From March 26 to April
9 we will be studying the civilization of the High Middle Ages in Europe
as reflected in two important, and related, cultural complexes: the cult
of the Virgin Mary and the building of the great cathedrals.
Our particular focus will be the Cathedral of Chartres, located about
45 miles southwest of Paris. Chartres
Cathedral is one of the earliest and most beautiful of the gothic cathedrals,
and also one of the best preserved.
(Although parts of the cathedral were looted and vandalized during the French
Revolution, and the town of Chartres suffered heavy bombardment by Allied
forces during the Second World War, the greatest damage has been done by
modern air pollution, which has softened the old stonework and made it vulnerable
to erosion.) The Cathedral of Chartres
is one of the most studied, visited, and photographed monuments in the world,
and could easily provide us with material for several complete college courses.
We’ll just scratch the surface in the next two weeks, but if you’d
like to learn more at some time in the future, there’s plenty available in
the library and on the web. As starting
points, I would recommend an old book by Emile Mâle, simply called Chartres
, and the many short books by Malcolm Miller.
(If you visit Chartres, be sure to take one of Miller’s famous guided
tours.) There are also numerous websites
that include useful background information as well as virtual tours of the
cathedral. There are links to many
of these sites at
http://www.chartrescathedral.org/webliography.htm
.
Chartres is an ancient
holy place whose sacred character predates Christianity.
There’s a well in the crypt of the present cathedral that was probably
used for religious purposes in Roman or possibly pre-Roman Gallic times.
You’ll sometimes hear that even the image of virgin and child at
the center of the cult at Chartres predates Christianity, having come from
a Druidic image that was worshipped on the spot when the first Christian
missionaries arrived. Alas, this
story can’t be traced any farther back than the Renaissance, and, besides,
the Druids don’t seem to have gone in for images.
Still, as one modern art historian and archeologist puts it, “There
may, all the same, have been a double source for the Virgin cult at Chartres
– one Christian and imported, the other pagan and local.”
(Robert Branner, Chartres Cathedral (New York and London,
1969), p. 71. Branner is my source
for most of the information in this paragraph.)
At least five large
Christian churches have been built on the site of the cathedral we see today.
Churches, like most medieval buildings, had a good deal of wood
in their construction, and were vulnerable to the fires that periodically
swept all premodern towns. When fire
destroyed one medieval church, a new one was generally built – on a grander
scale, if possible, and often incorporating surviving chunks of the old.
The crypt of the present cathedral at Chartres goes back to AD 1024,
to the time of the famous Bishop Fulbert
, who was one of the greatest scholars of his age (in Europe, anyway), and
a pivotal figure in the revival of learning that began around the turn of
the millennium. In 1134 a fire destroyed
much of the western end of Fulbert’s cathedral, and new construction began
that included the foundations of the present towers and the sculpture of
the west portals. This sculpture,
which will occupy much of our time in the slide lectures next week, dates
from 1145 to 1155. In 1194 a great
fire destroyed almost all of Fulbert’s cathedral, but left the recently constructed
west end largely undamaged. Between
1194 and about 1225, most of the cathedral we see today took shape around
this remnant, including the sculpture of the north and south portals, which
we will study at least briefly. The
last important part of the cathedral to be finished was the north tower, which
was begun in 1507 – coincidentally the same year that Martin Luther was ordained
as a Catholic priest.
On to our first lecture,
which will be held in an interesting and appropriate place: WYNNE CHAPEL
.
Wed 26 March
The Flowering of
European Civilization in the High Middle Ages
Reading Assignment:
Read ahead in the study guide for this unit.
The topic of today’s lecture will be the extraordinary
accomplishments of western European civilization in the High Middle Ages,
a period that runs from about AD 1000 down to about 1300.
At the end of this lecture, I hope you’ll be able to complete the
following sentence in convincing fashion:
“I will never ever call the High Middle Ages the Dark Ages because
. . . .”
I’ll say what I have to say in the lecture itself, so I won’t repeat it here.
While I have your attention, though, there are a couple of other
things that I’d like to discuss.
The first is the location of today’s lecture, in the Wynne Chapel.
We’re here for a fairly prosaic reason: the profs in HWC 44 need
the theater for one of their midterms.
