ABSTRACT
It cannot be said that the term Gothic in any shape or form looms large in the sociological mind. As a term, it belongs to architecture, the archaic and the antique, but certainly not to sociology, even in the most radical exercises of its imagination. The medieval overtones of the term point to premodern sensibilities seemingly utterly distant from sociological concerns with the immediate, with ideas of progress and emancipation from the superstitious and the credulous. As a pointed form of architecture embodying medieval aspirations to manifest contact with the heavenly, the Gothic finds its closest expression in medieval cathedrals and abbeys. A perfection of contact with the ethereal was made, which the Gothic revival in the nineteenth century sought to reinvent as a means of resisting the disenchanting effects of industrialisation and urbanisation. It deployed the light version of the Gothic as a badge of respectability, identity and civic worth. But that tributary concealed a darker version of the Gothic, one that pertains much to the concerns of a sociological noir.
