Review by Choice Review
An ambitious attempt to uncover, beneath the radical transformations of art and thought in the period from the 11th through the 13th century, an underlying commonality of purpose and method. In their focus on developments of the High Middle Ages in France as well as in their effort to establish parallels between patterns of art and intellectual discourse, the authors have been primarily inspired by Erwin Panofsky's classic Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). They are, however, less interested in styles of architecture and theology than in modes of cognition, understood as "the mental categories in terms of which scholars and builders both understood the central issues of their disciplines and endeavored to define solutions." They also differ from their predecessor in identifying these solutions with individual masters and builders set apart from the larger society rather than reflecting an all-embracing zeitgeist. Clark provides expert observations on salient aspects of French architecture and sculpture; Radding comments perceptively on the writings of figures like Fulbert of Chartres, Berengar of Tours, Abelard, Anselm of Laon, and Peter Lombard. For this reviewer, however, the effort to map the common cognitive ground between builders and thinkers is not invariably illuminating, and runs the risk, as did Panofsky's earlier effort, of hermeneutical circularity. These difficulties aside, the book will be a useful introduction both to significant historical events and to the methodological issues that their interpretation entails. W. Cahn; Yale University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