Although accidental, our location gives us something to think about.
Churches are used for a lot of things besides religious services.
In the past few years I’ve come to our chapel for Opening and Honors
Convocations (I’ve had to wear my medieval academic gown for those), for public
lectures by visiting scholars such as Timothy Ferris (I hope you too came
to see his wonderful slides of images made by amateur astronomers), concerts
by musicians such as Igor Kipnis and the Sherman Symphony, and for many other
events. At other times in my life
I’ve gone to churches to vote in a national election, to lecture to an adult-education
class, and to play chess. When I
was a child, I was occasionally left at a church for day care, and just last
January I learned from my colleague Hunt Tooley that the crypt of the Church
of St. Martin-in-the-Fields is a great place for a tourist to get a cheap
supper in London. Medieval churches
were the same, only more so. The
church was a place to meet for politics, for business, to negotiate a marriage,
and to see and be seen. On market
days at Chartres, the stalls clustering around the cathedral were the place
to buy produce or a pair of shoes.
Pilgrims and other travelers could find a place to sleep in the crypt of
the cathedral. And, of course, for
decades at a stretch, the cathedral was simply the place that the various
building trades went to earn their living as the work of construction carried
on.
If churches have a variety of uses, so do church personnel.
Early on, secular rulers discovered that the church was a goldmine
of intelligent, literate, and capable men who could be employed for secular
purposes. The best thing about them
was that, since they were already being supported by the church, they didn’t
need an additional salary or grant of land.
Often clergymen were primarily civil servants, with the religious
duties nominally attached to their offices being performed by a subordinate.
The mechanics of this could become fiendishly complex, since the
most able or best connected men required the revenues of multiple offices
to maintain an appropriate style of life, and the competition for the best
positions became intense. The rapid
expansion of the ecclesiastical courts in the High Middle Ages was fueled,
in part, by an explosion of lawsuits dealing with the right to control appointments
to given church offices, and thus to dispense their income as a form of patronage.
(For more about this, see R.W. Southern’s wonderfully readable book
Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth,
1970).
While I’m on the subject, I should mention that the importance of church
offices as a source of income meant that the church necessarily became entangled
in the struggle for wealth, power, and indeed survival among the prominent
families of Europe. We hear so much
about “The Church” when we study the Middle Ages that we’re sometimes tempted
to forget that the church was staffed by men and women who came into the
world in the same way anybody else did – in other words, by people who had
families. The family was a survival
system in medieval Europe – far, far more than it is now – and people would
never have dreamed of leaving their family connections behind when they entered
church service. Powerful families
viewed church offices, with the income and political influence they brought,
as very desirable possessions. The
result was that, with rare exceptions, abbots, bishops, and cathedral canons
tended to come from influential families.
The occasional brilliant commoner came up through the ranks, but
there was too much at stake for that to happen very often.
Getting back to the functions of the church, one of the most important, in
the long run, was supporting the life of the mind.
We’ve already heard quite a bit about this from Hunt Tooley.
The Carolingian Renaissance was largely the work of monks such as
Alcuin of York, and his program for the study of the seven liberal arts was
later carried on in the schools attached to the monasteries and cathedrals
of Europe. When the first universities
took shape in the 11th and 12th centuries, they too were staffed by clergymen.
Later, during the 13th century, the universities went from strength
to strength in the study of theology, philosophy, law, and medicine under
the leadership of members of the new religious orders of friars, the Dominicans
and the Franciscans.
As it happens, Chartres was home to one of the greatest of the cathedral
schools in Europe, outshining even Paris in the 11th and 12th centuries.
I’ve already mentioned Fulbert, who taught in the school before
becoming bishop of Chartres in 1007.
Famous names from the 12th century, when the cathedral school reached its
height, include Bernard of Chartres, William of Conches, and John of Salisbury
(they’re famous to me, buddy). The
school was particularly renowned for the study of natural philosophy, i.e.,
sciences such as astronomy, geology, optics, anatomy and physiology, etc.
The favorite text of the school was a strange and difficult later
dialog by Plato called the Timaeus, whose creation myth was used to
explicate the creation stories of Genesis.
As we know from the first-hand description written by John of Salisbury,
work at the cathedral school was intense, and the atmosphere was electric.
