For many centuries, Toledo cathedral was an ever-growing worksite at the heart of the medieval city. If the building was unrivalled in size, so was the institution in splendor and importance: known as the dives Toletana, the archbishopric was the “primate of Spain.” Begun in 1226 and replacing a converted mosque, the cathedral demanded the careful planning of people, materials, and design. Once the church’s main body reached completion in the mid-fourteenth century, attention turned to the cloister, under construction in 1383–1485. Amalia María Yuste Galán’s generous and innovative study focuses on the material and human resources and construction history of this major project (xi). It contributes to a constellation of recent works that illuminate the medieval cathedral as a collective body at the intersection of management, faith, and architecture.

Traditional narratives hold that the art and architecture of the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century were transformed by the arrival of artists, objects, and ideas from northern Europe. The year 1492 has been interpreted as a radical rupture, marking the end of the Islamic presence on the peninsula, the beginning of global encounters, and the intensification of exchange between Iberia and Renaissance Italy.This volume aims to nuance and challenge this narrative, considering the Spanish and Portuguese worlds in conjunction, and emphasising the multi-directional migrations of both objects and people to and from the peninsula. This long-marginalised region is recast as a ‘diffuse artistic centre’ in close contact with Europe and the wider world. The chapters interweave varied media, geographies, and approaches to create a rich tapestry held together by itinerant artworks, artists, and ideas.Contributors are Luís Urbano Afonso, Sylvia Alvares-Correa, Vanessa Henriques Antunes, Piers Baker-Bates, Costanza Beltrami, António Candeias, Ana Cardoso, Maria L. Carvalho, Maria José Francisco, Bart Fransen, Alexandra Lauw, Marta Manso, Eva March, Encarna Montero Tortajada, Elena Paulino Montero, Fernando António Baptista Pereira, Joana Balsa de Pinho, María Sanz Julián, Steven Saverwyns, Marco Silvestri, Maria Vittoria Spissu, Sara Valadas, Céline Ventura Teixeira, Nelleke de Vries, and Armelle Weitz.

The village of Cogolludo, in the mountainous countryside around 100 kilometres north-east of Madrid, holds a surprise for visitors. A theatrical square opens amidst a few houses, setting the stage for the ostentatious palace of the dukes of Medinaceli (Fig. 0.1). The palace, often celebrated as one of Iberia’s first Renaissance buildings, in fact resists temporal, geographical, and stylistic characterisation.1 It creates a sense of displacement that we have called the ‘Cogolludo effect’, a framework that offers a portal to this volume.

Karl Kinsella’s book opens with an imaginary walk along the Seine, and the metaphor of walking extends from the first page to the more detailed exploration of In visionem Ezekielis presented in the volume’s central chapters. “On Ezekiel’s vision” is an unfinished biblical commentary written by Richard of Saint Victor (d. 1173) at the renowned French abbey of Saint Victor. Richard’s text proposes a literal exegesis of the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a temple complex, contained in the Old Testament (Richard analyzes Ezekiel 40–48). Richard was the first to attempt a detailed study of the prophet’s complex visionary account. Kinsella’s book is explicitly structured as a walk-through of Richard’s analysis. Richard’s work itself retraces step-by-step the progress of the prophet’s vision, just as, in the biblical text, Ezekiel follows a man with a “brazen complexion” and a measuring rod through the temple complex (Ezekiel 40:3). “God’s own language” thus structured Ezekiel’s experience and its medieval commentaries, just as it organizes Kinsella’s resonating, multilayered analysis. Metaphors of movement are particularly fitting for this slender and engaging volume in which every word seems accurately calibrated to drive the “plot” forward.

The aim of this book is to provide a “complete, exhaustive, and systematic art historical study” of the Dominican college of San Gregorio, Valladolid (306). The college was established in 1487 by the prelate Alonso de Burgos. Readers of this Journal will be familiar with the building, now Spain’s Museo Nacional de Escultura. Especially remarkable is the mesmerising Astwerk façade, populated by armed savages benignly standing to attention, heroes fighting vicious beasts, and putti playing among pomegranates. The nineteenth-century writer José Maria Quadrado captured the imaginative richness of this teeming forest of sculptures when he described it as the brainchild of “fantasy, excited, in those years, by the discovery of the New World” (quoted, 73). Diana Olivares Martínez unravels this dream-like complexity with unfailing rigor, marshalling an impressive range of visual, literary, and documentary sources to analyse not only the much-discussed façade, but also the lesser-known spaces behind it, notably the monumental staircase and porticoed pavilion.

In 1520, Segovia's rebel city council besieged the impregnable royal fortress located on a narrow stone outcrop at the far west of the city. The cathedral stood just in front of the fortress, and the rebels demolished part of the church's structure to use it as a secure stronghold. Beyond the physical damage, the revolt demonstrated the peril posed by the proximity of cathedral and castle. Unsurprisingly, it was soon decided that the cathedral would be relocated to the city's main square. Deserted by its canons and chaplains, the old church was a ruin by 1562, while its younger counterpart was slowly reaching completion. Neglect coexisted with preservation: the first step in the construction of a new cathedral was the decision to move the building's cloister—stone by stone—from the old to the new site. This paper discusses the relocation, exploring its denouement and contextualizing it within pre-modern perspectives on heritage and architecture. In the early sixteenth century, the cathedral of the Castilian city of Segovia was relocated from the edge of the city to its main square. A new church was begun in 1525. Construction continued well into the seventeenth century, as the old building decayed and was eventually dismantled. Exceptionally, the cloister of the old cathedral was disassembled stone by stone and carefully—but not exactly—re-erected at the new site. This article explores the cloister's destruction and reconstruction from the perspective of architectural preservation and architectural history.

This book’s title, ‘The Inhabited Cathedral: Living History of an Architectural Space’, clearly conveys its contents and aims. ‘Space’ redirects the spotlight from the surfaces of walls and tracery — essential elements in taxonomies of architectural form — towards the vast interiors of cathedrals, those areas which usually remain blank in ground plans. The volume animates these nebulous spaces by focusing on the human presence within architecture, and specifically on institutional history, liturgy, ceremonies, local festivities, and other everyday activities. For Eduardo Carrero, it is these movements of life and ritual that shaped cathedral environments, rather than such remarkable events as coronations, which were ultimately too rare and unpredictable to define architectural design. Nevertheless, both regular and unexpected events articulate the longer histories of religious buildings. These lives are marked by large-scale, irreversible changes, from the aftermath of the Council of Trent to contemporary processes of musealisation, but also by daily adaptations and improvements. In keeping with this approach, the volume focuses on medieval buildings in Europe, but freely crosses chronological and geographical boundaries, challenging traditional conceptions of architectural history as a chronology of clearly differentiated regional styles.