Gothic in the Latin East

Abstract

This chapter chronicles changing scholarly attitudes to the study of the Gothic in the eastern Mediterranean during the last 170 years or so. Colonialism, as well as French and Italian nationalism, constituted a robust driving force behind the systematic study of medieval and early modern art in the eastern Mediterranean during the late nineteenth and the former half of the twentieth century. The chapter concentrates on ecclesiastical architecture and art in the states of Frankish Greece and the kingdom of Cyprus during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (with occasional forays into the later periods), to the exclusion of the Crusader states in Latin Syria, and the island of Rhodes, which only came under Latin rule in 1309. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the problems currently faced by the field and a few suggestions regarding potentially rewarding avenues for future research.