Islam and the West: The Early Use of the Pointed Arch Revisited

As this is a valedictory rather than an inaugural lecture, it seemed legitimate to be a little self-indulgent in the choice of theme. Every medievalist at some time or other has to take an interest in the role of the pointed arch in the transformation of medieval architecture from Romanesque to Gothic and in the ways that the pointed arch form was subsequently manipulated through the later Middle Ages. It is only a short step, but one that has been taken less often than you might expect, to pursue that interest back into the early use of the pointed arch in Islamic architecture: to ask how it came to replace the semicircular arch of classical architecture and why it was used.