The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History

Daniel Jütte

Σεπ 2015 · Yale University Press

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A prize-winning scholar offers a sweeping exploration of the role doors have played in history

Exploring a chapter not yet probed in the cultural history of the West, The Strait Gate demonstrates how doors, gates, and related technologies such as the key and the lock have shaped the way we perceive and navigate the domestic and urban spaces that surround us in our everyday lives. Jütte reveals how doors have served as sites of power, exclusion, and inclusion—and, by extension, as metaphors for salvation—in the course of Western history.

This book makes it clear that doors, more than any other parts of the house, are the objects onto which we project our ideas of and anxieties about security, privacy, and shelter. Without doors, of course, houses could not exist. But even though we each walk through doorways well over a hundred times a day, we typically pay little attention to the doors we encounter. We regard them simply as a means of entering or leaving a building or room. Yet when our doors stop working as they should—when we find that we cannot lock or open them, for instance—we react with discomfort and anxiety.

Drawing on a wide range of archival, literary, and visual sources, as well as on research literature across various disciplines and languages, Jütte pays particular attention to the history of the practices that have developed over the centuries in order to handle and control doors in everyday life.

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Daniel Jütte is a historian of early modern and modern European history. He is a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin. He lives in Cambridge, MA.