The sense in which the term ‘misprision’ is used in the rest of this essay, and throughout the rest of the book, is that proposed by Jean Jacques Lecercle in an article about Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s use of a theory of language. The article is called ‘The Misprision of Pragmatics’, and he uses […]

Scholarly attention has long focused on the imposing, austere west fagade of the cathedral which dates largely to the mid-twelfth century (Figure 4.3). Authors such as the local liturgist Yves Delaporte and, more recently, the musicologist Margot Fassler, have shown that an abundance of important liturgical information from the Middle Ages justifies the official demeanor […]

The Internet makes for dangerous, subverting times for the Catholic Church, which has traditionally addressed the faithful from a special, timeless space at the Roman centre, which claims the authority, once it has spoken on a disputed issue or principle, to discourage further debate. . . But how does such a centralized space, harbouring immutable, […]

Unifying the ambitions of developers and government bodies is a freely borrowed and frequently misapplied language lifted from the history of archi­tecture. It is a language not only adapted for the marketplace but it appears to neutralize opposition to commercial development. The discipline of architec­tural history remains in large degree focused on the study of […]

It is not my purpose here to narrate the full socio-political context of London Bridge but a few details will give a flavour of the loaded meaning of the struc­ture in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.8 London comprised the cities of London and Westminster on the north side of the Thames and the […]