Monumental Gothic sculpture of the twelfth-to the fourteenth-century was the most available and meaningful communicative medium during the later Middle Ages. Although it was perceived first and foremost as conveying a complex of theological precepts with fixed meaning, its mimetic, emotive, and spatial  qualities created a dynamic environment and spectatorship in which the sculptures were experienced on various cognitive levels, under various ceremonial circumstances,  and evoked a wide range of meanings and responses. This seminar will follow the theory of Gothic sculpture – image, idol, simulacrum – in the French- and German-speaking lands, and trace the potential for religious and non-religious response to the sculpture; the boundaries between object and subject; body and space; location and audience; the real and the imaginary.