Less a mere work of history than it is a meditation on it, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres starts out by walking the reader through those two famous French sites before broadening out into a more general discussion of the high medieval mind and ending with extended discussions of the thought of figures such as Peter Abélard and Thomas Aquinas.

First published in 1904 as a kind of guidebook for younger family members to bring with them to Europe, this book benefits from the fact that it was written by the kind of rich, connected nineteenth-century dude (Henry Adams' paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were both U.S. presidents) who had the means and time to spend months travelling western Europe and lingering over historic sites. Adams knows a lot about not just Mont-Saint-Michel and the cathedral of Chartres, but also many other medieval ecclesiastical buildings!

Adams also clearly felt unconstrained by the kinds of qualms that later historians would feel about making sweeping statements about their subjects. He is all wild claims ("In no well-regulated community, under a proper system of police, could the Virgin feel at home, and the same thing may be said of most other saints as well as sinners") and stuff that sounds nice and poetic but doesn't really mean anything ("The man who wanders into the twelfth century is lost, unless he can grow prematurely young") and hilarious swipes at some major historical figures (Héloise of Argenteuil was "by French standards, worth at least a dozen Abélards, if only because she called Saint Bernard a false apostle"; Abélard "taught philosophy to [Héloise] not so much because he believed in philosophy or in her as because he believed in himself").

I found this all deeply entertaining. It's not good history—not only has some of what Adams got to say here been superseded by later research, but it's all built on a whole foundation of weirdo paternalistic sexism and more than a smattering of antisemitism—and I wouldn't recommend reading it as such. For a variety of reasons, historians aren't really trained to write like Adams anymore, but I do feel a little envious about the leeway Adams had to just say fuck it and write about a vibe. If he's still to be read today, it should be for that. ( )

Adams casts this book as a vade mecum addressed to a “niece” (one of the charming young ladies in his social circle) about to make her first visit to these two monuments of medieval construction. Adams is a sensitive responder to architecture; he “reads” Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres with a perceptive eye. His intelligence probes deeper, though: these are not merely skillful arrangements of piles of stone; the great cathedrals and abbeys are the input of wealth, the result is an expression of energy. Why did eleventh-century Normans and twelfth-century French rulers make this investment?
What I admire about Adams, aside from the elegance and intimacy of his prose, is this grasp of the grand arc of history. When, after two centuries, the donors realized little return on their outlay—prayers accompanied by donations didn’t seem more efficacious than those without—the funds dried up. Indeed, Adams even sees the French Revolution a half-millennium later as taking back the wealth that went into the cult.
Adams also points out the significance that the coastal abbey is dedicated to the warrior-archangel Michael, and connects this to the Normans, who built it, as the dominant power of the eleventh century. They sat on the throne of Sicily, and while the abbey was a-building, William realized his ambition of conquering England.
Chartres, on the other hand, represents the apogee, in the twelfth and thirteenth century, of devotion to the Virgin, which Adams terms the “least reasonable” of “the unexpected revelations of human nature.” This seems to be a dismissal, but the way he describes this “almost fanatical frenzy” reveals that it resonated deeply in him, though he is the spawn of Puritans. The essence of the book, to me, was Chapter 13, “Les Miracles de Notre Dame.” This culminates what he has said in the previous chapters describing the cathedral. Throughout, he speaks of Mary not only as an object of devotion, but as a queen who loves, who knows, and who can have her will carried out. She is the pattern for the great queens of the time.
While there were exceptional men then—Abélard, Richard the Lion Heart, for example—Adams is fascinated by the strong women and their imposition of courtesy, the manners of the court. Foremost, Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom he refers to as Eleanor of Guienne, but also Blanche of Castille and Héloïse.
At the time Adams wrote this, his fellow historians saw history as the chronicle of great men. In the century since, this has often been balanced or replaced by attention to the role of economic forces and social movements. Adams predates this in his Autobiography with his ruminations on the role the dynamo played in his time. He sees the cult of Mary in similar terms of wealth and energy, but by relating it to the power of remarkable women, he is unique. I’m not aware of another historian of his time depicting an era as a chronicle of great women.
Adams charms the reader throughout with feigned ignorance in many fields, such as architecture, about which he clearly knows more than he lets on. But the limit of his understanding does show when he tackles theology. He claims to see no difference between Gregory the Great’s classic formulation of God’s omnipresence and garden-variety pantheism. And when Saint Bernard has Abélard condemned without a hearing, Adams seems to accept Bernard’s grounds: any effort to reach God by reason was “futile and likely mischievous,” as Adams puts it. Adams elides the crucial difference between attempting to prove God’s existence through reason and attempts to use it to understand God. Perhaps it is because he possessed a probing intellect that he is sensitive to its limits, and writes sympathetically of mystics — not so much Bernard, but Francis, whom he calls “the nearest approach the Western world ever made to an Oriental incarnation of the divine essence.”
The final chapter, devoted to Thomas Aquinas, closes the book by portraying his vast output as the intellectual equivalent of the soaring spires and broken arches of the gothic cathedral. In Thomas, the aspirations of medieval times rose as far as they could. Adams’s response to the Summa is similar to his response to Chartres: he is a tourist, overwhelmed by the beauty, moved to feel yet not to understand.
I enjoyed this book greatly, regretting only that Adams mars his account, so sensitive and penetrating in every other way, with gratuitous grumblings about Jews. It’s a shame that someone who could think so creatively was, on this point, captive to the prejudice of his time. ( )

