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Welcome back to the Age of Cathedrals.
Chartres was known as an intellectual center and
it was the rival of Paris, from the end of the tenth century
when Fulbert came to Chartres from the cathedral school of Reims.
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Chartres was the entry point of Platonism in Western Europe, and in particular,
the study of Plato's account of the creation of the world, the Timaeus,
just as Paris was the center for the study of Aristotelianism and
dialectics, as we saw with Abelard.
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The cathedral that Fulbert built burned in 1134,
which is when the cathedral that burned in 1194 was constructed,
in part through what was known as the Campaign of Carts.
Which is the topic of Miracle Number 17,
as well as of a chronicle account by Robert de Torigni,
abbot of Mont Saint-Michel.
In this same year, primarily at Chartres, men began with their own shoulders,
to drag the wagons loaded with stone, wood, grain, and
other material to the workshop of the church, whose towers were then rising.
Anyone who has not witnessed this will not see the like in our time.
Not only there, but also in nearly the whole of France and Normandy, and
in many other places.
One saw everywhere, humility and afflictio, afflictio
being the reading of penitential psalms while people lay prostrate on the ground.
Everywhere we see penance and
the forgiveness of offenses, everywhere mourning and contrition.
One might observe women as well as men dragging wagons through deep swamps on
their knees,
beating themselves with whips, numerous wonders occurring everywhere,
canticles and hymns being offered to God.
King Phillip-Auguste visited Chartres in 1210, and provided funds for
the North Portal.
Phillip's son Louis VIII and his son Louis IX,
Saint Louis, both contributed to the building of Chartres, as did Saint Louis's
mother Blanche of Castile, who donated the North Rose window and the lancets.
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The money to build Chartres also came form the townspeople,
who benefitted financially from such an immense construction site and
who worshipped there.
Local merchants donated 43 stained glass windows.
Their signatures appear in more than 100 scenes depicting the everyday
economic activity of the city.
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In the lower quadrants of the windows on all sides of the cathedral,
we see the trades of a bustling urban economy.
Men who devoted part of their profits, as we saw in Gimandra Machen's miracle
of the rebuilding of the cathedral to carvings and windows.
And this beginning with the cathedral builders themselves.
Here we see the master builder with his measuring rod,
seeming to direct two men working at a table.
One with a rolled up scroll and the other handling a compass.
With a sheet of paper drooping over the edge of the table
which shows the clear plan of a cathedral choir.
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And here we see a window showing the building masons laying courses of stone.
While another window displays the sculpting masons,
here carving out a natural statue that will be placed on the South Portal and
on the left they rough out the encoate stone
while on the right they work out the details of the sculpture.
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Along with the masons, a carpenter at the bottom of the Noah Window
can be seen sharpening his axe blades while his colleague builds a barrel.
In the center quatrefoil,
carpenters shape planks with an adze, while a saw hangs on the wall.
And in the far left losange,
carpenters can be seen fitting the beams of the forest or the roof structure of
a cathedral, which is clearly placed above the masonry, with its windows.
As for the urban trades, we encounter the butchers,
who contributed somewhat mysteriously to the Miracles Window.
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Here we see bakers, on the left making dough, and
on the right kneading it and hanging it to dry.
In the middle, they exchange baked loaves of bread and rolls for money.
Here we see armorers working in the right image,
fashioning a sword, on an anvil, and on the left, fitting a shield.
And here, shoemakers work in the right corner on cutting leather, in the middle,
on making shoes, on a last.
And in the left corner, on selling shoes to a seated customer.
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Here is a scene of money changers weighing gold on a scale.
Here, a furrier showing his pelts to an interested customer while his assistant,
possibly an apprentice, stacks their wares on a table.
Similarly, a clothier shows his wares to a customer
at the bottom of the Charlemagne Window.
And here a water seller gathers water from a stream in the middle triangular image,
and distributes it on the quadrants on either side.
Most of Chartres Cathedral was finished by 1223,
though the North Transceptor was still unfinished in 1230.
Because of this relatively short span of time,
Chartres is more unified aesthetically
than many other cathedrals which developed over periods of hundreds of years.
The original plan for Chartres called for
nine steeples, a project which was abandoned in the 1260s.
Chartres's interesting for us, because of all of the cathedrals we have
studied thus far, it was the least damaged in the revolution.
Though the famous statue of the Black Virgin, of which we spoke last time,
our Lady of the Crypt, was burned in front of the Royal Portal on December 20th,
1793, when Chartres Cathedral was rededicated as a Temple of Reason.
Howard BlochSterling Professor of French