The outlook of the school was profoundly optimistic.
William of Conches was heard to say that “the dignity of the human
mind is its capacity to know all things.”
The road to discovery seemed to lie open through the study of ancient
authors such as Plato, Augustine, Macrobius, and Boethius, all of whose writings,
in different ways, appeared to contain a spark of divine inspiration.
Hastily written commentaries on these texts testify to the excitement
of the project. (These precious 12th-century
manuscripts were destroyed in the bombardments of the Second World War, but
copies survive, thanks to Canadian microfilm.)
Tentatively, diffidently, the idea began to take hold that modern
men (and all men and women are modern in their own time) might even surpass
the achievements of the ancients by building on their work.
Bernard of Chartres said, “We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders
of giants; we see more things and more distant things than they, not because
our sight is keener nor because we are taller than they, but because they
lift us up and add their giant stature to our height.”
The achievements of the 12th-century philosophers have been overshadowed
in modern estimation by those of the 13th century, when all studies were
revolutionized by the rediscovery (at first via Arabic translations and commentaries)
of the works of Aristotle. They represent,
nevertheless, a noble chapter in the intellectual history of Europe, and
one that we must bear in mind as we approach Chartres Cathedral.
After all, it was the masters of the cathedral school, most likely,
who approved the plans for the windows and told the stonemasons what to carve
in the portals. It’s no accident
that we’ll be looking at sculptural representations of the Seven Liberal
Arts, and stained-glass windows depicting dwarfs riding on the shoulders
of giants.
Fri 28 March Cathedral
, a film by David Macaulay
Important Note: This film will
run until about 12 noon.
Today we’ll be watching a film, partly live and partly animation, by David
Macaulay. The film is a spin-off
from one of Macaulay’s immensely popular children’s books on the architectural
and engineering achievements of past times.
Like a lot of books and films designed for children, Macaulay’s
work is pitched at a more advanced intellectual level than most of what is
intended for adults. I’m trusting
that, as students at an elite liberal arts college, you’ll be able to handle
it. The story of the Cathedral of
Beaulieu is fictional, but as you’ll see when you read the various documents
assigned for this unit, it’s based on real events, many of which took place
at Chartres itself.
One thing I’m hoping you’ll get from this film as a gut feeling that the construction
of a cathedral was a remarkable engineering project, and that the men who
were responsible deserve our admiration and respect for their skill and determination.
The great technological advances of the Middle Ages are still too
little appreciated, except among specialists.
Something else I’d like you to understand at the gut level is that
the cathedrals were built by real people, some of whom spent the best years
of their lives on the job. In most
cases we don’t know their names, but the individuality of their work can
sometimes be rediscovered by the sharp eyes of art historians.
Just for the fun of it – it won’t be on the exam – I’m attaching
a link to a diagram of the west portals of Chartres Cathedral that appears
in a book by Whitney S. Stoddard, Sculptors of the West Portals of Chartres
Cathedral (Cambridge and New York, 1952 and 1987).
Stoddard and other scholars have distinguished the work of eleven different
sculptors who worked on the west portals in the years 1145 to 1155.
It’s turned out to be possible to recognize the hands of the individual
sculptor by a variety of clues, ranging all the way from the overall shape
and proportions of the human figures they carved down to the tiny details
that most of us would never notice – the quirky shape they gave to an ear
or the way they handled the drape of a thin robe over a kneecap.
The diagram simply labels the outlines of the various figures with
the charming names these otherwise anonymous sculptors have been given by
modern scholars: the Headmaster, the Saint-Denis Master, the Angel Master,
and so forth. The cathedral was the
work of individuals, each of whom had his own way of doing things, even while
working under the direction of a master of genius (the Headmaster?) who had
his own controlling vision of the whole.
Here’s another link – again to a diagram that won’t appear on the exam.
If the sculptors of Chartres can be recognized as individuals, then it might
be possible to recognize work that they did at other sites.
The reconstruction of the west portal at Chartres went on for a
long time, but not long enough to occupy the full professional life of every
sculptor who worked there. It’s
likely that they had jobs before and after their years at Chartres.
Stoddard and other scholars believe that they can recognize work
that resembles that of the Chartres sculptors at a number of other places.
