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This chapter posits a relationship between the foliate friezes that proliferated in French churches in the wake of the First Crusade and the golden vine of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. It argues that builders drew on textual descriptions of the Temple vine and on the golden vines inside the Umayyad Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, a building conflated with the Temple, to forge and promote connections to the biblical model. Identifying foliate friezes as the golden vine not only provides a new perspective on a ubiquitous element in French church design, but it also brings to the fore meaningful points of contact between Western medieval, Byzantine, and Islamic art and architecture in an era of pilgrimage, crusading, and burgeoning global trade.

This chapter delves into the material and visual culture of the Halle Orphanage as scientific community and pays special attention to its construction and exhibition of one of the largest wooden models of Solomon’s Temple ever made in this period. Francke’s friend, a local preacher-mathematician named Christoph Semler, built the model and left behind a detailed account of how he did so. In addition to technical skill and mathematical precision, it required an ability to combine and make visible the expertise of scholars from several confessional communities. The original was placed on display inside Orphanage and a copy of it was used during observational exercises inside the Pädagogium. It was used to teach young people how to be “eclectic observers,” how to emulate virtuous archetypes through systematically observing them, how to put things in perspective and how to see (and to reconcile) “all at once.”

This chapter investigates the analogy between architecture and literature, exploring the metaphors of the analogy and focusing on British examples. Renaissance architectural theory drew analogies with music, painting, or poetry, and developed these in progressively greater detail. The Horatian doctrine ut pictura poesis was restated in terms of architecture. The chapter then looks at shared number symbolisms. Numbers shared gave the ut architectura poesis doctrine a demonstrable basis. The chapter also considers the symmetry, analogies, and allegory in Renaissance poetry. It explores Renaissance shape poems, as well as the metaphor of the Renaissance frontispiece, which often resembled architectural (especially theatrical) façades. Finally, it examines the importance of Solomon’s Temple in the temple–poem metaphor.

This chapter considers the seventeenth-century debates over the readmission of Jews, when the English shifted from telling stories about Jewish houses to contemplating the accommodated Jew in earnest. During this period the link between Jews and materiality acquired new urgency in England, as the participants in Oliver Cromwell's Whitehall Conference pondered making a place, literally, for Jews on the island. This chapter examines both the appearance in England of a climate amenable to readmission and the resistance to such possibility, focusing on Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel's campaign for readmission through both polemical writings and his own prominent residence on the Strand, as well as Protestant polemicist William Prynne's collection of evidence favoring keeping Jews out of England. The chapter concludes by analyzing John Milton's position on readmission which he expressed in his 1671 play Samson Agonistes, with particular emphasis on his use of architectural figures to address issues of tolerance, Christianity, and Judaism. Instead of the house, however, Milton's preferred metaphor is Solomon's Temple.