City and Cosmos is an exploration of what 'the city' represented in the medieval imagination. Keith D. Lilley shows that, to the medieval mind, the city was not merely a collection of houses, it was an idea rich in Christian symbolism and cosmological meaning. Drawing upon original accounts, illustrations and maps from across medieval Europe, and on science, religion, art, literature, drama and architecture of the Latin West, City and Cosmos offers an innovative interpretation of how medieval Christians saw their urban worlds. Linking together textual and visual evidence, it examines how the city was understood simultaneously as a body' writ large and as a scaled-down version of the cosmos, each sharing common spatial forms and functional ordering. Crossing traditional subject boundaries, "City and Cosmos" will appeal to a wide range of medievalists working in history, archaeology, philology, philosophy and theology. It will also help students of architecture, urban planning, art history and human geography to re-evaluate the material and imagined forms of European towns and cities.
The idea it propounds that cities have deep meaning in the human imagination will also give the book wide appeal to those interested in urbanism and urban life.