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Abstract Although scholars have explored the colonialist nature of archaeology and the importance of antiquity in the legitimation of modern empires, accounts of French-occupied North Africa have largely overlooked the place of medievalism in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French colonial project. Illustrating the strategic importance of references to the crusader-king Louis IX, whose short stay in Tunisia culminated in his death in 1270, this article explores a dynamic ensemble of commemorative structures and spaces built by France and the Catholic Church on the Byrsa Hill, Carthage’s ancient acropolis. It considers a Gothic Revival chapel (1841), a scholasticate and antiquities museum (1879), an eclectic cathedral (1894), and an archaeological garden (1950–56) before concluding with a brief account of the site’s postcolonial development and current state. The conversion of the Byrsa by Catholic officials demonstrates the multifaceted nature of colonial mythologizing and architecture, where both antiquity and medievalism played critical sociopolitical roles.

Abstract Isfahan’s selection as the capital of Persia’s Safavid Empire (1501–1736) at the turn of the seventeenth century set off multiple phases of growth in the city. This included the development of Shah Abbas II’s (r. 1642–66) palatial complex of Sa’ādat-ābād, which encouraged Isfahan’s engagement with the nearby river Zāyandehrud. This article expands the discourse examining the river beyond the domain of nature by exploring the Zāyandehrud as a designed environment and a site of architectural imagination and action. As shown in this study, the river and the complex interconnections between natural and cultural systems played a central role in shaping the scheme of this royal complex. While a lack of visual and archaeological evidence has kept rivers and lakes on the sidelines in most studies of premodern Islamic water architecture, this article provides a new perspective on the roles of such bodies of water through a close reading of Safavid poetry, contemporary prose, spatial analysis, and architectural reconstructions.

Abstract Scholars have long recognized that “practical geometry,” the shapes and proportional relationships used to regulate construction, played a key role in medieval architectural design. Within this rich discourse, an emphasis on Gothic texts and buildings has produced a general image that master masons used totalizing forms to control the relations of parts to whole (such as ad triangulum and ad quadratum schemes). But as James S. Ackerman noted more than seventy years ago, many medieval buildings do not conform to this idealized method. A detailed analysis of the Romanesque Baptistery of San Giovanni in Ascoli Piceno, Italy (an adaptation of an Early Christian baptistery) illustrates an alternative mode of practical geometry, applied not as strict, regulating forms but as patterns of action governed by consistent geometric relationships with the variables of the site. This approach proved singularly capable of “regularizing the irregular” during a period marked by the adaptive reuse of ancient buildings.