The Rhetorical Occasions of Gothic Sculpture

Lately I have become interested in medieval sculpture, a medium of art which seems to open up an unusually wide range of issues appropriate to the heroic scope, if not exactly the intellectual interests, of Sophus Bugge. My concern is not so much the medium itself, as the intellectual predicament of its study. In this lecture I have chosen to focus on Gothic sculpture, of which many fine examples survive in wood in Scan-dinavia and especially Norway.1 My concerns will not be stylistic, iconographic or technical. Instead I will consider the agency of sculpture, how its function relates to its purpose, and how that purpose is social. To shed light on these matters I propose to consider rhetorical engagement