The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (review)

Reviewed by: The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts James Grier The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts. By Margot E. Fassler. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 612. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-300-11088-3.) The magnificent cathedral of Chartres, dedicated to the Virgin, needs no introduction to most medievalists. Those who have made the pilgrimage to Chartres cannot fail to feel awe at the sight of the edifice and its domination of the wheatfields on the Beauce plateau, its towering western façade, and the soaring interior—a place of mystery, peace, and grace. Some of that mystery [End Page 98] extends to large portions of the cathedral’s medieval history because of the unfortunate destruction, in the Allied bombing on May 26, 1944, of many of the holdings of the city’s Bibliothèque municipale. Photographic records and inventories of some medieval manuscripts survive, but much irretrievably perished. Margot Fassler attempts to penetrate some of the mystery through her analysis of the cathedral’s history and the ways in which its clerics shaped that history through their celebration of the liturgy and the design of the space in which the liturgy took place. Fassler begins by situating the cathedral, the Virgin, and the principal relic—the tunic said to have been worn by Mary during the birth of Jesus— in the social and political history of the central Middle Ages. Viking raids; the struggles for power among the Carolingians and their successors; and finally the emergence of the comital family of the Thibaudians, linked maritally in the twelfth century with the royal houses of both England and France, all take turns on the stage at Chartres. Throughout, the intercessory power of Mary and her relic, together with the church that housed it, play central roles in the drama. Within this context, then, the author shows how the liturgy that came to be celebrated at the cathedral shaped and retold history, biblical history, the life of Mary and Jesus, and the history of the city and the cathedral itself. The central focus of the book occupies its third and fourth sections, where Fassler recounts the rebuilding of the cathedral in the twelfth century, detailing the contributions of successive bishops and lay patrons (conveniently summarized in tabular form in appendix H, pp. 450–53). She provides a critical analysis of the architecture and its decoration, showing how the physical setting interacted with the liturgical ceremonies that took place in and around it to reshape and reinterpret the history that they, the decorative and liturgical programs, mutually presented. The many photographic illustrations included admirably supplement the discussion. As a kind of running counterbalance to this intensive analysis, the author presents, like a series of vignettes throughout the book, the texts of prominent chants in the liturgy, scrutinizing their internal meaning and their role in liturgical practices at the cathedral, all complemented by an anthology of some of the most important chants sung there (appendix D, pp. 387–419). Another useful appendix (A, pp. 369–75) lists the cathedral’s musical and liturgical books. This book represents the synthesis of an enormous amount of material from social and political history through architecture and the decorative arts to the liturgy and its constituent music. The reader emerges with a much clearer idea of the history of the city and the cathedral during this tumultuous period, but especially of the way its clerics preserved and reshaped that history in the cathedral’s decoration, and especially in its re-enactment during the celebration of the liturgy. [End Page 99] James Grier University of Western Ontario Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

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