Hi everyone, I’m looking for good books on the medieval history of Europe, especially anything in relation to the building of cathedrals. This is intended for someone who is interested in the period and has done a little reading, but would like to delve more deeply into the subject. Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated! 
I suppose your friend is looking for non-fiction, but if not – “Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett is an epic historical novel about the building of a cathedral.
It was a good read, and unless your friend’s an architecture student, this book might be a fun place to start. Sort of like using a coloring book before investing in paint and canvas.
Have you ever read A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman? This is the best book I’ve ever read on the subject (OK, it’s the only book I’ve ever read that deals strictly with the Middle Ages. But it’s still great).
Medieval Art by James Synder is a beautiful, although costly, art history book that has wonderful pictures, and a great deal of information about the architecture of cathedrals and the art found within them.
Look in your bookstore for anything by Norman Cantor, he’s a fairly well-known medievalist. I don’t think he has anything specifically about cathedrals, but he’s usually a good read, especially Medieval Lives.
Cathedral by David McCauley is in a picture book format, and I think it’s marketed for juveniles. But the illustrations are great, and show the building of a cathedral from start to finish. I think it would also be neat for an adult.
I’m hesitant to recommend Erwin Panofsky’s book about Abbot Suger and the building of the church of St. Denis. It’s art history. I think it’s great, but someone who is just starting to read about this period might find it dry.
AuntiePam - great book! I really enjoy that sort of novel. Alas, that’s not what my friend had in mind.
She’s somewhat familiar with Irish medieval history already (her family’s from the auld sod). This past summer she had the chance to visit some cathedrals in France & is now on a new kick - thankfully for me, because finding the right gift for her is usually problematic. 
KarlGauss, delphica, thanks for the suggestions; I’ll see if I can’t find at least one of those around here before I resort to Amazon.com.
Modifications on above suggestions:
Don’t read Tuchmann or Cantor. Tuchmann is not a medievalist, and while her books may be entertaining and seem illuminating, she makes numerous serious errors and should be avoided by students of the period. Cantor is a loudmouth and publishes a great deal, but he is the turd at the bottom of the well in the international community of medieval scholarship. He gets no respect. For very good reason.
delphica is right on the money with Erwin Panofsky, however. You cannot go wrong with his book on Suger or his [iGothic Architecture and Scholasticism*. They are both quite technical, and should perhaps not be a person’s first foray into the subject.
There is no good textbook or general history of the Middle Ages. I would suggest, however, some crucial books by Sir RW Southern: The Making of the Middle Ages and Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages. These are both required reading for any medievalist.
On the specific topic of cathedrals, I would highly recommend the works of Stephen Murray, especially his 1995 book Notre-Dame, Cathedral of Amiens : The Power of Change in Gothic. He also has published a really interesting videorecording on the construction and history of the Amiens cathedral, simply called Notre-Dame Cathedral of Amiens. Check these works out!
Hope this helps.
Regards,
MR
Maeglin, I’m a little surprised to learn that there is no good general history of the Middle Ages; I would have thought that someone might have given it a go already. (Ever think of writing a tome of your own? ) I will, however, keep your suggestions in mind while I shop. Grazie!
So what are Tuchman’s errors and Cantor’s sins?
Since I have read A Distant Mirror, there is a good chance that I’m walking around with some of whatever errors Tuchman made inside my head.
I’ve never read any of Cantor’s books, but I had some short readings by him in my college western civ class, and at the time I didn’t notice any of the very good reasons why he gets no respect. (The short readings basically said that Sicily and Spain were more important than the Outremer states as channels for transmitting Muslim scholarship to Europe).
People certainly have tried. “Definitive” histories of an entire period which span massive geographical scopes tend to blur crucial distinctions. By definition the author must choose his evidence selectively. He will try to paint a general, coherent picture of the period consonant with his own set of historical biases.
This sort of selectivity is inevitable in any historical writing. However, it is easier to pin it down and deal with it when dealing with smaller regions over shorter periods of time. It is easier to examine all or almost all of the evidence, hence the smaller the subject, the more he is actually accountable to the evicence. Furthermore, acedemic training encourages specialization. My particular area is in 10-12th century Norman history. I can parley this fairly easily into 10-12th century English and French history, but I very little experience working with the evidence from Germany. So if a specialized scholar were to write a general history of the period, expect to see a great deal of attention paid to his special time/region at the expense of the rest.
