Notes

Dr. Urbino’s most contagious initiative. Love in the Time of Cholera, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Vintage International, 2003), 44.

Notes to Chapter 1

Opera, next to Gothic architecture. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View (London: BBC, 1969), 241.

The Jongleur in the Circle of Richard Wagner

Minnesingers. This word anglicizes partially the German Minnesänger. A related term is Meistersänger, “master singer.”

the troubadour had become entrenched. Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 3–8; Clare A. Simmons, Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 59–62, 89–91.

Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore. The Italian means simply “the troubadour.” The opera had an Italian libretto written mainly by Salvadore Cammarano, which was based on the 1836 Castilian play El trovador by Antonio García Gutiérrez. The premiere took place in Rome on January 19.

a memorial in Parma. The monument, inaugurated in 1920, was constructed by the Italian sculptor Ettore Ximenes, beginning in 1913. A central altar survives, but not the far larger triumphal arch, flanked by semicircular colonnades, that contained statues representing key figures from all of Verdi’s operas. In later mass culture, the troubadour puts in an appearance in the snatches from the musical drama that are incorporated into A Night at the Opera, the 1935 American comedy film starring the Marx Brothers.

This opera. The German title is Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg. Wagner’s familiarity with Minnesinger melodies from the Middle Ages has been considered by Larry Bomback, “Wagner’s Access to Minnesinger Melodies prior to Completing Tannhäuser,” Musical Times 147.1896 (Autumn 2006): 19–31; Michael Scott Richardson, “Evoking an Ancient Sound: Richard Wagner’s Musical Medievalism” (Master’s thesis, Rice University, 2009).

Germanic Middle Ages. Volker Mertens, “Wagner’s Middle Ages,” trans. Stewart Spencer, in Wagner Handbook, ed. John Deathridge et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 236–68, at 237.

provided a complete picture of the Middle Ages. Mertens, “Wagner’s Middle Ages,” 236.

pilgrimages. Thus, Mark Twain in a travel letter from 1891 (“Mark Twain at Bayreuth,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 6, 1891): “. . . this biennial pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is”; an anonymous article on Bernard Shaw’s “The Perfect Wagnerite” entitled “The Bayreuth Pilgrim,” Literature (February 17, 1899): 126; Charles Henry Meltzer, “The Coming of Parsifal,” Pearson’s 11.1 (January 1904): 94–104, at 94; Max Simon Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), 213.

a friend read it aloud to her. Her letter (Munich, March 20, 1890) can be found in Cosima Wagner und Houston Stewart Chamberlain im Briefwechsel, 1888–1908, ed. Paul Pretzsch (Leipzig, Germany: Philipp Reclam jun., 1934), 144–45, at 145 (“Yesterday Dr. [Konrad] Fiedler [1841–1895, art historian] read aloud to us something that I would like to recommend very much to you: Old French Tales, adapted by Wilhelm Hertz. Pick up and read the Dancer of Our Dear Lady; I believe that it will speak to you as to us, and that would please me”); for Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s reply, which mentions the story only in a brief postscript, see 145–48, at 148 (“The Old French book of Hertz is a dear old friend of mine. Tonight, I will read again the story of The Dancer of Our Dear Lady”). Nearly two decades later, in 1908, Chamberlain married Eva von Bülow-Wagner, Cosima’s daughter and Wagner’s step-daughter.

Our Lady’s Dancer. In German, Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau: see Franz Trenner, ed., Cosima Wagner, Richard Strauss: Ein Briefwechsel, Veröffentlichungen der Richard-Strauss-Gesellschaft, München, vol. 2 (Tutzing, Germany: H. Schneider, 1978), 39 (her initial proposal, in a letter of March 26, 1890: “Recently I thought of you, when I became acquainted with a very beautiful poem, ‘Our Lady’s Tumbler,’ from Wilhelm Hertz’s ‘minstrel book’ [German Spielmannsbuch]. I believe that it would be a beautiful theme for a symphonic poem”), 45 (her follow-up, in a letter of April 15, 1890: “I am eager to know how you like the minstrel book and whether ‘Our Lady’s Tumbler’ gives some inspiration or not. The dance as a basis for the symphony seems to me artistically justified as a conscious theme for it. But only the one who must create it can decide that”), 49 (his reactions, in a letter of May 17, 1890: “Hearty thanks for your recommendation of the charming ‘minstrel book.’ ‘Our Lady’s Tumbler’ is certainly a charming thing; I have already taken it up into myself and must now just patiently wait and see if it dances back out of my heart as a symphonic poem”). See Willi Schuh, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years (1864–1898), trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 217n12.

Wilhelm Hertz. Wilhelm Hertz, ed. and trans., Spielmannsbuch: Novellen in Versen aus dem zwölften und dreizehnten Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, Germany: G. Kröner, 1886), 210–17. In the first half of the twentieth century, the collection was reprinted in 1900, 1905, 1912, and 1931.

The dance as a basis for the symphony seems to me artistically justified. “Der Tanz als Basis der Sinfonie erscheint mir als bewußter Vorwurf derselben künstlerisch berechtigt.”

cadre of Jews. Eric Werner, “Jews around Richard and Cosima Wagner,” Musical Quarterly 71 (1985): 172–99; Milton E. Brener, Richard Wagner and the Jews (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006).

interpreters have skirmished. Among the most influential and harshest constructions of Levi would be Peter Gay, “Hermann Levi: A Study in Service and Self-Hatred,” in idem, ed., Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 189–230. For less condemnatory views, see Brener, Richard Wagner and the Jews; Laurence Dreyfus, “Hermann Levi’s Shame and Parsifal’s Guilt: A Critique of Essentialism in Biography and Criticism,” Cambridge Opera Journal 6 (1994): 125–45; Frithjof Haas, Hermann Levi: From Brahms to Wagner, trans. Cynthia Klohr (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012).

returned to Germany in 1859. Haas, Hermann Levi, 22–25.

retire from leading an orchestra. Haas, Hermann Levi, 236–38.

came out in 1896. Under the title “Der Gaukler unserer lieben Frau,” Jugend: Münchner illustrierte Wochenschrift für Kunst und Leben 1.8 (February 22, 1896): 127–29. Levi’s authorship is not indicated in the pages where the tale is printed or in the index to the journal, but it is flagged (to cite only one example) by Haas, Hermann Levi, 263. The first authorized translation followed five years later, notably as the title story in a volume containing ten of France’s short stories: Der Gaukler unserer Lieben Frau und anderes, trans. Franziska Reventlow (Munich, Germany: Albert Langen, 1901), 1–13.

The main title of the periodical. The subtitle, translated into English, was Munich Illustrated Weekly for Art and Life. See Heinz Spielmann, Jugend 1896–1940: Zeitschrift einer Epoche. Aspekte einer Wochenschrift “Für Kunst und Leben” (Dortmund, Germany: Harenberg, 1988).

whom the conductor knew personally. Haas, Hermann Levi, 143.

The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. In the original German, the title is Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

mark corrections as she saw fit. Haas, Hermann Levi, 189, 191n10, citing Leviana, letter dated November 28, 1895, with a quotation from Mastersingers, Act 2.

Dancer of Our Blessed Lady. The German title is Der Tänzer uns’rer lieben Frau.

around the turn of the century. Hertz, Spielmannsbuch, 420. Hermann Hutter, Der Tänzer uns’rer lieben Frau: Nach dem gleichnamigen Gedicht von Wilhelm Hertz. Op. 17 (Leipzig, Germany: Luckhardt’s Musik-Verlag, 1899). On Hutter, see Jürgen Kraus, ed., Geborgen ruht die Stadt im Zauber des Erinnerns: Der Kaufbeurer Komponist Herman Hutter 1848-1926 und sein autobiographisches Vermächtnis, Schriftenreihe von Stadtarchiv und Stadtmuseum Kaufbeuren, vol. 3 (Kempten, Germany: Tobias Dannheimer, 1996).

Lancelot. “Lanzelot,” Opus 13 (1898). But note that the comparisons in a contemporary review are to Mendelssohn’s Loreley and Schumann’s Paradis und Peri: see Kraus, Geborgen ruht die Stadt, 18–19.

Reveille for the Nibelungen. “Nibelungen-Weckruf,” Opus 60 (verschollen): see Kraus, Geborgen ruht die Stadt, 23.

as it was understood by the nineteenth century. Danielle Buschinger, Das Mittelalter Richard Wagners, trans. Renate Ullrich and Danielle Buschinger (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007).

French songwriters. Steven Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25–167 on Massenet (but without inclusion of Le jongleur de Notre Dame, because of its date early in the twentieth century).

Tristan and Isolde. 1856–59, premiere 1865.

Parsifal. 1865–82, premiere 1882.

cast an undeniably daunting shadow. On Wagner’s influence in France, see Léon Guichard, La musique et les lettres en France au temps du wagnérisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963); Paul du Quenoy, Wagner and the French Muse: Music, Society, and Nation in Modern France (Bethesda, MD: Academica Press, 2011).

polemical articles. Carlo Caballero, review of Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge Opera Journal 12 (2000): 81–89, at 87.

satirically anti-Gallic tirade. Richard Wagner, “Eine Kapitulation,” trans. W. Ashton Ellis, “A Capitulation,” in Richard Wagner, Prose Works, vol. 5, Actors and Singers (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896), 5–33.

eyewitness account. Steven Huebner, “Massenet and Wagner: Bridling the Influence,” Cambridge Opera Journal 5.3 (1993): 223–38.

Who can render us that pure love. Claude Debussy, “M. Claude Debussy et Le martyre de saint Sébastien (Interview par Henry Malherbe),” in idem, Monsieur Croche et autres écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), 302; 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 323–25, at 324, repr. in idem, Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer Claude Debussy, ed. and trans. Richard Langham Smith (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1977), 247–49, at 247: “Qui nous rendra le pur amour des musiciens pieux des anciennes époques? . . . Qui recommencera le pauvre et suave sacrifice du petit jongleur, dont l’histoire attendrissante nous est demeurée?”

defending the cathedrals of his homeland. Marcel Proust, “La mort des cathédrales,” Le Figaro, August 16, 1904, repr. in idem, Pastiches et mélanges (1919). The best edition is in Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 146–47, with notes at 770–72.

Twilight of the Gods. In the original German, Die Götterdämmerung.

Tannhäuser

In The Education of Henry Adams. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (henceforth EHA), chap. 23, “Silence (1894–1898),” in idem, Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (New York: Library of America, 1983), 1049: “This amusement could not be prolonged, for one found oneself the oldest Englishman in England, much too familiar with family jars better forgotten, and old traditions better unknown. No wrinkled Tannhäuser, returning to the Wartburg, needed a wrinkled Venus to show him that he was no longer at home, and that even penitence was a sort of impertinence. . . . From time to time Hay wrote humorous laments, but nothing occurred to break the summer-peace of the stranded Tannhäuser, who slowly began to feel at home in France as in other countries he had thought more homelike.” In letters, he mentions hearing in Bayreuth Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), and Die Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the first, second, and fourth, respectively, in Wagner’s cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungen). For references to these and other Wagnerian operas, see Henry Adams, The Letters of Henry Adams (henceforth LHA), ed. J. C. Levenson et al., 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982–1988), 5: 267–72.

a study on the legend of Tannhäuser. Gaston Paris, “La légende du Tannhäuser,” Revue de Paris 5.2 (1898): 307–25, repr. in idem, Légendes du Moyen Âge (Paris: Hachette, 1903), 111–45. In the meantime between the debut and the Parisian revival, the story was not allowed to languish. In 1866, a lyrical and dramatic poem by the English writer Algernon Charles Swinburne was published on the theme. In translation, its Latin title of “Laus Veneris” means “Praise of Venus,” referring to the Roman goddess of love. Later, the same theme became the object of Aubrey Beardsley’s attention. He worked ceaselessly but ineffectually on a novel that was originally to have been entitled The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, but that began to appear in print only in 1896, in expurgated form, under the title Under the Hill. Beardsley’s version increases the sexual charge of the story.

a nobleman. Specifically, a landgrave.

Henry Adams became well acquainted with the Wartburg. Letter to Charles Francis Adams Jr., April 22, 1859, in LHA, 1: 34–39, at 36: “The old Wartburg above it is covered with romance and with history until it’s as rich as a wedding-cake.”

the Sleeping Beauty castle in Disneyland. Martha Bayless, “Disney’s Castles and the Work of the Medieval in the Magic Kingdom,” in The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy Tale and Fantasy Past, ed. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 39–56.

Pierrefonds. On the relationship between the two castles, see Jürgen Strasser, Wenn Monarchen Mittelalter spielen: Die Schlösser Pierrefonds und Neuschwanstein im Spiegel ihrer Zeit, Stuttgarter Arbeiten zur Germanistik, vol. 289 (Stuttgart, Germany: Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1994).

Viollet-le-Duc and his successors. For the restorer’s own words, see Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Description et histoire du Château de Pierrefonds, 11th ed. (Paris: A. Morel, 1883). For comparative analysis of the French chateau and the German construction, see Strasser, Wenn Monarchen Mittelalter spielen.

The Medievalesque Oeuvre of Jules Massenet

The composer has captured. “Le jongleur de Notre Dame,” The Musical Standard (June 30, 1906): 400–1, at 400.

Massenet achieved a similar status. The most recent general appreciation of his career would be Christophe Ghristi and Mathias Auclair, La belle époque de Massenet (Montreuil, France: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2011).

Academy of Fine Arts. In French, Académie des Beaux-Arts, founded in 1795.

medievalizing revival. For a capsule view of Massenet’s medievalism, see Didier Van Moere, “Massenet,” in La fabrique du Moyen Âge au XIXe siècle: Représentations du Moyen Âge dans la culture et la littérature françaises du XIXe siècle, ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths et al., Romantisme et modernités, vol. 94 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), 1077–84.

In the Midst of the Middle Ages. Chap. 23, “En plein Moyen Âge.”

The Virgin. The légende sacrée, La Vierge.

French libretto. The libretto is by Charles Grandmougin.

a libretto in French. The libretto is by Louis Gallet, Édouard Blau, and Adolphe d’Ennery. The opera premiered at the Paris Opera on November 30, 1885.

five-act tragicomedy. First performed and published in 1637.

librettists. Alfred Blau and Louis de Gramont.

Huon de Bordeaux. For a review by an author who was himself caught up in the medievalizing trend of this decade, see Marcel Schwob, “Esclarmonde,” Phare de la Loire, May 18, 1889, repr. in idem, Chroniques, ed. John Alden Green, Histoire des idées et critique littéraire, vol. 195 (Geneva: Droz, 1981), 52–55.

one of the writers. The librettist in question was Édouard Blau.

its composer was singled out officially. On its place within the overall presentation of music at the Exposition Universelle, see Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 32 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005). On its reception in general, see Annegret Fauser, ed., Jules Massenet, Esclarmonde: Dossier de presse parisienne (1889), Critiques de l’opéra français du XIXème siècle, vol. 12 (Weinsberg, Germany: L. Galland, 2001); she discusses the opening at p. v.

comprising a prologue and three acts. The libretto was based on a play by Paul-Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand that had been performed first in 1891.

as related in the Italian prose of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. See the tenth, and final, novella of the tenth day.

Massenet’s version. Grisélidis premiered on November 21, 1901, at the Opéra Comique in Paris.

various images. Especially the watercolor Love Among the Ruins, which was first exhibited in 1873 and was recreated as an oil painting in 1894 after the destruction of the earlier work.

a triptych of medievalesque operas. Stefan Schmidl, Jules Massenet: Sein Leben, sein Werk, seine Zeit, Serie Musik Atlantis-Schott, vol. 8310 (Mainz, Germany: Schott, 2012), 90–95 presents the three operas explicitly as such.

Amadis. Written by the man of letters, Jules Claretie, who was elected to the French Academy in 1888.

Spanish chivalric romance. It is entitled Amadís de Gaul.

as Grisélidis had been. The parallels between the two operas as musical miracle plays were not lost on Massenet’s near-contemporaries. For example, see the review in Nation 90.2326 (January 27, 1910): 95–96.

even before the musical drama was accepted for performance. Ronald Crichton, “Massenet and After,” Musical Times 112 (February 1971): 132.

the ruler of the principality had been an enterprising benefactor. Jules Massenet, Mes souvenirs: À mes petits-enfants, ed. Gérard Condé (Paris: Plume, 1992), 243; T. J. Walsh, Monte Carlo Opera 1879–1909 (Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 148.

a tidy sum. The precise amount was 20,000 francs: see Walsh, Monte Carlo Opera 1879–1909, 151.

going back to 1842. In this year, Henri Heugel’s father and partner moved into quarters on Rue Vivienne occupied by Le Ménestrel, a periodical devoted to music that they had acquired.

The Tall Tale of the Libretto

In his autobiography. See Jules Massenet, My Recollections, trans. H. Villiers Barnett (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1919), 231–35 (in the chapter headed “In the Midst of the Middle Ages”). Compare Raymond de Rigné, Le disciple de Massenet, 5 vols. (Paris: La renaissance universelle, 1921), 1: 12. For analysis of the flaws in Massenet’s account, see Demar Irvine, Massenet: A Chronicle of His Life and Times (Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1994), 229–30.

frets over taking nourishment within the community. Le jongleur de Notre-Dame, lines 108–10, 125–28, ed. Paul Bretel, Traductions des classiques du Moyen Âge, vol. 64 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), 82.

he is described. Le jongleur de Notre-Dame, lines 234–36, ed. Bretel, 86.

one Maurice Léna. For Léna’s recollections, see “Massenet (1842–1912),” Le Ménestrel 4422, 83.4 (January 28, 1921): 33–34. For recollections by another contemporary, see Raymond de Rigné, “Souvenirs sur Massenet,” Le Mercure de France 32.545 (March 1, 1921): 351, 362–63, 369–70.

professor of rhetoric. He taught first at the University of Lyon and later in Paris.

librettos for various composers. Léna also composed texts for such stage works as Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s 1908 Les jumeaux de Bergame (The twins of Bergamo), based on an eighteenth-century play; Charles-Marie Widor’s 1924 Nerto; and Philippe Gaubert’s 1927 Nalïa.

The Farce of the Vat. In French, La farce du cuvier, by Gabriel Dupont.

The Damnation of Blanchefleur. In French, La damnation de Blanchefleur: Miracle en deux actes, by Henry Février.

In the Shadow of the Cathedral. In French, Dans l’ombre de la cathédrale, by Georges Hüe.

Knight of the Barrel. In French, Le chevalier au Barizel: légende dramatique en trois parties, music by Charles Pons ([no place]: Imprimerie E. Desfossés, [no date]). Other versions of a story with the same title are attested in French in the second decade of the twentieth century. The free German adaptation from the same period is entitled Der Ritter mit dem Fäßchen. The story was adopted as a modest cartoon strip in the anonymous “Le chevalier au Barizel,” Les trois couleurs 6.230 (May 1, 1919), 3 (see Fig. n.1).

Fig. n.1 Comic strip of “Le Chevalier au Barizel.” Published in Les Trois Couleurs: épisodes, contes et romans de la grande guerre 6.230 (May 1, 1919), 3.

An obituary. Le Ménestrel (April 6, 1928), quoted and translated by Terence Noel Needham in “‘Le Jongleur est ma foi’: Massenet and Religion as Seen through the Jongleur de Notre Dame” (PhD dissertation, Queen’s University Belfast, 2009), 90–91, at n64.

Elsewhere. Henry T. Finck, Massenet and His Operas (New York: John Lane, 1910), 91.

portrays the writer. Massenet, Mes souvenirs, 240.

During the visit. Léna, “Massenet (1842–1912),” 34.

Massenet pretends. Massenet, My Recollections, 234–35.

Three manuscripts. Jean-Christophe Branger, “Massenet et ses livrets: Du choix de sujet à la mise en scène,” in Le livret d’opéra au temps de Massenet: Actes du colloque des 9–10 novembre 2001, Festival Massenet, ed. Alban Ramaut and Jean-Christophe Branger, Centre interdisciplinaire d’études et de recherches sur l’expression contemporaine: Travaux, vol. 108/Musicologie, cahiers de l’Esplanade, vol. 1 (Saint-Étienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2002), 251–81, at 269–70.

The Middle Ages of the Opera

Did you ever hear of this juggler. “Fascinating Legend Revived in Massenet’s Coming Opera,” New York Times, August 16, 1908.

delightful vignette in the primitive manner. Léna, “Massenet (1842–1912),” 33–34: “délicieux tableau de primitif.”

his thought. Rigné, “Souvenirs sur Massenet,” 348.

The Red and the Black. In French, Le Rouge et le Noir: Chronique du XIXe siècle.

between the Saône and the Loire rivers. Near Mâcon.

the monastery most emblematic of Cistercianism. Adriaan Hendrik Bredero, Cluny et Cîteaux au douzième siècle: L’histoire d’une controverse monastique (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1985).

the institution acquired melancholy fame. Janet Marquardt, From Martyr to Monument: The Abbey of Cluny as Cultural Patrimony (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2007).

became an object of fascination. Elizabeth Emery, “Le visible et l’invisible: Cluny dans la littérature française du XIXe siècle,” in Cluny après Cluny: Constructions, reconstructions et commémorations, 1720–2010. Actes du colloque de Cluny, 13–15 mai 2010, ed. Didier Méhu (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 339–52.

All Souls’ Day. On November 2.

National Museum of the Middle Ages. In French, Musée national du Moyen Âge.

American architectural historian. Kenneth John Conant conducted the archaeological investigations at Cluny from 1928 to 1950, under the auspices of the Mediaeval Academy of America.

Even the sounds. Jean-Pierre Bartoli, “Le langage musical du Jongleur de Notre-Dame de Massenet: Historicisme, expression religieuse et système musico-dramatique,” in Opéra et religion sous la IIIe République, ed. Jean-Christophe Branger and Alban Ramaut, Centre interdisciplinaire d’études et de recherches sur l’expression contemporaine: Travaux, vol. 129/Musicologie, cahiers de l’Esplanade, vol. 4 (Saint-Étienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2006), 305–33.

the score has the exquisite colors of stained glass. Ghristi and Auclair, La belle époque de Massenet, 160 (“La partition a d’exquises couleurs de vitrail”).

Léna reported. Massenet, Mes souvenirs, 240n3 (with reference to Léna in Le Ménestrel of February 4, 1921).

other French composers. See Schmidl, Jules Massenet, 94, on Vincent d’Indy’s opera Fervaal and Gabriel Pierné’s symphonic poem L’an mil (The year 1000), both written in 1897.

the artist told the poor fellow. Massenet, Mes souvenirs, 248; idem, My Recollections, 282.

is said to have satisfied the medievalist. Massenet, My Recollections, 241.

music of the theater. Jean-Christophe Branger, “Introduction,” in idem and Ramaut, Opéra et religion sous la IIIe République, 9–36, at 10, with reference to Camile Bellaigue, “La musique d’Église au théâtre,” La Tribune de Saint-Gervais 11.1 (January 1905): 4–13.

Solesmes. In the département of Sarthe near Sable.

school of singers. Known formally in Latin as the schola cantorum.

rhapsody in brew. Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).

The first perspective he isolated. G. K. Chesterton, “History Versus the Historians” (1908), in idem, Lunacy and Letters, ed. Dorothy Collins (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 128–33, at 130.

The historical music movement. Siegmund Levarie, “Henry Adams, Avant-Gardist in Early Music,” American Music 15 (1997): 429–45.

melismas. In reference to Gregorian chant, this technical term denotes a group of different notes sung to one syllable (such as the final letter a in the word alleluia). The contrast is coloratura, in which each syllable has its own note in a melody.

characteristically medieval. Arthur Pougin, quoted in Esther Singleton, A Guide to Modern Opera (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1909), 233.

chalumeau. A woodwind instrument that looks like a recorder but has a mouthpiece like a clarinet.

as the viol was viewed. Harry Danks, “The Viola d’Amore,” Music & Letters 38.1 (1957): 14–20.

Bertha of the Big Foot. Sometimes called Bertha Broadfoot, she is known in modern French as Berte aux grands pieds. For a translation, see Adenet le Roi, Bertha of the Big Foot (Berte as grans pié): A Thirteenth-Century Epic, trans. Anna Moore Morton, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 417 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013).

at least by mentioning them. Thus, we hear about the “toper’s creed.” This would be an oenophile’s deformation of the profession of faith known as the Nicene Creed, which begins “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty.” We also learn about the Te Deum of hippocras, a sweetened and spiced wine. This pseudoliturgy plays upon the early Christian hymn of praise often called the Ambrosian hymn, with the incipit “We praise thee, O God.” Another is the Gloria of the red-faced, alluding, of course, to the flushed complexion caused by hard drinking. The Latin refers to the so-called angelic hymn that opens with the Latin words “Glory to God in the highest” (Gloria in excelsis Deo).

One would search in vain. The foundational repositories of such medieval parodic material remain, for the Latin, Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, Germany: A. Hiersemann, 1963), and for the French, Eero Ilmari Ilvonen, Parodies de thèmes pieux dans la poésie française du Moyen Âge: Pater–Credo–Ave Maria–Laetabundus (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1914).

their medieval antecedents. The French had no direct equivalent of Wine, Women, and Song: Medieval Latin Students’ Songs by John Addington Symonds. The 1884 bestseller etched at least its title phrase upon the consciousness of the English-speaking world. All the same, France had its own oft-reprinted 1843 anthology of Popular Latin Poetry from before the Twelfth Century. See Édélestand Du Méril, Poésies populaires latines antérieures au douzième siècle (Paris: Brockhaus et Avenarius, 1843). The songs that are inevitably absorbed into such collections have had an abiding impact on high culture in the Anglophone world. For confirmation we need look no further than the 1949 book entitled The Goliard Poets: Medieval Latin Songs and Satires, by George F. Whicher, a friend of the American poet Robert Frost. In another branch of European literary and musical tradition, the Carmina Burana cantata of the German composer Carl Orff (based on the extensive medieval anthology conventionally known by the same name) includes tavern poems that reach a mass audience.

Play of Robin and Marion. In French, Jeu de Robin et Marion.

Adam de la Halle. Known also as Adam le Bossu.

at least twice. First, in 1872 it was put on in Paris in its entirety, adapted by Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin and performed at the Comédie française by a company from the Opéra Comique: see Julien Tiersot, Sur le jeu de Robin et Marion d’Adam de la Halle (XIIIe siècle) (Paris: Fischbacher, 1897), 5–6. Then, in 1896 it was performed in Arras, this time produced as modernized by Tiersot, a student of Massenet’s, and Emile Blémont. In the same year, a philologist published a popularization of the play in modernized form. See Adam le Bossu, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, ed. Ernest Langlois (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1896). His translations retained their appeal into the twentieth century, with reprintings, for example, in 1923 and 1933.

Instead, he moves on. Pierre Jonin, “Ancienneté d’une chanson de toile? La Chanson d’Erembourg ou la Chanson de Renaud?,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 28.112 (octobre-décembre 1985): 345–59.

Sage Wisdom

Legend of the Sage. In English translation, the herb has also been called Sage-Plant and Sage-Bush. In Mark Schweizer, words and music, The Clown of God: A Christmas Chancel Drama for Children’s Choir (Hopkinsville, KY: St. James Music Press, 1996), 10–11, Massenet’s sage plant is Americanized into the sagebrush familiar from cowboy westerns, which in actuality belongs to a separate genus.

It is sung. “Légende de la sauge,” act 2, scene 4.

Legendary Feasts. For the quotation, see Musical Standard (June 30, 1906): 401. The book is Amédée de Ponthieu, Les fêtes légendaires (Paris: Maillet, 1866).

illustrated French-language weeklies. First was La semaine de Suzette 37.13 (October 24, 1946), cover (for illustration). This “Suzie’s Weekly,” to put its title into English, appeared from 1905 (the year in which Church and State were legally separated in France) through 1960. On it, see Jacques Tramson, “Presse enfantine française,” in Dictionnaire du livre de jeunesse: La littérature d’enfance et de jeunesse en France (henceforth DLJ), ed. Isabelle Nières-Chevrel and Jean Perrot (Paris: Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie, 2013), 764–73, at 769; Marie-Anne Couderc, “Semaine de Suzette, La,” in DLJ, 883–84. Then came Bernadette: Illustré catholique des fillettes, n.s. 8 (January 26, 1947), cover (for illustration) and 124 (for text). The latter publication was thus titled after the Marian visionary of Lourdes by this name. On it, see Catherine d’Humières, “Bernadette,” in DLJ, 82–83. On such religious publications, see Michel Manson, “Religion et littérature de jeunesse,” in DLJ, 793–96, at 795.

