The question of tensions in medieval 'edification' concepts leads to far-reaching problem dimensions in the historical pragmatics and aesthetics of religious art. The anthology demonstrates from an interdisciplinary perspective how important it is for the reconstruction of building in the Middle Ages to relate the history of words and concepts, the history of processes and functions to one another in a differentiated manner. Instead of starting from the semantics of modern times, the edification reduced to inwardness, discursive simplicity and pure positivity, the present volume aims at ambivalent semantization strategies with which very differentiated concepts of edification are designed and implemented in the Middle Ages. Their historical conciseness can only be revealed if the tension between metaphor and concept is taken into account for the edification semantics, and for the edification poetics the competition between different aesthetic calculations.