In some cases, this appears to be because it’s the work of the very
same hands; in others, it’s perhaps because one of the Chartres sculptors
apprenticed or worked there, and picked up or passed on some elements of
his style. We know that in some trades
it was pretty common to travel in search of training and work.
Many people in the Middle Ages, perhaps the majority, never got
more than a few miles from the place of their birth.
But some of them – soldiers, pilgrims, students, craftsmen, and
many others – got around to an astonishing extent.
The diagram linked above, again from Stoddard, shows conjectural
itineraries for some of the Chartres sculptors to illustrate this point.
Below is a link to images of two pieces of sculpture, one in Paris
and one at Chartres, that are believed to be the work of the Angel Master.
(The one in Paris has been rather extensively restored.)
The travels of the Chartres masters lead us to another issue that doesn’t
get as much attention as it should.
When historians and other scholars talk about the diffusion of ideas (a.k.a.
the Heritage of Western Culture), we often think too much in terms of words
written in books. A lot of interesting
ideas probably traveled by word of mouth in the Middle Ages, perhaps more
than ever found their way onto a written page.
Moreover, some of the most important ideas were probably never written
down, because they pertained to the skills of eye and hand that were developed
and transmitted by artists and craftsmen – the kinds of ideas/skills that
are almost impossible to put into words, but that can be learned by watching
or being coached by someone who already knows them.
The history of technology shows that new skills can diffuse from
one area to another even at times when other channels of communication seem
to be blocked. And, of course, the
history of technology also shows their importance.
My students in History 63 howl in agony when I ask them to read
a mere two pages describing the various steps in the development of the steam
engine in the 18th century and the engineers who were responsible for them.
And yet these men shaped the modern world far more profoundly than
Napoleon and all of his armies put together.
Much the same could be said for the role of the artists, craftsmen,
and engineers of the Middle Ages. We can’t ignore the men and women who worked
with their hands – who thought with their hands – if we want to understand
the origins of the world in which we live.
Mon 31 March Discussion: How
(and Why) to Build a Cathedral
Meet in small groups at the usual
times and places.
Reading assignment: Read the “Cathedral
Documents” packet on electronic reserve at Abell Library
The reading assignment gives you a pretty diverse collection of material
to work with. Some of it comes directly
from Chartres, and some of it comes from other places, such as St. Denis
and Canterbury, where gothic churches
were being built at about the same time.
I hope that your viewing of David Macaulay’s Cathedral will
bring some of these documents to life.
Many of them are short, even cryptic.
But if you read between the lines, you should be able to sense some of the
tensions between the bishops, the cathedral chapters, the local nobility,
the townsmen, and others. Remember
what I wrote above about the ways in which church officials were enmeshed
in their families’ struggles for wealth and power, and the ways in which
churchmen could exercise authority in the secular world.
Something I didn’t mention earlier, but that also provides necessary
background for some of these texts, is that abbots, bishops, and cathedral
chapters often exercised direct authority over the people who lived on the
surrounding lands because they were their landlords and feudal overlords.
It could get complicated, and sometimes violent.
And then there’s the selection from Jacob of Voragine on the dedication and
consecration of a church. Was it
all about wealth and power, or did religious ideas have their own kind of
reality? Medieval Europeans built
cathedrals – not pyramids like the Egyptians, or aqueducts and roads like
the Romans, or skyscrapers and spaceships like the Americans.
Why so?
Wed 2 April Slide lecture:
The Cathedral of Chartres
Fri 4 April Slide
lecture: The Cathedral of Chartres
Meet in the Ida Green Theater
both days
On Wednesday and Friday of this week I’m going to be presenting slide lectures.
They’ll focus on the sculpture of the cathedral, especially the
figures on the west portal, which you’ll recall were carved between 1145
and 1155. Once again, I plan to
say what I have to say in the lecture, and I won’t repeat it here.
Below you’ll find links to JPEG scans of some of the slides I’ll
be showing, so you’ll be able to look at the images before the lectures and
use them for review afterwards.
