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Title: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (Penguin Classics) by Henry Adams, Ray Carney ISBN: 0-14-039054-5 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: An idiosyncratic tour of medieval French culture
Comment: Privately printed in 1904 (and revised seven years later), "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres" was never meant for the general public. It's the intellectual's ultimate "what I did on my summer vacation" essay, written for friends as a gift to accompany their excursions through France. The first half is a highly personal travel book and an idiosyncratic guide to art and architecture of medieval French cathedrals (particularly of Chartres); the last six chapters offer a succinct excursion through the spiritual mindset of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
If you've never been to Mont Saint Michel or to Chartres, the first ten chapters can be hard going; it's like reading a 250-page description of a painting you've never seen. Even if you have been to both locations, it's unlikely you'll remember the details Adams expected his readers to have in front of them. Fortunately, his prose is not dry (and is at times characteristically witty). Adams is able to render vividly the fleches, the portals, the arches, the statues, and the stained glass panels, and he provides the tourist with a thorough understanding of the achievement represented by medieval religious art. He also supplies as background a wealth of related literary and historical references .
The tenth chapter (and the last of Adams's official "tour") focuses less on the cathedral of Chartres itself and more on the cult of the Virgin that it represents. It serves as a segue to the second half of the book, which will be far more accessible to general readers. He compares contemporary portrayals of three queens--Eleanor of Guienne (Aquitaine), Blanche of Castile, and Mary of Champagne (who wasn't really a queen, but never mind)--to the representations of the Virgin Mary in the art, in poetry, and in hagiography. "The Virgin was a real person, whose tastes, wishes, instincts, passions, were intimately known," Adams argues. "Like other Queens, she had many of the failings and prejudices of her humanity." The final three chapters turn to the intellectual life: the ongoing tensions between universalism and nominalism, Bernard and Abelard, mysticism and rationalism--all culminating in the balancing act of Thomas Aquinas.
Over 75 years ago the "Cambridge History of English and American Literature" judged Adams's book as "probably the best expression of the spirit of the Middle Ages." Well, not quite; such a view could be proffered by a literary critic perhaps, but certainly not by a historian, and I think Adams himself would have been appalled by such a statement. (A more accurate and more thorough account from the early twentieth century is Charles Homer Haskins's "Renaissance of the Twelfth Century," published in 1927.) What Adams offers here is a glimpse of the medieval Catholic intellectual spirit as seen through the prism of his own rather conservative nineteenth-century Protestantism. His book is not so much a scholarly treatise as it is a wistful refashioning of the medieval spirit.
Rating: 5
Summary: A disguised autobiography
Comment: A reading of Richard Brookhiser's recent (and highly recommended) *America's First Dynasty* sent me back to *Mont Saint Michel and Chartres*, a book I hadn't read in thirty years. I'm glad I returned to it, because a few years have, I trust, put me in a better position to appreciate what's going on in the book.
On one level, the most obvious one, Adam's book is a sometimes idiosyncratic history of Medieval art, literature, and religion that takes as its center of gravity the great Gothic cathedrals of the period--structures that Adams thinks sum up what the middle ages are all about. To read the book on this level alone is fine. It provides intriguing insights into, for example, courtly love and the cult of Mary.
But I now believe that, at a deeper level, the book is disguised autobiography on the one hand and a backhanded history of Adams's own time on the other. An at times overwhelming sense of nostalgia permeates the book. In reading Adams on the 11th century mystics, the debates of the schoolmen, the chansons of the troubadours, and the unified worldview of the middle ages, one can almost hear him sigh with longing to return to a world which, he thinks, was whole, unfractured, and pure--a world, as the medievals themselves would've said, which reflects "integritas." This reveals a great deal about the restless, unquiet nature of Henry Adams the man. But it also reveals the restless, unquiet nature of the modern era which spawned and molded him: the gilded age, the fast-paced first wave of capitalism, secularism, and consumerism, which has no center of gravity, no art, no tradition. And even though we claim to be living in a "postmodern" age, it seems to me that a great deal of the qualities Adams deplored in his own times are still with us and account for our own sense of homelessness.
*Mont Saint Michel and Chartres,* then, is more than a quaint turn-of-the-last-century history. Read correctly, it's also a mirror of our present discontent. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5
Summary: A wonderful intro to Gothic cathedrals and the Middle Ages
Comment: Twenty years ago, I first read this book and was driven by Adams' compelling study of these two cathedrals to spend a decade studying Medieval and Renaissance literature. Adams at times finds his enthusiasm for his subjects embarrassing, but gives in to it nevertheless and writes a brilliant and joyous paean to these cathedrals and to the spirit that created them. Rereading this book now, twenty years later, I remember the thrill of reading it the first time, and it sparks my own enthusiasm all over again.
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Title: The Education of Henry Adams (Oxford World's Classics) by Henry Adams, Ira Nadel ISBN: 0192823698 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: July, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Chartres Cathedral: Illustrations, Introductory Essay, Documents, Analysis, Criticism (Norton Critical Studies in Art History) by Robert Branner ISBN: 0393314383 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Early Medieval Architecture (Oxford History of Art) by R. A. Stalley ISBN: 0192842234 Publisher: Getty Ctr for Education in the Arts Pub. Date: December, 1999 List Price(USD): $21.50 |
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Title: High Gothic the Classic Cathedrals of Chartres, Reims and Amiens by Hans Jantzen, James Palmes ISBN: 0691003726 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 March, 1984 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne ISBN: 0679454810 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 12 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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