Applied to this narrative. The original Latin legendum was used first as a verbal adjective, and later as a noun meaning “that which is to be read” in the liturgical office.

Such narratives were read aloud. Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), 8.

composers, too. Thus, in 1864–1865, Gabriel Fauré set to music as a work for mixed chorus and piano (or organ) a French translation of a Medieval Latin hymn, though under the somewhat misleading title Cantique de Jean Racine (Canticle of Jean Racine). The text by the seventeenth-century poet paraphrases a pseudo-Ambrosian hymn with the incipit “Consors paterni luminis.” To take another example, in 1910 Claude Debussy composed voice-and-piano music for three “ballades” by the French poet and vagabond François Villon.

contemporary critics. Richard Alexander Streatfeild, The Opera: A Sketch of the Development of Opera, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott, 1907), 248: “Rarely has Massenet written anything more delightful than this exquisite song, so fresh in its artful simplicity, so fragrant with the charm of mediaeval monasticism.” Another raved: “In the legend related by Boniface to Jean the composer is at his best.” See “Massenet’s ‘Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame,’” The Athenaeum 4034 (February 18, 1905): 218.

Juggling Secular and Ecclesiastical

A surprising thing. Jean d’Arvil, on reviews of Massenet’s Jongleur in the popular press, June, 1904. Quoted in Rigné, Le disciple de Massenet, 1: 49.

went so far as to observe. He made the remark in reference to passages in his oratorio-like choral “sacred drama” on Mary Magdalene, Marie-Magdeleine, with a text in verse by Louis Gallet.

I don’t believe in all this. Léon Vallas, Vincent d’Indy (Paris: Albin Michel, 1946), 195: “Oh! Vous pensez bien que toutes ces bondieuseries, moi, je n’y crois pas. . . . Mais le public aime ça, et nous devons toujours être de l’avis du public.” For translations, see James Harding, Massenet (London: Dent, 1970), 49; Michael White and Elaine Henderson, Opera and Operetta (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 208.

the writer assured his readers. Fernand de La Tombelle, “Massenet, musician religieux?,” La Tribune de Saint-Gervais: Bulletin mensuel de la Schola Cantorum 18 (1912): 285–88, at 288: “You will recognize that he loved religion, honored the Church, adored the Virgin as much as he respected the priest. His faith—and I affirm that he had it—was sensitive, poetic, naïve, but real, and when he had the jongleur dance in the silence of the abbatial church, rest assured that more than once he believed that he was putting himself on stage in offering the Holy Virgin ‘an opera,’ since it is that that he knew to make!”

could have been slighted either way. For revealing glimpses into the tensions at the time, see Proust, “La mort des cathédrales,” 3–4.

goes by the name of verismo. Translated into English, verismo would be literally “true-ism.”

The Girl from Navarre. In French, La Navarraise.

nurtured a genuine predilection. Rigné, “Souvenirs sur Massenet,” 355–56: “‘Est-il vrai que Massenet affectionait particulièrement Le Jongleur?’ Demanda Yvonne. ‘Massenet préférait toujours sa dernière pièce. Cependant, il eut une réelle predilection pour celle-là. Il a lancé un jour cette boutade: “Le Jongleur, amis, ce n’est qu’une carte de visite dans la vie d’un musicien!”’”

because he had given the most of himself to it. Combat, April 7, 1954: “Le Jongleur est mon oeuvre préférée parce que c’est ici que je me suis le plus donné.” Also quoted by Needham, “Le Jongleur est ma foi,” 1–2.

Thérèse is my heart. Charles Bouvet, Massenet: Biographie critique, illustré de douze planches hors texte (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1929), 108. Quoted in the original French (and taken as the title of his dissertation) by Needham, “Le Jongleur est ma foi,” 1. The source is a document reproduced in Rigné, Le disciple de Massenet, 1: 60.

a wooden image of Mary. Massenet, My Reflections, 52.

Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. The same painting by the Italian artist had made a strong impression on Clover Adams, but probably not for the same reasons. Raphael was received much differently in the United States than in France. See Martin Rosenberg, Raphael and France: The Artist as Paradigm and Symbol (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).

the photograph “remained lighted all night.” Irvine, Massenet, 183; cited by Needham “Le Jongleur est ma foi,” 81.

gaining the support of the Virgin. Massenet, My Recollections, 232: “The most sublime of women, the Virgin was bound to sustain me in my work, even as she showed herself charitable to the repentant jongleur.”

the marvelous cathedrals arose. Letter to the composer and pianist Paul Lacombe, Venice, May 23, 1873, Carcassonne, Bibliothèque municipale, cited by Branger, “Introduction,” 21n33.

blue Madonnas, pink Sacred Hearts. Madeleine Ochsé, Un art sacré pour notre temps, Je sais, je crois, vol. 132 (Paris: Fayard, 1959), 14; quoted by Claude Savart, “A la recherche de l’art dit de Saint-Sulpice,” Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité 52 (1976): 263–82, at 282: “Blue Virgins, pink Sacred Hearts, chocolate-brown Saint Josephs belonged for me to this enchanted world of Catholic childhood in which the heavens visit the earth without ado.”

it will emit a note. William R. Lethaby, Architecture: An Introduction to the History and Theory of the Art of the Building, Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, vol. 39 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), 201: “The ideals of the time of energy and order produced a manner of building of high intensity, all waste tissue was thrown off, and the stonework was gathered up into energetic functional members. These ribs and bars and shafts are all at bowstring tension. A mason will tap a pillar to make its stress audible; we may think of a cathedral as so ‘high strung’ that if struck it would give a musical note.”

The food is good in the monastery. “La cuisine est bonne au couvent / Moi qui ne dînais pas souvent / Je bois bon vin, je mange viandes grasses. / Jour glorieux!”

glory may be wrapped up in religion. “La Vierge aujourd’hui monte aux cieux, / Et pour elle on répète un cantique de grâces. / Avec tristesse / Un cantique en latin!” (“The Virgin today ascends to heaven, and for her her people say over and over a canticle of thanksgiving. [Sorrowfully.] A canticle in Latin!”)

clerical in social station. The classic study is Herbert Grundmann, “Litteratus-illitteratus,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 40 (1958): 1–65.

verses from the hymn to the Virgin. The passage appears at the opening of the second act. The Latin of the hymn goes back ultimately to an acrostic on the “Ave Maria”: see Guido Maria Dreves, ed., Analecta hymnica medii aevi, 55 vols. (Leipzig, Germany: Fues’s Verlag, R. Reisland, 1886–1922), 15: 115–23, at 115 (no. 94, strophe 1).

a tag from Virgil. Georgics 2.496, “agitans discordia fratres.”

Massenet’s measured mockery. Louis Bethléem et al., Les opéras, les opéras-comiques et les opérettes (Paris: Revue des lectures, 1926), 334, discussed by Branger, “Introduction,” 16–17.

a brief text. René Brancour, Massenet (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1922), 56: “Souvenez-vous devant Dieu de MASSENET / Compositeur de musique, Né à Saint-Etienne le 12 mai 1842, Mort à Paris le 14 août 1912. / Le Jongleur est ma foi / Requiescat in pace.”

served in the National Guard. “Autobiographical Notes by the Composer Massenet,” Century Magazine 45 (November 1892): 122–26, at 124.

romantic opera. In French, the terms are respectively “opéra romanesque,” “comédie lyrique,” “opéra légendaire,” “opéra féerique,” and “conte lyrique.”

Eve: Mystery Play. In French, Éve: mystère, to a libretto by the prolific librettist Louis Gallet.

In the Middle Ages. L’Echo de Paris, February 19, 1902, quoted by Needham, “Le Jongleur est ma foi,” 105 (my translation).

up to the middle of the sixteenth century. Among scholars, the philologist Gaston Paris had earned himself everlasting association with the miracle, thanks to the forty specimens of the genre he coedited in the Miracles of Our Lady, by Characters. See Gaston Paris, ed., Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, 8 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1876–1893), in collaboration with Ulysse Robert.

the hood does not make the monk. Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, 1.5.56, “Cucullus non facit monachum,” in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 412.

the mere outward trappings of monkishness. Thesaurus proverbiorum medii aevi: Lexikon der Sprichwörter des romanisch-germanischen Mittelalters, 13 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995–2002), 7: 70–72 (Kleid 2.3.2.2 Kleider machen keinen zum Mönch, Geistlichen, Einsiedler oder Heiligen).

a statue served the purpose instead. See Needham, “Le Jongleur est ma foi,” 2.

Blessed are the humble. Compare Matthew 5:5–15.

a French reader. Caecilia Pieri, Il était une fois, Contes merveilleux, vol. 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 89 (introduction), 101 (supporting instructional material).

Affected simplicity. The passage as a whole is quoted from Brancour, Massenet, 79 (my translation). It incorporates La Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims and Reflections (1665–1678), no. 289, “La simplicité affectée est une imposture delicate.”

deliberately for sake of the Virgin. “But to please Mary, I remain simple.”

another quality that has been discerned. Brancour, Massenet, 78 (“Jean le jongleur, un peu plus naïf tout de même que nature”).

A reviewer commented. Le Figaro, February 19, 1902: quoted and cited by Needham, “Le Jongleur est ma foi,” 98.

Thanks be to God! In the original, “Deo gratias! / Feliciter! / Amen.” A review of the Parisian premiere of Le jongleur de Notre Dame quotes the composer as having said: “The Benedictines had a practice of concluding their works in this way; it was their cry of thanks to God and expression of their submission to a higher will. I am like them: Go to God!” See Le Temps, May 10, 1904.

James Bond novels. For example, in Casino Royale, Never Say Never Again, and GoldenEye.

its first night. The role of Jean was created by Adolphe (Alphonse) Maréchal, a tenor of Belgian nationality (see Fig. n.2). The role was originally meant for Albert Vaguet. Boniface was performed by Maurice Renaud (see Fig. n.3), the prior by Gabriel-Valentin Soulacroix, both French baritones. The monks were played by Berquier, Juste Nivette, Grimaud, and Cuperninck, and the angels by Marguerite de Buck and Mary Girard. The settings were designed by Lucien Jusseaume. See Walsh, Monte Carlo Opera 1879–1909, 152.

Fig. n.2 Adolphe Maréchal as Jean in Massenet’s Le jongleur de Notre-Dame. Photograph, 1904. Photographer unknown. Published in Musica (June 1904).

Fig. n.3 Maurice Renaud. Photograph by Herman Mishkin, 1912.

amid the spectators’ deafening whoops. Walsh, Monte Carlo Opera 1879–1909, 156.

Salle Garnier. Designed by the architect Charles Garnier, the theater named after him was built in a half year to open in 1879. It stands on the former site of entertainment rooms of the casino. Its interior is an impressive square, twenty meters on a side, with a ceiling nineteen meters high.

the campaign to peddle Monaco. A color lithograph from 1897, in the full splendor of art nouveau, constitutes a stunning benchmark of this promotional effort. It was the doing of Alphonse Mucha. A highly versatile artist, he worked across many media but merited greatest acclaim for his advertising posters. Ethnically Czech, he gained stature as the father of Parisian art nouveau.

memorialized for philatelists. On the centenary of the Salle Garnier opera in 1979, the principality issued five commemorative postage stamps to honor operas that had premiered there, together with one to celebrate the building itself and its architect. Two were by Massenet: Le jongleur de Notre Dame (1.00 franc) and Don Quichotte (1.50 franc). The others were Louis Ganne’s Hans, le joueur de flûte (1906, 1.20 franc), Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1925, 2.10 franc), and Arthur Honegger and Jacques Ibert’s L’Aiglon (1937, 1.70 franc). The opera house stamp had the highest denomination (3.00 franc). The stamps are designated as Yvert 1175–80, referring to item numbers in the annual Catalogue de timbres-poste (Amiens, France: Yvert, commencing in the 1930s).

he himself epitomized the era. Consider the title of José Bruyr, Massenet: Musicien de la belle époque (Lyon, France: Éditions et imprimeries du Sud-Est, 1964).

I heard then Le jongleur! Rigné, Le disciple de Massenet, 1: 1, 2, and (here) 4.

a few other European cities. Other first nights included Hamburg, Germany, September 24, 1902; Brussels, Belgium, November 25, 1904; and Geneva, Switzerland, November 29, 1904. A description of the first night in Monte Carlo can be read in Irvine, Massenet, 240.

we can hear later ones. Malibran Music, CDRG 156 (compact disc).

more than other such famous musical dramas of the period. Irvine, Massenet, 254.

the year was an especially good one. In the same year it opened in Brussels and Geneva.

staged on four continents. In 1905, Le jongleur de Notre Dame was performed in (to use present-day names) Algiers, The Hague, Milan, and Berlin; in 1906 in Lisbon and London; in 1908 in New York; in 1911 in Buenos Aires, and both Graz and Vienna in Austria; in 1912 in Montreal, Zagreb, and Limberg, Austria; in 1914 in Prague; in 1915 in Rio de Janeiro; in 1919 in Barcelona; and in 1920 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. For the fullest information on places and dates of premieres, see Alfred Loewenberg, Annals of Opera, 1597–1940, 3d ed. (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978), columns 1239–40. At first, the libretto was controlled jealously by the publisher. After the original French, translations appeared in German, Italian, and other languages. See, for example, Jules Massenet and Maurice Léna, Der Gaukler unserer lieben Frau: Mirakel in drei Akten, trans. Henriette Marion (Paris: Au Ménestrel, Heugel, 1902), and Le jongleur de Notre-Dame (Il giullare di Nostra Signora): Miracolo in tre atti, trans. Biante Montelioï (Paris: Au Ménestrel, Heugel, 1905).

Jean, Bénédictine, and Selling Gothic

Bénédictine. Among bartenders and mixologists, the beverage may be known best today with its name reduced to a mere initial, in the pairing of Bénédictine and brandy called “B & B.”

public limited company. In French, société anonyme.

facilities designed to fulfill a dual function as tourist attractions. Lynn F. Pearson, Built to Brew: The History and Heritage of the Brewery (Swindon, UK: English Heritage, 2014).

enchantment of technology. See Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 40–63.

The distillery served. On the museum and collection as constituted in the late nineteenth century, see Distillerie de la liqueur Bénédictine de l’abbaye de Fécamp: Musée, catalogue illustré de nombreux dessins de H. Scott gravés par Bellanger avec préface et notice historique sur l’abbaye de Fécamp (Fécamp, France: L. Durand, 1888).

Palais Bénédictine. The French name implies simultaneously what in English would require both “Benedictine Palace” (for the monastic order) and “Bénédictine Palace” (for the liqueur brand). Although the original building was destroyed in a fire in 1892, the rebuilding of an expanded replacement was undertaken in the following year and completed in 1900.

his experiments with one of these elixirs. Jean-Pierre Lantaz, Bénédictine, d’un alambic à cinq continents (Luneray, France: Bertout, 1991), 251.

endorsements of the cordial’s potability. The results were ten lithographs of “Contemporary Celebrities and Bénédictine.” The set was printed in color on stiff cards and distributed unbound but in a book-like case, with a string to keep the contents secure. The newsmakers ranged from the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont through the actor Albert Brasseur to Sem himself.

I am sure that the Benedictines. Sem (Georges Goursat), Célébrités contemporaines et la Bénédictine (Paris: Devambez, 1909), 16 x 24 cm: “Je suis certain que les Bénédictins au temps du ‘Jongleur de Notre Dame’ buvaient de l’exquise Bénédictine comme nous en avons heureusement encore aujourd’hui.”

everything seemed to taste better. We have seen the brew promoted already: an engraving of Raoul Gunsbourg with a few bars of his 1909 opera Le vieil aigle (The old eagle) bears at the bottom, above his autograph, the caption “Dream of it and drink some Mariani” (see Fig. 1.73).

cutting-edge photomechanical processes. Willa Z. Silverman, The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 27.

The painter. The artist was Guillaume Dubufe.

Salettine. This liqueur was peddled by Maximin, one of the children who had claimed to experience the vision at La Salette. He put his name and a picture of himself on the label. See Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London: Penguin, 1999), 252; Lisa J. Schwebel, Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas: Christianity and the Paranormal (New York: Paulist Press, 2004), 122; Victor Witter Turner and Edith L. B. Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, Lectures on the History of Religions, New Series, vol. 11 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 223.

If you have never heard of these things. “Fascinating Legend Revived in Massenet’s Coming Opera,” New York Times, August 16, 1908.

The Musician of Women

he grasped the need to maximize their appeal. Finck, Massenet and His Operas, 64.

a woman’s composer. The French phrases are “compositeur de la femme” and “musicien de la femme.” Fairly or not, he has been considered a “musician of femininity.” See Ghristi and Auclair, La belle époque de Massenet, 160. A contemporary referred to him as “the musician of woman and of love”; see Louis Schneider, Massenet: L’homme–le musicien (Paris: L. Carteret, 1908), 2 (“le musicien de la femme et de l’amour”); compare 382–83, where Schneider points to Massenet’s allegedly universal appeal to women as the basis for his current and future fame. Compare Finck, Massenet and His Operas, 64: “That he has been a great admirer of women it is needless to say to anyone familiar with his operas, for women and love are the themes of most of them. And the women reciprocated.”

The sneering latent in such observations. George Cecil, “Impressions of Opera in France,” Musical Quarterly 7 (1921): 314–30, at 320: “The ‘high brows’ jeer at him as a feminist composer of sugary ditties intended for the delectation of sentimental men and women incapable of appreciating really well thought-out music.”

an effeminate voluptuary. Charles Lecocq (see Fig. n.4), who came in for a goodly share of high-handed criticism himself, curled his lip about Massenet in this regard to his fellow composer Saint-Saëns. Examining Le jongleur de Notre Dame and Massenet’s reactions to Mary Garden’s insistence on singing the part of Jean in this context could lead to interesting results: see Huebner, French Opera, 160–66 (“Massenet Emasculated”); for this quotation, 162: “It is well known Massenet is a sensualist and that he always takes care to make declarations of love to the public with his music.”

the French musician could not write a successful opera. “Angry at an American Prima Donna: Mary Garden Rouses the Ire of Paris because She Profanes a Sacred Opera by Assuming the Role of a Man in a Work Where Women Are Barred,” Morning Oregonian (Portland, OR), January 10, 1909, 8.

According to one critic. Carl Van Vechten, Interpreters, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), 85.

an unsparing caricature. “Charvic,” La Silhouette, March 25, 1894. On caricatures of Massenet, see Clair Rowden, “Mémorialisation, commémoration et commercialisation: Massenet et la caricature,” in Massenet aujourd’hui: Héritage et postérité. Actes du colloque de la XIe biennale Massenet des 25 et 26 octobre 2012, ed. Jean-Christophe Branger and Vincent Giroud, Centre interdisciplinaire d’études et de recherches sur l’expression contemporaine: Travaux, vol. 166/Collection musique et musicology: Les cahiers de l’Opéra théâtre, vol. 1 (Saint-Étienne, France: Publications de l’université de Saint-Étienne, 2014), 39–63.

he reminded himself. Massenet, My Recollections, 232.

Feminist theology. Elizabeth A. Johnson, “The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women,” Horizons 12 (1985): 116–35.

The All-Male Cast

What, I exclaimed to myself. Massenet, Mes souvenirs, 240 (and see Condé’s n. 2, on La Terre promise).

a cast made up entirely of men. On this phenomenon generally, see Vincent Giroud, “Couvents et monastères dans le théâtre lyrique français sous la Troisième République,” in Branger and Ramaut, Opéra et religion sous la IIIe République, 37–64, at 59–64.

the Belgian symbolist poet Émile Verhaeren. With a libretto by Verhaeren and music by a French Jewish composer named Michel-Maurice Lévy. Written in 1899, the piece of theater was staged and published in 1900, first in Brussels and slightly later in Paris. After a delay of a decade and a half, the work was also made into an opera that was performed in the 1914–1915 season.

the English translation. The translation is The Cloister: A Play in Four Acts, trans. Osman Edwards (London: Constable, 1915). The review, by Arthur Davison Ficke, is in a piece entitled “Two Belgian Poets,” Poetry 8 (1916): 96–103, at 102.

the list of characters. It includes the jongleur Jean, singing tenor; Brother Boniface, bass; the prior, bass; the monk-poet, tenor; the monk-painter, baritone; the monk-musician, baritone; the monk-sculptor, bass; and, to move from the soloists, a crowd, merchants, and monks.

the dearth of space for sopranos. Edward Lockspeiser, “Broadcast Music,” Musical Times 100.1396 (June 1959): 330 (“there is a sameness of tone-color in the voices which soon begins to pall”).

As a journalist posed the question. L’Illustration, no. 3194, May 14, 1904, 336.

An etching. Done by Charles Baude, after a canvas by Albert Aublet. The original painting, entitled Autour d’une partition (Gathering around a score), was shown at the 1888 Salon.

a sumptuous drawing room. The house belonged to Pierre Loti (see Fig. n.5). Coincidentally, this French novelist and naval officer was, at least sporadically, a medievalizer. He once hosted a costumed dinner party that was staged in a notional 1470: see Elizabeth Emery, “Pierre Loti’s ‘Memories’ of the Middle Ages: Feasting on the Gothic in 1888,” in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture, ed. Elma Brenner et al. (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 279–97.

Sibyl Sanderson. On Sanderson, the best starting point is Jack Winsor Hansen, The Sibyl Sanderson Story: Requiem for a Diva, Opera Biography Series, vol. 16 (Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 2005).

its anachronism. On the anachronism, see Claudio Galderisi, “Le jongleur dans l’étui: Horizon chrétien et réécritures romanesques,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 54 (2011): 73–82.

Fig. n.4 Caricature of Charles Lecocq. Illustration by Aroun-al-Rascid [Umberto Brunelleschi], 1902. Published in L’Assiette au beurre (September 1902).

Fig. n.5 Pierre Loti. Photograph by George Grantham Bain, late nineteenth century. Washington, DC, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection.

Notes to Chapter 2

I don’t want realism. Blanche DuBois, in Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, scene 9 (New York: Signet, 1951), 117.

Mary Garden Takes America

It is hardly too much to say. Musical America, January 25, 1908.

Later the soprano came to be known in America. See Charles Ludwig Wagner, Seeing Stars (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 203; John Pennino, “Mary Garden and the American Press,” The Opera Quarterly 6.4 (1989): 61–75, at 61 and 62.

in the right spirit of picturesque feeling and romance. Hermann Klein, “The London Opera House,” Musical Times, 53.828 (February 1, 1912): 95–96, at 96: “What if the part of the Boy-Juggler was originally written for a tenor? By afterwards giving it to Mary Garden and altering it to suit her, the composer not only exercised a discretion to which he was entitled, but imparted to his opera, as I can personally testify, a measure of variety and interest that helped largely to enhance its popularity. The Chicago singer achieved what was required, because she approached her task in the right spirit of picturesque feeling and romance.”

His article. Morning Oregonian (Portland, OR) 28.2, January 10, 1909, 8.

her “Eiffel Tower.” Along the same lines, music critics of the day referred to the vocal height Sanderson achieved in this opera as the “Eiffel note of the Opéra Comique”: see Fauser, Jules Massenet, Esclarmonde, vi.

established singer. Marthe Rioton.

constructed his opera obsessively. The playwright had been assured, wrongly, that the opera would star his mistress and not Mary Garden.

redolent of medieval legends and romances. Michael T. R. B. Turnbull, Mary Garden (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1997), 58. For broader context, see Paul Gorceix, “Maurice Maeterlinck, la mystique médiévale et le symbole,” La Licorne 6.1 (1982): 51–64; Carole J. Lambert, The Empty Cross: Medieval Hopes, Modern Futility in the Theater of Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Claudel, August Strindberg, and George Kaiser (New York: Garland, 1990), 20–101; Arnaud Rykner, “Le drame symboliste,” in La fabrique du Moyen Âge au XIXe siècle: Représentations du Moyen Âge dans la culture et la littérature françaises du XIXe siècle, ed. Simone Bernard-Griffiths et al., Romantisme et modernités, vol. 94 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), 1061–68.

as in a painting by Hans Memling. Gösta Mauritz Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1977), 315. The early Netherlandish artist, German by birth, was on many minds. Later, the singer Yvette Guilbert, in the phase of her career when she performed a medieval repertoire, was compared with him. See Bettina Liebowitz Knapp and Myra Chipman, That Was Yvette: The Biography of Yvette Guilbert, the Great Diseuse (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964), 263: “She inherits the grace of the ‘Primitive’ painters, she sings as Van Eyck and Memling painted, with the careful and experienced preoccupation for drawing and construction that every great work and every great artist must possess.”

my Mélisande. Vincent Sheean, The Amazing Oscar Hammerstein: The Life and Exploits of an Impresario (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1956), 203.

Oscar Hammerstein I

In the annals of music in America. Finck, Massenet and His Operas, 13.

The delivery that these singers cultivated. They combined the agile leaps of coloratura singing, in which the soprano ornamented the vocal melody elaborately, with nearly glaciated stances of body. See Turnbull, Mary Garden, 59.

proliferation of performances. To take Christmas Day of 1909 as an example, Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera presented in New York Tales of Hoffmann and Tosca, in Philadelphia Aïda and Faust, in Montreal Le Caïd and Mignon, and in Pittsburgh Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci, and, last but not least, Le jongleur de Notre Dame.

the critical acclaim they achieved. Finck, Massenet and His Operas, 15.

as a singing actor. Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera (1815–1930) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 231–76.

made her vulnerable to quibbling. See Evening Tribune, San Diego, California, July 15, 1922, 14, and San Diego Weekly Union, July 20, 1922, 8.

Making a Travesti of Massenet’s Tenor

women remained attached to them. Stéphane Michaud, Muse et madone: Visages de la femme de la Révolution française aux apparitions de Lourdes (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 23.

costumed as a male. This stratagem, in which a soprano sings the tenor part, goes in English by the name of a “trousers-role” or “breeches-part.” In demanding this major adjustment, the impresario reportedly acted on the advice of Maurice Renaud, the French baritone who had played Boniface in Monte Carlo. His approach to performing opera aligned well with Mary Garden’s: he was famed as much for his dramatic panache as for his vocal prowess.

the actor in question would be disguised. Mary Garden and Louis Biancolli, Mary Garden’s Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951), 131, 139. This autobiography, not quite ghostwritten but often ghastly in its writing, exceeds Massenet’s in its unreliability. Elsewhere, she claimed to be the only woman singer to have secured Massenet’s permission to sing as the jongleur: see Turnbull, Mary Garden, 86. It is not known whether or not another French baritone, Lucien Fugère, with whom she had studied in Paris and who had scored a great success as Brother Boniface, had any role in the negotiations.

the boyish figure she prided herself on maintaining. Garden and Biancolli, Mary Garden’s Story, 132; Gillian Opstad, Debussy’s Mélisande: The Lives of Georgette Leblanc, Mary Garden, and Maggie Teyte (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2009), 248.

Garden had won great kudos. Opstad, Debussy’s Mélisande, 122.

putting her histrionic talent to a new test. This sentence paraphrases William S. Niederkorn, “Massenet’s ‘Jongleur’ Has Its U.S. Premiere,” New York Times, November 28, 1908.

A substantial article appeared. “Fascinating Legend Revived in Massenet’s Coming Opera,” New York Times, August 16, 1908: “When performed in Europe, the role has always been entrusted to a tenor, which makes the American production a novelty, even from the Continental standpoint.”

their own mixed feelings. Gary Waller, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11 and passim.

Tongue-dragging. Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 129–37 and 155–61 on masochism, 133–35 on tongue-dragging. The description in this book lacks either photographic or documentary support, and even the Italian term or terms used for the activity are not provided. Yet the practice is attested here and there, most notably in the dialect dictionary of Manlio Cortelazzo and Carla Marcato, I dialetti italiani: Dizionario etimologico (Turin, Italy: UTET, 1998), 419 (on the noun strascìnë which is attested amply in the Lucano dialect of Basilicata); Andrea Mancusi, La matréia (la matrigna): Saggio sul dialetto di Avigliano (Avigliano, Italy: Galasso, 1982), 116 (on the noun strascíne).

Freudian explanations. Michael P. Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

The supremely famous Sarah Bernhardt. Sheean, Amazing Oscar Hammerstein, 208. For the general topic, see Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds., En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

the Sarah Bernhardt of opera. Turnbull, Mary Garden, 89.

Napoleon II of France. The play by Edmond Rostand was entitled L’aiglon, a nickname of the young emperor. “The Eaglet” had its London premiere in 1901. See Peter G. Davis, “An American Singer,” Yale Review 85.4 (1997): 1–19, at 14.

in a scrapbook. Opstad, Debussy’s Mélisande, 78.

