To browse Academia. An evaluation of my contribution to medieval historical studies, and the difficulties most art historians have with my work. Thirty years ago John James published the Contractors of Chartres, in which he presented his extensive research on the fabric of the great cathedral, and proposed that the resulting building must have been the result of a series of different crews coming to the site for a season, and then leaving, only to return several years later.
This paper was originally presented at the "Masons at Work" conference held at the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. In her introduction to Fragmentation and Redemption , Caroline Bynum laid out a methodology for historical writing that celebrated the fragmentary while acknowledging the challenges that an incomplete record poses to interpreters.
As Professor Bynum often reminded us in the classroom, medieval writers rarely tell us the things we are most eager to know-and the points where we feel most surprised, confused, or frustrated are precisely the ones that beg further investigation, for such passages throw light on the assumptions and expectations of our own that might be obscuring what was most important to people of the past.
Historians of medieval art face a different version of this challenge. With precious few exceptions, the makers of manuscript paintings, jeweled reliquaries, and Gothic cathedrals left us no writings at all to tell us what they were thinking, where and how they received their technical training, how they learned the narra Bynum, "In Praise of Fragments. Annals of Clinical and Medical Case Reports, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Safety, Log in with Facebook Log in with Google.
Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Book review of G. Cohen , Jill Caskey. Nina Rowe. Roundtable: Medieval Art Today, Why? By then I knew the literature and wanted to answer some of the questions that had plagued Chartrain scholars for the previous 80 years. As an architect and builder, it was natural for me to let the stones speak for themselves. For five years I lived in the town with the keys in hand and examined the building.
