What Is the Gothic Enterprise?

The movement I call the Gothic enterprise began in the first half of the twelfth century in the Greater Paris Basin. In fits and starts, it continued for the next four hundred years throughout Europe. By the mid-fifteenth century Gothic cathedrals could be found from Scandinavia in the north to the Iberian Peninsula in the south, and from Wales in the west to the far reaches of Central Europe in the east. I know of no comprehensive list of medieval Gothic cathedrals, but the total would surely be in the hundreds. In addition, thousands of abbey churches were built during this period (more than five hundred just in France), plus tens of thousands of small parish churches. One authority, Jean Gimpel, estimates that between 1050 and 1350, more stone was cut in France alone than at any period in the entire history of Egypt. Gimpel also reckons that there was one church for every 200 inhabitants of France and England, and that the English cities of Norwich, Lincoln, and York, with populations in the range of 5,000 to 10,000, each had forty to fifty churches. Another authority, Richard Morris, estimates that of the nearly 19,000 ecclesiastical buildings in existence in England and Wales today, nearly half date to the medieval period. Imagine all the quarrying, carving, and laying of stone, the harvesting of timber, the mining of lead, and the assembling of other materials required to build these structures. This was clearly the greatest, most sustained ecclesiastical building campaign in the history of Christendom.

The earliest Gothic great church was the Abbey Church of St. Denis, located seven miles north of Paris. Under the direction of St. Denis's famous and influential Abbot Suger, work on erecting a Gothic-style west front began in 1137, quickly followed by the renovation of its choir to the new style in 1141. Though St. Denis was not a cathedral (see box), the work there appears to have stimulated renovation to the new Gothic style of a large number of Romanesque cathedrals in the surrounding Greater Paris Basin (see Map 1). These included the cathedral churches at Sens (1140s), Senlis (1151), Reims (1150s), Laon (1160), Noyon (1160), Notre Dame of Paris (1160), Chartres (1194), Amiens (1220), Troyes (1220), and Beauvais (1226), to name just a few.

The Greater Paris Basin proved fertile ground for Gothic cathedral-building for good reason. Unlike other regions of France, such as Flanders, Burgundy, and Champagne, where powerful counts supported the construction of monasteries and cathedrals, the vicinity of Paris had seen precious little church-building during the previous century because of the general weakness and financial impoverishment of the monarchy. But once the monarchy began to gain strength (see Chapter 5), the absence of a recent regional style, combined with the fact that most abbeys and cathedrals in the Greater Paris Basin were old and in disrepair, created an opportunity for wholesale renewal of churches that could not have arisen elsewhere.

The new style of the west front and choir of St. Denis was not an abrupt departure from the earlier style; rather, it involved a liberal borrowing of the most advanced features of the Romanesque great churches that were being built in adjacent provinces of northern France. But even if none of its constituent elements was novel, the elements were employed and coordinated in fresh ways. The renovation of St. Denis in turn jump-started great-church-building campaigns throughout northern France and elsewhere, although considerable time elapsed before the Gothic style emerged as predominant. Moreover, what appeared were not carbon copies of the west front, choir, and planned nave of St. Denis, but projects that explored the implications of Abbot Suger's ideas. Over time, the Gothic style transformed the earlier Romanesque into something new, a style that would become the antithesis of Romanesque architecture. (See Chapters 7 and 8 for a detailing of the Gothic style and its differences from Romanesque architecture.)

Initially, the new style received its warmest reception in northern France and, slightly later, in England. This pairing should not surprise us because the cultural, political, economic, and ecclesiastical ties between England and France ran deep. A great many of the leading prelates of twelfth-century England were French, and those who were English by birth had been educated at the great cathedral schools of France, such as Chartres and Notre Dame. By 1140 English kings had greater influence in certain regions of France than did the nominal suzerains of the French monarchy, and French had been the first language of English elites since the Norman Conquest of 1066. It seems natural that the new style of architecture being developed in and around Paris inspired the building of great churches in England—especially as the timing was right. The burst of cathedral-and great-church-building after the Norman Conquest had lulled by the mid-1100s, creating an opportunity for a new style to take root.

Elements of Gothic design appeared in widely dispersed places throughout England. One was in the great Cistercian abbeys of the north, such as those in Ripon (1160), Byland (1170), and York Minster (1150). Another was in the southeast, where the pivotal development was the rebuilding of the choir at Canterbury following its destruction by fire in 1174. As seat of the head of the Church of England, Canterbury Cathedral galvanized the Gothic church-building movement in England. Its immediate progeny included cathedral churches at Rochester (c. 1179) and Wells (1180), the great abbey church at Glastonbury (1184), and cathedrals at Chichester (c. 1187), Winchester (c. 1190), Lincoln (c. 1192), and Llandaff, Wales (c. 1193).

The new style quickly found its way to other parts of Europe. In Sweden, work on Uppsala Cathedral began in the 1230s, and in Germany cathedrals were begun at Strasburg and Cologne in 1240 and 1248 respectively. In Germany, initially, the use of Gothic elements in cathedral design was generally cautious; such elements were insinuated into preexisting Romanesque structures in such a way as to preserve the integrity and harmony of the early style rather than to...