I will try to be brief.
It is virtually impossible to separate Cantor’s political agenda from his academic work. This is a common vice, but it is especially marked in Cantor. Dr. Bartlett, who reviewed Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, remarks:
Political agendas such as this ought to take a back seat. They should be subordinated to issues of historiographical method and accuracy. Cantor’s politics are hardly surprising given that his beloved teacher was Theodor Mommsen.
Cantor’s extreme conservatism results in often appalling failures of scholarly judgment. When discussing the past century of medieval histioriography, his discussion of the Annales school is downright flawed, ridden through with the conception that the so-called “history written along Marxist lines” is the enemy of real scholarship. His assessment of the Annales school, founded by the great French medievalists Bloch and Febvre, is downright wrong. This is what instills the desire in many medievalists to hurl his book across the room.
Why is Cantor so popular? He’s easy to read. He is absolutely brilliant at characterizing movements, institutions, people, etc. He is interested in probing the motivations and personalities of some of the key actors of the period. This may be great reading, but it is bogus history. It tells readers nothing other than Cantor’s vision of the Middle Ages. It is utterly impossible to substantiate on any textual or material basis. Perhaps Dr. Bartlett’s most telling remark is:
Overwhelming political agenda. Misjudgment of histioriography based on personal politics. History with no redeeming value other than entertainment. I’d say that pretty well sums it up.
Tuchmann is a different case. Unlike Cantor, she is a fine scholar. Her book is actually interesting, and her portrait of 14th century France is skillfully characterized. This trait she shares with Norman Cantor.
However, I find her parallelization of 14th century disasters with those of the modern world to be patently ridiculous, and they tell us little or nothing about the Middle Ages itself. It is flight of historical fancy, whose sweeping narrative forms a coherent picture only by bending historical truth and by forcing discontinuities and disparities together to entertain the reader. Tuchmann has personalized the “facts” at the expense of accurate reporting. She smoothes the discontinuities and complications of the 14th century in order to draw preordained conclusions.
I hope this was useful.
MR
Call me old fashioned, but I think Will(and Ariel) Durant’s volume, The Age of Faith, is good. Long and very detailed, but I like their whole history series too.
I will call you old fashioned, Baker. Will and Ariel Durant write 19th century teleological history. Though they tell a good story, they are to be avoided as well.
Maeglin, I’m getting set to disagree with you, but let me be sure I understand you first, lest we repeat our cross purposes from the “Conservative Philosophy” thread.
When you say “teleological” history, does that mean an interpretation of history as being progress toward a single fixed purpose or set of purposes? Basically, the 19th-century Whig interpretation? If that is what you mean, then I don’t think it’s an accurate description of the Durants at all.
They don’t participate in all of the flaws of whig and positivist history, certainly not. However, I think you would have a difficult time denying that the Durants do cohere their narrative into convenient, extremely teleological patterns. They are extremely traditional historians, though certainly not Victorians.
MR
Well, my basic objection to calling the Durants “teleological” is this: their main theme is the various conflicts of faith and reason throughout history. And in examining this theme they very clearly do not consider history to be the slow and steady triumph of reason (or of faith), but of continual conflict with no end in sight. The Durants did not rule out a resurgence of faith or a collapse of reason, nor did they state whether the conflict would continue indefinitely or would end someday.
The Durants are also fascinated by art and philosophy (sometimes to the point of annoying me; they’re willing to forgive a tyrant almost anything if he only he patronizes the arts). Here too I see no sign that they see history as the unfolding of greater and greater progress toward a “perfect” present; for example, the Durants are quite harder on Ruskin than on earlier art critics.
That the Durants “cohere their narrative” into convenient “patterns” is clear to me; that these patterns are “teleological” is not.
One thing we should both make clear is which of the Durants’ works we’re basing our opinions on. My comments are based on reading volumes 1 through 9 of The Story of Civilization. I have not read The Lessons of History, and if that is what you are basing your opinion on, it might explain our different evaluations.
I have not read the entire Story of Civilization, but I have formed an entirely different impression of what I have read.
