Introduction. A Personal Journey Awe. Inspiration. Humility. These words just hint at the powerful responses evoked by the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. The visionaries who dreamed them command our admiration and respect, and the audacity of those who actually built them elicits disbelief. How, we may wonder, did ordinary people manage these feats of tremendous physical and creative eªort during a time, to quote Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), when life was “nasty, brutish, and short”? Technology in the twelfth to sixteenth centuries was rudimentary, famine and disease were rampant, the climate was often harsh, and communal life was unstable and incessantly violent.Yet communities with only a meager standard of living managed to make the immense investment of capital demanded by the construction of these great edifices. They mobilized the spiritual and civic determination needed to sustain building projects that sometimes spanned centuries. And they created buildings whose exquisite beauty continues to amaze us today. This is a book about this grand undertaking—the great Gothic enterprise that produced the hundreds of cathedrals and great monastic churches that dot the landscape of Europe. Most other books about cathedrals are devoted to a single building or a set of buildings, and the diferent styles of columns, vaults, buttresses, altars, and stained glass we find in them. My aim is diªerent: it is to understand the very idea of a cathedral—any cathedral. What did it stand for? What conception did it embody? What sort of a cultural artifact was it? In his classic work, The Interpretation of Culture, the American anthropologist Cliªord Geertz observes about Chartres cathedral that, although it is made of stone and glass, to understand and see it for what it is, we need to understand the relations among God, man, and architecture that governed its creation and that it embodies. I believe this remark applies as well to all great medieval churches, and his assertion expresses well the fundamental aim of my book. People who are familiar with my background and training have been surprised to learn that I have undertaken this project. Nothing about my past career as a teacher, researcher, and academic administrator anticipates it. My degree is in sociology, which I taught for seventeen years while on the faculty of Princeton University. My courses there and elsewhere dealt with topics far removed from the subject of this book. Moreover, I have never formally studied medieval history, art, or architecture, nor have books about the medieval period been high on my leisure-time reading list—that is, until about a decade ago, when I began working on this project. Most important, my inspiration did not come via the familiar academic route of a deductive descent from atop some grand theory for which the Gothic cathedral provides a compelling example. It came by the opposite route. I fell in love with one particular cathedral—the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Salisbury in England, the building that Samuel Johnson described as “the last perfection in architecture” (Figure 1). ...
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