Through the Labyrinth: Designs and Meanings over 5000 Years

Hermann Kern's Through the Labyrinth, Designs and Meanings over 5000 Years, published by Prestel in 2000, is the standard catalogue and typology of labyrinth designs across cultures and centuries, distinguishing the unicursal labyrinth, a single winding path with no choices, from the branching maze with which it is often popularly confused. Kern's own contribution was systematic classification, tracing design variants from Bronze Age petroglyphs through medieval church pavements to modern turf mazes and dating each surviving form where the evidence allows. Its strength is the sheer range of the catalogue and the discipline of keeping the labyrinth and the maze conceptually distinct, a distinction much popular writing on the subject collapses. Its limit is that a typology documents form and chronology rather than settling what any given labyrinth meant to the people who built or walked it, so a claim about ritual or symbolic meaning needs a source addressing that specific tradition rather than the catalogue alone.