knowledge of the ways in which past architectures shaped the history of feeling and emotions.
Rob Boddice’s second edition of The History of Emotions has already recognised this. Examining the relationship that exists between emotions, place, space, and objects, Boddice begins with a personal account of the feelings that he experienced on his two visits to the Jewish Museum and Holocaust Tower. While Boddice’s first trip to the Tower, which took place in broad daylight, left him mostly ‘unmoved’, the darkness that he found himself plunged into during his second visit in the winter resulted in the experience of an ‘overwhelming feeling of panic’.20 Such was this panic’s potency that not even the sense of security that might normally have been expected to accompany the knowledge that the space was filled with other people, including the guest Boddice had brought, was enough to mitigate it.21 Indeed the narrative, as Boddice creates it, suggests that this actually served to aggravate the panic and disorientation that had arisen from the initial submersion in darkness.
The contrast between the responses described imbues Boddice’s narrative with an emotional profundity that carries enough potency to strike a chord in anyone who has ever found themselves in the scenario where the same place inspires a marked contrast in the types and strength of the emotions felt the second time around.22 An exploration of what it was that gave the Museum’s deliberately designed spaces the power to generate emotive success leads Boddice to identify affective atmospheres as playing an important role in determining an architecture’s ability to alter feeling.23 Affective atmospheres, as defined by Ben Anderson, are ‘the shared ground from which subjective states and their attendant feelings and emotions emerge.’24 As a turbulent and indeterminate ‘class of experience’, affective atmospheres ‘occur before and alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human and non-human materialities, and in-between subject/object distinctions.’25
Boddice is not the only scholar to have mentioned atmospheres in relation to historic buildings. Mark Seymour’s analysis of the ways in which former church spaces were converted into a courtroom with legal and classical allusions during Captain Giovanni Fadda’s murder trial opens with the line ‘an emotional atmosphere emanated from the crowd gathered outside an imposing ecclesiastical building in Rome on the morning of 30 September 1879.’26 Vladimir Ivanovici, exploring the manipulation of light in late antique baptismal theory and the eucharistic liturgy, also refers to Christian churches as providing a setting in which ‘the atmosphere of heaven’ could be reproduced.27 Both studies acknowledge the presence of atmospheres in inspiring or affecting emotional responses. Yet scholarship investigating the power of atmospheres to shape past emotions and our ability to access the gap between intent and experience has yet to recognise their full potential.28 This is where this essay and the wider research project in which it is located (Emotional Architectures: Atmospheres of Power in Late Antique Churches) comes in.
2 Architectural Atmospheres and Emotions: What, Why, and How?
What gives architecture the ability to inspire and affect emotion? Or, to put it another way, what transformed the episcopal church at Clermont into a place where one could witness the terror that the prospect of facing God inspired? Was it the scale and shape of the building? The variegated marbles and other materials that gave it structure? Was it the great brightness or sweet odour of spices that Gregory documents? Or were the reasons why it was built and the purposes for which it was used the main source of its emotional power? The answer is that it was no one thing. The ability of the episcopal church at Clermont to inspire the terror of God came not from any one specific architectural or contextual component, but from the atmospheres, ambiences, or auras that emanated from each of the above elements working together to create a wider sensory experience.
