Technology and Culture

The Strait Gate is a compelling exploration of symbolic meanings, cultural practices, and social conventions associated with doors, gates, and portals in the pre-modern European city. Daniel Jütte explores the nature of doorways as a locus of religious, secular, and familial power in urban society, [End Page 1072] and with it, the complementary psychologies of security and anxiety. His historic scope includes material from ancient sources, some medieval developments, and an occasional reflection on the modern world, but the main focus is on the centuries just before and after Martin Luther's use of a particular church door for a particular political act. Among the book's many worthwhile contributions, Jütte contextualizes Luther's mytho-historic action within a broad practice of posting notices and arguments on church doors.

Though a fascination with the potent psychology of doors proliferates in the arts and the contemplation of doors as thresholds is integral to many phenomenological meditations on architecture, scholarly studies tend to focus on style and ornament. Jütte's anthropological approach is unique. He is less interested in the door as a threshold and passage from one condition to another (exterior to interior, profane to sacred, past to future) than as a point of control and communication. He brings to life its role as a backdrop for rituals, a place for legal proceedings and notices, for information sharing, and for public honor and shaming. Though he describes the door as an object, the text conveys the door largely as a surface that communicates through scale and material, ornament, inscription, and a wide variety of things applied or fixed to it, from chalk marks to knockers to corpses. The second chapter, "The Power of the Keys," links a practical necessity of daily life as manifested in a metal object to social relationships and meanings that multiply artfully in both secular and religious contexts.

While the symbolic weight of Christian beliefs and depictions of the entries to heaven and hell loom large, an array of stories about real-world doors convey an equally rich source of meaning. We learn of many practices that were aimed at increasing the protective power of the door as a guard to the family honor, possessions, health, and safety (in addition to locks and keys): burying things under the threshold, fixing religious or other objects on it, having the door marked or blessed by a priest, and daily cleansing of the exterior of the doorway. The various ways of communicating at doors are explored, including both knocking at them and knocking them down. Most interesting are the various kinds of messages that were commonly placed on doors. Here, the church door is the most potent for all manner of public announcements. The private door, on the other hand, was generally the recipient only of negative messages. Some were written notes, while others were more visceral, such as animal blood or excrement. These aimed at making public accusations about the character or behavior of the recipient and, even more importantly, at wounding their honor.

Though the book is well written, some repetition suggests that it was assembled from previously written essays. Odd skips outside of the primary place and time (Captain Cook's story, Japanese sliding doors, the dismantling of Antwerp's city gates in the nineteenth century) do not add meaning. The chapter on "reading doors" is focused exclusively on the [End Page 1073] messages placed there and ignores the visual communication in the door's design. Where this topic does arise in an earlier chapter, architectural treatises are appropriately referenced, but not adequately engaged (especially Sebastiano Serlio). Least satisfactory is the chapter on city gates, a topic that has been well covered in urban histories. While the process of gaining entry to a walled city is well placed here, the physical and visual aspects of city gates and their relationship to the city within is poorly represented by just a few...