Garden also claimed to have traveled with Debussy. Opstad, Debussy’s Mélisande, 119–20.

it was staged at the Odéon. Elizabeth Silverthorne, Sarah Bernhardt (Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 2003), 49–50.

Zanetto’s Serenade. In French, Serénade de Zanetto. Another French composer, Émile Paladilhe, who had won the prestigious French Rome prize three years before Massenet, failed miserably with an opera that hewed to Coppée’s text.

made subsequently into operas. The first was The Lady of the Camelias (La dame aux camélias), originally an 1848 novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, adapted for the stage in 1852 and put to music by Giuseppe Verdi in La Traviata in 1853. The second was La Tosca, meaning “the Tuscan woman,” first an 1867 play by the French playwright Victorien Sardou and later an opera by the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini. See Opstad, Debussy’s Mélisande, 31.

the French actor had thought twice about playing the role. Sheean, Amazing Oscar Hammerstein, 268. On the scandal, see Theodore Ziolkowski, Scandal on Stage: European Theater as Moral Trial (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 59–73.

The theatrical work was published. Wilde came to hold a place of reverence within Garden’s pantheon of artistic influences. According to the American Margaret Caroline Anderson, she and her partner Jane Heap (see Fig. n.6) were struck when meeting the singer to discover that she had a large photograph of the Irish writer on display on her piano. See Margaret C. Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War: An Autobiography (New York: Covici, Friede, 1930), 137–38. Anderson founded, edited, and published the cultural magazine The Little Review (1914–1929). On The Little Review: Literature, Drama, Music, Art, see David Miller and Richard Price, British Poetry Magazines, 1914–2000: A History and Bibliography of “Little Magazines” (London: British Library, 2006), 29, item A 112.

London Opera House. The house was renamed the Stoll Theatre after being bought by the theater manager Oswald Stoll in 1916.

showcased Le jongleur de Notre Dame. For this season, Hammerstein had produced a libretto, Jules Massenet, Our Lady’s Juggler: Miracle in Three Acts, libretto by Maurice Léna, trans. Louise Baum (Paris: Au Ménestrel, Heugel, 1911). The principal role was sung by Victoria Fer. The French soprano had been dubbed by Massenet “the goddess of Nice,” after the city in southern France. She also substituted for Mary Garden in this capacity at the Manhattan Opera House. See Klein, “London Opera House,” 96.

the gross receipts had been eye-popping. Musical Times 53.829 (March 1, 1912): 192: “The season lasted ten weeks, and was the most successful ever given in Chicago. The gross receipts amounted to $463,000, or $63,000 more than last year. Among the operas performed, the following have obtained the most conspicuous success: ‘The Juggler of Nôtre [sic] Dame’ (Massenet), ‘The Jewels of the Madonna,’ ‘The Secret of Susanne’ (Wolf-Ferrari), and ‘Natoma,’ the new American-Indian opera by Victor Herbert.”

starting up. The company was built to no small extent on the set, costumes, copyrights, scores, and artists that the Metropolitan Opera had acquired by buying out Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House.

The Jewels of the Madonna. The original Italian was I gioielli della Madonna, known also in German as Der Schmuck der Madonna (not to be translated as “the Madonna’s schmuck”), a tragic opera in three acts by the Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, by the librettists Carlo Zangarini and Enrico Golisciani. The opera premiered in 1911 at the Kurfürstenoper (Electoral Opera House) in Berlin.

the dazzling artist. Massenet, My Recollections, 237.

clothing from the Rue de la Paix. See Massenet, My Recollections, 237; for the second quotation, 237–38: “My feelings are somewhat bewildered, I confess, at seeing the monk discard his frock after the performance and resume an elegant costume from the Rue de la Paix. However, in the face of the artist’s triumph I bow and applaud.”

famous for women’s jewelry and haute couture. For instance, the American novelist Edith Wharton referred to it in The Age of Innocence as allowing for “artistic” choices of merchandise, and she mentioned well-to-do New Yorkers to whom “Fifth Avenue is Heaven with the rue de la Paix thrown in.” The Age of Innocence, book 1, chap. 10, and book 2, chap. 33, in Edith Wharton, Novels, Library of America, vol. 30 (New York: Library of America, 1985), 1082, 1279.

the diva would endorse cosmetic products. The upper left of an advertisement from 1920 displays her in stylish dress as she applies either rouge or face powder; the upper right has large lettering that proclaims “Rigaud, 16 Rue de la Paix, Paris.”

a journalist reviewing her performance. “‘The Juggler,’ with Novelty,” New York Times, Thursday, January 11, 1912.

At least one other music critic. Henry Edward Krehbiel, More Chapters of Opera, Being Historical and Critical Observations and Records concerning the Lyric Drama in New York from 1908 to 1918 (New York: H. Holt, 1919), 99.

there is no such thing as bad publicity. The aphorisms provide an English correlative to the French concept of succès de scandale, literally “success from scandal” or “scandal success.”

We must wonder. Sheean, Amazing Oscar Hammerstein, 288.

one of those passive musicians. Quoted in Edward Wagenknecht, Seven Daughters of the Theater: Jenny Lind, Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, Julia Marlowe, Isadora Duncan, Mary Garden, Marilyn Monroe (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 165. See also Garden and Biancolli, Mary Garden’s Story, 138.

helping to establish and propagate a new music. Quoted in Wagenknecht, Seven Daughters, 165: “Today we see the beginning of the great modern school, the music which deals with and carries to the hearts of its audiences great human truths. This modern music aims not wholly at the senses, but also at the mind. It does not aim merely at producing a vehicle for the production of glorious tones. It goes deeper than tone. It strives for a musical interpretation of the impulses and motives of the human mind and heart and soul. It represents not persons, but passions.”

the American première of Massenet’s Thaïs. On November 25, 1907. It had been performed first in 1894 and revised in 1898, with a libretto by Louis Gallet.

The dress stuck to my flesh. Garden and Biancolli, Mary Garden’s Story, 113; Turnbull, Mary Garden, 57.

James Gibbons Huneker. Arnold T. Schwab, James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), 257.

she had studied ballet daily. Musical America, Special Fall Issue (October 10, 1908): 28: “I take a dancing lesson each day, and think it will be very amusing to become a ballerine!” Garden here uses the French word for ballerina.

nearly transparent flesh-colored silk. Turnbull, Mary Garden, 57.

New York may insist on a few more clothes. On both the transparent silk and the different mores of New York, see “MARY GARDEN MAKES A THRILLING SALOME; Her Costume for Dance of Seven Veils—It Is Impossible to Describe It Even in Paris. RINGS ON LITTLE FINGERS A Red Wig, Too—Times Correspondent Sees Rehearsal Before She Sails—Comes on the Adriatic,” New York Times, October 25, 1908.

The resulting tempest in a teapot. June Sawyers, “The Night that ‘Salomé’ Shocked the Whole Town,” Chicago Tribune, “Lifestyles,” and The Milwaukee Journal, October 26, 1944. For the night itself, see New York Times, November 30, 1910.

Clothes are only shams. Turnbull, Mary Garden, 67.

Salomania. Udo Kultermann, “The ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’: Salome and Erotic Culture around 1900,” Artibus et Historiae 27.53 (2006): 187–215.

They bruited abroad. Ronald L. Davis, Opera in Chicago (New York: Appleton-Century, Affiliate of Meredith Press, 1966), 98.

Selling the Jongleur

Garden would grow irate. “Miss Garden Muses on Woman’s Perils,” New York Times, January 16, 1910, 16.

her manipulation of the media circus. On her handling of the media, see Pennino, “Mary Garden and the American Press.”

never was an active publicity hound. Wagner, Seeing Stars, 208–9, 211.

a scent that was marketed under her name. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer 2.2, “Longlegged Jack of the Isthmus,” in idem, Novels, 1920–1925, Library of America, vol. 142 (New York: Library of America, 2003), 608. The perfume was produced by the parfumier Rigaud. An advertisement in the December 1917 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal spotlights her face and hair, while to the right is a partially draped French flag. Underneath are arrayed more than a dozen different cosmetics in the line.

miracle perfume. In French, a parfum miracle.

one exquisite odour. Thankfully, the copywriter resisted referring to the odor of sanctity. That would have stunk.

would open soon in America. The libretto followed was Le jongleur de Notre Dame (The Juggler of Notre Dame): Miracle Play in Three Acts, trans. Byrne, published in 1907.

the same issue of the daily. New York Times, August 16, 1908, p. SM8 (for Le jongleur de Notre Dame) and 7 (for “Isadora Duncan Arrives”).

New Woman. Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford, eds., The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and the Theatre (1850–1914) (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).

where are the snows of yesteryear?. This topos is often designated ubi sunt, to convey concisely the question “Where are… today?”

Duncan Grant. A British artist, he was a member of the Bloomsbury Group of artists, writers, and intellectuals.

and me too? Hugh McDiarmid, “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle,” lines 30–32, in idem, Complete Poems, 2 vols. (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1993–1994), 1: 83–168, at 84.

Yvette Guilbert. Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 214–15. For a study of Guilbert’s life, see Knapp and Chipman, That Was Yvette.

Garden knew and studied her. James Huneker, Bedouins: Mary Garden, Debussy, Chopin or the Circus, Botticelli, Poe, Brahmsody, Anatole France, Mirbeau, Caruso on Wheels, Calico Cats, The Artistic Temperament; Idols and Ambergris; with The Supreme Sin, Grindstones, A Masque of Music, and The Vision Malefic (New York: Scribner, 1920), 10, 17; Garden and Biancolli, Mary Garden’s Story, 105, 145, 268.

diseuse. The technical term for a female monologuist.

café-concert singer. During this phase, she was a favorite subject in the art of the French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Society for the Oldest French Texts. In French, Société des Anciens Textes Français.

founded in Paris in 1875. Knapp and Chipman, That Was Yvette, introduction (unnumbered page).

cathedral of Reims. Knapp and Chipman, That Was Yvette, 258.

sensational concerts. Knapp and Chipman, That Was Yvette, 279.

miracle of the Virgin. Knapp and Chipman, That Was Yvette, 280.

tours in Europe and America. See Elizabeth Emery, “From Cabaret to Lecture Hall: Medieval Song as Cultural Memory in the Performances of Yvette Guilbert,” in Memory and Medievalism, ed. Karl Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism, vol. 15 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 3–25; Elizabeth Emery, “‘Resuscitating’ Medieval Literature in New York and Paris: La Femme que Nostre-Dame garda d’estre arse at Yvette Guilbert’s School of Theatre, 1919–1924,” in Cultural Performances in Medieval France, ed. Eglal Doss-Quinby et al. (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), 265–78.

the jongleur also had another Mary to thank. We have recordings of this Mary’s voice as she sang the role of Jean on March 21, 1911 in New York: Columbia, 30699, 12-inch. Other cylinders and disks conserve the sounds as she crooned in 1903 in London and, to the accompaniment of Debussy’s piano playing, in 1904 in Paris. From far past her prime we have a record made in Camden, New Jersey in 1926. On 1912, see Opstad, Debussy’s Mélisande, 243; on 1903 and 1904, 118n34; on 1926, 259. In 1912, Mary Garden also sang at a dinner in Paris before a bevy of nobility and diplomats, including Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bliss—the eventual donors of the Harvard-owned institute in Washington that I presently direct: see “Entertainments in Paris: Kittens and Doves as Favors at Cotillion Given by Mrs. Moore” (special cable), New York Times, June 30, 1912, C5.

Mary Garden Dances the Role

Mary Garden’s time in Chicago. Although Chicago movie studios were important in the nascent film industry from 1907 through 1913, Garden’s involvement came after the rise of Hollywood. Without reference to her, see Michael Glover Smith and Adam Selzer, Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry (New York: Wallflower Press, 2015).

gave her pride of place. In the Saturday Evening Post magazine of October 27, 1917.

one of the most colossal flops in movie history. Roger Butterfield, “Sam Goldwyn,” Life, October 27, 1947, 133.

To the majority of the audiences. In the April 5, 1918 issue of Variety magazine, quoted and cited by first Anne Morey, “Geraldine Farrar,” in Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s, ed. Jennifer M. Bean (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 137–54, at 142, and then Mary Simonson, “Screening the Diva,” in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 83–100, at 86.

remain legendary. In the standard biography of Mary Garden, the chapter on the year in which she premiered in Le jongleur de Notre Dame in New York at the end of November and later in Philadelphia is entitled “The Creation of a Legend: 1907–1908”: see Turnbull, Mary Garden, 55–65. For comments by those who saw her performances in the role of the jongleur, see pp. 88, 160, 171, 197.

to toy with taking the veil. On her dalliance with conversion, see Garden, Mary Garden’s Story, 133–34; Opstad, Debussy’s Mélisande, 198.

Mary Garden Avenue. In French, Rue Mary-Garden.

Place Mary-Garden. In English, Mary Garden Square. See Garden, Mary Garden’s Story, 135–37. Mary Garden’s contribution to the monument in Peille was honored in a small exposition that opened on Armistice Day, 2012.

January 24, 1931. For the date of Garden’s retirement, see Turnbull, Mary Garden, 173.

In her memoirs. Garden, Mary Garden’s Story, 247.

More than two decades passed. For her performances, see Davis, Opera in Chicago, 275–342.

the journalist described. Fred D. Pasley, Al Capone: Biography of a Self-Made Man (New York: Ives Washburn, 1930), 45: “This [a peculiar lurch in his walk, from a childhood injury] and his trick of canting his head as he talked produced on most visitors an impression of infinite slyness, reminiscent of Le Jongleur de Notre Dame.” The gangster compared with the juggler was Dion O’Banion.

The Role of Dance

a collector and historian of art and literature. Carola Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce,” in Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, ed. Willard Potts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), 256–80. Giedion-Welcker also produced an In memoriam James Joyce (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1941).

a professor of English literature. His name was Bernhard Fehr.

wild jumps and kicks. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce,” at 273–74. “These rhythmical and astonishingly acrobatic exercises” reduced his stiff straw hat to nothing more than a wreath.

part juggling clown. Giedion-Welcker, “Meetings with Joyce,” at 273–74: “The grotesque flexibility of his long legs, which seemed to fill the room, and the bizarre grace with which he executed all movements of this strange dance, made him appear part juggling clown and part mystical reincarnation of Our Lady’s Tumbler, who would like to have continued the performance endlessly, urged on by the constantly changing musical variations of the tireless piano player.” Nothing suggests that the Irishman had the comparison with the entertainer on his mind, and the raconteur makes the literary allusion decades after the evening in question.

outright appeal for dancing. Vincent Giroud, “La danse dans les opéras de Massenet: Typologie et fonction,” in Musique et chorégraphie en France de Léo Delibes à Florent Schmitt: Actes de la journée d’étude du 13 juin 2008, ed. Jean-Christophe Branger (Saint-Étienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2010), 89–121, at 90.

the composer was sensitive to the role of dance. Giroud, “La danse.”

here it refers to a series of movements. Giroud, “La danse,” 110. The noun suggests by its etymology “young shepherdess” in French.

classical dance music. Giroud, “La danse,” 110–11.

Our Lady’s Dancer. In German, “Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau.” Hedwig Müller, Mary Wigman: Leben und Werk der grossen Tänzerin (Weinheim, Germany: Quadriga, 1986), 310–20, at 312. The dance is not mentioned in Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). It is touched upon in Maggie Odom, “Mary Wigman: The Early Years 1913–1925,” The Drama Review 24.4 (December 1980): 81–92, at 83.

pioneer of modern dance. She put into practice the dance theories of the dancer and dance theorist Rudolf von Laban, after whom were named the method for describing human movement known as Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and Labanotation.

medieval-style outfit. The garb consists of trousers worn under a tunic that incorporates prominently in its pattern a large pectoral cross.

Our Lady’s Dancer. In German, once again “Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau,” with music by Stürmer. He was hired by the Hannover theater director Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard: see Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture (1910–1935) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 297–98. The balletic expressions of the story may well have had an impact on silent film as well as on theater, but the evidence is thin.

Terpis himself took the lead role. On March 2, 1923. Later he went on to become ballet director of the Berlin Staatsoper (State Opera), as well as leader of his own dance school in the same city.

Our Lady’s Juggler. As set to music by Ottorino Respighi. The Rambert Dance Company, known also variously as the Marie Rambert Dancers, Ballet Club, and Ballet Rambert, was founded by Dame Marie Rambert (1888–1982), and has existed under various names since 1926. Rambert was Polish Jewish by birth, but as an adolescent converted to Christianity. In 1912–1913, she trained with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where she assisted Nijinsky. She came to London in 1914, where she opened her own educational institution in 1920.

from 1930 on. “Our Lady’s Juggler,” performed first on February 25, 1930 (choreographed by Susan Salaman), and in October 1933, on November 25, 1935, and other dates (choreographed by Susan Salaman and Andrée Howard): see Kathrine Sorley Walker, “The Choreography of Andrée Howard,” Dance Chronicle 13 (1990–1991): 265–358, at 271–72; Sally Gilmour, “Remembering Andrée Howard,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 2.1 (1984): 48–60, at 55 (for an incidental mention).

a red Madonna dress. The dress dates from 1917, when it was worn by Marie Rambert in La pomme d’or (The golden apple). Also in 1930, she played the Madonna in A Florentine Picture. See Jane Pritchard, “Archives of the Dance: The Rambert Dance Company Archive,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 6.1 (1988): 59–69, at 64, repr. idem, “Rambert Dance Company Archive, London, UK,” in Dance History: An Introduction, ed. Janet Adshead-Lansdale and June Layson, 132–50, at 140. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1994.

The Lonely Lady. Gilmour, “Remembering Andrée Howard,” 55.

educational institutions. Her establishment evolved into what is today the University of Cape Town School of Dance. At the time of its foundation in 1934–1935, it was the UCT Ballet School.

A French Legend of the 14th Century. With music by W. H. Bell, staged in August 1936.

reviewers rendered tribute to the lighting. “The lighting of this ballet was extremely convincing and the halo about ‘Our Lady’ was probably the most successful effect of the evening.” This sentence from an anonymous review appeared under the title “At the Ballet” in a contemporary newspaper. A clipping of it is in a scrapbook that belongs to Pamela Chrimes, a colleague and friend of Dulcie Howes. The book is currently in the private collection of Eduard Greyling.

Sexless, Sexy… and What Sex?

with a man in the title role. “Second Thoughts on Music: ‘Juggler’ Opera Proves Ingratiating Performance,” Springfield (Massachusetts) Union, published as Springfield Republican, February 26, 1961, 57, asserts that the opera was never performed with a tenor—but this is wrong.

The one-time retrogression failed abysmally. Finck, Massenet and His Operas, 101.

an elaborate hennin. Noblewomen wore this conical headdress in the late Middle Ages.

the part should always be performed by a woman. For the “sexless” quotation, see Garden, Mary Garden’s Story, 166; for her insistence that the jongleur should be played by a woman, ibid., 132.

the challenges of succeeding in the pretense. “Now, this was one of my strangest and most problematic creations. Here was a little boy of fifteen, a sexless child, with a voice that wasn’t yet broken, and there was Salomé, with a voice of passion and colour, and I had to take my voice and make it that other thing. I couldn’t put into that boy passion of any kind. The voice had to be pure and high, like a choir boy’s before it changes, and how it tired me! It wasn’t easy, but what a part, the Jongleur! The critics and the public all loved it. They never even thought about the fact that it was a woman doing it.”

was the divinity nonsexual. “Aye, there’s the rub”—and the etymologies of both prurience (Latin prurire, “itch”) and tribade (Greek tribō, “rub”) remind us that rubbing may be very sexual, as a countermeasure against itching.

the attraction to her. Garden, Mary Garden’s Story, 133.

wardrobe malfunction. Van Vechten, Interpreters, 87: “In the second act she found it difficult to entirely conceal the suggestion of her sex under the monk’s robe.”

she avers. Garden, Mary Garden’s Story, 138.

the opera Aphrodite. The musical drama by the composer Camille Erlanger was adapted from the bestselling novel of 1906 about the life of courtesans in Alexandria by the French author Pierre Louÿs (see Figs. n.7 and n.8).

Fig. n.6 Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson. Photograph by Man Ray, 1922. Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. © Art Resource, New York. All rights reserved.

Fig. n.7 Mary Garden as Chrysis in Camille Erlanger’s Aphrodite. Photograph, 1906. Photographer unknown. Published in Henry T. Finck, Massenet and His Operas (New York: John Lane, 1910), facing p. 72.

Fig. n.8 Mary Garden as Chrysis in Camille Erlanger’s Aphrodite. Photograph by Paul Boyer, 1906. Reproduced on postcard (F. C. et Cie, ca. 1906).

The Knight of the Rose. Der Rosenkavalier.

same-sex romancing. Mary Garden’s Story, 220: “Everybody said I would have made a wonderful Octavian. Perhaps. The role didn’t appeal to me at all. Making love to women all night long would have bored me to death.”

in the simplicities of Jean the Juggler. Huneker, Bedouins, 5–6.

Mary Garden: Superwoman. Schwab, James Gibbons Huneker, 258. On their correspondence and highly limited personal contacts, see Schwab, 257, 357n121.

one opera buff defended Garden. Edward Moore, Forty Years of Opera in Chicago (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930). The quotation is to be found in Davis, Opera in Chicago, 186: “No tenor, no matter how talented, could ever be as boyish as Miss Garden. I would rather hear her sing and then cry and mop her eyes and wipe her nose than listen to the finest tenor on earth in the part. When the prior scolds her she twists her body into something that is all knees and elbows, and it is all boy, too.”

delightful and adorable Mary Garden. Van Vechten, Interpreters, 93.

she is quite irresistible. Huneker, Bedouins, 19.

an ineradicable residuum of herself. Finck, Massenet and His Operas, 102.

something feminine. “Devries in Title Role in Le Jongleur,” New York Times, February 27, 1910, 11.

to see her at the opera in Paris. In Louise, Cherubin, Thaïs, and Salomé.

he had taken the Church to task. Henry Adams, Historical Essays (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 1–41, at 38 (“Primitive Rights of Women”).

Mary Garden could come through in the role. Theatre Magazine 11.109 (March 1910), 91.

an almost slavering craving. No one could mistake the thrust, so to speak, of comments such as “I am hungry for Mary Garden,” “Mary Garden is squirming at the Grand Opera,” and “I dropped in at the Opera last night for half an hour to see Mary Garden squirm Salome.” See LHA, 5: 414 (to Elizabeth Cameron, October 8, 1902: “to hear Miss Garden in Louise”), 422 (to Anne Palmer Fell, November 22, 1902: “I go there only to hear Mary Garden sing ‘Louise.’ I no longer count the times, but I go whenever she sings it”), 517 (to Elizabeth Cameron, November 2, 1903: “to hear Mary Garden sing the premier jour [in Louise]”), 663 (to Elizabeth Cameron, May 28, 1905: “to the Opera Comique to see Mary Garden in Cherubin”); 6:141 (to Elizabeth Cameron, May 14, 1908), 154–55 (to Elizabeth Cameron, June 16, 1908), 339 (to Elizabeth Cameron, May 19, 1910: “squirm Salome”), 342–43 (to Raphael Pumpelly, May 19, 1910: “squirming at the Grand Opera”).

I only go when Mary’s there. Davis, Opera in Chicago, 128.

cultural icon to lesbian opera fans. Bonnie Zimmerman, ed., Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures, vol. 1/Garland Reference Library of the Social Sciences, vol. 1008 (New York: Garland, 2000), 1: 558.

the lesbian opera singer. Terry Castle, The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 867; contrast p. 403, where she is “the bisexual turn-of-the-century opera singer.”

one rabidly reported case. New York Times, February 18, 1913, 1.

Her ‘Queen Cleopatra’. The heading refers to a role that Garden made her own, displaced only decades later by an even bigger star, Elizabeth Taylor.

she had gone devotedly to hear Mary Garden sing. Terry Castle, “In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender: Reflections on Diva-Worship,” in Blackmer and Smith, En Travesti, 20–58, at 27.

Jane Heap. She was a writer and an artist, formerly the lover of Djuna Barnes.

definitely not declawed. Holly A. Baggett, ed., Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 179n33; compare pp. 66, 180n50, where Mary’s movement (clearly Garden) is juxtaposed with a black panther’s. Mary Garden is also mentioned on pp. 111; 183n61.

one of the most thrilling human experiences. Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War, 138, cited by Castle, “In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender,” 27.

an aging gentleman. The man is sometimes identified as the attorney, railroad executive, and politician Chauncey M. Depew. The earliest attestation known to me at this moment is Zanesville (Ohio) Signal, August 9, 1943, 6.

lesbian icon. The term is applied to Mary Garden in the index to Blackmer and Smith, En Travesti, 377.

a crush she had. Mary Garden’s Story, 6–7.

her status as a lifelong single. Mary Garden’s Story, 192: “The grande passion never came into my life.”

her passion and only real romance. Mary Garden’s Story, 294: “My passion was opera, and that was the only real ‘romance’ of my life.” Elsewhere she clarified, “I believed in myself, and I never permitted anything or anybody to destroy that belief. … I wanted liberty and I went my own way. … I never really loved anybody. I had a fondness for men, yes, but very little passion and no need; that’s it, perhaps, I never had any real need for it.”

nobody in God’s green earth. Mary Garden’s Story, 155.

she expresses her rapture. Mary Garden’s Story, 84.

Painted Veils. James Huneker, Painted Veils (New York: Modern Library, 1920).

wealthy lesbian who wears men’s clothing. See Castle, “In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender,” 28.

Huneker’s biographer decoded Brandes. Schwab, James Gibbons Huneker, 267.

occasionally and understandably conflated. See, for example, Alan H. Morriss, “A Twentieth-Century Folk Mass,” Musical Times, 98.1378 (December 1957): 671–72, at 672. One reference work for literary scholars goes so far as to assert that Hugo was inspired by the medieval story in conceiving his own. See Jean-Charles Seigneuret, ed., Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs, 2 vols. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 1 (“A-J”): 233. In the same passage, the miracle of the medieval story is described as taking the form of “a gracious smile” with which Mary rewards the tumbler. Thanks to equally fallible associative thinking, a newsletter announced W. H. Auden’s The Ballad of Barnaby as being based on “the medieval French legend of ‘The Juggler of Paris.’” See “‘Barnaby’ Goes to Scotland and Also Will Be Published,” Lytellwyk 2.1 (November 1969), front page. Along the same lines, a novelist referred to the “Jongleur of Paris”: see John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance, vol. 1, chap. 19 (“The Pageant”) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932), 624.

At least nineteen operas. David Littlejohn, “Hugo Sung and Unsung: Or Why We Put Up with Dumb Opera Plots,” in idem, The Ultimate Art: Essays around and about Opera (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 172–82, at 176. The tally of nineteen does not factor in sketches and other projects that did not eventuate in complete operas.

a lost sketch of a musical drama. Irvine, Massenet, 37.

a popular hit, in due course California’s official state song. In 1913, she became the first to sing “I Love You, California.”

the American songwriter Irving Berlin. This happened during her stint as manager of the Chicago Opera Company. See Fort Worth Star-Telegram 42.40, March 12, 1922, 2.

23rd Street and Broadway station. At the BMT Broadway train line.

open the floodgates. Opstad, Debussy’s Mélisande, 249–50.

The Jongleur Goes to Notre Dame

migrated him into the first two media. “Mary Garden in Radio Opera: ‘Le Jongleur de Notre Dame’ to Be Broadcast from Chicago by WJZ’s Network on Thursday Night,” New York Times, December 18, 1927, XX15. For the fullest treatment, see Luther F. Sies, Encyclopedia of American Radio, 1920–1960, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 1: 498.

from its founding through 1934. Notre Dame Juggler, vols. 1–15 (December 1919–May 1934).

like the medieval entertainer’s. The Juggler of Notre Dame 1 (December 1919): 6: “In emerging from the darkness of back stage, the Juggler begs the audience’s suffrage for a curtain speech that will, he hopes, explain and justify his performance.”

after the US Senate’s historic vote. The vote was taken on June 4, 1919.

