Notre-Dame of Amiens

In prose as finely wrought as the vaults and buttresses he describes, Stephen Murray teaches us how to look at a great building, combining commentary on the cathedral as it exists today and masterful insight into its history. Murray instructs, delights, and inspires deep longing to set out for Amiens. -- Robert E. Harrist Jr., Jane and Leopold Swergold Professor of Chinese Art History, Columbia University
This lively, splendidly illustrated book demonstrates why its author is one of the most influential teachers of Gothic of his generation. Like the best medieval preachers, Murray deploys vivid language, gentle wit, and a well-controlled path forged of deep learning to guide his audience through complex content—the long, multilayered life of a particularly grand medieval church, encompassing daring architectural forms and a rich array of sculpture, furnishings, relics, and liturgical performances. It is a model of astute, humane analysis and a joy to read. -- Jacqueline E. Jung, author of Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture
Celebrating the eight hundredth anniversary of Gothic France’s greatest cathedral and animating its daring architecture with new discoveries and insights, Stephen Murray’sNotre-Dame of Amiens unlocks the secrets of its lithic fabric using close looking, measurement, digital modeling, and archival study. Lucidly written with a compelling narrative, the book offers an exemplary model for future studies of medieval cathedrals. -- Peter Fergusson, author of Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the Age of Becket
What a wonderful book! This beautifully illustrated and elegantly written account of Amiens Cathedral makes the splendor and sophistication of its architecture, sculpture, funerary monuments, and furnishings clear to the scholar and general reader alike. Much more than this, Notre-Dame of Amiens offers a new paradigm for writing the history of the medieval cathedral that not only charts the building’s chronology but also implicates its various protagonists in the contract implicit in the creation of a great building. Written by the leading historian of French Gothic architecture, it is a stunning tribute to Amiens cathedral in its eight hundredth year and will be the last word on the subject for many years to come. -- Matthew M. Reeve, author of Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole
In Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of a Gothic Cathedral, Murray inverts the usual narrative applied to a cathedral: rather than clearing away later accretions and alterations in a search for the purity of an original vision, he presents the building in time as a product of intentional interventions and unanticipated consequences. Rather than frozen in a moment or brief period of time, the fabric of Amiens cathedral offers an unfolding chronicle of structural behavior, changing devotional attitudes and practices, and shifting taste. -- Michael T. Davis, Mount Holyoke College
Murray has done an excellent job of compiling an impressive amount of research into a readable and enjoyable book. * Comitatus *