Paris: The Powers that Shaped the Medieval City considers the various forces – royal, monastic and secular – that shaped the art, architecture and topography of Paris between c. 1100 and c. 1500, a period in which Paris became one of the foremost metropolises in the West.
The individual contributions, written by an international group of scholars, cover the subject from many different angles. They encompass wide-ranging case studies that address architecture, manuscript illumination and stained glass, as well as questions of liturgy, religion and social life. Topics include the early medieval churches that preceded the current cathedral church of Notre-Dame and cultural production in the Paris area in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, as well as Paris’s chapels and bridges. There is new evidence for the source of the c. 1240 design for a celebrated window in the Sainte-Chapelle, an evaluation of the liturgical arrangements in the new shrine-choir of Saint-Denis, built 1140–44, and a valuable assessment of the properties held by the Cistercian Order in Paris in the Middle Ages. Also, the book investigates the relationships between manuscript illuminators in the 14th century and representations of Paris in manuscripts and other media up to the late 15th century.
Paris: The Powers that Shaped the Medieval City updates and enlarges our knowledge of this key city in the Middle Ages.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Dany Sandron, Notre-Dame in Paris before the Gothic Period
Chapter 2: Lindy Grant, Abbot Suger’s Paris
Chapter 3: Alexandra Gajewski, The Power of the Saints: Architecture and Liturgy in Abbot Suger’s Shrine-Choir at Saint-Denis in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
Chapter 4: William Chester Jordan, The King’s City: The Disciplinary ‘Sense-scape’ of Paris in the Thirteenth Century
Chapter 5: Meredith Cohen, The Great Thirteenth-Century Chapels of Paris
Chapter 6: Emily Guerry, City of light: Picturing the translation of the Crown of Thorns to Paris in the Gothic glass of the Sainte-Chapelle
Chapter 7: Anna Russakoff, Jean Pucelle, Mahiet, and the Fauvel Master: Relationships between Manuscript Illuminators in Fourteenth-Century Paris
Chapter 8: Jana Gajdošová, Building Paris on its Bridges
Chapter 9: Terryl Kinder, Not so vast a Solitude: Cistercians in Medieval Paris
Chapter 10: Raphaëlle Skupien, Images of Paris in the late Middle Ages: The Great Monuments
