Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Invention of the Gothic

"A lively, open-ended study of the building of Chartres Cathedral. . . . Ball puts the fun back in medieval scholasticism." -Los Angeles Times

Chartres Cathedral, south of Paris, is revered as one of the most beautiful and profound works of art in the Western canon. But what did it mean to those who constructed it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries-and why was it built at such immense height and with such glorious play of light, in the soaring manner we now call Gothic?

In this eminently...