2.1 What Are Architectural Atmospheres and How Do They Relate to Emotions?
Derived from the ancient Greek words for ‘vapour’ (
Recent decades have seen significant developments occur in our understanding of the ways in which atmospheres emerge and function in relation to architecture and spatial design. The scholarship produced by the German philosopher, Gernot Böhme, and Finnish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa, have been most helpful here. Approaching atmospheres as products of our analytical evaluation of objects, people, forms, climates, and colours, Böhme locates atmospheres within the realm of bodily states and presence.31 As the ‘primary object of perception’, Böhme’s atmospheres are felt spaces, the background to the human perception and understanding of their history and presence within that.32 Architecture, as the theory and practice of spatial design, affects atmospheres by altering the character of space through which we move.33 In other words, architecture redefines our perception of place, space, and atmosphere through its manipulation of geometry, materials, light, and sound.34
In a similar vein to Böhme, Pallasmaa also perceives atmospheres to be multisensory phenomena that emerge out of a person’s assessment of the ways in which the physical and material aspects of a building interact with their emotional and existential sensibilities.35 For Pallasmaa, atmospheres are fusions ‘of perception, memory, and imagination’ that appear when our eyes, nose, skin, ears, and muscles detect changes in the continuity, balance, gravity, illumination, colours, temperature, sounds, and stability of our environment.36 These peripherally sensed changes produce emotional impressions that we interpret using our imagination and memory.37
Pallasmaa’s notion that architectural atmospheres lead to the production of emotional impressions is important for thinking about the nature of the relationship that exists between emotions and architectural atmospheres. As invisible, intangible, and experiential phenomena that are ephemeral and difficult to capture reliably, architectural atmospheres and emotions share an intrinsic but also deeply complicated bond.38 Both are connected to the human condition and both help to define, and are affected by, social interaction and wider context.39 Despite these similarities, there remains an interesting question as to whether emotions should be considered to be the products or expressions of architectural atmospheres or whether they should be regarded as one and the same. Böhme’s suggestion that ‘atmospheres are experienced as an emotional effect’ certainly brings this question to the foreground.40 If emotions constitute the means through which architectural atmospheres are discerned, then can the latter be said to exist separately from former?
The answer to this question is both yes and no. The process by which atmospheres are produced, as well their function in facilitating and mediating emotional experience, allows for a distinction to be drawn between the two.41 Yet the need for a change in a person’s existing emotional state to be detected before they can discern that an architectural atmosphere is present prevents a complete separation of the two entities. As experiential phenomena, architectural atmospheres emerge when humans, as mindful and sensory beings, encounter a place or space.42 The moment a person comes into contact with a building, their senses automatically attune to it and assess the environment that it produces and is surrounded by. Everything from the levels of light to the stability of the floor and surrounding sounds, smells, materials, colours, gravity, temperature, movements, and scale of the interior spaces are subconsciously gauged.43 When this multisensory assessment is processed in the mind, it interacts with the person’s memories, perceptions, and imagination.44 This initiates an emotional response that is then intellectualised and either acted upon or internalised.45 As part of the intellectualisation process, the emotion(s) that have been stimulated by the architectural atmosphere are filtered through the person’s existing emotional knowledge, sensibilities, capacities, and states to produce a final impression.46
This entire process takes place incredibly quickly, within the space of a second if not faster, but the multisensory assessment is not always linear.47 The assorted components of diverse buildings can affect, or be perceived by, the senses in different ways and with varying intensities. Gregory’s description of the episcopal church at Clermont, for example, gives priority to the scale and shape of the building followed by its great brightness, odour of spices and embellished walls.48 A comparison of this with the details provided in the poem that Gregory’s friend, the poet-bishop Venantius Fortunatus, created to celebrate the episcopal church that Felix of Nantes sponsored, reveals a slightly different order. Precedence is given to shape then scale, decoration, and finally light.49 Smell is not mentioned at all. The absence of this and difference in the order of features that Fortunatus lists help illustrate the variations that can take place at the sensory assessment stage.
2.2 Why Are Architectural Atmospheres Important for Developing Our Knowledge of Past Emotions?
Discussing the importance of atmospheres to the processes involved in architectural creation, Pallasmaa has already argued that atmospheres provide the means to understanding ‘the secret power of architecture and how it can guide large masses [of people].’50 The secret power to which Pallasmaa refers is emotion. When a person encounters a building, it is the emotion(s) that they experience which move them. These emotions are generated by the architectural atmospheres that are the products of the emotional intentions that drove and underpinned the architecture and the results of multisensory assessments that were made by those who used and visited it thereafter.51 It is this connection that exists between architectural atmospheres and emotions that transforms architectural atmospheres into keys that can unlock what could be called the secret emotional power of architecture. As the medium through which humans are moved to experience and attempt to affect emotions, architectural atmospheres are essential for developing our knowledge of the ways in which historic architectures affected, and were affected by, the feelings of past peoples.