The College Woman as Jongleur

illustrated explanation and demonstration. Frederica LeF. Bellamy, The Jongleur’s Story: A History and Demonstration of Religious Drama (New York: The Woman’s Press, 1926).

the other two may be women or girls. Bellamy, Jongleur’s Story, 4: “The Brother should of course be a man, preferably deep-voiced. Unless young men of real dramatic ability are available, the Jongleur and Player parts should be done by women or girls with good voices of rich timbre.”

stilted speech. The first three sentences, preceded by authorial directions on how to bring the character of the jongleur to life, give ample insight into the shortcomings of this piece of theater: “Jongleur (The Jongleur is debonair and winning, but just a little wistful and pleading, for he knows very well what it is to be hungry, proud as he is of his calling): Good even, all! This, meseemeth, is a goodly company. Are there children here or any of simple hearts, who would listen gladly to the telling of a tale?”

performances that took place in the late 1920s. The shows were put on in May of 1927 and 1928, and June of 1939, on the steps outside Finney Chapel, the largest performance space on campus, designed by the architect Cass Gilbert under the inspiration of Southern French Romanesque. At least one image from 1927 shows a performance outdoors in a park, probably Ladies Grove. Oberlin is a liberal arts college located in Oberlin, Ohio. Fullest information is available at http://www.oberlin.edu/alummag/oampast/oam_winter/iwas.html. Under the title “I Was Our Lady’s Juggler–A Memory,” this site offers the reminiscences of the juggler, Conna Bell Shaw (Oberlin, ’28), as a ninety-one year-old woman. The same recollections were published in Oberlin Alumni Magazine (Winter 1998). They are supported both by photographs, mostly from 1939, and verbatim quotations from the Oberlin Review of May 23, 1939 and June 26, 1939. The typescript of the play “Our Lady’s Juggler” from 1927 is found in the Oberlin College Archives, Frederick B. Artz papers, box 8. The Archives also possess a silent film of the 1939 performance.

general introduction to the Middle Ages. Frederick Binkerd Artz, The Mind of the Middle Ages, A.D. 200–1500: An Historical Survey, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). As the citation indicates, the introduction went through three editions.

townsfolk watch in wonderment. No doubt many other dance performances have been based on the story of Our Lady’s Juggler. The New York Public Library has a 28 and 1/2-minute black-and-white reel of 16-millimeter film (*MGZHB 12–880. Location PerfArts-Dance) of a dance telecast on Descript 1 reel, 28 1/2 min., 1024 ft., sd. b&w.; 16 mm. Note Telecast on WCBS-TV, New York, May 2, 1965, in the program “Lamp unto my feet,” produced by Pamela Ilott, directed by Marvin Silbersher, choreographed by Flower Hujer, and performed by the Flower Hujer Dance Theatre. The cast included the choreographer as the statue and Pablo Candelas as the juggler.

The newspaper report. “Smith Dancing Group in Recital Tomorrow,” Springfield Republican, February 26, 1929, 6.

a new course in dance and choreography. “Advanced Course in Dance Is Offered,” Springfield Union, April 2, 1949, 28.

dedication of a chapel. Little Chapel, located at the extremity of an addition to the college library, was eventually desacralized to be used instead as library space.

more than a half dozen states. Wisconsin, Oklahoma (pictured), Nebraska, Utah, California, and Ohio.

Orchesis. From 1932 on, “The Juggler of Notre Dame” was staged annually as a “dance drama” at the University of Oklahoma. On the first such performance, see “Oklahomans at Home and Abroad,” Sooner Magazine 5.4 (1933): 99–108, at 104. On the fourth, see “Campus Events,” Sooner Magazine 8.3 (1935): 49. On the twelfth annual performance, see Sooner Magazine 17.4 (December 1944): 4–5. On the sixteenth one, see Katherine Wolfe, “News from the Dance Section,” Journal of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation 20.3 (1949): 191–94. On even later iterations, see “The Sooner Salutes,” Sooner Magazine 25.5 (1953): 9; Bill Crawford, “Maryland, My Maryland,” Sooner Magazine 26.4 (1953): 13, 29; “O. U. Calendar of Events,” Sooner Magazine 28.3 (1955), table of contents. The tradition of both Orchesis and the Christmas pageant was brought to the Oklahoma campus by a physical education teacher, Helen Gregory. She had become familiar with both the organization and the pageant during her studies at the University of Wisconsin.

At San Jose State Teachers College, Le jongleur de Notre Dame was put on similarly at Christmas time annually from at least 1932 through 1936, as a dance drama, with heavily or entirely female casts. See Charlotte G. MacEwan, “News from the Dance Section,” Journal of Health and Physical Education (henceforth JHPE) 8.3 (1937): 1; Amy R. Howland, “Women’s Athletic Section News,” JHPE 8.3 (1937): 182–83; Spartan Daily 24.46, December 4, 1935, 4; Spartan Daily 24.50, December 10, 1935, 1, 4.

At Pomona College, the local women’s dance organization presented in December of 1932 a recital with “The Juggler of Notre Dame” as the highlight of the program. See the 1932 Pomona College yearbook, Metate (Claremont, CA: Associated Students of Pomona College, 1932), 101: “Orchesis, a Greek word meaning ‘to dance,’ is an organization founded for girls interested in carrying on their dancing outside of class work. Its meetings are held weekly in the evening with one of the members taking charge. Twice a year, try-outs are held with the president and adviser as judges when any girl of advanced ability and keen interest is eligible for membership. As a Christmas feature this year the group presented a recital on December 15, with individual, group, and comic numbers, where ‘The Juggler of Notre Dame’ was the highlight of the program.” From 1936 to 1938, the dance club presented “The Juggler of Notre Dame” for its annual Christmas assembly. See Marcia L. Lloyd, “NDEO Lifetime of Achievement Award—Elizabeth Roths Hayes: A Biographical Sketch of a Dance Educator,” Journal of Dance Education 3.3 (2003): 103–6, at 104–5.

In 1943, the branch of Orchesis at the State Teacher’s College in La Crosse, Wisconsin presented “The Juggler of Notre Dame.” See Janet Cumming, “News from the Dance Section,” JHPE 14.2 (1943): 106–7, at 106.

“The Juggler” or “Our Lady’s Juggler” is also described in detail as a production of the Choral-Dance-Theatre at the Ohio State University, from 1939 through 1949, but with no mention of either Massenet or Mary Garden. See Helen Paula Alkire and Louis H. Diercks, “Choral, Dance, Theatre,” Music Educators Journal 35.5 (April 1949): 26–28. An oral history interview of Helen Alkire, conducted on November 27, 2001, by Jeanette Sexton furnishes helpful context.

In 1949, it was reported that “The Juggle of Notre Dame” had become a traditional element of the Annual Orchesis Demonstration for Freshmen Women at the University of Utah. See Katherine Wolfe, “News from the Dance Section,” Journal of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation 20.4 (1949): 250. In 1953, a dance drama “The Juggler of Notre Dame” capped the annual spring program at the University of Nebraska. See Margaret Dehaan Freed, “Spotlight on the Dance,” Journal of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation 24.5 (May 1953): 44, 47, 51, at 51.

which took its name. The group was founded at the University of Wisconsin about 1925. A prominent member from the beginning was Miss Berta (sometimes spelled Bertha) Ochsner (Mrs. Douglas Gordon Campbell) (1900–1942). In college, she was president of the parent chapter. Later she would become a well-known dancer and choreographer in the Midwest. She particularly promoted “Juggler of Notre Dame,” but also performed such pieces as Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie” (The sunken cathedral). See Daily Illini 50.101, January 7, 1931, 1; Spartan Daily 25.45, December 2, 1936, 4.

her students organized a dance club. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, “H’Doubler, Margaret,” in International Encyclopedia of Dance, ed. Selma Jean Cohen et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3: 352–53; Janice Ross, Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).

helped to sow throughout the United States such programs for women. On the spread of her teaching from the University of Wisconsin, see J. A. Gray and D. S. Howe, “The Education of Dance Educators at the University of Wisconsin: 1927–1933,” in Dance: The Study of Dance and the Place of Dance in Society. Proceedings of the VIII Commonwealth and International Conference on Sport, Physical Education, Dance, Recreation, and Health. Conference ’86 Glasgow, 18–23 July (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1986), 204–11, at 210.

a book form of “Our Lady’s Juggler.” The item in question was printed with a six-tone illustrated frontispiece, four full-page illustrations, and one small illustrated strip on another page.

two Newbery Honor awards. In 1931 and 1949, for the novel Ood-le-uk the Wanderer by Alice Lide and Margaret Johansen (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930), about an Alaskan Eskimo who crosses the Bering Strait and returns after adventures among Siberian tribesmen; and for the children’s history book The Story of the Negro by the American poet (and member of the Harlem Renaissance) Arnaud “Arna” Bontemps (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). In this period, the aspiring artist was living mostly in the Lower East Side of New York City, and he publicized his portfolio on his own, in hopes of securing work as an illustrator: see his Drawings for Books, Magazines and Advertisements (New York: Raymond Lufkin, 1940).

Oberlin College’s annual calendars. He illustrated the 1941 and 1942 calendars.

the pageant directed by Artz. http://www.oberlin.edu/archive/holdings/finding/RG30/SG142/biography.html

can be harvested elsewhere. In 1945, we read that the “Juggler of Notre Dame” was a customary Christmas vespers program at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, where the dance organization comprised nearly twenty young women (still called “girls” in those days). See Gertrude Lippincott, “News from the Dance Section,” JHPE 16.4 (1945): 197–200, at 197.

another college, in Cleveland, Mississippi. Delta State Teachers College, today’s Delta State University.

a beautiful, miraculous story. The interviewee was Billie Rossie (Tonos). At the time of the performance she was the Grand Stage Manager of the Alpha Psi Omega sorority and the President of Delta Playhouse. The interview, conducted by Brenda Outlaw, took place on September 10, 1999. It is preserved as Delta State University, Charles W. Capps, Jr. Archives and Museum, DSU Oral Histories, no. 266: http://www.deltastate.edu/academics/libraries/university-archives-museum/guides-to-the-collections/oral-histories/delta-state-university-oral-histories/tonos-interview/. Evelyn Hammett (note the correct spelling) was an English professor at Delta State University.

From Opera to Vaudeville

her most famous performances. Frank Cullen, Vaudeville, Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1: 7.

She would dance country style. “I danced my country dances. I played my fiddle. I juggled the three balls, and sometimes I used to let one go and make the people of the village laugh. It made them happier to think I was such a bad juggler. But I was always the boy, excited and awkward and adoring.”

the Mary Garden of vaudeville. In 1911, two papers in Scranton, Pennsylvania refer thus to a Miss Louise Dickinson: Scranton Truth, November 25, 1911, 12; Scranton Republican, November 25, 1911, 18. Two years later, another paper gives the same billing to Belle Story: Westfield (NJ) Leader, March 19, 1913, 2. In 1916, a newspaper in Elmira, New York does likewise in presenting Lucy Tonge: Telegram, May 28, 1916. If the performers lacked in talent, the strategy could backfire because of the false expectations it raised: we read of a woman named Olga Cook that “a new single on the Loew time was much picked upon last week because she was billed as ‘The Mary Garden of Vaudeville’—and disappointed”: Variety 34.5 (April 3, 1914): 15.

the Mary Garden of jazz. The phrase was used to describe Frieda Leonard: see Davenport (Iowa) Democrat and Leader, February 17, 1922, 5.

Sophie Tucker. For “Mary Garden of Vaudeville,” see New York Sun, June 3, 1918, 5; McClure’s Magazine 50 (July 1918): 55. For “Mary Garden of Ragtime,” see Eugene (Oregon) Register-Guard, January 9, 1915, 10; Vancouver (BC) Sun, November 1, 1917; Pacific Coast Musical Review 33.7 (San Francisco, November 17, 1917): 6; Deseret Evening News (Salt Lake City, UT), January 1, 1918. For the context within her career, see Armond Fields, Sophie Tucker: First Lady of Show Business (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), 40, 41, 51, 54, 56, 68.

comedian. At the time, a woman in this capacity was known as a comedienne.

imitator and appropriator of African-American singing. Such a singer risked then being labeled with the racist slur of “coon shouter.”

she proclaimed herself. Eden Elizabeth Kainer, “Vocal Racial Crossover in the Song Performance of Three Iconic American Vocalists: Sophie Tucker, Elsie Janis, and Ella Fitzgerald” (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2008), 82. On Tucker’s byname as “World-Renowned Coon Shouter,” see Lori Harrison-Kahan, The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 25.

a 1918 playbill. The playhouse, known as B. F. Keith’s Theatre, existed from 1894 to 1928, in Boston, Massachusetts. The playbill is for performances in the week of March 25, 1918.

Five Kings of Syncopation. The gentlemen in question were Sam Green, Ed Pressler, Ralph Hertz, Phil Sax, and Pete Quinn.

what she and her backup group looked like. They are pictured on the cover of the sheet music for a hit song in 1918 entitled “Ev’rybody Shimmies Now.”

Other prima donnas. Massenet, Mes souvenirs, 245n1, refers to Geneviève Vix in Buenos Aires in 1915.

an oddity to enliven a repertory. Opera News (Metropolitan Opera Guild) 25 (1960): 709, report on the New England Opera Theater: “The company’s fifteenth season was climaxed by a production of Massenet’s rarely heard jongleur de Notre-Dame.”

Sister Beatrice. In French, Sœur Béatrice.

the exquisite Tombeur. Myrrha Lot-Borodine, trans., Vingt miracles de Notre-Dame, traduits de l’ancien français et précédés d’une introduction, Poèmes et récits de la vieille France, vol. 14 (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1929), v–vi.

Notes to Chapter 3

If a person wished to paint you. Constantine of Rhodes (ca. 870/880–after 931), Epigram for the Virgin, in Anthologia Palatina, book 15, epigram 17, lines 1–6, in The Greek Anthology, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916–1918), 5: 120–23 (for text and translation, which I have modified). To satisfy purists, at the risk of making the elements less approachable to nonspecialists, the poet’s name may be rendered as Konstantinos Rhodios.

The Power of Madonnas in the Round

through compassion. Edward Dowden, A History of French Literature (New York: D. Appleton, 1897), 7: “If there be no other piety in such a tale as this, there is at least the piety of human pity.”

images of the Mother of God. For a quick overview of Madonnas in medieval France, see René Germain, “Les représentations de la Vierge, expression de la foi au Moyen Âge en France,” in Autour du culte marial en Forez: Coutumes, art, histoire. Actes du colloque des 19 et 20 septembre 1997 à l’Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Étienne (Saint-Étienne, France: Université de Saint-Étienne, 1999), 75–83.

regarded as actually animate. Assaf Pinkus, Sculpting Simulacra in Medieval Germany, 1250–1380 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014).

set up to preside over synods. William D. Wixom, Medieval Sculpture at the Metropolitan, 800 to 1400 ([New York]: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 12.

Canticles of Holy Mary. The conventional title in Galician-Portuguese is Cantigas de Santa Maria.

The Mimicking Minstrel. Incipit “Par Deus, muit’ é gran dereito,” Cantigas de Santa María, no. 293, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill, Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise: A Translation of the “Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 173 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), 355.

biblical injunctions. In the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah by Jews and the Pentateuch by Christians, see particularly Exodus 20:4–5 and Deuteronomy 5:8–9.

Worshipers must differentiate. Jean-Marie Sansterre, “Omnes qui coram hac imagine genua flexerint. … La vénération d’images de saints et de la Vierge d’après les textes écrits en Angleterre du milieu du XIe siècle aux premières décennies du XIIIe siècle,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 49.195 (2006): 257–94.

a culmination of aesthetic and formal changes. For the definitive study of this high-water mark, see Ilene H. Forsyth, The Throne of Wisdom: Wood Sculptures of the Madonna in Romanesque France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).

the Latin verb meaning “to stand.” The word is sto, stare.

if the two would have differed much. Nancy Black, “Images of the Virgin Mary in the Soissons Manuscript (Paris, Bnf, Nouv. Acq. Fr. 24541),” in Gautier de Coinci: Miracles, Music, and Manuscripts, ed. Kathy M. Krause and Alison Stones, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, vol. 13 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 253–77, esp. 256–57, 276–77.

not borne in any kind of parade. The technical term for such transportation of a cult object is the verb process, pronounced process (with the stress on the final styllable).

Madonnas in Majesty

He did not remember his mother. Robert Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (London: John Murray, 1849), 427.

on a throne. The ceremonial chair is the cathedra.

all-holy bringer of victory. In Greek, panagia nikopoia.

majesties. The English translates the Italian Madonna in maestà and Latin maiestates respectively.

throne of wisdom. From the Latin sedes sapientiae, literally “seat of wisdom.”

the Mother of God. The conception of Mary as the parent of God was expressed in Greek by the adjective theotokos: the epithet emphasizes by extension that Jesus is God incarnate. The term is rendered in Latin variously by words or phrases meaning “Mother of God,” “begetter of God,” and “bearer of God” (Mater Dei, Dei genitrix, Deipara). Both the epithets and the pose emphasized the role and regal status of the Virgin as the God-Bearer that had been affirmed for her by the Council of Ephesus in 431.

the Word made flesh. John 1:14.

hewn from single tree trunks. Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, 7. For a brief presentation of the major findings in this study, see Ilene Haering Forsyth, “Magi and Majesty: A Study of Romanesque Sculpture and Liturgical Drama,” The Art Bulletin 50 (1968): 215–22.

predominated in the twelfth century. Only later would come images with the Triumph of the Virgin, in which a crowned Mary and the adult Christ are seated alongside each other on a throne or thrones; the Coronation of the Virgin, in which Mary is shown alongside Christ as she is being crowned by an angel or by Christ himself; and the Virgin and Child, in which Mary stands with the babe in one of her arms. A cursory exposition is offered by Penny Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 43–75. For a brilliant and exhaustive study, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

tympana. This architectural term (the singular is tympanum) designates the triangular or semicircular area surrounding an entranceway.

by itself. As in the so-called Royal Portal on the right side of the west façade at the cathedral of Chartres.

depicting the Adoration of the Magi. As on the right side of the west façade at the abbey of Vézelay.

Madonnine images. Michael P. Carroll, Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 17, argues that strict usage requires speaking of Madonnine rather than Marian images, since Madonnas are many but Mary unique.

cease-and-desist order. John Ruskin, “Mornings in Florence,” §35, in idem, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), 23: 330.

paint and other pigments applied. On the twelfth-century Morgan Madonna from Auvergne, see Marco Leona, “Microanalysis of Organic Pigments and Glazes in Polychrome Works of Art by Surface-Enhanced Resonance Raman Scattering,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106.35 (2009): 14757–62. On The Cloisters’s twelfth-century Montvianex Madonna from Auvergne, see Lucretia G. Kargere, “The Montvianex Madonna: Materials and Techniques in 12th Century Auvergne,” ICOM Committee for Conservation: 13th Triennial Meeting, Rio de Janeiro, 22–27 September 2002. Preprints, 2 vols. (London: James & James, 2002), 2: 507–12.

a standing Virgin and Child. The statue is held by the Dumbarton Oaks Museum (accession number BZ.1912.2): see Gary Vikan, Catalogue of the Sculpture in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection from the Ptolemaic to the Renaissance (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1995), 123–26, no. 45.

Morgan Madonna. So called because it was a gift from J. Pierpont Morgan in 1916, and was renowned already before being given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The loveliness of the stained glass. Yves Delaporte, Les trois Notre-Dame de la cathédrale de Chartres: Étude suivie de la liste des images de la Vierge appartenant à la cathédrale et de quelques mots sur le pèlerinage de Chartres, 2nd ed. (Chartres, France: Étienne Houvet, 1965); Chantal Bouchon et al., “La Belle-Verrière de Chartres,” Revue de l’art 46 (1979): 16–24 (for detailed examination of the dating of the different restorations within the window).

one manuscript. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 3516, fol. 127r (dated 1268).

Lambeth Apocalypse. Its shelfmark is London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 209; this image is fol. iiv. The whole manuscript is available in facsimile in Nigel Morgan, ed., The Lambeth Apocalypse, Manuscript 209 in Lambeth Palace Library (London: Harvey Miller, 1990). The folio side has been reproduced in Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 228, fig. 120.

Multiple paintings purportedly by the Evangelist. The Hodegetria in Blachernae, in the northwestern section of Constantinople, is the earliest case in point, while the icon in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome rates as the most important in the West.

contact with Islam. The locus classicus is Gustave E. von Grunebaum, “Byzantine Iconoclasm and the Influence of the Islamic Environment,” History of Religions 2.1 (1962): 1–10.

between 754 and 787. In 754, the council of Blachernae, far from unanimously, paved the way for Emperor Constantine V to legislate against images. In the aftermath, icons were removed, hidden, painted over, and burned. Then in 787, Empress Irene, with the backing of the Second Council of Nicaea, countermanded the policies that had favored iconoclasm.

Charlemagne’s Books. In Latin, Libri Carolini, also known as Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (The Work of King Charles against the Synod), most likely the product of Bishop Theodulf of Orléans, a Visigoth from what is now Spain in the service of Charlemagne.

a thinking exercise or brainteaser. Theodulf of Orléans, Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (Libri Carolini), ed. Ann Freeman (Hannover, Germany: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1998), 528 (line 41)–529 (line 8); trans. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, Medieval Aesthetics, ed. Cyril Barrett, 3 vols. (The Hague: Mouton, 1970–1974), 2: 100 (with modifications): “Offeruntur cuilibet eorum, qui imagines adorant, verbi gratia duarum feminarum pulcrarum imagines superscriptione carentes, quas ille parvipendens abicit abiectasque duolibet in loco iacere permittit. Dicit illi quis: ‘Una illarum sanctae Mariae imago est, abici non debet; altera Veneris, quae omnino abicienda est’; vertit se ad pictorem quaerens ab eo, quia in omnibus simillimae sunt, quae illarum sanctae Mariae imago sit vel quae Veneris? Ille huic dat superscriptionem sanctae Mariae, illi vero superscriptionem Veneris: ista, quia superscriptionem Dei genetricis habet, erigitur, honoratur, osculatur; illa, quia inscriptionem Veneris, Aeneae cuiusdam profugi genetricis, habet, deicitur, exprobratur, exsecratur. Pari utraeque sunt figura, paribus coloribus, paribusque facte materiis, superscriptione tantum distant.” (“To one of those who venerate pictures, the pictures of two beautiful women were shown without any captions, which a person had thrown away, caring little for them. Someone said to him: ‘One of these is a picture of the Virgin Mary and should not be thrown away; the other is of Venus, and should at all costs be thrown away.’ The man turned to the artist and asked him which one was the picture of Mary, and which one was of Venus, for they were alike in all regards. The painter supplied one picture with the caption The Virgin Mary, and the other with the caption Venus. The picture with the caption Mother of God, was elevated, venerated and kissed, and the other, because it had the caption Venus, was maligned, scorned and cursed, although both were equal in shape and color, and were made of identical material, and differed only in caption.”)

the Mother of God might be mistaken. Ed. Freeman 540 (lines 15–36); trans. Ann Freeman, “Scripture and Images in the Libri Carolini,” in idem, Theodulf of Orléans: Charlemagne’s Spokesman against the Second Council of Nicaea (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Variorum, 2003), 163–88, at 165: “Even if we suppose that an image of the Holy Mother of God ought to be adored, how are we to identify her image, or differentiate it from other images? When we see a beautiful woman depicted with a child in her arms, with no inscription provided, how are we to know whether it is Sarah holding Isaac, or Rebecca with Jacob, or Bathsheba with Solomon, or Elizabeth with John, or indeed any other woman with her child? Or if we consider the fables of gentiles, which are often depicted, how are we to know whether it is Venus with Aeneas, or Alcmene with Hercules, or Andromache with Astyanax? For if one is adored for another, that is delusion, and if one is adored that should never have been adored, that is madness.”

This monk and writer of Saint Gall. Ekkehard IV, St. Galler Klostergeschichten/Ekkehard IV, chap. 45, trans. Hans F. Haefele, Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters, vol. 10 (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 102. For discussion, see Jean-Marie Sansterre, “Le moine ciseleur, la Vierge Marie et son image: Un récit d’Ekkehart IV de Saint-Gall,” Revue bénédictine 106.1–2 (1996): 185–91.

a reverie by Abbot Robert of Mozat. The text of the Visio monachi Rotberti by Deacon Arnaldus is extant in Clermont-Ferrand, Bibliothèque du patrimoine (formerly Bibliothèque communautaire et interuniversitaire, itself formerly Bibliothèque municipale), MS 145, fols. 130–134. The drawing appears on fol. 130v. The manuscript was copied at the end of the tenth or the beginning of the eleventh century, in a manuscript of Gregory of Tours. The juxtaposition of the two texts may have been deliberate. For edition and commentary, see René Rigodon, “Vision de Robert, abbé de Mozat, au sujet de la Basilique de la Mère de Dieu édifiée dans la Ville des Avernes, relation par la diacre Arnaud,” Bulletin historique et scientifique de l’Auvergne 70 (1950): 22–55. For analysis, see Dominique Iogna-Prat, “La Vierge en Majesté du manuscript 145 de la Bibliothèque municipale de Clermont-Ferrand,” L’Europe et la Bible, ed. Mireille Mentré and Bernard Dompnier (Clermont-Ferrand: Bibliothèque municipale et interuniversitaire de Clermont-Ferrand, 1992), 87–108. For Rigodon’s edition, a French translation, and further analysis, see Monique Goullet and Dominique Iogna-Prat, “La Vierge en Majesté de Clermont-Ferrand,” in Marie: Le culte de la Vierge dans la société médiévale, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), 383–405. For an English translation, see Sarah Jane Boss, ed., Mary: The Complete Resource (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 173–76.

crafted in 946. The statue no longer exists, having been destroyed in the French Revolution, but for a long time it stood on a column behind the altar in the central apse.

cathedral of Clermont. Now Clermont-Ferrand, in southeastern central France.

dated to the mid-twelfth century. More precisely, it has been placed during the abbacy of Wazelin II, ca. 1149–1158.

as she suckles the infant Jesus. The pose is known in the Greek East as Virgin Galaktotrophousa (meaning literally “milk-nursing”), in the West as Maria lactans. Jacques Stiennon, “La Vierge de dom Rupert,” in Saint-Laurent de Liège: Église, abbaye et hôpital. Mille ans d’histoire, ed. Rita Lejeune (Liège, Belgium: Soledi, 1968), 81–92.

Both figures are haloed. Surrounding the Virgin is a rounded Romanesque arch that bears a Latin inscription from Ezekiel 44:2: “This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall pass through it: because the Lord God of Israel hath entered in by it.”

Animated Images

Ekkehard IV. Ekkehard IV, Casus Sancti Galli 45, in idem, St. Galler Klostergeschichten, 102. On the live quality of cult images, see Ellert Dahl, “Heavenly Images: The Statue of St. Foy of Conques and the Signification of the Medieval ‘Cult-Image’ in the West,” Acta ad archaeologiam et atrium historiam pertinentia 8 (1978): 175–91, at 188–89.

the effigy is unique. The most exhaustive study of the image is now Beate Fricke, Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conques and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art, trans. Andrew Griebeler, Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages, vol. 7 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015).

Faith. Sainte Foy in French, Sancta Fides in Latin.

the place from which he has taken his name. In northwestern France.

Conques. In the southwest.

Book of Miracles of Saint Faith. In Latin, Liber miraculorum sancte fidis.

rendering supernatural the being represented. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 299.

It was an image made with such precision. Liber miraculorum sancte fidis, 1.13.5, ed. Luca Robertini, Biblioteca di Medioevo Latino, vol. 10 (Spoleto, Italy: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1994), 112 “[statuam] ita ad humane figure vultum expresse effigiatam, ut plerique rusticis videntes se perspicaci intuitu videatur videre oculique reverberantibus precantium votis aliquando placidius favere”; The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 77. For a description of the statue and of Bernard’s reactions to it, see Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, Writing Faith: Text, Sign, and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5–6, 41. For the broadest context, see Jean Taralon and Dominique Taralon-Carlini, “La Majesté d’or de Sainte Foy de Conques,” Bulletin monumental 155 (1997): 11–73.

a learned companion who was punished. The reactions of Bernard and his companion were reenacted centuries afterward by another author. In keeping with the earlier-mentioned Charlemagne’s Books, this later writer took exception to having the Virgin Mary put on a par with an ancient statue of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. “Can Our Lady wish to be represented in a sculpted image as Vesta did?” The quotation is provided in translation by Camille, Gothic Idol, 221–22, 383n51, who ascribes it to Peter Abelard, Commentaria in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos (Commentary on Romans) 1:32, in his Opera theologica, ed. E. M. Buytaert, Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio mediaevalis, vols. 11–15, 190 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1969–2004), 11: 75. Despite the seeming precision of the citation, the cited passage in Abelard does not mention the Virgin in conjunction with Vesta (or with Venus). The miscitation has been followed by other scholars, notably Diana Webb, “Image and Pilgrimage: The Virgin Mary in the Later Middle Ages,” in Mary for Time and Eternity: Papers on Mary and Ecumenism given at International Congresses of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Chester (2002) and Bath (2004), a Conference at Woldingham (2003), and Other Meetings in 2005, ed. William M. McLoughlin and Jill Pinnock (Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 2007), 349–66, at 349, 364n1, and Katherine Allen Smith, “Bodies of Unsurpassed Beauty: ‘Living’ Images of the Virgin in the High Middle Ages,” Viator 37 (2006): 167–87, at 175n35.

inflicting multiple wounds upon them. Leopold Kretzenbacher, Das verletzte Kultbild: Voraussetzungen, Zeitschichten und Aussagewandel eines abendländischen Legendentypus, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, Jahrgang 1977, vol. 1 (Munich, Germany: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1977), 72–80.

major financial and forensic transactions. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 301.