Henry Adams toured French mediæval gothic architecture, and apparently took a lot of notes, focusing on the Grande Cathedrals of Mont-Saint-Michel (built in the 1100s) and Chartres (built in the late 1100s to 1200s). The notes became the book. If that were the extent of the book, however, it could be summed with a few nice photos and captions. But there’s also 360 pages of mystery and fascination surrounding the architecture. Most of the book is Adams’ observations on the culture surrounding the buildings, moreso than on the buildings themselves. Adams takes us on a gothic travelogue through the intrigues of mediæval royal families of France, clashes in the cloisters of church hierarchy, power struggles in church and court, dark-age philosophers and poets telling stories captured in sparkling gothic stained-glass perfection.

Reminiscent of Melville’s long chapters on the anatomy of the whale, there are long detailed descriptions of the elements of the cathedral. Wading through that pays off. The stories told literally and figuratively in the massive stained glass paintings, in themselves and in their relation to other architectural features, represent the heart and soul of people’s faith, fears, allegiances, loves, hates, and pivotal events of the time.

So many fascinating stories and events converge in the 1100s and 1200s: the Golden Legend; the founding of Orders; the Chanson de Roland as metaphor for Mont-Saint-Michel, or vice versa; the intellectual romance of Abélard and Héloïse, Christian of Troyes retelling the age-old story of Tristan and Iseult (originating from a pre-Islamic Persian story); the famous invention and flowering of “Courteous Love” and how it is epitomized in the chantefable Aucassins et Nicolette; the real-life romances of Thibaut and Blanche of Castille; the backdrop of the Crusades; the touching familial closeness of Richard Cœur de Lion and Mary of Champagne; the Magna Charta and the Zodiac Window; the scholastic vs. mystic battles of theology between Abélard and Bernard of Clairvaux; inquiries into universals of geometry and syllogisms, and unity versus multiplicity; the controversy of the two Popes and its effects on people’s careers. The book closes out the 1200s with Thomas Aquinas’ rise from “dumb ox” to Summa Theologica—building his Church Intellectual to complement the Church Architectural—a “gothic Cathedral to the Trinity” (329). As Adams puts it, “His sense of scale and proportion was that of the great architects of his age” (354, 355). For culture, science, and art, the equilibrium of the universe rested on the delicate balance of the flying buttresses.

To most people, the above references have little meaning, if any. But if you read this book, they will have a lot of meaning and enrich your experience. The broad brushstrokes across history, occasionally filled in with colorful detail, renewed my interest in the period. So after finishing the book, I searched on key people and events and found additional fascinating bits of historical intrigue. The book covers so much of the culture, arts, science, philosophy, politics, and social aspects of the period, it’s a great reference point for further investigation.
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This is a history of France in the 11th through the 13th Centuries, as told through architecture, and was very interesting. ( )

Mr. Adams was a descendant of the Adamses of Massachusetts and could afford the travel necessary to write this description of two medieval masterpieces for the American public. Both studies have since been replaced by modern analyses of the their functions, but the initial work has charms. The style is literate, and not condescending. He is a keen observer of the sites, and meditates on them with a sensibility formed by the popular attitudes of the later nineteenth century, the mindset that created the arthuriana of Howard Pyle and many faux-medieval country houses. Restful to read as an artefact. ( )