2.3 How Might Scholars Recover Architectural Atmospheres and Their Emotions?
The multisensory nature of architectural atmospheres means that no individual component, decorative feature, or purpose of any given architecture can be regarded as solely responsible for stimulating the emotions, passions, or feelings that emerge when that building or architecture is encountered. The attestation of this in the architectural description that Gregory created for the church that Namatius built at Clermont is partly what makes this narrative so remarkable. In Histories 2.16, Gregory’s recognition that the ability and power of this episcopal church to provoke the terror of God stems not from one singular element of its architecture, but from the interaction of its shape, scale, and materials with the bright light, sweet odours, and sounds that would have been introduced through natural and artificial means (e.g. the performance of the liturgy) comes to the fore. Gregory may not use the term ‘atmosphere’, but the phenomenon as it is now understood can still be detected. When Gregory talks about the witnessing of the terror of God in that place, he is referring to what architectural theory would now consider to be the atmosphere of that church and the subsequent feeling that this generated.
Gregory’s account of the episcopal church at Clermont is far from the only detailed architectural description of a building to have survived from late antiquity, but it is unusual in providing an explicit, language-based identification of the feelings that Gregory wanted people to perceive this building to have inspired.52 How then might scholars go about identifying and exploring the passions, feelings, or emotions that were inspired or affected by the other buildings that shaped the urban and rural landscapes of Gregory’s world and the wider historic past when there is little or no emotion vocabulary provided?
One approach could be to reconstruct the atmospheres that the architecture(s) under consideration produced. The fleeting, invisible, intangible and highly subjective nature of architectural atmospheres means that this process is fraught with difficulty, but it is not entirely impossible.53 Histories 2.16 helps provides the starting blocks through its identification of several of the components that Gregory perceived to have played a role in creating a terror-of-God-inspiring atmosphere. These include the shape and size of the architecture, the materials used to create and decorate it, the levels of light that it contains, and smells that permeate or are exuded from it.54 To these may be added the features that modern spatial and architectural theory have identified as being central to the production of architectures and their atmospheres. This includes the types of sounds and silences that are present, the strength and stability of the flooring, and the movement of peoples both to and from the building as well as within it.55 Wider contexts pertaining to the reasons why the architecture was created, the different ways in which it was used, the methods and processes required to construct it, and the social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental framework that surrounded it are also vital.56 Once these details have been established, the historian can start to create a picture of the architecture which can then be measured against those for which references to emotional responses are extant. The more this process is repeated, the more data is amassed and easier it becomes to start drawing tentative conclusions about which architectures could plausibly have generated similar atmospheres and emotional responses.57
Uncovering or recovering each of the elements outlined above as far as is practicable necessitates collaboration and conversation with a range of different disciplines. Although textual descriptions, like the one provided by Gregory on the terror-of-God-inspiring church at Clermont, can provide explicit data about the material and immaterial components that could generate specific feelings, this information still needs to be contextualised within the broader archaeological, architectural, cultural, and theological settings that surround the author and architecture. Accessing the archaeological records detailing the many other buildings and monuments (Christian or otherwise) that Gregory would have encountered, for example, is vital for evaluating how these structures and the wider urban environment could have affected Gregory’s experiences of the church built by Namatius.58 Learning about the liturgical practices and theological beliefs that drove the creation and purpose of this church is also important for contextualising the terror of God that Gregory identifies as having been present.59 Conversations about current architectural processes can also reveal more about the collaborative efforts and emotions that would have been involved in the building of these structures. Evaluating the power of Christian basilicas and churches to inspire, shape, and reflect the different passions that were felt by Gregory and his contemporaries requires a merging of traditional historical analyses of textual and material evidence together with the data, methods, and theory employed in archaeology, architecture, art history, theology, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.60
The exact disciplinary framework required to recover and analyse past architectural atmospheres present in other historical settings is likely to vary depending on the geographical region and time period in focus, the type or types of architecture under consideration and the quality, amount, and nature of the evidence available. While it should be acknowledged that the shifting and subjective nature of architectural atmospheres means that no complete recovery will ever be possible – connections between emotions and spaces change over time and the same person can register different emotional responses (or experience the same emotion differently) in the same place – a collaborative approach increases the likelihood of being able to piece together a collection of snapshots that show how the different components that resulted in the production of architectural atmospheres elicited different emotional responses.61 This knowledge can then lay the foundations for future studies to draw comparisons that test whether the intentions that drove the creation of a particular architecture were in any way successful in achieving their goals.