Our Lady of Under the Earth. The French is found alternatively as Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre (with or without the hyphens).

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Adams, Mont Saint Michel et Chartres (henceforth MSMC), chap. 7, “Roses and Apses,” in Henry Adams, Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (New York: Library of America, 1983), 441.

Nativity and Epiphany plays. See Forsyth, “Magi and Majesty,” 215–22; idem, Throne of Wisdom, 49–60. One major text of this type was on the Adoration of the Magi, the Officium stellae or The Office of the Star.

they could serve as proxies. On their use in the Epiphany drama, Erwin Rosenthal, “The Crib of Greccio and Franciscan Realism,” The Art Bulletin 36.1 (March 1954): 57–60, at 59.

in a grotto. See Tommaso da Celano, Vita seconda, 30.84, and Bonaventura da Bagnoregio, Leggenda maggiore 10.7, in Fonti francescane: Editio minor (Assisi, Italy: Editrici Francescane, 1988), 267–70, 605–6 respectively. The grotto was later transformed into a chapel dedicated to Saint Luke, which contains two frescos from the fourteenth century.

the first crèche. Amédée Gastoué, Noël: Origines et développements de la fête (Paris: Bloude, 1908), 10–22; Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 2: 24–28; Rosenthal, “Crib of Greccio”; Roberta Fidanzia, “L’immagine del Presepe nelle fonti francescane,” Storia del mondo 19 (January 5, 2004), http://www.storiadelmondo.com/19/fidanzia.presepe.pdf. In Italian the corresponding term is presepio.

a statue of the Virgin Mary in the round. Rosenthal, “Crib of Greccio,” 59.

a fresco. Dated 1296–1300.

Giotto. To give his name in full, Giotto di Bondone, in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi. 270 x 230 cm.

places an image of the infant Jesus within a humble cowshed. The Christmas Eve placement of Jesus in the crèche is documented widely in media.

shrine Madonnas. For a fine study, see Elina Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). They are also known by the French Vierges ouvrantes, which translates literally (and a little peculiarly) as “opening Virgins.”

Miracles of Madonnas

The most beautiful blooms. Karl Storck, “Kritische Rückschau über Konzert und Oper,” Der Klavier-Lehrer: Musik-pädagogische Zeitschrift für alle Gebiete der Tonkunst 29.1 (1906): 6–9, at 7.

tales of miracles of the Virgin. Jean-Marie Sansterre, “La Vierge Marie et ses images chez Gautier de Coinci et Césaire de Heisterbach,” Viator 41 (2010): 147–78. On Madonnas in Caesarius, see Egid Beitz, Caesarius von Heisterbach und die bildende Kunst (Augsburg, Germany: Benno Filser, 1926), 37–43.

already totaled almost 1800. The tally exceeds 1780 in Albert Poncelet, “Index miraculorum B.V. Mariae quae saec. VI–XV latine conscripta sunt,” Analecta Bollandiana 21 (1902): 242–360.

two-dimensional paintings. In medieval French the paintings are designated tavletes or tavletes paintes, single-panel paintings or portable carved and painted sculptures.

three-dimensional statues. The statues are usually to be placed on altars. On both the paintings and statues, see Black, “Images of the Virgin Mary,” 253–77, especially at 256–57, 276.

statues that come to life. Camille, Gothic Idol, 222.

Golden Madonna of Essen. For details on the image, see Frank Fehrenbach, Die Goldene Madonna im Essener Münster: Der Körper der Königin, ed. Michael Bockemühl et al., KunstOrt Ruhrgebiet, vol. 4 (Ostfildern, Germany: Edition Tertium, 1996).

earliest known. Dated conjecturally to ca. 980–990.

when Christ was said to be made man. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, 7: 36, ed. Joseph Strange, 2 vols. (Cologne: J. M. Heberle, 1851), 2: 65; trans. H. Von Essen Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, as The Dialogue on Miracles, 2 vols. (London: G. Routledge, 1929), 2: 530.

at Déols, near Châteauroux. Jean Hubert, “Le miracle de Déols et la trêve conclue en 1187 entre les rois de France et d’Angleterre,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 96.1 (1935): 285–300; André Vauchez, “L’image vivante: Quelques réflexions sur les fonctions des représentations iconographiques dans le domaine religieux en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge,” in Pauvres et riches: Société et culture du Moyen Âge aux temps modernes. Mélanges offerts à Bronislaw Geremek, ed. Maurice Aymard et al. (Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictno naukowe PWN, 1992), 231–40, at 236, repr. André Vauchez, “Les images saintes: Représentations iconographiques et manifestations du sacré,” in idem, Saints, prophètes et visionnaires: Le pouvoir surnaturel au Moyen Âge (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), 79–91, 240–42, at 85–86; Sansterre, “Omnes qui coram hac imagine genua flexerint,” 278–80.

described as having feelings. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 303.

effusions reported. See Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, 3n2; Freedberg, Power of Images, 283–316; Camille, Gothic Idol, 220–41.

spitting image. Laurence R. Horn, “Spitten Image: Etymythology and Fluid Dynamics,” American Speech 79.1 (2004): 33–58.

blood-type analysis. Raffaele Palmirotta et al., “Origin and Gender Determination of Dried Blood on a Statue of the Virgin Mary,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 43.2 (1998): 431–34.

such noteworthy events. Somewhat separate are images that do not become enlivened by turning into the Virgin they represent but that nonetheless move themselves. Often, statues that have been buried or hidden return to the place where they were discovered, as a sign that a sanctuary should be erected in the find-spot. See René Laurentin and Patrick Sbalchiero, “Spostamenti,” in Dizionario delle “apparizioni” della vergine Maria, ed. René Laurentin and Patrick Sbalchiero (Rome: Edizioni ART, 2010), 726.

we saw a statue of the blessed Virgin. Theodore G. Tappert, ed. and trans., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1959), 234. This is cited by Bridget Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56, where at n. 135 other similar accounts from the first half of the sixteenth century are noted.

Two such installations. Theodore Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 22, reported on one that was exhibited in the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism in Leningrad. No such item is found now in the State Museum of the History of Religion in Saint Petersburg. For a description of such a mechanism on display eighty years ago in an installation at the former Strassnoi Monastery in Moscow, see Adam Jolles, “Stalin’s Talking Museums,” Oxford Art Journal 28.3 (2005): 429–55, at 447.

miracle at the Blachernae chapel. Henri Barré, “Plaidoyer monastique pour le samedi marial,” Revue bénédictine 77 (1967): 375–99, at 381; Venance Grumel, “Le ‘miracle habituel’ de Notre-Dame des Blachernes à Constantinople,” Échos d’Orient 30.162 (1931): 129–46; Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icon and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 144–63, 236–42 (“The Blachernai Responds: The Icon of the ‘Usual Miracle’”).

the famous scene. The still of the skirt-blowing scene has become iconic, in a twentieth-century and later sense of the adjective, but not in a way that a medieval Byzantine would have comprehended.

a flurry of experiences in 1796 and 1797. Massimo Cattaneo, Gli occhi di Maria sulla rivoluzione: “Miracoli” a Roma e nello Stato della Chiesa (1796–1797) (Rome: Istituto nazionale di studi romani, 1995).

a Madonna in Boston’s North End. The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles, prod. Beth Harrington, Independent Television Service, April 1, 1997. The effigy in question was the Madonna del Soccorso (Our Lady of Help).

a snoozing pilgrim. Miracles of Simon de Montfort, in The Chronicle of William de Rishanger, of the Barons’ War, the Miracles of Simon de Montfort, ed. James Orchard Halliwell, Camden Society Publications, vol. 15 (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1840), 107–8. The interpretation of the scene is found in Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 34.

Walcourt. In the province of Namur in Belgium.

sheathed in silver. The sculpture was supposedly carved by Saint Maternus.

a nobleman. The aristocrat in question was purportedly Count Thierry II of Walcourt.

as he stood outside. Thierry Réjalot, Notre-Dame de Walcourt: Manuel du pèlerin & du visiteur au Sanctuaire de Notre-Dame de Walcourt (Walcourt, Belgium: R. Bughin-Baisir, 1938), 6–67, 22; Le culte de Notre-Dame de Walcourt (Namur, Belgium: Georges Dereine, 2000).

Black Virgin. Ean C. M. Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin, rev. and expanded ed. (London: Arkana, 1996), 162; Le culte de Notre-Dame de Walcourt, 34–36 (the image), 37–43 (the annual procession); Paul Lievens, Walcourt en cartes postales anciennes: Texte et collection (Cerfontaine, Belgium: Musée & Cercle d’histoire de Cerfontaine, 1997), 17–18 (the image), 19 (the image in procession).

responded by blessing him. Frederic C. Tubach, Index exemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1969), 390 (no. 5155).

The Lord is with you. In Latin, Dominus tecum. Tubach, Index exemplorum, 39 (no. 433).

A third related. Tubach, Index exemplorum, 39 (no. 439).

Afflighem. In the Belgian province of Flemish Brabant.

Greetings, Bernard. In Latin, Salve, Bernarde. For some information, see Carl Neumann, Bernhard von Clairvaux und die Anfänge des zweiten Kreuzzuges (Heidelberg, Germany: Carl Winter, 1992), 37–38.

the Lactation of the Virgin. From the vast bibliography on the topic, note Jacques Berlioz, “La lactation de Saint-Bernard dans un ‘exemplum’ et une miniature du Ci nous dit (début du XIVe siècle),” Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses 39.3–4 (1988): 270–84; Léon Dewez and Albert van Iterson, “La lactation de St. Bernard: Légende et iconographie,” Cîteaux in de Nederlanden 7 (1956): 165–89; Cécile Dupeux, “La lactation de Saint Bernard de Clairvaux: Genèse et évolution d’une image,” in L’Image et la production du sacré: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 20–21 janvier 1988, organisé par le Centre d’historique des religions de l’Université de Strasbourg II, Groupe “Théorie et pratique de l’image cultuelle,” ed. Françoise Dunand et al. (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1991), 165–93. For more information, see James France, Medieval Images of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 210 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2007), xxi–xxii.

The likeness in the miracle of the Lactation. Although the original was destroyed by fire in the eighteenth century, the replacement survives.

Hail, Star of the Sea. In Latin, Ave, maris stella.

show yourself as a mother. In Latin, Monstra te esse matrem.

suckling brother of Christ. Or “foster-brother of Christ,” collactaneus Christi in Latin.

a heretic named Tanchelm. For general background on this character, see Herbert Grundmann, Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalter, 2nd ed. (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1967), 15–18; Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 50–52. The episode discussed here was retold by Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, 45. See also Smith, “Bodies of Unsurpassed Beauty.” For the Latin text, see Paul Fredericq, ed., Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae, 5 vols. (Ghent, Belgium: J. Vuylsteke, 1889–1906), 1:15–18; trans. Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 99–100.

a motif that is common in Marian miracles. Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, 46–47; Claudio Galderisi, “Le récit du mariage avec la statue: Résurgences et modalités narratives,” Romania: Revue trimestrielle consacrée à l’étude des langues et des littératures romanes 119.1 (2001): 170–95. For the overview that is most comprehensive chronologically, geographically, and thematically, see the chapter entitled “Image as Theme: Venus and the Ring” in Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images, 18–77.

William of Malmesbury. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum (The History of the English Kings), 2.205, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, Oxford Medieval Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998–1999), 381–85.

The Ring Given to Venus. See William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, ed. Florence S. Boos, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 2: 569–608.

Metamorphoses. 10.243–97.

Romance of the Rose. In French, Roman de la Rose.

many troubling overtones. On the Pygmalion story in the Romance of the Rose, see Douglas Galbi’s purplemotes.net, https://www.purplemotes.net/2015/05/31/romance-rose-sexual-fulfillment/

One miracle. Gabriela Signori, Maria zwischen Kathedrale, Kloster und Welt: Hagiographische und historiographische Annäherungen an eine hochmittelalterliche Wunderpredigt (Sigmaringen, Germany: Jan Thorbecke, 1995), 90–91; Smith, “Bodies of Unsurpassed Beauty,” 175–76; Jean-Marie Sansterre, “Sacralité et pouvoir thaumaturgique des statues mariales (Xe siècle–première moitié du XIIIe siècle),” Revue Mabillon 22 (2011): 53–77, at 60–61.

A historian of ballet. Carol Lee, Ballet in Western Culture: A History of Its Origins and Evolution (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), 15.

One American illustrator. L. A. Patterson.

she could have put her babysitter-less moppet down. In tale 59 of the Old French Life of the Fathers, the Virgin sets the Child at her feet. Unfortunately, this tale is not among those thus far edited in Félix Lecoy, ed., La Vie des Pères (Paris: Société des anciens textes français, A. et J. Picard, 1987–1999).

resumed her place in the artwork. For brief orientation, see Frederika H. Jacobs, Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 96–97. For full details, Anna Benvenuti, ed., Santa Maria delle Carceri a Prato: Miracoli e devozione in un santuario toscano del Rinascimento (Florence: Mandragora, 2005); Robert Maniura, “The Images and Miracles of Santa Maria delle Carceri,” in The Miraculous Image: In the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf, Analecta Romana Instituti Danici. Supplementum, vol. 35 (Rome: Bibliotheca Hertziana, 2004), 81–95. The boy was named, to accord him full onomastic splendor, Jacopino d’Antonio di Ser Nichola di Ser Tingo Lapovera.

enlisted an architect. The designer was Giuliano da Sangallo; the church, Santa Maria delle Carceri. The development of the cult was well documented from 1484 to 1505. See Isabella Gagliardi, “I miracoli della Madonna delle Carceri in due codici della Biblioteca Roncioniana di Prato,” in Benvenuti, Santa Maria delle Carceri a Prato, 97–153.

ignoring the child to focus on Mary. Ruth Sawyer, The Way of the Storyteller (New York: Viking, 1942), 231–41, at 241: “It is no longer a figure there who smiles—it is the living Mother of Jesus. She leans far down and gathers that small king of the jugglers into Her arms and cradles him. He who has never known cradling knows a mother’s arms at last, the close, everlasting blessing they give.” In the first sentence, Sawyer addresses the mystery of the relationship between the Madonna and the Virgin, while in the second she manages at once to accentuate Mary’s maternal quality and to leave us guessing about what she does with her own infant.

the Protestant John Ruskin and the Catholic Marcel Proust. Cynthia J. Gamble, “Proust-Ruskin Perspectives on La Vierge Doreé at Amiens Cathedral,” Word & Image 9 (1993): 270–86, at 273–74. Gamble points out later, p. 286, that Proust never saw the carving in person, but had viewed a plaster cast. In addition, he owned a photograph of it that hung in his bedroom: see Mary Bergstein, “Proust and Photography: The Invention of Balbec through Visual Resources,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 29.4 (2013): 307–32, at 326.

primarily as a maiden. Smith, “Bodies of Unsurpassed Beauty,” 179–80.

Notes to Chapter 4

the medieval is linked to decay. Alice Chandler, “Order and Disorder in the Medieval Revival,” Browning Institute Studies 8 (1980): 1–9, at 7.

Grottoes and Crypts

going “downhill.” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 14–21.

sundry derivations. Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine: Histoire des mots, 4th ed. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979), 661; Alois Walde and Johann Baptist Hofmann, Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 6th ed. (Heidelberg, Germany: Carl Winter, 2007), 2: 618–19, s.v. sublīmis.

katabasis. Also spelled catabasis.

Aeneas reaches the underworld. On Aeneid 6, see Raymond J. Clark, Catabasis: Vergil and the Wisdom-Tradition (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1979).

the underlying Latin adjective. The relevant Latin words are sub, “under,” and tēla, “web”: see Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 188–89.

Such a fine line is textural. On the underlying metaphor, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, “Text and Textuality, Medieval and Modern,” in Der unfeste Text: Perspektiven auf einen literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Leitbegriff, ed. Barbara Sabel and André Bucher (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), 109–31.

a descendant of the noun. Lines 113, 266, 402, 667. The French word is crote or croute.

Latin crypta. Also commonly written crupta.

derives from Latin. The same holds true for a large number of cognate nouns in other Germanic languages.

the crypt of a church. Oxford English Dictionary, s.vv. undercroft and croft sb. As such, it is like related words in Middle Dutch and Dutch, Middle Low German, and Old High German.

from the more recent constructions above. Think of the multitiered San Clemente in Rome. The high-medieval basilica resides atop a fourth-century one, converted from a nobleman’s home, which has beneath it a Mithraeum above a former villa and warehouse.

a downbeat outcome. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 16.

the location of the jongleur’s routine. Sansterre, “La Vierge Marie et ses images,” 152–53n33.

The spire justifies the church. Henry Adams, MSMC, chap. 16, “Saint Thomas Aquinas,” 691.

in his novel La Cathédrale (The Cathedral). J.-K. Huysmans, La cathédrale (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1898), 68, cited by Joëlle Prungnaud, Gothique et décadence: Recherches sur la continuité d’un mythe et d’un genre au XIXe siècle en Grande-Bretagne et en France, Bibliothèque de littérature générale et comparée, vol. 7 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), 278.

victims of Nazi concentration camps. To be more specific, it commemorates the 200,000 people who were deported for such internment from Vichy France. Inaugurated in 1962, this construction is architecturally discrete and sited behind the church proper, at the tip of the Île de la Cité, the natural island in the Seine on which the cathedral is located.

His romance. In German, the text is known as Jüngerer Titurel; in English, as either Later Titurel or Younger Titurel. Completed before 1272, the poem expanded, to over 6300 lines, fragments of the Titurel written by Wolfram von Eschenbach.

but instead in radiant space. The description of the Grail temple comes from Albrecht von Scharfenberg, Jüngerer Titurel, stanzas 329–439 (alternate numbering, 311–415), ed. Werner Wolf, 6 vols., Deutsche Texte des Mittelalters, vols. 45, 55, 61, 73, 77, 79 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1955–1995), 1: 83–110. The stanza against crypts is 408 (alternate numbering 386), at 1: 103; Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 10, 184.

Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris. Translated into English often as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

harems of women. Simmons, Popular Medievalism, 141–65.

subterraneous dungeons. Review of Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk, A Romance (1796), in Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Raysor (London: Constable, 1936), 370–78, at 370.

associations with trapdoors. Gary Richard Thompson, “Introduction,” in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. idem (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1974), 1.

cryptic subterranean spaces. David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 51.

above (or below) all, crypt. Prungnaud, Gothique et décadence, 56–58.

Milk Grotto. On this site, see Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1: 137–57. On past pilgrimage to it, see Edmund Waterton, Pietas Mariana Britannica: A History of English Devotion to the Most Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of God. With a Catalogue of Shrines, Sanctuaries, Offerings, Bequests, and Other Memorials of the Piety of Our Forefathers (London: St. Joseph’s Catholic Library, 1879), 2: 202–5. On present-day frequentation of it, see Susan Starr Sered, “Rachel’s Tomb and the Milk Grotto of the Virgin Mary: Two Women’s Shrines in Bethlehem,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 2.2 (1986): 7–22.

The Crypt, or, Receptacle for Things Past. Vols. 1–3 (Ringwood, UK: W. Wheaton), August 3, 1827–December 1, 1828).

locked space within the subject’s ego. Christine Berthin, Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), who relies on Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.

full-blown monasteries. For example, the literature on the rock-cut cave monasteries and hermitages of Cappadocia is vast. For a classic study, see Spiro Kostof, Caves of God: Cappadocia and Its Churches, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

The built areas officially at his disposal. On the spaces accessible to lay brothers, see Megan Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces and Their Meanings: Thirteenth-Century English Cistercian Monasteries. Medieval Church Studies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001, 1: 171–80; Terryl N. Kinder, Cistercian Europe: Architecture of Contemplation, Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 191 (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2002), 305–32.

Madonnas in Crypts

Trinity Church. Begun in 1839 and dedicated in 1846 by the architect Richard Upjohn.

Raphael’s Madonna before a tolerable sign painting. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, reprinted in A. J. Downing, Rural Essays, ed. George William Curtis (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853).

were famously negative. Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Bernd Nicolai, “Die Entdeckung des Bildwerks: Frühe Marienbilder und Altarretabel unter dem Aspekt zisterziensischer Frömmigkeit,” Studien zur Geschichte der europäischen Skulptur im 12.–13. Jahrhundert (1994): 29–43.

illuminated book of hours. The manuscript dates from just after the middle of the fifteenth century.

Peter Abelard referred to jongleurs. Theologia Christiana, 2.129, in Peter Abelard, Opera theologica, ed. Buytaert, 12: 193, lines 1982–84: “Totus flagrat et anhelat animus foras ad curiam daemonum et conuentus histrionum, ubi sunt in oblationibus prodigi et cum summo silentio et toto desiderio attenti illi, ut dictum est, diabolicae praedicationi.”

ceaseless cosmic dance. James Miller, Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity, Visio, Studies in the Relations of Art and Literature, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986).

quintessential emptiness. Peter Brooks, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968).

formations analogous to manmade structures. Dominick Daniel Daly, “Caves at Sungei Batu in Selangor,” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 3 (July 1879): 116–19, at 117: “The roof and sides of the caves, which were 50 to 70 feet high and some 60 feet wide, were beautifully arched, presenting the appearance of a great Gothic dome, with curved arches and giant buttresses. Verily there was a stillness and sublimity in this work of nature that even surpassed the awe of the holy place raised by human art.”

it earned this designation. Robert Davidson, An Excursion to the Mammoth Cave, and the Barrens of Kentucky: With Some Notices of the Early Settlement of the State (Lexington, KY: A. T. Skillman and Son, 1840), wrote of “Gothic screenwork” (p. 14) and “a beautiful and regularly-shaped dome, running up to a point, and ribbed, like old Gothic masonry” (p. 57; see also 69). Later, the name Gothic Cave is mentioned in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (1851), 356, and the alternate Gothic Gallery is attested a quarter century later in The Illustrated London News (1876).

Lehman Cave. This geological feature is located within what is presently the Great Basin National Park.

gorgeously banded alabaster columns. The quotation is from Horace Bath and Gus Newman, “Nature’s Treasure House Lies Buried in White Pine County,” The Twenty-Thirtian Magazine 7.6 (March 1933): 18–19, 32–33, at 33.

Cistercian Crypts

one of their statutes. Statute 20, in Bernard of Clairvaux, Statuta capitulorum generalium ordinis Cisterciensis ab anno 1116 ad annum 1786, ed. Joseph-Marie Canivez, 8 vols., Bibliothèque de la Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, vol. 9 (Leuven, Belgium: Bureaux de la Revue, 1933–1941), 1: 12–32, at 17; trans. in Rudolph, “Things of Greater Importance,” 185–86: “Concerning Sculptures, Paintings, and the Wooden Cross: We forbid sculptures or paintings in either our churches or in any of the rooms of the monastery, because when attention is turned to such things the advantage of good meditation or the discipline of religious gravity is often neglected. However, we do have painted crosses that are of wood.” On the dating, see Conrad Rudolph, “The ‘Principal Founders’ and the Early Artistic Legislation of Cîteaux,” in Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture, ed. Meredith P. Lillich, vol. 3, 6 vols., Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 89 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987), 1–45.

in a cloister near Groningen. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum 7.46, 2: 65–66. On Caesarius and images, see Beitz, Caesarius von Heisterbach, 38–43; Nicolai, “Die Entdeckung des Bildwerks.”

boxed a nun on the ear. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum 7.33, 2: 41–42.

Virgin of Mercy. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum 7.59, 12.37, 2: 79–80, 346–347. The Virgin of Mercy is often designated by scholars with the German Schutzmantelmadonna.

Marvelous Valley. In Latin, Mira Vallis.

Chapel-by-the-Gate. On its seal, see The Victoria History of the County of Warwick, vol. 2, ed. William Page (London: Archibald Constable, 1908), 75–78 (no. 9 Abbey of Merevale), at 78: “The thirteenth-century seal is pointed oval; the Virgin, with crown, seated on a throne, under a trefoiled canopy, pinnacled and crocketed, supported on slender shafts; the Child on the left knee. In base, an ornamental corbel. In the field, on the left, a dexter hand and arm issuing, grasping a pastoral staff; on the right a crescent between two stars. Legend:—. . ABBATIS ET CONVE . . . IREVALL . . .”

a mob was nearly trampled to death. Roy Midmer, English Mediaeval Monasteries (1066–1540): A Summary (London: Heinemann, 1979), 218.

to help raise funds after buildings were destroyed. Janet Burton and Julie Kerr, The Cistercians in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2011), 135.

pre-Cistercian constructions. Kinder, Cistercian Europe, 165.

years of shoveling at Clairvaux. Terry N. Kinder, “Les églises médiévales de Clairvaux: Probabilités et fiction,” in Histoire de l’abbaye de Clairvaux: Actes du colloque de Bar-sur-Aube I Clairvaux, 22 et 23 juin 1990, ed. Benoît Chauvin (Bar-sur-Aube, France: Association Renaissance de l’abbaye de Clairvaux, 1991), 204–29. See Bretel, Le jongleur de Notre-Dame, 116–17.

it too has no basement. Jean-Michel Musso and Michel Miguet, “Le bâtiment des convers de l’abbaye de Clairvaux: Histoire, archéologie, restauration,” Les cahiers de la Ligue urbaine et rurale 109 (1990): 24–32, especially at 30–31.

chevet. This term, from the French for “headpiece,” designates the choir and apse, with the chapels that radiate from them.

Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders. De oorkonden der graven van Vlaanderen (1191–aanvang 1206), ed. Walter Prevenier, 3 vols., Recueil des actes des princes belges/Académie royale de Belgique, Commission royale d’histoire = Verzameling van de akten der belgische vorsten/Koninklijke Akademie van België, Koninklijke Commissie voor Geschiedenis, vols. 5–6 (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1964–1971), 2: 509–12, no. 243. On the chapel, see Anselme Dimier, “La chapelle des comtes de Flandre à Clairvaux,” Annales du Comité Flamand de France 45 (1954): 151–56; Thomas Coomans, “Cistercian Nuns and Princely Memorials: Dynastic Burial Churches in the Cistercian Abbeys of the Medieval Low Countries,” in Sépulture, mort, et représentation du pouvoir au Moyen Âge: Actes des 11es Journées Lotharingiennes, 26-29 septembre 2000, Centre Universitaire de Luxembourg, ed. Michel Margue, Publications de la Section historique de l’Institut Grand-Ducal de Luxembourg, vol. 118/Publications du CLUDEM, vol. 18 (Luxembourg: Section Historique de l’Institut Grand-Ducal de Luxembourg, 2006), 683–734, at 691.

Philip and his next of kin. His wife, Mathilda of Portugal, was also buried there. See Nicholas L. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 118.

before departing on Crusade. Philip’s nephew Baldwin went there before leaving for the East in 1202, his grandson Guy of Dampierre in 1270. See Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps, 148–49.

the best of their booty. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps, 115, 118.

accounts of visits paid there. The earlier visit was by Joseph Meglinger, a monk of Wittenberg, in 1667, as recorded in his Iter Cisterciense. The later one was by Edmond Martène and Ursin Durand, Voyage littéraire de deux religieux bénédictins de la congrégation de Saint-Maur (Paris, 1709), in Alexandre Assier, L’abbaye de Clairvaux en 1547 et en 1709: Pièces curieuses publiées avec des notes, Bibliothèque de l’Amateur Champenois, vol. 3 (Paris: Dumoulin, 1866), 37–38, repr. 2 vols. (Paris: Florentin Delaulne, 1717–1724), 1: 100.

two elegiac couplets in Latin. “Hic jacet in cavea Bernardi prima propago, / Cujus mens superas possidet alta domos. / Hic locus est sanctus, venerans insignia tanta / Supplex intrato, cerne, nec ossa rape.” (“In this hollow here lies the first generation of Bernard, the lofty mind of which occupies homes on high. This place is hallowed; as a suppliant enter, with reverence for such eminent bones—and take them not.”)

