“The Gothic genre… points, like the Gothic arch, upward, towards transcendence”
Alison Milbank is a British Anglican priest and a professor at the University of Nottingham in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. Her approach to religion and culture attends particularly to stylistics, genres and poetics as embodying and performing theological meaning, as can be seen in my 'Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians'. It is this approach that undergirds her ‘God and the Gothic' monograph, which attends to the double gesture of liberation and nostalgic return of the Gothic narrative in relation to the fraught history of the Church of England's emergence in the sixteenth century, and the development of the doppelganger in relation to Lutheran and Calvinist accounts of conversion. Her interest in the grotesque in Chesterton, Dante, Ruskin and also the Reformation is in the way a mode of the monstrous and horrific can have a positive valence in aesthetics and theology.
“Raises important questions about what happens to faith when it is shorn of its imagination, its instinct for the liminal and its arcane ritual, and made to conform to too much rational dissection, reasonable practice and 'scientific' moderation.” ― Jonathan Herapath, University of Kent, Theology