3 Atmospheric Architectures: A New Way Forward?
How and why might the relationship between the emotions, architectures, and atmospheres of the past become a load-bearing column in the future of emotions and History of Emotions research? As highlighted above, previous scholarly approaches to the history of architecture and emotions have emphasised that a divide exists between the intention to use past architectures to affect emotional experience and the lived emotions that these places and their spaces generated following their creation. While considerable energy has been given to reconstructing the emotional intentions that underpinned the creation of past places and spaces, the gap that exists between intent and the lived experience is still largely underexplored.62 Engaging with this means recovering and analysing the atmospheres that give architectures (past and present) their ability to inspire emotions and affect emotional experience. Architectural atmospheres are highly complex phenomena that present multiple challenges through their subjective nature, fleeting and changeable existence, and limited visibility in the textual and material record. Yet in much the same way as emotions, these complications do not have to place architectural atmospheres beyond the reach of the historian.
Accessing architectural atmospheres alongside the passions and emotions that they inspired requires historians to learn to engage with a variety of textual and material evidence. This can include everything from the narrative descriptions of those buildings that appear in histories, poems, and letters to extant buildings, floor plans (archaeological and architectural), visual media (e.g. mosaics and paintings), and various objects (e.g. sarcophagi and liturgical equipment) that were built into or used in association with these structures. Interpreting and contextualising such a wide and varied body of evidence necessitates cross-, multi-, and even interdisciplinary collaborations which can require the historian to step outside their comfort zone. This need was recognised as being pivotal to the development of the future of emotions studies back during the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions’ third international conference on ‘The Future of Emotions: Conversations Without Borders’ (2018).63 Combining contributions from scholars in history, classics, literary studies, and social sciences, the conference’s concluding plenary stressed the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration for growing our understanding of the political, social, and cultural impact of past emotions as biologically, socially, and culturally constructed experiences.
In the context of future explorations of past emotions in relation to place, space, and architecture, the fruits of such collaborative efforts can lead to an enhanced understanding of the ways in which contemporaries influenced and were affected by the emotional landscapes that they created through the shaping of space and construction of architecture. Approaching architectures as atmospheric inspirers of emotion(s) offers scholars a new avenue through which to develop our understanding of past peoples and their landscapes of feeling. Reconstructing and analysing the architectural atmospheres of past buildings helps us to appreciate the emotional capacity of these structures, explore the gap between intention and lived experience, and understand the ways in which the built-up environments of the past affected, and were changed by, the feelings of those who commissioned, constructed, and used them. Looking to the future, the reconstruction and analysis of atmospheric architectures has the potential to be highly fruitful for deepening our knowledge and appreciation of the emotions and emotional landscapes of the past.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (grant number: ECF-2022–296). I would like to thank Professor Katie Barclay (Macquarie University) for inviting me to make this submission and Professor Danuta Shanzer (Universität Wien) and Cade Meinel (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) for providing timely and constructive feedback.
This essay is an outcome of a Leverhulme Trust ECF on Emotional Architectures: Atmospheres of Power in Late Antique Churches. The arguments and approach here proposed are being developed at greater length in the monograph that constitutes this fellowship’s main outcome and which is contracted for publication with Edinburgh University Press (May 2025). Readers should note that this essay, which is a late addition to the EHCS forum on The Future of Emotions, is intended to give readers a quick insight into the original methodology that the Emotional Architectures project is developing. It is not exhaustive. Constructive feedback offered by historians and scholars of other disciplines will be appreciated.