If you take bones upon entering here. “Quæ vallem hanc coluit Bernardi prima propago, / Hic jacet. Huc intrans, si rapis ossa, peris.” For the epitaph and tomb that John of Joinville placed at Clairvaux for his great-grandfather Geoffrey, see Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps, 148.

dedicating crypts to the Mother of God. See the entry “Lady Chapel,” in The Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. Colum Hourihane, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press), 4: 7–8. The abbey of Saint Denis has in its crypt a chapel of the Virgin, called the Chapel of Dagobert (see Fig. n.9). The Sainte Chapelle has a statue of the Madonna and Child at the entrance to the crypt (see Fig. n.10). The chapel of Notre-Dame de Pitié, in the hamlet of Provins near Annecy, has in the crypt of the Sacred Heart such an image, which has been held to be miraculous for more than two centuries (see Fig. n.11). In Cruas the basilica, consecrated in 1095, contains a remarkable crypt. A postcard of it, with a stamp canceled in 1902, shows a ninth-century Virgin (see Fig. n.12).

authors of the late Gothic period. Rolf Wallrath, “Zur Bedeutung der mittelalterlichen Krypta (Chorumgang und Marienkapelle),” in Beiträge zur Kunst des Mittelalters: Vorträge der ersten deutschen Kunsthistorikertagung auf Schloss Brühl, 1948 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1950), 54–69, at 65.

an altar to honor Mary. Jan van der Meulen et al., Chartres: Sources and Literary Interpretation: A Critical Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), 685–91 (nos. 2489–2506).

a cave or grotto. Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, 106–7. A cautious view of the possibilities is taken by Margot Elsbeth Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 210–11. The basic facts were already laid out in [F. J.] Doublet de Boisthibault, “Notice historique sur la crypte de Notre-Dame de Chartres,” Revue archéologique 12.1 (April–September 1855): 89–105, at 97–98.

the Chartrian chapel. Along with a healing well known as the Puits des Saints-Forts.

worship of the Madonna. Laura Spitzer, “The Cult of the Virgin and Gothic Sculpture: Evaluating Opposition in the Chartres West Façade Capital Frieze,” Gesta (1994): 132–50.

pilgrim’s souvenirs. Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges, Medieval Finds from Excavations in London, vol. 7 (London: Stationery Office, 1998), 129–30, nos. 136–38 (images), 131–33 (text).

the Benedictine monk Hugh of Poitiers. Hugh of Poitiers, Historia Vizeliacensis monasterii (History of the Monastery of Vézelay), in Monumenta Vizeliacensia: Textes relatifs à l’histoire de l’abbaye de Vézelay, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio mediaevalis, 42 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1976).

but was only blackened. The passage was quoted, largely translated, and discussed by Forsyth, “Magi and Majesty, 216–17; idem, Throne of Wisdom, 33–34. I follow her translation. For the Latin, see Hugh of Poitiers, Historia Vizeliacensis monasterii, lines 2140–48; for an alternative translation, see John Scott and John O. Ward, trans., The Vézelay Chronicle and Other Documents from MS. Auxerre 227 and Elsewhere (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 284. On the Black Madonna, see Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin, 234. The site of this ruinous conflagration was the church at the abbey of Vézelay. Both the abbey as a whole and the basilica as a separate entity were dedicated to another Mary, namely, Saint Mary Magdalene.

An anonymous Latin miracle collection. Jean le Marchant, Miracles de Notre-Dame de Chartres, no. 3, ed. Pierre Kunstmann, [Mémoires] Société archéologique d’Eure-et-Loir, vol. 26 (Ottawa, Canada: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1973), 1991 repr. in Publications médiévales de l’Université d’Ottawa, vol. 1, 66–78 (with both Old French and Latin texts: the miracle is no. 1 in the Latin text). On Marian miracles in the Latin Miracula Beatae Mariae Virginis in Carnotensi ecclesia facta (1210–1225), see Signori, Maria zwischen Kathedrale, Kloster und Welt, 174–201.

We are told elsewhere. Marcel Joseph Bulteau, Monographie de la cathédrale de Chartres, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (Chartres, France: R. Selleret, 1887–1892), 1: 100; William the Breton, Philippidos 4.598–618, in Œuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, historiens de Philippe-Auguste, ed. Henri François Delaborde, 2 vols., Société de l’histoire de France, vols. 210, 224 (Paris: Renouard/H. Loones, 1882–1885), 2: 122–23.

stored conditionally in the crypt. See Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 118, for an instance in which images were kept safe from Protestant image-breakers by being hidden in the crypt.

permanently or routinely. Bretel, Le jongleur de Notre-Dame, lines 388 and 428, pp. 66–67.

He declined a grand burial-place. “Dates of the Decease of the Archbishops of Canterbury, from the Martyrology and Obituary of Christ Church, Canterbury,” in The Church Historians of England, trans. Joseph Stevenson, 5 vols. in 8 (London: Seeleys, 1856), 4.1: 297–312, at 311: “And although he had been very often urged by several persons to build for himself a sepulcher of suitable dimensions, sumptuousness, and magnificence, he chose a burial-place, not in open view, not in a place frequented, but in a private spot, underground, within the crypt, covered only with a marble slab, before our image of the most blessed Virgin Mary, whom he loved in his heart: there his happy corpse now reposes.”

what the crypt would have meant symbolically. Wallrath, “Zur Bedeutung der mittelalterlichen Krypta,” 54–69.

The same qualities are sometimes detected. Jeff Gundy, “Cathedrals, Churches, Caves: Notes on Architecture, History, and Worship,” The Georgia Review 54 (2000): 673–99, at 692.

Fig. n.9 Postcard of the shrine to the Virgin in the crypt of the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, Paris (early twentieth century).

Fig. n.10 Postcard of a statue of the Virgin and Child at the entrance to the crypt of the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris (early twentieth century).

Fig. n.11 Postcard of the crypt of the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Pitié (Provins), Annecy-le-Vieux, France (Éditions Jos., early twentieth century).

Fig. n.12 Postcard of the crypt of the Abbatiale Sainte-Marie, Cruas, France (Nancy: A. B. & Cie, ca. 1902).

pre-Christian, especially druidic, worship. On the connection of Chartres with the druids, see Fassler, Virgin of Chartres, 3–4, 345, 353–56, 358–60, 365–66, 554–55, 567, 589.

To the Virgin about to Give Birth. In Latin, Virgini pariturae.

The Altar of the Druids. In French, L’autel des druides. To the side is a well, with a banderole indicating “Le puitz des sainctz fortz” (The Well of Powerful Saints).

demonstrably a Black Virgin. Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin, 179–80.

an ancient well located there. Spitzer, “Cult of the Virgin.” For the archaeological evidence, Spitzer refers to Roger Joly, “Permanence des structures antiques dans la cathédrale de Chartres,” Mémoires de la Société archéologique d’Eure-et-Loir 6 (1985): 1–18.

their desire to produce a male heir. Pierre de L’Estoile, Registre-journal du règne de Henri III, ed. Madeleine Lazard and Gilbert Schrenck, 6 vols., Textes littéraires français, vol. 522 (Geneva: Droz, 1992–), 4: 12 (January 26, 1582).

being displayed. Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, 39.

The artistic evidence is ambiguous. Camille, Gothic Idol, 233.

between Mass and Vespers. In one text from Trier, the office is performed after Vespers.

located in the crypt. Young, Drama of the Medieval Church, 1: 143.

Gothic Crypts

this love of dramatized decay. Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, 3rd ed. (London: Constable & Co., 1962), 31.

Grottoes entered the picture. Geoffrey Grigson, “The Origin of Grottoes,” Country Life (September 1, 1950): 688–93.

touches of sportiveness. Robert A. Aubin, “Grottoes, Geology, and the Gothic Revival,” Studies in Philology 31 (1934): 408–16, at 412.

Oakley, described in 1733. Aubin, “Grottoes,” 413.

ruins of nature. Aubin, “Grottoes,” 414.

for the prayers of remorseful nuns. Aubin, “Grottoes,” 413.

connected with fantasy. Arthur Symons, “Cathedrals,” in idem, Studies in Seven Arts (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906), 156–57: “The crypt is the work of gnomes, or of giants of the under-earth. . . . [I]n the crypt there is only force, and the solemn playfulness of force in its childhood.”

A Reminiscence of Rome. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 15 (June–November 1857): 740–45.

posed in vignettes. Neither tableau vivant (“living picture,” for a costumed group posed stock-still to represent a historical or artistic scene) nor nature morte (“dead nature,” for a still-life painting) would be the apt descriptor.

The Monk of Horror. Peter Haining, ed., Great British Tales of Terror: Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance, 1765–1840 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 133–37, at 133; J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Book of Horror Stories (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984), 59–61. The story is cited by Prungnaud, Gothique et décadence, 412.

Kreuzberg. In the German province of Lower Franconia.

Book of Obedience. In Latin, Liber obedientiae.

“subterraneous chambers” and “passages.” William H. Pierson Jr., American Buildings and Their Architects, vol. 2.1: Technology and the Picturesque: The Corporate and the Early Gothic Styles (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970–1978), 272–73.

Happy families are all alike. Chapter 1, first line.

Tales from the Crypt. The subgenre led to comic books from the 1950s, a feature-length film from 1972, and a television series from 1986 to 1996. Digby Diehl, Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

judged an undercroft from a millennium ago to embody. Chris Baldick, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), xix: “For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.”

Crypt of Shadows. Volume 1.1, illustrating a story entitled “Midnight on Black Mountain.”

the succubus-like leading lady. The witch-woman bears more than a passing resemblance to the red-dressed Gina Lollabrigida in the role of Esmeralda in the film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

stairways to heaven. Toby Huitson, Stairway to Heaven: The Functions of Medieval Upper Spaces (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014).

Karl Vollmoeller. Frederik D. Tunnat, Karl Vollmoeller: Dichter und Kulturmanager. Eine Biographie (Berlin: Vendramin, 2012), 299.

Notes to Chapter 5

The Incandescent Virgin

The necessity for light. Adams, MSMC, 432 (chap. 6, “The Virgin of Chartres”).

have been cast as being antithetical. Klaus Arnold, “Das ‘finstere’ Mittelalter: Zur Genese und Phänomenologie eines Fehlurteils,” Saeculum 32 (1981): 287–300.

romantically dark. The term Dark Romanticism has been proposed as a replacement for Gothic as a literary-historical term. See Thompson, Gothic Imagination, 1–10.

the light of the world. John 8:12.

star of the sea. In Latin, stella maris.

Strawberry Hill. The villa is located beside the river Thames, in Twickenham, London.

Walpole asserted. Horatio Walpole, “Preface” to “A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole at Strawberry-Hill near Twickenham,” in The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, 5 vols. (London: Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, Paternoster-Row, and J. Edwards, Pall-Mall, 1798), 2: 398.

gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals. For a few pages about gloom and gloomth in Gothic literature of the time, see David D. McKinney and Warren Chappell, The Imprints of Gloomth: The Gothic Novel in England, 1765–1830: The Tracy W. McGregor Room, February-July (Charlottesville: Alderman Library, University of Virginia, 1988), 7–8, 10.

which he described. To Sir Horace Mann, British Envoy at the Court of Tuscany, from Strawberry Hill, April 27, 1753, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 20: 372: “I perceive you have no idea what Gothic is; you have lived too long amidst true taste, to understand venerable barbarism. You say, ‘you suppose my garden is to be Gothic too.’ That can’t be; Gothic is merely architecture, and as one has a satisfaction in imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals on one’s house, so one’s garden on the contrary is to be nothing but riant, and the gaiety of nature.” For context, see Brian Fothergill, The Strawberry Hill Set: Horace Walpole and His Circle (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 45.

the dualistic essence of human existence. He wrote to Lady Ossory, who had lost a child, on July 12, 1778: “Life seems to me as if we were dancing on a sunny plain on the edge of a gloomy forest, where we pass in a moment from glare to gloom and darkness.”

the puppet-show of the times. The letter referring to Strawberry Hill as a form of puppetry is to Richard Bentley (1708–1782), English writer and designer, from Strawberry Hill, June 10, 1755, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 35: 227.

choosing to imagine the house. Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 10: 127 (Horace Walpole to Montagu, June 18, 1764); 20: 111 (to Mann, January 10, 1750); 9: 149 (to Montagu, June 11, 1753). Cited by Michael Snodin, “Going to Strawberry Hill,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. idem (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 15–57, at 15.

well-wrought little gadget. Letter to H. S. Conway, from Twickenham, dated June 8, 1747, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 37: 269: “It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix’s shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enameled meadows, with filigree hedges.”

collected enamels and portrait miniatures. Katherine Coombs, “Horace Walpole and the Collecting of Miniatures,” in Snodin, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, 183–99.

disparaging him. Lewis Melville [Louis Saul Benjamin], The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (London: W. Heinemann, 1910), 299: “The place was a miserable child’s box—a species of gothic mousetrap—a reflection of Walpole’s littleness. My having his playthings he could not tolerate, even in idea, so he bequeathed them beyond my reach.” The quotation comes from a conversation with Cyrus Redding that Beckford had forty years after Walpole’s death.

the most distinguished gem. Stephen Clarke, “The Strawberry Hill Sale of 1842: ‘The Most Distinguished Gem That Has Ever Adorned the Annals of Auctions,’” in Snodin, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, 261–74.

a parody. See Clarke, “Strawberry Hill Sale of 1842,” 265.

The Little Box of Mother-of-Pearl. In French, L’étui de nacre.

a European subset of primitivism. Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The First Gothic Revival and the Return to Nature,” Modern Language Notes 47 (1932): 419–46.

The gloom of the lofty vaults. Brooks Adams, Law of Civilization and Decay (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895), 64 (chap. 3, “The First Crusade”).

regarded as being bright. Suger, Abbot of Saint Denis, De rebus in administratione sua gestis, chap. 28, in Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. and tr. Erwin Panofsky, 2nd rev. ed. Gerda Panofsky-Soergel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 50–51, at lines 11–12: “Bright is the noble edifice which is pervaded by the new light.”

the Virgin’s own preferences. Adams, MSMC, 424, 433 (chap. 6, “The Virgin of Chartres”): “The Queen Mother . . . liked both light and colour.”

color that filters through the panes. Adams, MSMC, 459 (chap. 7, “Roses and Apses”): “the lighting of her own boudoir,” and 491 (chap. 9, “The Legendary Windows”).

confessed to Lizzie Cameron. Henry Adams, Letter to Elizabeth Cameron, in LHA, 4: 311–13, at 312.

necessity of artificial lighting. Aldous Huxley, “Notes on the Way,” Time and Tide (July 3, 1937): 889–91, repr. James Sexton, ed., “Notes on the Way, July 3, 1937,” Aldous Huxley Annual 4 (2004): 26–31, at 28: “The only thing that connects [the interiors] with the outer walls is the fenestration, which is Gothically parsimonious of light. In spite of the sun and the more than Mediterranean sky, Duke has need, even in daytime, of a deal of electricity.”

Yale University invalidated half of. “To put deeply splayed Gothic church-windows with heavy mullions and leaded panes into reading rooms which require the maximum of light and air, is the last word in folly.”

Dressing Madonnas: What Are You Wearing?

studded with gold. Adam of Eynsham, The Revelation of the Monk of Eynsham (chap. 47), ed. Robert Easting, Early English Text Society, vol. 318 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 140.

limbs could be posed and moved. For specifics on such articulation in Spanish Madonnas, see Susan Verdi Webster, “Shameless Beauty and Worldly Splendor: On the Spanish Practice of Adorning the Virgin,” in Thunø and Wolf, Miraculous Image, 249–71, at 264–66. For a broad anthropological context, see Marlène Albert-Llorca, Les Vierges miraculeuses: Légendes et rituels (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). For subsequent studies, see Valeria E. Genovese, Statue vestite e snodate: Un percorso, Tesi: Classe di lettere, vol. 6 (Pisa, Italy: Edizioni della Normale, 2011); and especially the review article by Marlène Albert-Llorca, “Les statues habillées dans le catholicisme: Entre histoire de l’art, histoire religieuse et anthropologie,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 164 (2013): 11–23.

bedecked with special clothing. Richard Trexler, “Habiller et déshabiller les images: Esquisse d’une analyse,” in Dunand, L’image et la production du sacré, 195–231.

dress and undress the statues. Marlène Albert-Llorca, “La Vierge mise à nu par ses chambrières,” CLIO: Histoire, femmes et sociétés 2 (1995): 201–28.

reached its zenith in the baroque period. Heinrich Schauerte, “Bekleidung der Marienbilder,” in Marienlexikon, ed. Remigius Bäumer and Leo Scheffczyk, 6 vols. (St. Ottilien, Germany: EOS, 1988–1994), 1: 414–15.

during waves of iconoclasm. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 99.

redeployed to clothe ecclesiastics. Trexler, “Habiller et déshabiller,” 198.

a detailed description. Stanley Smith, The Madonna of Ipswich (Ipswich, UK: East Anglian Magazine Limited, 1980), 23: “The robe, square cut on the breast, hanging in ample pleats from a high waist in deep rose. A blue mantle with full long sleeves hangs from the shoulder of the figure. . . . Our Lady’s coat with two gorgets of gold to put about her neck.”

two coats for the Virgin Mary. Charles Pendrill, Old Parish Life in London (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 16.

Lady Church. In German, Frauenkirche.

and other ornaments. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 37. For further information on Nuremberg, see Bridget Heal, “Images of the Virgin Mary and Marian Devotion in Protestant Nuremberg,” in Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe, ed. Helen Parish and William G. Naphy (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 25–46.

at the shrine of Mont-Saint-Michel. Hilding Kjellman, ed., La deuxième collection anglo-normande des miracles de la Sainte Vierge et son original latin avec les miracles correspondants des mss. fr. 375 et 818 de la Bibliothèque nationale (Paris: E. Champion, 1922), 289, no. 44.

no longer catalogue such accoutrements. Heal, “Images of the Virgin Mary,” 45n31.

dispersed, destroyed, or both. In 1816, the church was reacquired by the Catholic Church.

It is tempting to conjecture. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 102, 112.

girdle. On the sash and robe, see Wilfrid Bonser, “The Cult of Relics in the Middle Ages,” Folklore 73 (1962): 234–56, at 244.

In the Aachen cathedral. Heinrich Schiffers, Karls des Großen Reliquienschatz und die Anfänge der Aachenfahrt, Veröffentlichungen des Bischöflichen Diözesanarchivs Aachen, vol. 10 (Aachen, Germany: J. Volk, 1951).

Holy Chemise. Sancta camisia in Latin, sainte chemise in French. The word interula is also used.

that the Virgin wore. E. Jane Burns, “Saracen Silk and the Virgin’s ‘Chemise’: Cultural Crossings in Cloth,” Speculum 81 (2006): 365–97; idem, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 156–84.

the garment could be processed and displayed. Hervé Pinoteau, Notre-Dame de Chartres et de France: Le voile de la Vierge et autres merveilles (Paris: F. X. de Guibert, 2008).

not at all a chemise but rather a veil. Yves Delaporte, Le voile de Notre-Dame (Chartres, France: Durand, 1927, 2nd ed. 1951); André Grabar, “La cathédrale de Chartres: La relique du voile de la Vierge et l’iconographie,” Notre-Dame de Chartres 28 (September 1976): 14–19; Pinoteau, Notre-Dame de Chartres et de France; Jean Villette, “Le voile de la Vierge depuis onze siècles à Chartres,” Notre-Dame de Chartres 28 (September 1976): 4–13.

tourist medallion. 34 mm in diameter, 2 mm thick, 16 grams in weight, copper-aluminum-nickel alloy. Minted by the Monnaie de Paris (Paris mint), an administrative bureau of the French government.

holy card from Chartres. The board is made of hard paper but framed in a lightly perforated paper called canivet lace. The French canif, borrowed from the same Old Norse word as English knife, means “penknife.” The paper is produced by making holes using such a knife.

what was once a Black Madonna. By whatever name, this sculpture has been colored completely differently in the recent restoration of Chartres cathedral: it is most definitely no longer a Black Madonna.

topped by the image of Mary. Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin, 179–80.

discrete from the site of Notre-Dame-sous-Terre. Forsyth, Throne of Wisdom, 105–11.

Holy Robe. In Latin, sancta roba.

badges. Scilla Landale, “A Pilgrim’s Progress to Walsingham,” in Walsingham: Pilgrimage and History. Papers Presented at the Centenary Historical Conference, 23rd–27th March 1998 (Walsingham, UK: R. C. National Shrine, 1999), 56.

Carrying a Torch for Mary

Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 67.

widely accepted by the end of the fifteenth century. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 25–26.

Candelaria. In French, la Chandeleur, Italian la Candela, German Mariä Lichtmess, Dutch Maria-Lichtmis.

handed out to all in attendance. Kinder, Cistercian Europe, 131, 175.

both pilgrims and regular worshipers. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 198.

carry tapers. Young, Drama of the Medieval Church, 2: 252–53. Compare Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 226–27, 268–69.

candlesticks are commonly mentioned. Heal, Cult of the Virgin Mary, 111–12; Carroll, Madonnas That Maim, 82–83.

customary texts. Known in Greek as typika.

appropriate to a given icon. Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, “Icons in the Liturgy,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): 45–57, at 45.

an odor of sanctity. Sansterre, “Sacralité et pouvoir thaumaturgique,” 59.

Petrus Iverni at Rocamadour. Peter Haas, “Petrus Iverni von Sieglar und das Wunderbuch von Rocamadour,” Troisdorfer Jahreshefte 36 (2007): 84–89.

a Black Madonna. Of polychrome wood that is partially clad in plates of oxidized silver: see Begg, Cult of the Black Virgin, 216; Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, Vierges noires (Rodez, France: Rouergue, 2000), especially 100–101.

One hypothesis. For discussion, see Stephen Benko, The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology, Studies in the History of Religions, vol. 59 (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993), 213.

the Holy House of Walsingham. Landale, “Pilgrim’s Progress to Walsingham,”18.

miracle of the candle. Harris, Lourdes, 8, 20, 63, 201, 204, 205, 293. This miracle occurred in the seventeenth of the apparitions, on April 7.

became a business interest. On the manufacturing and commerce, see Harris, Lourdes, 191, with fig. 11 (in color inserts).

made them appear unnatural. Harris, Lourdes, 87–92, 262, 263 fig. 58.

Lighting Effects: Lights, Camera, Action!

artificial lighting. For a truly illuminating general and popular account, see Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

The age of gas. Terence A. L. Rees, Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978), ix.

nightlife. Brox, Brilliant, 75.

Perhaps you will catch. Quoted by Arline Boucher Tehan, Henry Adams in Love: The Pursuit of Elizabeth Sherman Cameron (New York: Universe Books, 1983), 176.

first with gas and later with electricity. See http://www.archives.nd.edu/about/news/index.php/2011/let-there-be-light/

The original stage-book. For the translation as well as for highlighting the very existence of the stage-book, credit goes to Needham, “‘Le Jongleur est ma foi’,” 229 (who quotes the original French): “The painting, until then dimly lit, illuminated with an intense light, the effect produced by an electric light that is stage left, and that gives all its power to illuminate completely the painting of the Virgin.” The stage-book is in the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris: see Needham, 313.

an impresario. David Belasco, in New York World, February 17, 1901, cited by A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 115; Peter Baxter, “On the History and Ideology of Film Lighting,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 83–106, at 86.

As the technology developed. Initially came the earliest practical incandescent bulbs from Edison, then a shift from incandescent to tungsten-halogen lamps, next the arc lamp invented in 1896, and still later the carbon-arc klieg light created in 1911.

with a great and mystic brightness. New York Times, August 16, 1908, SM8.

suffused with a soft light. Musical Times, 47.761 (July 1, 1906): 484.

the earliest poster. The poster, 31.75 in. (80.64 cm) in height and 25.25 in. (64.14 cm) in width, bears the imprint of IMP E. DELANCHY, 51, F9 ST. DENIS, PARIS. It was commissioned to advertise performances at the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique.

Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse. He was elected first a knight and later an officer of the French legion of honor. Here the distinguished French historical and decorative painter is portrayed as he partakes of the cocaine-laden wine, Mariani (see Fig. n.13). In another indication of the interconnections among literature, opera, and art, he produced the color frontispiece to an edition of Anatole France, Thaïs: Quinze compositions, dont un frontispiece en couleurs (Paris: F. Ferroud, 1909), as well as the illustrations to Anatole France, Le Puits de Sainte Claire (Paris: Ferroud, 1925).

The artist of this engraving. Édouard François Zier.

a ring of bright light. Le Monde illustré (May 14, 1904), 395.

preoccupied with florid settings. Although many of his compositions set in earlier times concentrate upon violence, his paintings inspired by medieval literature and lore elicited from him a range of colors and a type of innocence that owe much to romanticism and later movements such as the Pre-Raphaelites.

The Knight of Flowers. Le chevalier aux fleurs. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, RF 898.

One reviewer. Klein, “London Opera House,” 96. An advertisement from 1915 (run in The American Magazine, New Outlook, and elsewhere) for Mazda lamps made by the General Electric Company shows scientists being strafed by a beam of bright light (see Fig. n.14). Like fugitives from a heavily guarded prison, the spectators look as if they should be on one or the other side of a barbed-wire perimeter.

Fig. n.13 Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse, with bottle and glass of Vin Mariani. Drawing by Joseph Uzanne, 1894. Published in Figures contemporaines: Tirées de l’Album Mariani, 14 vols. (Paris: Henri Floury, 1894–1925), 2: 210, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Georges-Antoine_Rochegrosse.jpg

Fig. n.14 Advertisement for Mazda lightbulbs, by General Electric Company, 1915.

Franz Johannes Weinrich. The author came to be better known in his theatrical works for his Columbus: A Tragedy (Columbus: Ein Trauerspiel, 1923) and The Maid of God: A Play about Saint Elisabeth (Die Magd Gottes: Ein Spiel von der heiligen Elisabeth, 1928), as well as for his treatment of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (Die heilige Elisabeth von Thüringen). For biographical information, see Clemens Siebler, “Weinrich, Franz Johannes,” in Baden-Württembergische Biographien, ed. Bernd Ottnad (Stuttgart, Germany: W. Kohlhammer, 1994–), 3: 441–44. In 1921, he published a collection of poems that he entitled With You I’ll Dance My Way to the Nearest Star (Mit dir ertanze ich den nächsten Stern) (Munich, Germany: Patmos, 1921). “Dancing with the Stars” would seem to be nothing new.

A Little Play. Franz Johannes Weinrich, Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau: Ein klein Legendenspiel nach altem Text (Augsburg, Germany: Haas & Grabherr, 1921; 2nd ed., Frankfurt, Germany: Bühnenvolksbund, 1925).

Much light. P. 25.

contrasts between bright and dark. Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre, 373.

not all the evidence. E.g., June 29, 1923: “Als Ballett wird in der Berliner Staatsoper Franz Johannes Weinrichs Legendenspiel ‘Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau’ aufgeführt.” The popular edition indicates that the set paintings were designed by Ludwig Sievert, who achieved some prominence as an expressionist before World War II, and that the music was the work of the composer Bruno Stürmer; see http://www.chronikverlag.de/tageschronik/0629.htm

Popular Theater League. In German, Bühnenvolksbund.

Cultural Theater instead of Show Business. In German, “Kulturtheater statt Geschäftstheater.”

the disfavor of the Nazis. Cecil William Davies, Theatre for the People: The Story of the Volksbühne (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 165–66; idem, The Volksbühne Movement: A History, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), 287–88.

how to achieve these effects. Bellamy, Jongleur’s Story, 15, 38–39: “Soft blue light from both sides, until the Abbot enters, when an amber slide is placed over the lower part of the flood on the side opposite the Abbot. As the blue slide is slowly removed, the amber slide is raised, so that the golden beam of sunlight seems to fall first on the dead boy, and finally reaches the face of the statue as she raises her arms in benediction.”

illustration of a lighted taper. Van B. Hooper, Christmas Stories That Never Grow Old (Milwaukee, WI: Ideals, 1961), unpaginated. The illustration runs the length of the text block.

describes the incandescence. Vincent Arthur Yzermans, Our Lady’s Juggler (St. Paul, MN: North Central, 1974), 13 (with a spectacular dangling participle): “Emerging from behind the column the altar suddenly became flooded with light so brilliant that the surrounding area was as bright as midday.”