#1 Chartres Cathedral: Jan term 2001
#2 Floor plan of the cathedral
#3 Stained-glass window: The Blue
Virgin – Notre Dame de la Belle Verričre
#4 Stained-glass window: Christ tells
the story of the Good Samaritan
#8 The cathedral from the west, showing
the north tower on the left and the south tower on the right
#9 West portal (or Royal Portal),
central bay: jamb figures
#10 West portal, central bay: jamb
figures (detail)
#11 West portal capital frieze: Judas
betrays Jesus
#13 West portal, right bay.
Lower lintel detail: The Annunciation and the Visitation
#14 West portal, right bay.
Archivolt detail: Music and Grammar
#16 West portal, left bay.
Archivolt detail: Works of the year – a man slaughters a pig.
#18 West portal, central bay.
Tympanum detail: Christ in majesty.
#21 South portal, central bay.
Lintel and tympanum: The Last Judgment
Mon 7 April Music lecture:
Hymns to the Virgin
Meet in the Ida Green Theater
Medieval Hymns to the Virgin (Please print this document and bring it to class on Monday.)
In today’s lecture I’ll be playing DJ with a program of hymns to the Virgin, mostly composed in the 11th, 12th, and early 13th centuries in England and northwestern France. (There’s a link above to the texts.) Although only one of these hymns comes to us directly from a manuscript preserved at Chartres, they take us right to the heart of the cathedral builders’ world.
Music was
one of the seven liberal arts that were taught at the cathedral school of
Chartres. It had special importance
to the masters concerned with natural philosophy because they had learned
from Plato and other ancient philosophers such as Pythagoras that the order
of the cosmos was, in a deep sense, a harmonious or musical order.
An understanding of the laws of harmony was thus an indispensable
complement to the study of arithmetic and geometry, and a necessary preparation
for the study of astronomy. (If
you know a bit about the history of astronomy, you know that that idea had
a long lifespan. As late as the 17th
century, the great astronomer Johannes Kepler was still searching for laws
that would connect planetary astronomy, the geometry of the regular polyhedra,
and the intervals of the musical scales.)
Music was important for the study of practical subjects such as medicine
because health was conceived as a kind of harmonious balance among the four
major humors (fluids) of the body, which echoed the harmony of the cosmos.
(I could show you pictures.)
Knowledge of music and astronomy was also considered essential because it
was generally agreed that the human body was a microcosm – a miniature version
of the universe as a whole, sometimes called the macrocosm – whose parts
were all linked to the heavenly bodies by occult relations of harmony and
sympathy. As late as the 17th century,
astronomy was still an extremely common pre-med specialization in the universities.
So much for theory. The High Middle
Ages were also a time of extraordinary creativity in European musical practice.
It was during these years that European composers began to create
the first pieces of complex polyphonic music, that is, music with two or
more independent but interrelated parts.
This is the kind of composition that has dominated western art music
down to the present day. The origins
of this new kind of music aren’t fully understood, but one necessary precondition
may actually take us back to the Carolingian Renaissance.
It’s a complicated story, but it boils down to this.
You can’t have complex polyphony without written musical notation.
Simpler kinds are possible within an oral tradition, and that’s
undoubtedly a big part of the story, but for the really tricky stuff you
have to put some kind of marks down on paper to see whether your harmonies
line up properly. Most of the world’s
musical cultures don’t have musical notation, and don’t need it.
If all you want is to make beautiful music, it’s quite sufficient
for skills to pass from master to student by imitation, just as with the
artistic and technological skills I discussed above.
But the later Carolingians were strong promoters of written musical
notation, because they saw it as a tool for imposing uniformity on the religious
ceremonies (which included the regular chanting of the psalms) that were
practiced throughout their far-flung
domains. In large part because of
their support, written notation became deeply entrenched in the musical centers
of northwestern Europe. That meant
that when musicians in the 11th and 12th century began to develop simple
forms of polyphony, musical notation was there to help them clarify their
thoughts – and also to tempt them into ever bolder experiments.
The texts of these hymns are also of great significance, reflecting as they
do the spectacular rise of the cult of the Virgin in the High Middle Ages.
Many of them, as you’ll notice, are related to the miracle stories
that we’ll be reading for Wednesday.
Others are hymns of praise that owe some of their features to hymns that
predated Christianity. Still others
are related in interesting ways to the literature of courtly love (including
the songs of the troubadours and trouvčres) that was developing at precisely
the same time. Some of these texts
are in Latin, the language of the church, but others are in the vernacular
languages of the emerging nations of Europe, languages that are the ancestors
of modern English, French, Spanish, etc., and could be understand by everyone,
not just the educated.