‘Sanctus vero Namatius post obitum Rustici episcopi apud Arvernus in diebus illis octavus erat episcopus. Hic ecclesiam, qui nunc constant et senior infra murus civitatis habetur, suo studio fabricavit, habentem in longo pedes 150, in lato pedes 60, id est infra capso, in alto usque cameram pedes 50, inante absidam rotundam habens, ab utroque latere ascellas eleganti constructas opere; totumque aedificium in modum crucis habetur expositum. Habet fenestras 42, columnas 70, ostia 8. Terror namque ibidem Dei et claritas magna conspicitur, et vere plerumque inibi odor suavissimus quasi aromatum advenire a religiosis sentitur. Parietes ad altarium opere sarsurio ex multa marmorum genera exornatos habet.’ Gregory of Tours, Libri Historiarum X (hereafter DLH), ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, 2nd edn, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum (MGH: SRM) 1.1 (Hahn, 1951), 2.16, p. 64. Translation author’s own. I thank Danuta Shanzer for noting that an alternative translation may also read: ‘For a terror of God and a great brightness are witnessed in the same place …’.
On Gallus see DLH, 4.5, pp. 138–39 and Gregory of Tours, Liber Vitae Patrum (hereafter VP), in Gregory of Tours, Miracula et Opera Minora, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH: SRM 1.2 (Hahn, 1885), 2.2, p. 220; 2.6, pp. 229–36.
Gregory discusses the miracle and his promise in VP, 2.2, p. 220. He discusses Nicetius’s influence on him in VP, 8.2–3, pp. 242–44.
Avitus’s rise to the bishopric of Clermont is discussed in DLH, 4.35, pp. 167–68.
Gregory mentions Avitus as his travelling companion in his life of the recluse Caluppa. VP, 11.3, p. 261. DLH, 5.9, p. 204 indicates that Caluppa died in 576. Gregory refers to Avitus as bishop (‘beato Avito episcopo’) in the life of Caluppa, meaning that this journey had to have happened between 572 and 576. Eufronius’s death in 572, coupled with Gregory’s appointment and move to Tours in 572–573, means that this visit could be interpreted to have taken place either just before Gregory left for Tours or on a later visitation.
For an extended discussion of the history and significance of sixth-century Tours see Luce Pietri, La ville de Tours du ive au vie siècle: naissance d’une cite chrétienne (École Francaise de Rome, 1983), 171–334 (general), and 339–429 (architectural landscape). A summary of the key aspects underpinning Tours’s significance is available in Hendrik Dey, The Afterlife of the Roman City: Architecture and Ceremony in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 162–64.
For a discussion of the ways in which Namatius’s cathedral might have shaped Gregory’s restoration of Tours Cathedral, see Catherine-Rose Hailstone, ‘Atmospheric Architecture: Gregory of Tours’s Use of the Fear of God in Tours Cathedral and the Basilica of St Martin’, Early Medieval Europe 30, no. 3 (2022): 331–41.
Gregory wrote many other works besides the Histories. The extant corpus includes eight books of Miracles, a hagiographical volume on The Life of the Fathers, a Syriac to Latin translation of the Passion of the Seven Holy Martyrs Sleeping at Ephesus, and a treatise
On Ecclesiastical Offices (renamed in accordance with the Bamberg MS to On the Course of the Stars in Bruno Krusch’s edited MGH: SRM volume). Architectural descriptions of various basilicas, churches, and other manmade marvels can be found in Gregory’s volumes on The Glory of the Martyrs and The Glory of the Confessors as well chapters 2–8 of his treatise On Ecclesiastical Offices.
DLH, 2.14, pp. 63–64.
On the church to St Stephen see DLH, 2.17, pp. 64–65; for Gregory’s list of the bishops of Tours and their exploits see DLH, 10.31, pp. 526–36.
On Gregory’s use of the fear of God as a marker for discipline and self-control see Catherine-Rose Hailstone, God, Demons, and Fear: Emotion, the Self, and Self-Control in Gregory of Tours (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming), ch. 1.