I believe the Durants argued that events in previous eras were important not only for their own sakes but because they are harbringers of the inevitable conflict between communism and capitalism. They never fail to discuss the possible connections between even the most minor character or event and the development of this conflict, which to my mind they viewed as the culmination of modern history. For the Durants, the entire course of human history is a prelude to the Cold War.
This is not enlightenment teleology, but teleology all the same. The steady triumph of reason is not the end, but the inevitable collision of capitalism and communism is.
Since the Cold War is finished, the Durants’ narrative loses virtually all of its authority.
MR
The Durants wrote Our Oriental Heritage, The Life of Greece and * Caesar and Christ* before the Cold War started. I do not believe they viewed all of history as a leadup to something that hadn’t happened yet! These first three books, at the least, may be excused from the category of Cold War teleological history.
Nor do I see much sign of any teleological interpretation in their postwar books. Indeed, the one Durant comment I can remember that bears most clearly on the subject suggests a view of the Cold War as more ethnic than ideological: in The Age of Faith they note that the Slavic peoples began to expand their territory in the early Middle Ages and are still on the march today (“today” being about 1950). I also recall some geographic determinism in their thoughts about Russia, in their view that Russia historically has been bound “by the direction of its rivers” to seek control of the Bosporus, which concept they used to explain the numerous wars between Russians and Turks. I don’t see any communist-capitalist clash being predicted or explained in these thoughts.
Indeed, I am not sure that the Durants even realized the significance of communism. I recall them writing that the secular modern world has come to suffer from pessimism, due to fear that humanity’s irrational tendencies may lead to the fruits of science being used to destroy the world instead of creating a better life for mankind. This pessimism may well have been true of the capitalist world, but was certainly not true of the communist world, where it was believed that human reason could and indeed inevitably would lead to a utopia where the state would wither away and all people would be equal in wealth. Thus, with the effective collapse of communism throughout most of the world, the Durants’ feelings about the “secret pessimism of the modern world” are truer today than they were during the Cold War.
But I have to stretch my memory to come up with even the above tangential references to the Cold War world. I just finished reading The Age of Voltaire, and the only reference to America that I can even remember is a bit about Ben Franklin’s contributions to scientific theory. I don’t recall a single reference to the Cold War, to Russia, to Marx, to Lenin, or to any postwar American or Russian political figure in the whole book. There’s a subchapter about Jean Meslier, a French priest who advocated an essentially communist social order without private property, but not one word linking him to the Cold War.
And I refer you again to the Durants’ constant fascination with philosophy and art: I defy you to find any word in it their ecstatic paeans to Michelangelo and Tintoretto, Spinoza and Leibniz, Vermeer and Rembrandt, to a hundred artists and philosophers whose names I’ve already forgotten, that uses their art or thought as explanations for the Cold War.
Again, you may be basing your thought on some work of the Durants that I have not read, but so far the historians you’re describing to me sound more like Francis Fukuyama than Will and Ariel Durant.
The idea of the “inevitable” clash of communism and capitalism far antedates the Cold War. I am not quite ready to excuse them yet.
I do not own The Story of Civilization nor do I have access to it at work. I am unable to argue with any of your cites, as I haven’t read the Durants in some time.
So my only recourse appears to be to trawl the net to see if, by chance, anyone who has written a review agrees with me. I am not presenting this as substantive evidence. Rather I am testing my own reading of the books to see if perhaps I did not have my head screwed on the wrong way.
From Richard Seltzer’s review:
And after about a half hour, it’s the only review I could find short of the drivel on Amazon. So I could of course be completely mistaken about the Durants, but it is gratifying that someone else formed a similar impression of The Story of Civilization.
MR
Try the book “Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism” by
Erwin Panofsky.
The Macaulay book has great illustrations-- we make slides of them to use in class. Robert Calkin’s textbook (covers the whole medieval period) is great and doesn’t fall into the habit of never leaving the Ile de France.
Be careful with the Panofsky-- great, great book but a tad flawed. His tight correspondances between scholasticism and the buildings should be taken with a grain of salt-- he was a bit loose or unaware of some facts (such as when the Psuedo-Areopagite was translated, versus what languages Suger could read). But, in the end, he is a God, and we stand on the shoulders of giants. The specifics of his Grand-Unification-theories end up being a bit much, but his approach is something we are all very influenced by.