Voyeurism and Performance Art

Seeing the Virgin. Kathy M. Krause, “Gazing on Women in the Miracles de Nostre Dame,” in Krause and Stones, Gautier de Coinci, 227.

scopophilia. From Greek skopos, “watching.”

viewers. On women as the oglers, see Sandra Lindemann Summers, Ogling Ladies: Scopophilia in Medieval German Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013).

the story of the pear tree. The most famous telling in English is in The Merchant’s Tale, one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

voyeuristic moments in fiction. The classic treatment of such watching, although without reference to Le Tumbeor Nostre Dame, is A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

males stare glassy-eyed. Madeline Harrison Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 1–44.

figures of jealous people. The stock figure of the jealous person is the gilos, in medieval Occitan lyric.

watchmen. The Occitan term is gardador. See Patrizia Onesta, “Lauzengier-Wāshī-Index, Gardador-Custos: The ‘Enemies of Love’ in Provençal, Arabo-Andalusian, and Latin Poetry,” Scripta Mediterranea: Bulletin of the Society for Mediterranean Studies 20 (1999): 119–41.

tattletales. In Occitan, this kind of person is termed a lauzengier. For full information, see Marcello Cocco, “Lauzengier”: Semantica e storia di un termine basilare nella lirica dei trovatori (Cagliari, Italy: Università di Cagliari, Istituto di lingue e letterature straniere, 1980).

spoilsport. Both killjoy and spoilsport are first attested in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Notes to Chapter 6

Nothing is more catholic. Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, “Modèles d’églises romanes et gothiques,” in Annales archéologiques 12 (Paris: Victor Didron, 1852): 164–67, at 165: “Rien n’est plus catholique, dans le sens rigoureux du mot, que le style du XIIIe siècle; il est de tous les temps, si l’on peut dire ainsi, comme il est de tous les pays.”

Stony Silence

The word silence is still a sound. Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure, Collection Tel, vol. 23 (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 25 (“le mot silence est encore un bruit”); trans. Stuart Kendall, Inner Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 20.

long tradition of apparitions. Michael S. Durham, Miracles of Mary: Apparitions, Legends, and Miraculous Works of the Blessed Virgin Mary (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 49–63.

If you talk to God. Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (New York: Doubleday, 1973).

imposes a hush. “I could never fathom how any man dares to lift up his voice in a cathedral. What has he to say that will not be an anticlimax? For though I have heard a considerable variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so expressive as a cathedral. ’Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches day and night, not only telling you of man’s art and aspirations in the past, but convicting your own soul of ardent sympathies.” Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1878), 169–70.

the travel writer’s verbal one. Stevenson’s description appears in a chapter of An Inland Voyage (pp. 166–75) called, unsurprisingly, “Noyon Cathedral”: “After a while a long train of young girls, walking two and two, each with a lighted taper in her hand, and all dressed in black with a white veil, came from behind the altar, and began to descend the nave; the four first carrying a Virgin and Child upon a table.”

overpower his recollection of all else. “In the little pictorial map of our whole Inland Voyage, which my fancy still preserves, and sometimes unrolls for the amusement of odd moments, Noyon cathedral figures on a most preposterous scale, and must be nearly as large as a department. I can still see the faces of the priests as if they were at my elbow, and hear Ave Maria, ora pro nobis [‘Hail, Mary, pray for us’], sounding through the church. All Noyon is blotted out for me by these superior memories.” Stevenson, Inland Voyage, 170–71.

solidity of prayerfulness. Henry Adams, MSMC, 369 (chap. 2, “La Chanson de Roland”): “The qualities of the architecture reproduce themselves in the song: the same directness, simplicity, absence of self-consciousness; the same intensity of purpose; even the same material; the prayer is granite.”

sound and soundlessness. Cass Gilbert said of the Woolworth Skyscraper that he designed: “To me, a Gothic skyscraper is like a musical harmony like Stabat Mater, whose final notes give us the highest pitch of emotion before they are lost in the silence.” See Robert A. Jones, “Mr. Woolworth’s Tower: The Skyscraper as Popular Icon,” Journal of Popular Culture 7.2 (1973): 408–24, at 414.

Collecting Clusters of Cloisters

the Columbian exchange. The term was coined by Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972).

there is no “pure” medieval. Stephanie Trigg, “Walking through Cathedrals: Scholars, Pilgrims, and Medieval Tourists,” New Medieval Literatures 7 (2005): 9–33, at 33.

the Renaissance and paintings. Manfred J. Holler and Barbara Klose-Ullmann, “Art Goes America,” Journal of Economic Issues 44 (2010): 89–112.

museums of their own national cultures. The effort was exemplified at the highest level by Wilhelm von Bode, who conceived and founded in 1904 the institution known today as the Bode Museum. See Frank Matthias Kammel, “Kreuzgang, Krypta und Altäre: Wilhelm von Bodes Erwerbungen monumentaler Kunstwerke und seine Präsentationsvorstellungen für das Deutsche Museum,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen (1996): 155–75.

integrating masterpieces across media. For a study of the corresponding movement that applied these principles in museums in the US as they took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Kathleen Curran, The Invention of the American Art Museum: From Craft to Kulturgeschichte, 1870–1930 (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2016).

German romanticism. Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 309–77.

Fort Tryon Park. Near the northern tip of Manhattan Island.

the most remarkable memorial. To spare someone the trouble of only discovering this after hunting it down, Major Nicholas Utzig, “(Re)casting the Past: The Cloisters and Medievalism,” Year’s Work in Medievalism 27 (2012): 1–10, has virtually nothing to observe about The Cloisters themselves.

five medieval cloisters. Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, Trie-en-Bigorre, and Froville.

other southern French monastic sites. The second of these has received close study in Daniel Kletke, The Cloister of St.-Guilhem-le-Désert at The Cloisters in New York City (Berlin: Dr. Köster, 1997). For more recent attention (especially to the reconstruction at the original site in France), see Matthews, Medievalism, 73–75. In the technical terminology of architecture, the cloisters are peristyles. Four rows of columns form a box of porticoes that surrounds either a garden or a court. Three of these structures are outside, complemented by gardens that are meant to be true to medieval monastic horticulture. Inside, around three thousand works of art are exhibited. For all that, the name of the museum derives from the form it puts on display.

cento. The original Latin cento refers to a patchwork garment.

the rightness of the Gothic sincerity. The quotation is from C. Lewis Hind; see Harold E. Dickson, “George Grey Barnard’s Controversial Lincoln,” Art Journal 27.1 (1967): 8–19, at 14. The bust is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

young people. He taught in New York’s Art Students League, an art school on West 57th Street that was founded in 1875 to accommodate (as it does to this day) learners from the ranks of both amateurs and professionals.

attractions in the new museums. Pamela Born, “The Canon Is Cast: Plaster Casts in American Museum and University Collections,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 21.2 (2002): 8–13, at 8; Alan Wallach, “The American Cast Museum: An Episode in the History of the Institutional Definition of Art,” in idem, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 38–50.

received their share of attention. Established in 1901, the Germanic Museum of Harvard University was renamed one half century later the Busch-Reisinger. The collection was given a physical home in a building that was begun in 1914 and completed in 1917.

collection of casts. For an account of the collection, see Lynette Roth, “‘Old World Art on the Soil of the New’: Plaster Casts and the Germanic Museum at Harvard University,” in Casting: A Way to Embrace the Digital Age in Analogue Fashion? A Symposium on the Gipsformerei of the Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, ed. Christina Haak and Miguel Helfrich (Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2016), 106–17.

much aspersion was cast. Kathryn McClintock, “The Earliest Public Collections and the Role of Reproductions (Boston),” in Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800–1940, ed. Elizabeth Bradford Smith (University Park: Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, 1996), 54–60. The topic of plaster casting has been studied within a broad chronological and methodological purview, but with little reference to the Middle Ages, in Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand, eds., Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, Transformationen der Antike, vol. 18 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010).

battle of the casts. Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American Art,” Media, Culture & Society 4.4 (1982): 303–22, at 306.

whole chambers could be disassembled. John Harris, Moving Rooms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2007).

collecting capitals and other sculpture. See Martin Weinberger, The George Grey Barnard Collection: Catalogue (New York: Robinson Galleries, 1941).

fragments of broken cathedrals. H. E. Dickson, “The Origin of ‘The Cloisters,’” Art Quarterly 28 (1965): 252–74, at 255.

he did not manage to project his name. Dickson, “Origin of ‘The Cloisters,’” 252–74; J. L. Schrader, “George Grey Barnard: The Cloisters and The Abbaye,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art n.s. 37 (1979): 2–52; Elizabeth Bradford Smith, “George Grey Barnard: Artist/Collector/Dealer/Curator,” in idem, Medieval Art in America, 133–42.

Golden Age of Collecting. Holler and Klose-Ullmann, “Art Goes America.”

Thorstein Veblen’s scalding critique. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 349.

magnificent accumulation of art. R. Aaron Rottner, “J. P. Morgan and the Middle Ages,” in Smith, Medieval Art in America, 15–126.

the first Gothic museum in the United States. “Barnard, George Grey,” in Biographical Sketches of American Artists, 4th ed. (Lansing: Michigan State Library, 1916), 32–33, at 33.

Barnard’s Cloisters. Alternatively, “Barnard Cloisters.” The location was Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights. The site stood near the northern end of Manhattan Island in New York, a few miles south from where his quarry of quadrangles was moved when acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For the quotation, see Peter Barnet and Nancy Wu, The Cloisters: Medieval Art and Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Yale University Press, 2012), 9.

spirit of Gothic. He put quotation marks around the key phrase since it translated the title of a German book, Karl Scheffler’s Der Geist der Gothik (Leipzig, Germany: Insel, 1917).

widows and orphans. Schrader, “George Grey Barnard,” 2.

age the building’s appearance. See Mary Rebecca Leuchak, “‘The Old World for the New’: Developing the Design for The Cloisters,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 23 (1988): 257–77, at 257.

a statue of the Virgin and Child. The piece was mounted to stand above an arcade, at the center of a large stained-glass window in a clerestory that comprised an arch flanked by two smaller ones on each side.

Dramas in Stone. William M. Van der Weyde, “Dramas in Stone,” The Mentor 11 (March 1923): 19–34.

the sounds of medieval chant. William H. Forsyth, “Five Crucial People in the Building of the Cloisters,” in The Cloisters: Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary, ed. Elizabeth C. Parker (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/International Center of Medieval Art, 1992), 51–59, at 52.

lacked the permanency. In 1925, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired most of the ensembles in Barnard’s Cloisters. The original brick structure reopened in October of 1937 as a museum, to display a new collection the sculptor had built up in the interim, but he died not a year later. Barnard’s own new collection was dispersed, most of it sold to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1945. See Smith, “George Grey Barnard,” 138. The museum in the City of Brotherly Love put its medieval holdings on display first in 1931. At that time, they contained already a sampling of salvage from some of the same sites that supplied elements for the making of The Cloisters. Harris, Moving Rooms, 165: “Part of the cloister of Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines housed the fountain from the cloister of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, whereas at the Cloisters Museum the fountain in the middle of the Cuxa was from Saint-Genis.” Over a couple of decades after Barnard’s death, the flotsam and jetsam from his assemblage of art and architecture spread elsewhere throughout the country, but his name receded rapidly from public knowledge. Barnard’s diminishment may be construed in part as a deliberate eclipse of him by Rockefeller: see Frederick C. Moffatt, “Re-Membering Adam: George Grey Barnard, the John D. Rockefellers, and the Gender of Patronage,” Winterthur Portfolio (2000): 53–80.

acquired the chapter room from Pontaut Abbey. For a systematic review of architectural components from the monasteries of white monks, see Terryl N. Kinder, “Historic Cistercian Abbey Fragments,” in The Cistercian Arts: From the 12th to the 21st Century, ed. Terryl N. Kinder and Roberto Cassanelli, trans. Joyce Myerson (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 395–402; for the chapter room from Pontaut Abbbey, p. 395.

land to the north. This tract amounts to sixty-six and a half acres.

the reassembly of Barnard’s museum. With the same proactivity and integrity of vision, he also ensured that a plot with additional acreage (no fewer than seven hundred acres) in New Jersey, on the bluffs of the Palisades across the Hudson to the west of The Cloisters, would remain unsullied by development.

illumination. Barnet and Wu, The Cloisters, 14: “The atmosphere was intended to be intimate, with minimal ornamentation, limited artificial lighting, and even an occasional burning candle.”

A Gothic Room

spoliation. To spoliate means literally to despoil, but in this technical usage the verbal noun signifies taking spoils from earlier phases of civilization. The term spolia is often applied to reusable components from classical architecture that were appropriated and incorporated into medieval buildings.

recycled within a church. See Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Spolia Churches of Rome: Recycling Antiquity in the Middle Ages (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2015).

William K. Vanderbilt. Her first husband inherited an immense fortune made from the New York Central Railroad and steamship lines.

1883. To be precise, on March 26, 1883.

fling down his gauntlet. Robert Huish, An Authentic History of the Coronation of His Majesty, King George the Fourth (London: J. Robins, 1821).

impersonated in attire based on tomb effigies. Helene E. Roberts, “Victorian Medievalism: Revival or Masquerade?,” Browning Institute Studies 8 (1980): 11–44, at 27–32.

basing fancy dress parties upon paintings. Paul F. Miller, “Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, arbiter elegantiarum, and Her Gothic Salon at Newport, Rhode Island,” Journal of the History of Collections 27.3 (2015): 347–62, at 361n3.

spectacular summerhouse. In the local parlance of Newport, Rhode Island, it was referred to as a “cottage.”

Marble House. In its overall neoclassical architecture, the so-called cottage was modeled by the architect Richard Morris Hunt upon the most un-medieval Petit Trianon at Versailles.

Petit Château. In English, “Little Chateau.” In the designations for both these period houses, the epithet petit is, of course, the French for “little.”

The whole space was designed. Paul F. Miller, “A Labor in Art’s Field: Alva Vanderbilt Belmont’s Gothic Room at Newport,” in Gothic Art in the Gilded Age: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection, ed. Virginia Brilliant (Sarasota, FL: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2009), 22–35; idem, “Alva Vanderbilt Belmont,” 347–62.

Alva Vanderbilt’s name has become unhooked from her Gothic Room. In 1926, her medieval objects were moved out of Marble House, and were then sold to John Ringling in 1927. See Virginia Brilliant, “Taking it on Faith: John Ringling and the Gothic Room Collection,” in idem, Gothic Art in the Gilded Age, 36–50. As part of the circus entrepreneur’s holdings, pieces of the Gothic Room remain to this day in Cà d’Zan (in Venetian dialect) or “House of John,” the Venetian-style mansion-become-museum he was creating at the time of the purchase in Sarasota, Florida. Today, Ringling’s name has palimpsested Alva Vanderbilt’s. No site associated with her exists now to bring home the effects the Gothic Room once exercised. Yet in her lifetime, the special space had no small influence, especially after she opened it for the benefit of women’s suffrage to public tours in 1909 and 1910. Gothic Room may also be coordinated with the Gothicizing architectural excesses that were undertaken or perpetrated by other members of the Vanderbilt clan. Most remarkable is Biltmore Estate, with a mansion built between 1889 and 1895 that is touted for being the largest privately owned house in the United States. Its idiosyncratic and eclectic style, known as châteauesque, incorporates much Gothic adornment, although not spolia.

an eclectic buffet. Harris, Moving Rooms, 203–4. The broad-based manner that resulted has been labeled the American grand style. Customarily, the French phrasing is used: the grand goût américain.

a profusion of elements. Items from late medieval Europe within the chamber include a carved and gilded triptych, a wheel-window, and stained-glass windows. Before the fifteenth-century fireplace stand two thirteen-foot Gothic torchères. See Hilliard T. Goldfarb, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Companion Guide and History (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1995), 134–47.

arbiters of taste imported into the US windows. Madeline H. Caviness and Jane Hayward, “Introduction,” in Stained Glass before 1700 in American Collections: Corpus Vitrearum Checklist, vol. 3: Midwestern and Western States, 4 vols., Studies in the History of Art, vol. 28 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 11–35.

the likes of Charles Eliot Norton. Morris Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 93–95; Kathryn McClintock, “The Classroom and the Courtyard: Medievalism in American Highbrow Culture,” in Smith, Medieval Art in America, 41–53.

new affluence. Ben H. Procter, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31.

her American recreation. For building a skeleton of original stones, she selected column bases, columns, capitals, door frames, balconies, balustrades, and arches for importation from Europe. In her new courtyard, she matched the imported items with sculptural elements.

Raymond Pitcairn and the “New Church”

New Church. Its proper name is the “Cathedral of the General Church of the New Jerusalem.”

In planning the cathedral. Jane Hayward and Walter Cahn, “Authors’ Preface,” in Radiance and Reflection: Medieval Art from the Raymond Pitcairn Collection, ed. Jane Hayward and Walter Cahn (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982), 6–7, at 6.

twelfth-century capitals. The dozen column heads came from the Benedictine abbey church of Moutiers-Saint-Jean in Burgundy. Their transatlantic transfer was negotiated between 1918 and 1922. A thirteenth capital was secured separately later. In 1927, the carved stones were installed in the Renaissance Italian-style courtyard at the heart of the Fogg Art Museum. See Kathryn Brush, “The Capitals from Moutiers-Saint-Jean (Harvard University Art Museums) and the Carving of Medieval Art Study in America after World War I,” in Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages, ed. Janet T. Marquardt and Alyce A. Jordan (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 298–311. They are no longer on display today.

systematic collecting of decorative elements. Beth Lombardi, “Raymond Pitcairn and the Collecting of Medieval Stained Glass in America,” in Smith, Medieval Art in America, 185–88.

obliged to build a home. Jane Hayward, “Introduction,” in Hayward and Cahn, Radiance and Reflection, 33–47.

Glencairn. On Pitcairn’s church and home, see Shirin Fozi, “American Medieval: Authenticity and the Indifference of Architecture,” Journal of the History of Collections 27 (2015): 469–80. Fozi also examines Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum and The Cloisters.

stained glass from the Reims cathedral. Elizabeth Emery, “The Martyred Cathedral: American Attitudes toward Notre-Dame de Reims during the First World War,” in Marquardt and Jordan, Medieval Art and Architecture, 312–39, 331; especially Shirin Fozi, “‘A Mere Patch of Color’: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Shattered Glass of Reims Cathedral,” in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture, ed. Elma Brenner et al. (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 321–44, on Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Accession no. C8eI “Heads in a panel of fragments collected during World War I,” 21.5 × 13.5 inches.

Her acquisitions were not depredations. A contemporary newspaper laid out matters explicitly: “Particular stress should be laid upon the circumstance that the materials wrought into this building have in no instance been obtained from any structure that was demolished or dismantled for the purpose or that to this end was deprived of any feature. The spirit in which Fenway Court was conceived and carried out was one of too great reverence for monuments of the past to countenance in any degree their destruction or their spoliation for its own purposes.” Sylvester Baxter, “An American Palace of Art: Fenway Court,” Century 67 (January 1904), 362–82, at 370, quoted by McClintock, “Classroom and the Courtyard,” 48.

elginism. The phenomenon is named after the transportation of the Parthenon Marbles from Greece to London effected by Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, between 1801 and 1805. See Smith, “George Grey Barnard,” 136–37.

The Hearst Castle

a 1939 novel by Aldous Huxley. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (first American ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1939, repr. 1983). In the 1941 mystery drama film Citizen Kane, the director Orson Welles caricatured Hearst’s collecting habits less pungently than Huxley had done, but he still clearly portrayed the mercenary millionaire as being tragically (or lamentably) acquisitive.

a few years earlier. Frank Baldanza, “Huxley and Hearst,” Journal of Modern Literature 7 (1979): 441–55.

Hearst Castle. Welles’s movie made the residence more familiar, albeit set in Florida, as the estate called Xanadu, with its cleverly alliterating mimicry of the element San. The director took the name from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” where the title character constructs a “stately pleasure-dome” in the ancient city of Xanadu.

scholarly defenders. Victoria Kastner, “William Randolph Hearst: Maverick Collector,” Journal of the History of Collections 27.3 (2015): 413–24.

clumsy Gothic extravagance. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, 13: “The thing was Gothic, mediaeval, baronial—doubly baronial, Gothic with a Gothicity raised, so to speak, to a higher power, more mediaeval than any building of the thirteenth century.”

registers item by item. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, 24, 29, 30, 46–47. For recent analysis of the reality, see Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 93.

boudoir shrine to the Virgin. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, 18, 135–36, 141, 154–55, 177.

his conception of medieval art. Mary L. Levkoff, Hearst, the Collector (New York: Abrams, 2008), 63.

abandoned cloisters. Levkoff, Hearst, the Collector, 63.

the minstrels’ gallery. Kastner, “William Randolph Hearst: Maverick Collector.”

Saint Donat’s. The castle is located near Llantwit Major in the Vale of Glamorgan, on the north side of the Bristol Channel in Wales.

other modern-day keeps. Title passed to him in 1927 for one in Gothic revival style at Sands Point, on the north shore of Long Island. From 1925 on, he bought up the acreage for an estate named Wyntoon which he established near Mount Shasta. With guidance from the architects Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan, he aspired to create a romanticized village with supersized cottages in a revival style modeled upon German late Gothic. See Levkoff, Hearst, the Collector, 117–22.

northern Spanish cloisters. Originally built between 1133 and 1144 in Sacramenia near Segovia. See “Hearst Importing a Spanish Cloister,” New York Times, December 14, 1926.

transported to the United States. Despite their purchaser’s sporadic ambition to erect the equivalent of Barnard’s Cloisters on the West Coast, he never fulfilled his pipe dream of erecting an architectural museum for the University of California.

storage in Brooklyn. Geoffrey T. Hellman, “Onward & Upward with the Arts: Monastery for Sale,” New Yorker (February 1, 1941): 33–39.

North Miami Beach. In the end, the chiseled pieces were put back together to serve as the Parish Church of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. See Kinder, “Historic Cistercian Abbey Fragments,” 398. Initially, the scheme was to pitch the reconstruction as a touristic destination in the guise of an “Old Spanish Monastery.” How the often stern and judgmental holy man of the twelfth century would have reacted to being honored with such extravagance is fascinating to guess.

he called Mountolive. They were from Santa Maria de Óvila, a Cistercian monastery founded in the late twelfth century in the province of Guadalajara near Sigüenza.

delapidation. Though many buildings were demolished without being selected for shipment, the scale of the operation can be gauged from the size of the monastery church, which was taken: it was over 150 feet long and 50 feet tall.

shipped to San Francisco. The transportation required 14,000 wooden crates. From there, it was to be taken for use in a replacement for his mother’s home, designed by Bernard Maybeck, which had burned down. See Margaret Burke, “Santa Maria de Ovila,” in Lillich, Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture, 1: 78–85. The residence was to be called Wyntoon Castle, after the location near Mount Shasta in California where it was to be located. Hearst never succeeded in executing his plan. He presented the crates in 1941 to the city of San Francisco, which was to reassemble the monastery as a museum.

sat for decades. The crates suffered from at least five fires caused by arson during the extended warehousing. The surviving stones suffered vandalism and pilferage. The sixteenth-century portal that had served as the portal to the church was ultimately rebuilt at the University of San Francisco. See Kinder, “Historic Cistercian Abbey Fragments,” 402. Eventually, the remaining components of the chapter house suitable for further use were moved 175 miles north to Vina, California, and reconstructed within the Abbey of New Clairvaux. On May 5, 2012, the monks celebrated the completion of the transvaulted ceiling by singing in Latin the hymn to the blessed Virgin, “Hail, Holy Queen” (Salve, Regina) (see Fig. n.15).

given to three museums. Two were gifted to the Los Angeles County Museum, two to the Cloisters, and one to the Detroit Institute of Arts. These portals have been demonstrated to be likely forgeries: Amy L. Vandersall, “Five ‘Romanesque’ Portals: Questions of Attribution and Ornament,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 18 (1983): 129–39.

Fig. n.15 Chapter house from Ovila, Spain, currently located in the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux, Vina, CA. Photograph, date and photographer unknown. Image courtesy of the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux. All rights reserved.

The Last Hurrah

Gothic period room. The Lucy Maud Buckingham Memorial.

one donor’s collection. On the original collection, see Christina Nielsen, “‘To Step into Another World’: Building a Medieval Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago,” in To Inspire and Instruct: A History of Medieval Art in Midwestern Museums, ed. idem (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 25–38. On the collection as it was reorganized nearly a quarter century later, see Meyric R. Rogers and Oswald Goetz, Handbook to the Lucy Maud Buckingham Medieval Collection (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1945); Thomas E. A. Dale, “Meyric Rogers, Oswald Goetz, and the Rehabilitation of the Lucy Maud Buckingham Memorial Gothic Room at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1940s,” in Nielsen, To Inspire and Instruct, 118–30.

truly Gothic. Nielsen, “‘To Step into Another World,’” 31. The quotation that follows this one is equally apropos.

a large French medieval dwelling. Curran, Invention of the American Art Museum, 118.

three different French sites. The arcade on the west side of the gallery came from an unknown site closely related to Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa (perhaps Espira d’Agly), another on the north side purportedly but disputedly from the Cistercian abbey of Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut in Gascony (the chapter house of which is in The Cloisters), and the third on the south side from the monastery of Saint-Pons-de-Thomières in Languedoc-Roussillon. In general, see Ricki D. Weinberger, “The Cloister,” Toledo Museum of Art: Museum News 21.3 (1979): 53–71; Richard H. Putney, Medieval Art, Medieval People: The Cloister Gallery of the Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, OH: Toledo Museum of Art, 2002), 5–8, 23, 62–63. On the arcade, purchased in 1931, that is supposed to have come from Pontaut abbey, see Kinder, “Historic Cistercian Abbey Fragments,” 395. Harris, Moving Rooms, 165, writes, with specific attention to overlap with The Cloisters: “one colonnade is from Cuxa, another from the Abbey of Saint-Pons near Toulouse, and a third from the cloister of Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut, all three contributing associated salvages to the Cloisters.” For broad context, see Mary B. Shepard, “In All ‘Its Chaste Beauty’: Cloistered Spaces in Midwestern Art Museums,” in Nielsen, To Inspire and Instruct, 87–98 (with notes on 209–13).

garden courtyards of brick. Smith, “George Grey Barnard,” 136. For a systematic study, see Peter Barnet, “‘The Greatest Epoch’: Medieval Art in Detroit from Valentiner to ‘The Big Idea,’” in Nielsen, To Inspire and Instruct, 39–53.

a donor. Mrs. Julia Shaw Carnell.

Nuremberg Madonna. This polychrome image represents Mary in her guise as Mater Dolorosa, “Our Lady of Sorrows.”

St. Louis Art Museum. See Sherry C. M. Lindquist, “A ‘Sympathetic Setting’ for Medieval Art in St. Louis,” in Nielsen, To Inspire and Instruct, 99–116.

now resides in the Worcester Art Museum. After the Philadelphia Museum of Art declined it, the institution in New England purchased it in 1927 from the French dealer and landowner, disassembled it, and conveyed the stones in cases to the city in Massachusetts, where it was put together as part of the museum in 1933. It features ceilings, with ribbed vaulting, that rest upon piers and columns. The arches are both rounded and pointed.

early sixteenth-century. Dated more narrowly 1506–1515. The arcaded galleries, marble capitals, windows, and doorframes fuse inspirations from Gothic and Hispano-Moresque architecture. These elements were sold in 1904 by the castle’s owner and secured in Paris in 1913 by George Blumenthal, who put them in his townhouse on Park Avenue in New York City. After Blumenthal died and his townhouse was taken down, the blocks were brought to the Museum and reassembled in 1964.

museum fatigue. For a spectrum of studies, see Benjamin Ives Gilman, “Museum Fatigue,” The Scientific Monthly 2 (January 1, 1916): 62–74 (the first to describe and analyze the phenomenon); Gareth Davey, “What is Museum Fatigue?” Visitor Studies Today 8.3 (2005): 17–21; Stephen Bitgood, “Museum Fatigue: A Critical Review,” Visitor Studies 12.2 (2009): 93–111.

barely scratches the surface. For a single idea-packed and wide-ranging overview, see Faye Ringel, “Building the Gothic Image in America: Changing Icons, Changing Times,” Gothic Studies 4.2 (2002): 145–54.

crowning achievement of American museology. Barnet and Wu, The Cloisters, 14.

predatory noblemen. The equivalent German designation is Raubritter.