Hailstone, God, Demons, and Fear, intro.
See Hailstone, ‘Atmospheric Architecture’, 331–41, 348–49.
Some of the core works that have influenced my research into the broader use of architecture, place, and space in late antiquity include Fikret Yegül and Diane Favro, Roman Architecture and Urbanism: From the Origins to Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Bissera Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017); Vladimir Ivanovici, Manipulating Theophany: Light and Ritual in North Adriatic Architecture (ca. 400–ca. 800) (De Gruyter, 2016); Ann Marie Yasin, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Naissance des arts chrétiens: Atlas des monuments paléochrétiens de la France, ed. Noël Duval et al. (Imprimerie Nationale, 1991); Gaëlle Herbert de la Portbarré-Viard, Descriptions monumentales et discours sur l’édification chez Paulin de Nole: Le regard et la lumière (epist. 32 et carm. 27 et 28) (Brill, 2006); and Richard Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 4th edn (Yale University Press, 1986).
Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals in Persia and British India, 1865–1914 (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 6, 12, 16–17.
Ebrahimi, Emotion, 6–24, 216–22.
Ebrahimi, Emotion, 12–15. See also William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 122–30; Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2005), esp. 2–4, 24–27; and Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220 (193–94, 209–20).
Ebrahimi, Emotion, esp. 219–21.
Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions, 2nd edn (Manchester University Press, 2023), 189. All subsequent references cite this edition.
Boddice, History of Emotions, 187–88.
Boddice, History of Emotions, 188.
I refer here to the very different emotional experiences that accompanied my visits to the Basilica of St Martin at Tours on 11 November 2018 and 4 July 2025.
Boddice, History of Emotions, 188–95.
Ben Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, Emotion, Space, and Society 2, no. 2 (2009): 77–81 (78); also discussed in Katie Barclay, ‘Emotions of the Age and the Future of Feeling’, in this issue.
Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, 78–80.
Mark Seymour, ‘Emotional Arenas: From Provincial Circus to National Courtroom in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy’, Rethinking History 16, no. 2 (2012): 177–97 (177). The trial is discussed at length in Mark Seymour, Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy (Oxford University Press, 2020), where the different types of atmospheres associated with the trial are mentioned on pp. 12, 16, 160, 163, 165, 170–77, 191–92, 195–96.
Ivanovici, Manipulating Theophany, 5.
Boddice, History of Emotions, 195.
For a succinct guide to the semantic history of the term atmospheres, see Elisabetta Canepa et al., ‘Atmospheres: Feeling Architecture by Emotions: Preliminary Neuroscientific Insights on Atmospheric Perception in Architecture’, Ambiances 5, (2019): para. 3, https://doi.org/10.4000/ambiances.2907.
See Canepa et al., ‘Atmospheres’, paras 2–5, for a fuller discussion of the different ways of defining atmospheres.
Gernot Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, trans. A. Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul (Bloomsbury, 2017), 34–35, 69, 79.
Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, 35, 70, 182.
Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, 77.
Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, 55–68, 74–76, 123–34, 143–56.
Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place, and Atmosphere: Peripheral Perception in Existential Experience’, in Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, ed. Christian Borch (Birkhäuser, 2014), 18–41 (19–20, 34).
Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place, and Atmosphere’, 19, 34.
Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place, and Atmosphere’, 19, 30.
Klaske Havik, Hans Teerds, and Gus Tielmans, ‘Editorial: Building Atmospheres’, in Sfeer Bouwen = Building Atmospheres: Material, Detail and Atmosphere in Architectural Practice, ed. Peter Zumthor et al. (Nai, 2013), 3. Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, 79, refers to atmospheres as being ‘never finished, static, or at rest’.