The history of the Virgin’s cult is a long and complex one, but for now I
think it will be enough just to quote a concise summary by the eminent musicologist
Philip Pickett:
“No figure in the New Testament owes more to legend than that of the Virgin Mary. The Gospel account, in which she rarely appears and still more rarely speaks, must have seemed increasingly inadequate, and so in the early Christian period there arose the apocryphal stories which later satisfied the medieval appetite for information about her. In Christian theology the cult of Mary began to grow in the sixth and seventh centuries. It made some headway in the circle around Charlemagne’s court, and various Offices and Feasts were introduced in the ninth and tenth centuries, but the worship of the Virgin remained little more than a variant of the cults of the individual saints, holding no special significance until early in the eleventh century, when the popular Miracle Legends began to be written down. These were further assembled into collections in several countries in the twelfth century, each collection being given a title such as ‘The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary.’ From then on the cult developed – the Office of the Virgin was recited daily, the greatest cathedrals were built in her name, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was anticipated, and the new Orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, spread her cult among the people.”
The Tree of Jesse (from the Psalter of Queen Ingeborg)
One last topic before we start the music.
Several of the hymns we’ll be hearing draw on the imagery of the
Tree of Jesse, which we’ve encountered in the stained-glass of the west portal
of Chartres Cathedral. Above I’ve
linked to a scan of a beautiful manuscript illumination on the same subject
that comes from about the time that the north and south portals at Chartres
were being built. The idea of the
Tree of Jesse comes from a prophecy in the book of Isaiah (11:1), “There
shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow
out of his roots.” Jesse was the
father of David, so this text refers to a future descendant of David, and
has traditionally been interpreted as a prophecy of the coming of the Messiah.
Two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, are at pains to show that
Jesus fulfills this prophecy, by providing genealogies that trace the ancestry
of his mother’s husband back to David and beyond to Abraham or Adam.
In a previous life I used to teach these texts in a course much
like HWC 22, and every year there would be at least one wisenheimer who wanted
to know what any of this had to do with Jesus, since Joseph was not his biological
parent. Well, people in the Middle
Ages asked the same question. The
answer they usually got was that Joseph and Mary were closely related, so
that most of Joseph’s ancestry was Mary’s as well.
That meant that the Virgin was important not just as the mother
of Jesus’ human nature, but also as his link to the messianic prophecies
concerning the house of David. There
was a neat little pun that could be used to make the point.
The Latin word for virgin is, of course, virgo.
The Latin word for branch or shoot is virga.
Virga virgo est – the branch is the Virgin, the green shoot
that will come forth from the stock of Jesse.
Wed 9 April Discussion:
The Miracles of the Virgin
Reading Assignment: Read the “Miracles
of the Virgin” packet on electronic reserve at Abell Library
The reading assignment today is a collection of miracle stories, most of
them directly associated with the Cathedral of Chartres and some of them
apparently intended to show the Virgin’s concern for that place as her special
home on earth. Some of these stories
seem to have grown out of the exempla that popular preachers used
as the basis for their sermons – brief and compelling stories that made a
moral point and could be elaborated at need.
(Compare this with what Todd Penner had to say about the use of
exempla in classical rhetoric, and how this can illuminate what Tacitus
was doing with his stories of the Germans.)
Others may have been intended to advertise the benefits of a visit
to Chartres to potential cash-paying tourists – er, I mean, pilgrims.
Still others seem to come directly from the thanks of very humble
people whose lives had been touched by the Virgin, often in quite humble
ways. It’s an interesting mix.
Some of the stories in this collection don’t seem particularly miraculous
nowadays, and that’s something else that’s worth thinking about.
What was the meaning of the word miraculum in the Middle
Ages? Why were stories of miracles
so popular, and why were so many miracle stories told about the Virgin?
What is the connection between these stories and the construction
of the cathedrals, “the oldest buildings on earth that are still in use for
their original purpose”?
Meet in the Ida Green Theater
from 11 AM to 12 noon
This exam will cover Units Three and Four.
Please bring a blue book.