Notes to Chapter 7

European history is of profound importance. Charles H. Haskins, “European History and American Scholarship,” The American Historical Review 28.2 (1923): 215–27, at 215. In the ellipsis Haskins points out interestingly, “The latest statue of Abraham Lincoln looks toward Westminster Abbey and toward the grave of the unknown British soldier who fell in a cause of liberty common to both sides of the Atlantic.” This piece is his presidential address before the American Historical Association, delivered in New Haven on December 27, 1922. The statue mentioned is the colossus, completed in 1920 and unveiled in 1922, in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The ellipsis reads “We may at times appear more mindful of Europe’s material indebtedness to us than of our spiritual indebtedness to Europe; we may in our pharisaic moods express our thanks that we are not even as these sinners of another hemisphere; but such moments cannot set us loose from the world’s history.”

Out of the ruins. See Ezio Levi d’Ancona, Il libro dei cinquanta miracoli della vergine (Bologna, Italy: Romagnoli-Dall’Acqua, 1917), clxv–clxviii (appendix, “Rielaborazioni moderne dei miracoli medievali”).

he died in exile. For his biography, see Cesare Segre and Alberto Vàrvaro, Ezio Levi d’Ancona, Profili e ricordi, vol. 15 (Naples, Italy: Società nazionale di scienze, lettere e arti, 1986).

a play entitled Our Lady’s Tumbler. Princeton University Library, III. Papers of Persons Other Than Ridgely Torrence, Box 95, Folder 7. The typescript is thirteen pages.

the twins committed double suicide. “Brings Story of Cromwell Tragedy,” New York Times, January 29, 1919, 1.

women who had worked as nurses. Harriet Monroe, “A Gold Star for Gladys Cromwell,” Poetry 13 (1919): 326–28.

not a minor cultural undercurrent or countercurrent. Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Professor Charles Rufus Morey. Craig Hugh Smyth, “Concerning Charles Rufus Morey (1877–1955),” in The Early Years of Art History in the United States: Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching, and Scholars, ed. idem and Peter M. Lukehart (Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1993), 111–21, at 115–16. More recently, see Colum Hourihane, “Charles Rufus Morey and the Index of Christian Art,” in The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography, ed. idem (London: Routledge, 2017), 123–29.

Ruining Europe

We are transported into times long past. Christian Cay Laurenz Hirschfeld, Theorie der Gartenkunst, 5 vols. (Leipzig, Germany: M. G. Weidmann, 1779–1785), 2: 111; trans. in Georg Germann, Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and Ideas, trans. Gerald Onn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 82. The passage continues: “For a few brief moments we find ourselves living in the centuries of barbarity and feudal warfare, but also of strength and courage; in the centuries of superstition, but also of inward piety; in the centuries of savagery and rapacity, but also of hospitality.”

These once-sturdy edifices. See Michael Charlesworth, “The Ruined Abbey: Picturesque and Gothic Values,” in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 62–80.

the Gothic picturesque garden. Daniela Carpi, “The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense,” Pólemos 7 (2013): 269–83.

sham ruins within gardens. See David Stewart, “Political Ruins: Gothic Sham Ruins and the ’45,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (1996): 400–11.

a leitmotif of medieval revivals. Günter Hartmann, Die Ruine im Landschaftsgarten: Ihre Bedeutung für den frühen Historismus und die Landschaftsmalerei der Romantik, Grüne Reihe: Quellen und Forschungen zur Gartenkunst, vol. 3 (Worms, Germany: Werner’sche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1981), 130–35.

Professor Arthur Kingsley Porter. Linda Seidel, “Arthur Kingsley Porter: Life, Legend, and Legacy,” in Smyth and Lukehart, Early Years of Art History, 97–110, at 101.

He was knowledgeable and respectful. Among other things, he made heavy use of photographs in his research, regarding the images as a means both to facilitate preservation and to document what was original in monuments and what resulted from later modifications. As a scholar, he wished to spare other members of his profession the obligation to spend weeks in teasing apart what was authentically medieval from what had been imposed through pseudomedieval changes in the nineteenth century or later. See Friedrich Kestel, “The Arthur Kingsley Porter Collection of Photography and the European Preservation of Monuments,” Visual Resources 9 (1994): 361–81.

keeping the art and architecture of the Middle Ages truly medieval. He belonged to the inaugural cohort of fellows in the Medieval Academy of America, which also included Ralph Adams Cram.

a tenth symphony. Douglas Shand Tucci, Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800–2000 (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1978), 163, quoted Arthur Kingsley Porter, letter of June 22, 1926, to Cram.

commemorating them when they perished. Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); John C. Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); Debra N. Mancoff, The Return of King Arthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1995), 101–29.

Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. The poem had been composed between 1859 and 1885.

the Armistice. November 11, 1918.

Treaty of Versailles. Signed on June 28, 1919.

tales of King Arthur and the Round Table. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 198–99.

Reims: Martyr City and Cathedral

reliquary of our national glories. Maurice Landrieux, The Cathedral of Reims: The Story of a German Crime, trans. Ernest E. Williams (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1920), 102.

the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine. Joëlle Prungnaud, Figures littéraires de la cathédrale: 1880–1918 (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2008), 226–27.

demonstrative reactions in the populace. Prungnaud, Figures littéraires de la cathédrale, 231–42.

the “martyr city.” In French, ville martyre and cathédrale martyre. Only after writing this section did I become aware of Elizabeth Emery’s characteristically well-researched and insightful “The Martyred Cathedral.”

suffered more extreme injury. For revisionary views, see Klaus H. Kiefer, “Die Beschießung der Kathedrale von Reims: Bilddokumente und Legendenbildung—Eine Semiotik der Zerstörung,” in Kriegserlebnis und Legendenbildung: Das Bild des “modernen” Krieges in Literatur, Theater, Photographie und Film, vol. 1: Vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, der Erste Weltkrieg, ed. Thomas F. Schneider (Osnabrück, Germany: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 1999), 115–52; Jean-Noël Grandhomme, “L’incendie de la cathédrale de Reims pendant la Première Guerre mondiale: réalités, symbole et propaganda,” in Les hommes et le feu de l’Antiquité à nos jours: Du feu mythique et bienfaiteur au feu dévastateur. Actes du colloque de Besançon, Association interuniversitaire de l’Est, 26–27 septembre 2003, ed. François Vion-Delphin and François Lassus, Annales littéraires de l’Université de Franche-Comté, vol. 823 / Série “Historiques,” vol. 29 (Besançon, France: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2007), 311–17; Yann Harlaut, “L’incendie de la cathédrale de Reims, 19 septembre 1914. Fait imagé… Fait imaginé,” in Mythes et réalités de la cathédrale de Reims: De 1825 à 1975, ed. Sylvie Balcon (Paris: Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2001), 70–79. The most recent, thorough, and broad examination of Reims cathedral and its significances owing to the war damage is Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Reims on Fire: War and Reconciliation between France and Germany, trans. David B. Dollenmayer (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2018). The book appeared too late for consideration here.

assaulted repeatedly by German missiles. These attacks took place between September 3, 1914, and October 5, 1918.

First Battle of the Marne. September 5–12, 1914.

pelted it with heavy weaponry. From September 14.

Shortly afterward. On September 16.

media competition to score propaganda points. For a lengthy account by a contemporary who attempts to give an equable assessment, see Richard Harding Davis, With the Allies (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 46–58 (chap. 6 “The Bombardment of Rheims”). The title alone suffices to indicate where his allegiance lay.

closely related to mass killing. On the German outlook, see Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 27–30.

compared the dismantling. Louis Réau, Histoire du vandalisme: Les monuments détruits de l’art français, ed. Michel Fleury and Guy-Michel Leproux, 2nd ed. (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994), 842–50 (844 for the quotation from Mâle): “When France learned that the cathedral of Reims was in flames, every heart was stricken. Those who cried for a son found fresh tears for the saintly church.” For this reference as well as other contextual information and the translation in this paragraph I am obliged to Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press), 168–69, 219.

sought to construe the wreckage. Ralph Adams Cram, Heart of Europe (New York: Scribner, 1915), 9, 119.

donnybrook between evil and good. Cram, Heart of Europe, 4–5: “between a brute power founded on Bismarckian force and Nietzschean antichristian philosophy, on the one hand, and on the other nations newly conscious of their Christianity, ashamed of their backsliding, and ready to fight for what had made them.” Compare pp. 249–50, 317, 319.

published a pamphlet. The original “Notre Dame de Reims” was printed in Saint-Flour (Cantal, France: Imprimerie du Courrier d’Auvergne, n.d.), probably in 1918. For the French, see Denis Hollier, La prise de la Concorde; suivi de, Les Dimanches de la vie: Essais sur Georges Bataille (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 33–43. For an English translation, see Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 14–22 (translation on 5–19). For an attempt to fit this youthful panegyric and polemic within a larger view of Bataille’s medievalism, see Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 26–56, especially at 29–30.

the coronation of King Charles VII. Before ascending to the throne, the heir apparent had been conventionally known as the Dauphin.

Reims in 1429. “The people exultant with pious joy and hope, the cathedral white and immense as victory, and the whole city open like the ornate portals of Notre-Dame to anyone coming in the name of the Lord.” On one level, his rhapsodizing is directed against the Germans, who, Bataille asserts, blasted the cathedral nearly to smithereens before putting it to the torch. On another, it lies within the realm of possibility to sense in the fizz of his phraseology the sexuality of a young man, particularly of one who would later devote much thought and many words to sexology.

in his first youthful screed. Hollier, La prise de la Concorde, 32.

Remembrance of Things Past. Literally, In Search of Lost Time. In French, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927).

Saint Hilary. In French, Saint-Hilaire.

The ruination of the stones. William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 665; Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, 169; Christopher Prendergast, Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 193–94.

kept to this day. In the Palace du Tau.

Arthur Kingsley Porter. Arthur Kingsley Porter, “Gothic Art, the War and After,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects (October 1917): 485–87, at 487, repr. idem, “Gothic Art, the War and After: Flying Buttresses of the Cathedral at Reims,” in idem, Beyond Architecture (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1918), 56–65, at 65: “Gothic churches cannot and must not be restored. What is done cannot be undone. The losses caused by the Revolution, in ignorance, were great. . . . Let the destroyed monuments of France stand as ruins, but noble, poetic, beautiful ruins, not machine-made, modern churches. Let them stand a sempiternal reproach and source of shame to the Germans; but let it never be said that their friends destroyed what their enemies had spared.” On Porter himself, see Linda Seidel, “Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883–1933),” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil, 3 vols., Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, vols. 1350, 2071, 2110 (New York: Garland, 1995–2000), 3: 273–86.

Much the same argument had been framed about Ypres by the Belgian architect Eugène Dhuicque, who headed the national commission to document wartime artistic and architectural losses. He wrote: “On the morning after the armistice the ruins of the hall and of the cathedral of Ypres expressed the unshakable resistance of an entire race with more eloquence and relief than any description could possibly give [. . . ]. Certainly no one more than I, who have had the sad privilege of beholding day after day the progressive ruining of these illustrious monuments, regrets their tragic fate. But do they not still belong to history? Are yesterday’s events less important than those of years ago? What entitles us to erase their traces.” See Jeffery Howe, “A New Key: Modernism and National Identity in Belgian Art,” in A New Key: Modern Belgian Art from the Simon Collection, ed. idem (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2007), 21–90, at 56.

Cram promoted an elaborate Plan B. Cram, Heart of Europe, 118. Porter’s ambivalence about reconstruction is evident also in Ralph Adams Cram, My Life in Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), 136–37.

had a cathedral epiphany. Linda Seidel, “The Scholar and the Studio: A. Kingsley Porter and the Study of Medieval Architecture in the Decade before the War,” in The Architectural Historian in America, ed. Elisabeth Blair MacDougall (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, and Hanover, NH: Distributed by the University Press of New England, 1990), 145–58, at 147.

resanctified in July of 1938. See Charles Pound, “Rheims Celebrates: Restored Cathedral to Be Ready for the Public Again after Ceremonies in July,” New York Times, June 26, 1938, 133; Helen Solterer, Medieval Roles for Modern Times: Theater and the Battle for the French Republic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 1.

Rebuilding Europe in America

A great cathedral. Elihu Root, “Cathedral Building: An Index of National Character,” speech delivered on November 20, 1922 (New York: n.p., 1922).

Art Deco. The last term took its name from the 1925 Paris Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, which was dedicated to the modern decorative arts. Nonetheless, the exhibition held there and then was itself just a summa of the first phase in the movement.

Cloth Hall of Ypres. It was in fact rebuilt in situ.

small-scale constructions. Ralph Adams Cram, “War Memorials,” Architectural Record 45 (February 1919): 116–17, at 117, quoted by Katherine Solomonson, The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 192. He specified “some chapel or château or bridge that should stand always as an example of what the universal enemy destroyed when he could get the chance, and as an evidence of what our men went abroad to save, and did save—the fine spirit of true civilization that showed itself once in art such as this, and has been preserved, that it may show itself again.”

footnote. On this form of annotation, see Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

the Eiffel Tower. Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 3; Nate LeBoutillier, Eiffel Tower (Mankato, MN: Creative Education, 2007), 10.

German Expressionism

The longing of the times. Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus (Munich, Germany: R. Piper, 1914), 39–40, at 45: “Die Sehnsucht der Zeit ist eine neue Gotik, das Schaffen einer Kunst, die der alten vor der Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst gewachsenen an Energie des Ausdrucks und der Geistigkeit gleichkommt.” For context, see Magdalena Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik und die expressionistische Kunst: Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie 1911–1925 (Munich, Germany: S. Schreiber, 1990).

Franz Johannes Weinrich. Siebler, “Weinrich, Franz Johannes.”

A Little Play Based on a Legend. The playbook was printed in first and second editions in 1921 and 1925. Franz Johannes Weinrich, Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau: Ein klein Legendspiel nach altem Text (Augsburg, Germany: Haas & Grabherr, 1921; 2nd ed. Frankfurt: Bühnenvolksbund, 1925).

became a favorite of theatrical groups. Thereafter, Weinrich’s work was staged as a ballet in the Berlin State Opera (Staatsoper) on June 29, 1923: see http://www.chronikverlag.de/tageschronik/0629.htm. The German church organist (and composer) Theodor Pröpper recorded that in 1928 it was performed in Balve, a town in North Rhine–Westphalia. It was also performed again in 1937, when copies where made (Düsseldorf, Germany: Jugendhaus-Feierdienst, 1937).

The initial production of Weinrich’s play involved music composed by Bruno Stürmer, recalled today mostly thanks to the taint of his later extensive association with the Nazis, and artwork by Ludwig Sievert, a stage designer. On Stürmer and the Nazis, see Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 71–72, 130, 133, 165, 184. On the stage design of Sievert during this period, see Ludwig Wagner, Der Szeniker Ludwig Sievert: Studie zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Bühnenbildes im letzten Jahrzehnt (Berlin: Bühnenvolksbundverlag, 1926).

A review by a contemporary. “A work with these contents could nowadays become only with difficulty a work of art: it is to be expected from the outset that we are dealing with a work of arts and crafts.” Oskar Loerke, Der Bücherkarren; Besprechungen im Berliner Börsen-Courier, 1920–1928, Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung/Darmstadt, vol. 34 (Heidelberg, Germany: L. Schneider, 1965), 76.

expressionism. On the gradual transference of the term from French to German artists, and on drawbacks to considering it a movement in the full sense of the word, see Donald E. Gordon, “On the Origin of the Word ‘Expressionism,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 368–85.

identified a primitivism. David Pan, Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).

the abstraction of morality plays. See William Angus, “Expressionism in the Theatre,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 19.4 (1933): 477–92 (on abstraction in the medieval morality play); Selz, German Expressionist Painting, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 12–19.

The Burghers of Calais. Die Bürger von Calais. The play appeared in 1914 but was not performed until 1917.

an episode from the Hundred Years’ War. Jean Froissart recounts that to end the siege of Calais, King Edward III of England demanded that six of its burghers surrender to him. The half dozen expected to be executed, but instead were spared thanks to the intervention of the English queen. See Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans. Geoffrey Brereton, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1978), 105–10.

From Morning to Midnight. Von Morgens bis Mitternachts, released in 1916 but first performed in 1917.

station drama. In German, Stationendrama.

principles of medieval mystery plays. In the film version of 1921 that was directed by Karlheinz Martin, the contrastive play of light and dark is quite powerful, especially within a very simple décor.

two editions. The first was Augsburg, Germany (Haas & Grabherr, 1921), while the second was Frankfurt: Verlag des Bühnenvolksbundes (Patmos-Verlag, [1923?]). The latter was reprinted in 1923 and 1925. Another edition was printed in Düsseldorf, Germany: Jugendhaus-Feierdienst, 1937.

I seek myself. In German, “Mich such ich, mich, mich!”: Weinrich, Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau, 11.

Pray for us!. In the original, “Bitte für uns.”

On the contrary, you pray, good brothers! In German, “Bittet lieber Ihr, gute Brüder!”

I am nothing; you are everything. The original has “Ich bin nichts—Du bist alles!”

French Piety

Maurice Vloberg. Maurice Vloberg, La légende dorée de Notre Dame: Huit contes pieux du Moyen Âge (Paris, D. A. Longuet, 1921), 177–96: “In those days there was great joy in the city of Our Lord Saint Denis, the glorious martyr and patron of France.”

Of the Tumbler Who Juggled. In French, “Du tombeur qui jongla devant l’image de Notre Dame.”

his later books. Maurice Vloberg, La Vierge et l’Enfant dans l’art français, 2 vols. (Grenoble, France: B. Arthaud, 1933, 2nd ed. 1934, repr. 1954); idem, La Vierge, notre médiatrice (Grenoble, France: B. Arthaud, 1938); idem, La vie de Marie, mère de Dieu (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1949); idem, Les Noëls de France (Grenoble, France: B. Arthaud, 1934, repr. 1938, 1953). Vloberg’s lifelong devotion to the Virgin, as a man of letters, scholar, and otherwise, is apparent even to his final decade. In 1960, he published an article on the reanimation of stillborn children in sanctuaries of the Virgin, in 1963, another on Madonnas that can be opened and closed. See idem, “Les réanimations d’enfants mort-nés dans les sanctuaires, dits ‘à répit,’ de la Vierge,” Sanctuaires et pèlerinages: Bulletin du Centre de documentation 18 (1960): 17–32; idem, “Vierges ouvrantes: Sanctuaires et pèlerinages,” Sanctuaires et pèlerinages: Bulletin du Centre de documentation 30 (1963): 25–34. To this day his Marian scholarship, especially in art history, retains a rock-solid standing. The simplest confirmation would be the fact that, more than fifty years after its initial publication, an article of his on iconography was reprinted in translation as the concluding chapter in a standard reference work on Mary: see Maurice Vloberg, “The Iconographic Types of the Virgin in Western Art,” in Boss, Mary, 537–85.

Blessed are simple hearts without deceit. Compare Matthew 5:8.

a dramatic monologue. Léon Chancerel, Frère clown; ou, le Jongleur de Notre-Dame (Brother Clown, or the Jongleur of Notre Dame): Monologue par Léon Chancerel d’après le miracle du ménestrel Pierre de Sygelar mis en vers français par le Révérendissime Père Gautier de Coincy de l’Ordre de Saint Benoit, Grand Prieur Clastra de l’Abbaye de St-Médard de Soissons (1177–1236), Répertoire du Centre d’études et de représentations (Lyon, France: Editions La Hutte, 1943), 11.

a color-illustrated periodical. Chanteclair, no. 176 (1923): 18.

Gallic rooster. This prince among poultry was understood to betoken the ancient Gauls, in their guise as the French people millennia in advance of when France was constituted as a nation.

an 1891 oil painting. Entitled L’Ambulance de la Comédie Française: Siège de Paris (1870–1871) (The infirmary of the Comédie Française: Siege of Paris), by the French painter André Brouillet. The painting hangs at the top of the staircase of honor in the Paris Descartes University.

Another nurse and a doctor. The doctor is Didier-Dominique-Alfred Richet, father of Charles Richet, who commissioned the painting.

Painting the Juggler

a report of a brush drawing. Die Christliche Kunst: Monatsschrift für alle Gebiete der christlichen Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft 16 (1919): 63. This passage is viewable though Google Books but it has not been verified in the printed periodical.

Herbert Granville Fell. P. H. Wicksteed, trans., Our Lady’s Tumbler: A XIIth Century Legend Transcribed from the French (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1924), with frontispiece and two other illustrations by Herbert Granville Fell, who specialized in bookbinding and illustrating. His best work is in art nouveau books.

Roberta F. C. Waudby. P. H. Wicksteed, trans., Our Lady’s Tumbler: A Twelfth Century Legend, illustrated by Roberta F. C. Waudby (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930). Waudby produced images for many children’s and religious books. Among them are such religious books as Muriel Chalmers, Jesus, Friend of Little Children, Bible Books for Small People, vol. 11 (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1935); idem, Hosanna to the King, Bible Books for Small People, vol. 12 (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1935), and H. W. Fox, Tales from the Old Testament (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934).

Hugo von Habermann. Baron of Dillingen an der Donau. For biographical information, see Hans Detlev Henningsen, “Habermann, Hugo,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1966), 7: 396–97. This artist is sometimes designated as Hugo von Habermann the Elder, to differentiate him from his homonymous nephew, who is then called Hugo von Habermann the Younger. He is identified as having been Catholic.

Munich Secession. In German, Sezession. The movement was inspired by a similar action taken by artists in Paris in 1890 and followed five years later by the Vienna Secession.

appears to have avoided being alienated. Wolfgang Johannes Bekh, Die Münchner Maler: Von Jan Pollak bis Franz Marc, 2nd ed. (Pfaffenhofen, Germany: W. Ludwig, 1978), 210–11.

appointed to the Munich Academy. He taught there from 1905 to 1924.

Jugendstil. The “Youth Style” was so called after the Munich magazine Die Jugend, or “Youth.” Jugendstil and Sezessionstil were respectively German and Austrian expressions of art nouveau, an ornamental style of art that was widespread between roughly 1890 and 1910.

his fellow nobleman. For the perspective of shared nobility, see John Trygve Has-Ellison, “Nobles, Modernism, and the Culture of fin-de-siècle Munich,” German History 26.1 (2008): 1–23. Herterich illustrated the covers of Jugend 5.3 (January 15, 1900) and 9.19 (April 28, 1904).

The Dancer before Our Lady. Der Tänzer zu unserer lieben Frau, 14¾″ × 11¼″ (37.6 × 28.6 cm.), sale date October 28, 2006, from the auction house Winterberg Arno in Heidelberg, Germany. It is incomplete; it was done by brush in India ink over pencil drawing, probably as a preliminary sketch. It has never been published and is now in private hands.

his same-sex preferences and his adopted religion. For a parallel, think of Sebastian Marchmain (who ends up in a monastery) in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, first published in 1945.

a 1928 painting of Le jongleur de Notre Dame. J. G. Paul Delaney, Glyn Philpot: His Life and Art (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999), 85 (with plate C18). A composition study, graphite on paper, is held at the Courtauld Institute of Art (D.1962.GC.296). The painting has also been reproduced from a private collection in Jacques Le Goff, Héros & merveilles du Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 125.

Mother of Pearl. Anatole France, Mother of Pearl, trans. Frederic Chapman, illustration by Frank C. Papé (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1929).

Rodolphe Duguay. Rodolphe Duguay, “Naître pour mourir: Journal (extraits),” Liberté 39.3, no. 231 (1997): 64–102, at 72 (November 11, 1920, with reference to November 10, 1920).

afterlife in book illustration. Still more exhaustive rifling would be required to determine across all possible languages which translations and adaptations of the tale were illustrated.

short stories by Anatole France. The 1933 book merits comparison with the Italian version of Anatole France, “Il giocoliere della Madonna,” La Lettura 3 (monthly magazine attached to Corriere della Sera) (March, 1, 1932): 234–39; http://www.internetculturale.it/opencms/opencms/it/index.html (search title). The illustrations of this version are by A. Guazzoni. This artist downplays the performance and instead emphasizes the monks and the Virgin (see Fig. n.16).

American Gothic

All that I attempted to do. Grant Wood, interviewed in Chicago Leader, December 26, 1930, quoted by Thomas Hoving, American Gothic: The Biography of Grant Wood’s American Masterpiece (New York: Chamberlain Bros., 2005), 64. For other perspectives on Wood’s painting, see Steven Biel, American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (New York, W. W. Norton, 2005); Jane C. Milosch, ed., Grant Wood’s Studio: Birthplace of American Gothic (Cedar Rapids, IA: Prestel, 2005).

The period from 1900 to 1930 is in full swing. Letter to John Hay, November 7, 1900, in LHA, 5: 167–69, at 169.

the Dutch translation. Wies Moens, De danser van Onze Lieve Vrouw: Een klein mirakelspel (Antwerp, Belgium: De Sikkel, 1930).

Americanissimum. The Latin superlative signifies “American to the utmost.”

Chicago Annual Exposition. Also known as the American Artists Exposition.

by no means a neologism. Elizabeth Emery, “Postcolonial Gothic: The Medievalism of America’s ‘National’ Cathedrals,” in Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” outside Europe, 237–64,” ed. Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 243, cites another Wood—William Halsey Wood—who in the 1880s insisted upon the term “American Gothic” in promoting his vision for the design of the cathedral of Saint John the Divine. In 1891, Wood asked and answered a question about “American Gothic”: William Halsey Wood, “The Cathedral of St. John the Divine: The Second Competition,” American Architect and Building News 32.802 (May 9, 1891): 81–84, at 84: “It may again be asked, and in reasonable good faith, ‘Is this American Gothic? And can Gothic put on National types?’ The answer is plainly ‘Yes’; and, that when any recognized type of construction proves unequal to the constantly shifting and growing requirements of advancing civilization it must, and righteously suffer loss and fall into decadence. This study is confidently, yet with all modesty, advanced as a demonstration of this practicability and plasticity of Gothic ideals. …”

what caught the painter’s fancy. In 1803, more than a century and a quarter earlier, the architect Richard Else had had a similar reaction. See Germann, Gothic Revival, 42: “It would evidently be extremely absurd to employ the same sort of window for a house as in a church.”

Of Gothic architecture we have done little more. [Clarence King], “Style and the Monument,” The North American Review 141 (November 1885): 443–53, at 449.

the artists’ colony that he cofounded. The building was called the Green Mansion, the community the Stone City Art Colony. See John Evan Seery, America Goes to College: Political Theory for the Liberal Arts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 225n37.

the human beings who inhabited them. In 1937, he produced a lithograph with a self-portrait of himself as the recipient of an honorary degree, flanked to his right by a dean and to the left by a professor (see Fig. n.17). The composition, entitled The Honorary Degree, echoes his most famous painting in the centrality of a lancet window, which is mimicked by the angle of the neckline to the fabric that is about to be draped around Wood as the honor is conferred.

a decade before his birth. It was built from 1881 to 1882.

a kit of designs. Andrew Jackson Downing, Cottage Residences, or, A Series of Designs for Rural Cottages and Cottage Villas, and Their Gardens and Grounds: Adapted to North America (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1842).

The second specimen. Design 2, number 9.

houses of this sort. He described how pseudoclassicism had been displaced by “the Gothic or English cottage, with steep roofs and high gables, just now the ambition of almost every person building in the country. There are, indeed, few things so beautiful as a cottage of this kind, well designed and tastefully placed.” See Andrew Jackson Downing’s untitled article in Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste 5.1 (July 1850): 9–11, at 10, repr. “A Few Words on Rural Architecture,” in idem, Rural Essays, 207.

including Renaissance and northern Gothic. Hoving, American Gothic, 71.

he sojourned repeatedly in France and Germany. He made stays in Europe in 1920, 1923, 1926, and 1928.

a three-month business trip. During it, he collaborated with glaziers to produce a stained-glass window for a war memorial in Cedar Rapids.

I simply invented some American Gothic people. Grant Wood, letter to the editor, printed in “The Sunday Register’s Open Forum,” Des Moines Register, December 21, 1930, quoted by Thomas Hoving, American Gothic, 38.

he showed her pictures of stone carvings. Seery, America Goes to College, 225n37, with reference to Archives of American Art 1216/286.

bears more than a passing resemblance to a Madonna. Hoving, American Gothic, 89.

Fig. n.16 The juggler kneels before the Virgin. Illustration by A. Guazzoni, 1932. Published in Anatole France, “Il giocoliere della Madonna,” La Lettura 3 (March 1, 1932), 239.

Fig. n.17 Grant Wood, The Honorary Degree, 1938. Lithograph on paper, 41.3 × 29.8 cm. Washington, DC, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of Park and Phyllis Rinard in honor of
Nan Wood Graham.