Gernot Böhme, ‘Urban Atmospheres: Charting New Directions for Architecture and Urban Planning’, in Architectural Atmospheres, ed. Borch, 42–59 (45–46) recognises the role of social interaction and communication in the production of atmospheres. Atmospheres are shown to be affected by underlying emotional contexts in Gernot Böhme, ‘Atmosphere as Mindful Physical Presence in Space’, in Sfeer Bouwen, ed. Zumthor et al., 21–32 (27). Peter Stearns and Carol Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, The American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985): 813–36, argue for the individual experience of emotions as being located, constructed, and determined by wider social standards and interactions. Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context 1, (2010): 1–31 (19–21) provides a summary of the social role of emotions.
Böhme, ‘Urban Atmospheres’, 46.
Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, 80, also states that atmospheres are ‘autonomous from the bodies that they emerge from, enable and perish with’. This declaration implies that atmospheres can develop a level of independency or ‘life’ that exists separately from the human body and emotions that it produces.
On human mindfulness see Böhme, ‘Atmosphere as Mindful Physical Presence’, 27.
Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place, and Atmosphere’, 19–20. Also, see Klaske Havik and Gus Tielens, ‘Atmosphere, Compassion, and Embodied Experience: A Conversation About Atmosphere with Juhani Pallasmaa’, in Sfeer Bouwen, ed. Zumthor et al., 33–52 (35, 43).
Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place, and Atmosphere’, 19.
Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place, and Atmosphere’, 30, argues that atmospheres are felt before they are comprehended.
Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects (Birkhäuser, 2006), 13; Böhme, ‘Atmosphere as Mindful Physical Presence’, 27.
Zumthor, Atmospheres, 13, states ‘in the fraction of a second’.
Gregory of Tours, DLH, 2.16, p. 64.
Venantius Fortunatus’s poem on the episcopal church built by Bishop Felix of Nantes is Carminum Epistularum Expositionum libri undecim 3.7, in Venantius Fortunatus, Opera poetica, ed. Frederick Leo, MGH: Auctores Antiquissimi 4.1 (Weidmann, 1881), pp. 56–58, esp. lines 23–58. For an English translation, see Poems: Venantius Fortunatus, trans. Michael Roberts (Dumbarton Oaks, 2017), 3.6, pp. 146–151.
Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place, and Atmosphere’, 39.
I remain cautious of Boddice’s statement that an ‘atmosphere is not built in’ (History of Emotions, 195). The removal of the ‘built in’ aspect does not consider that even if the desires of those who designed and/or ordered the architecture to be constructed are not felt by those who subsequently encounter them, the architectural atmospheres and emotions that do emerge would not do so, and cannot be considered in the absence of the original intentions that underpin the architecture’s existence. That is not to say that there are not gaps between intent and lived experience. There are. But even if the emotions experienced end up being the opposite of what was intended, those emotions would still not exist without the intentions that brought the place and space into existence. Whether it is possible to fully extricate architectural atmospheres and the emotions that they shape or inspire from the feelings and intentions that brought the architecture into being is a question that needs further exploration.
Other interesting architectural descriptions from the period include Paulinus of Nola’s report on St Peter’s basilica at Rome in Paulinus of Nola, Epistulae, ed. Wilhelm Hartel, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 29 (Tempsky, 1894), 13.11, pp. 92–93; 13.13, pp. 94–95; translated in Letters of St. Paulinus of Nola, trans. P. G. Walsh (Newman Press, 1966), 13, pp. 117–43; and the detailed descriptions of the sixth-century Hagia Sophia provided by Procopius, On Buildings, ed. and trans. H. B. Dewing (Harvard University Press, 1940), 1.1.27–78, pp. 12–33; and also Paul the Silentiary. A partial translation of the architectural aspects of Paul’s Description of the Hagia Sophia can be found in Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453: Sources and Documents (University of Toronto Press, 1986), 80–91. The standard critical edition for the full Greek text is Paulus Silentarius, Descriptio Sanctae Sophiae, Descriptio Ambonis, ed. Claudia Stephani (De Gruyter, 2011), 1–71.
On atmospheres as subjective see Böhme, ‘Urban Atmospheres’, 50; and Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, 23, 78. Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, 78–79, identifies atmospheres as creators of subjectivity.
