Note to the Reader
This volume is the third of a half dozen. Together, the six form The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. The book series as a whole probes one medieval story, its reception in culture from the Franco-Prussian War until today, and the placement of that reception within medieval revivalism as a larger cultural phenomenon. The study has been designed to proceed largely in chronological order, but the progression across the centuries and decades is relieved by thematic chapters that deal with topics not restricted to any single time period.
This third installment, entitled “The American Middle Ages,” explores the reasons why the American not-so-public intellectual Henry Adams was drawn to the medieval story and more largely why many of his compatriots in the Gilded Age turned to the literature and architecture of the Middle Ages. The fourth in the series, under the heading “Picture That: Making a Show of the Jongleur,” follows the tracks of the medieval entertainer as he wends his way out of nineteenth-century scholarship and literature, into opera in the early decades of the twentieth century. It includes attention to issues, as important in the Middle Ages as in modernity, relating to images of the Virgin, the significance of the crypt, and the illumination of Madonnas. Later volumes trace the story of the story down to the present day.
The chapters are followed by endnotes. Rather than being numbered, these notes are keyed to the words and phrases in the text that are presented in a different color. After the endnotes come the bibliography and illustration credits. In each volume-by-volume index, the names of most people have lifespans, regnal dates, or at least death dates.
One comment on the title of the story is in order. In proper French, Notre-Dame has a hyphen when the phrase refers to a building, institution, or place. Notre Dame, without the mark, refers to the woman, the mother of Jesus. In my own prose, the title is given in the form Le jongleur de Notre Dame, but the last two words will be found hyphenated in quotations and bibliographic citations if the original is so punctuated.
All translations are mine, unless otherwise specified.