Gregory, DLH, 2.16, p. 64. The power and role of light in inspiring emotions in the context of late antique religious architectures has already received attention in Ivanovici, Manipulating Theophany, 19–216; and Nicolas Reveyron, ‘Ambiance lumineuse et architecture: les antécédents antiques des formules romanes et gothiques’, Hortus Artium Medievalium 26, no. 1 (2020): 204–12.
Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place, and Atmosphere’, 19–20, lists motion and sound as central components in the formation of atmospheres. Havik and Tielens, ‘Atmosphere, Compassion, and Embodied Experience’, 43, identify floors and their stability as one of the early determining factors of architectural experience. For an excellent study of the importance of flooring within the context of the fourth-century cruciform church of Babylas, see Sarah F. Porter, ‘A Church and Its Charms: Space, Affect, and Affiliation in Late Fourth-Century Antioch’, Studies in Late Antiquity 5, no. 4 (2021): 639–77 (661–76). Motion or movement can be broken into two categories: the movement invited by the architecture’s layout and form and the movement of peoples to, from and within architectures. The importance of the former is explored in Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture (MIT Press, 1964), 127–58. Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia, 99–120, remains the best study on the power and profundity of sound in a late ancient architectural context.
Christian Borch, ‘Introduction: Why Atmospheres?’ in Architectural Atmospheres, ed. Borch, 6–17 (15), reminds us that architectural atmospheres ‘should not be conceived of as singular entities, but rather as parts of a larger atmospheric whole’.
This is something that I am actively working through and testing.
May Vieillard-Troiekouroff, Les monuments religieux de la Gaule d’après les oeuvres de Grégoire de Tours (Champion, 1976), 85–104, is especially helpful here.
For a discussion of the liturgy and liturgical practices in late antique Gaul see Lisa K. Bailey, The Religious Worlds of the Laity in Late Antique Gaul (Bloomsbury, 2016), 103–15. Also, see Lisa K. Bailey, ‘The Strange Case of the Portable Altar: Liturgy and the Limits of Episcopal Authority in Early Medieval Gaul’, Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association 8 (2012): 31–51.
See, for example, the discussion of ‘emotants’ and their value for accessing emotions in an archaeological context in Eleanor Standley, ‘Love and Hope: Emotions, Dress Accessories and a Plough in Later Medieval Britain, c. AD 1250–1500’, Antiquity 94, no. 375 (2020): 742–56. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Social Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Blackwell, 1991), 68–228, provides a pivotal, if not uncriticisable, philosophy on the formation and shaping of space. Diverse architectural, sociological, anthropological, and archaeological approaches to architectures as ‘assemblages’ can be found in Elements of Architecture: Assembling Archaeology, Atmosphere and the Performance of Building Spaces, ed. Mikkel Bille and Tim Flohr Sørensen (Routledge, 2016). The value of assemblage theory, as the study of the interaction and relationality between objects and people, for reinterpreting changes to social practices has been shown in Georgina Pitt, The Persuasive Agency of Objects and Practices in Alfred the Great’s Reform Programme (ARC Humanities Press, 2024), 21–23. Theological and archaeological approaches to different religious spaces in late antiquity are explored in Spaces in Late Antiquity: Cultural, Theological, and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Juliette Day et al. (Routledge, 2016), 69–137, 141–211.
Boddice, History of Emotions, 189, emphasises the difference between intent and the experiences that occur when a building becomes ‘alive’. Margarit Pernau, ‘Space and Emotion: Building to Feel’, History Compass 12, no. 7 (2014): 541–49 (541), recognises the ability of the same space to elicit different emotions in groups of people and individuals. This builds on the acknowledgement that the same emotion can also be experienced differently depending on the setting in which it is experienced; see Benno Gammerl, ‘Emotional Styles: Concepts and Challenges’, The Journal of Theory and Practice16, no. 2 (2012): 161–75 (165).
This point is also recognised in Boddice, History of Emotions, 195.
This conference took place at the University of Western Australia on 14–15 June, 2018 and was sandwiched between two training workshops on ‘Emotions and Place’ (13 June) and the ‘Digital Humanities’ (16 June).
