At the outset of this monumental study Margot Fassler takes pains to position herself in relation to Chartes’s “major industry,” the making of history. In keeping with recent scholarly trends, she takes as axiomatic that history is akin to a performance, thoroughly informed by the cultural system in which it is produced (most recently, see Robert A. Maxwell, ed., Representing History, 1000–1500: Art, Music, History, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010; this volume includes a contribution by Fassler). During the Middle Ages, she argues, the liturgical and visual arts often played a key role in this process, for most “learned about the past in what they heard and saw and reenacted, not in what they read” (viii). Indeed, medieval usage of the term historiae commonly extended to include the texts and music making up the liturgical offices of saints. Drawing upon Chartres’s abundant liturgical, cartulary, and art-historical monuments, Fassler excavates various layers of understanding of the Virgin, deftly identifying shifts in emphases in the saint’s cult and associating these with broader changes in the socio-political sphere. The Virgin of Chartres emerges in this study as a remarkably chameleon-like figure, capable of serving manifold, even contradictory, needs.

The study comprises four sections arranged in rough chronological order. The first begins in the ninth century to examine the development of the cult of the Virgin up to the tenure of the eleventh-century Bishop Fulbert (d. 1028). Two chapters examine early histories and legends, many of which record various attacks on the town and cathedral. Portions of these texts later featured prominently in the liturgy of Chartres, becoming embedded in communal memory. Though the precise origins of the Virgin’s cult at the site remain unclear, Fassler gently suggests that the Mother of God could work both ways in a period rife with political conflicts and power struggles: she could be connected to a venerable past through her venerable genealogy, the styrps Jesse, or embody the beginning of a new era. Bishop Odo (967–1003) features as a likely key promoter of devotion for Mary. It is to roughly the time of his episcopacy that we can date the first evidence for the relic of the saint’s tunic, worn at the Annunciation and at the Nativity, and the adoption of the liturgical sequence Hec clara die.

The second section focuses on the augmentations to Chartrain liturgy over the course of the eleventh century. One key development was the augmentation of Advent and Adventus liturgies, which become important for understanding how medieval Christians positioned themselves in relationship to their Jewish forebears. Fulbert’s influential sermon Approbate consuetudinis casts Mary as a member of the house of David, a crucial move because the Bible only mentions Joseph, who obviously was not Christ’s biological father, as a descendent of the Old Testament king. A sinister corollary to this fashioning of history can be identified in Fulbert’s sermon against the Jews, which justifies Christian understanding of the Virgin’s genealogy in supersessive terms and, thus, could ultimately serve as a justification for anti-Jewish violence.

Fulbert’s followers idealized him and made initial moves toward his sanctification. Fassler is rather circumspect about how much Fulbert ultimately contributed to the rebuilding of the cathedral in the wake of a 1020 fire—much of the work likely postdated his death—but has no doubt that he was a strong advocate of the Virgin’s cult. Moreover, in the years following the bishop’s death the liturgy celebrating the saint expanded, including the addition of numerous responsaries. Several historians in subsequent centuries incorrectly attributed all these works to Fulbert, a mistake that only served to enhance the bishop’s prominent role in the cathedral’s history. The reluctance to change liturgical texts at Chartres from the second half of the eleventh century onward further served to augment and preserve the figure of Fulbert in the communal memory.

Section three examines political, intellectual, and religious developments at twelfth-century Chartres. The reforming Bishop Ivo (d. 1115) not only did much to promote peace in the region, but in his sermons developed influential notions concerning typological relationships, Mary, and the role of the visual arts. Fassler argues that all of these ideas informed the program of Chartres’s west façade. Pace Richard Southern, she follows recent scholarly trends to cast the school of Chartres as intellectually rigorous. Additionally, she traces the Thibaudians, a noble house of the region, as likely patrons of the cathedral’s art and architecture. For roughly fifty years after 1164, a member of this house served as bishop of Chartres. Other notable Thibaudians include King Stephen of England and Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester. As a result of these familial ties, the city and cathedral of Chartres were imbricated in international politics, which, in turn, may have helped inform themes within the cathedral’s decorative program. For example, the recurrent emphasis on genealogy on Chartres’s west façade can be read in view of the many crises of royal succession in France and England, often involving Thibaudians.

The final section offers a liturgically grounded exegesis of the mid-twelfth-century arts at Chartres, especially the stained glass and sculpture of the west façade. Although the arrangement of some works changed after the 1194 fire, Fassler believes that the resonances between the twelfth-century liturgy and surviving artistic monuments, most datable to the 1140s, can still be profitably examined. Chapter 9 examines the iconography of the Virgin as Throne of Wisdom (sedes sapientiae). Fassler doubts that Chartres possessed a wooden statue of this type, but concentrates on the visualization of this type in stained glass, the Belle Verrière. This celebrated work is explicated at length in terms of its many liturgical resonances, including the text of the tablet she holds, Omnis vallis implebitur, the opening words of the canticle sung at lauds on Ember Saturday in Advent. Foregrounding, among others, the “signature” Marian antiphons of Chartres, chapter 10 considers the jamb figures of the west façade, as figures that proclaim the Virgin’s Old Testament lineage, both kingly and priestly. Chapter 11 extends this theme to the capital frieze, the meanings of which are characterized as inflected by the Old Testament figures in the pilasters below. The final chapter briefly considers the cult of the Virgin in subsequent centuries, focusing largely on the celebrated well in Chartres’s crypt to trace the manifold interpretations, from Druidical place of worship to site of apostolic martyrdom.

Comprising roughly one hundred pages, the volume’s eight substantial and extremely useful appendices include, among others, a genealogy of the Thibaudians, transcriptions and translations of key liturgical texts, a table of donors, and a list of liturgical manuscripts that can be associated with Chartres. In perusing these fascinating materials, I was struck by how deftly Fassler has distilled her arguments from primary sources.

This book has a few minor tics in presentation. The absence of in-text references to images makes some of the arguments a bit difficult to follow, especially in the final section. Dates or definitions of terms are sometimes given well after their first mention in the text. Individual chapters are written in such a way that readers can make sense of the wider arguments of the entire study. This presentational strategy is advantageous for the reader who wishes to dip into the volume and read a chapter or two, but it also leads to repetitions that are somewhat distracting for anyone who reads this study from cover to cover. These are obviously just quibbles, for overall the writing style is extremely lucid, sometimes even vivid in the many stories that it recounts. The scholarly apparatus is admirably extensive.

More sustained engagement with performance or reception theory, especially as it has been incorporated within art-historical studies, might have added further nuance to Fassler’s discussions of sculptures and stained glass in the fourth section (Leah Rutchick ‘s dissertation endures as the most lengthy study of this type for a monument from the first half of the twelfth century [“Sculpture Programs in the Moissac Cloister: Benedictine Culture, Memory Systems and Liturgical Performance,” PhD diss, University of Chicago, 1991]. She notes the importance of Ernst Gombrich’s notion of the “beholder’s share” within recent medieval art history, but its implications are not uniformly applied: whereas chapter 10 offers admirably labile accounts of the jamb figures, chapter 11 presents a rather traditional iconographic analysis of the capital frieze, apparently the result of Fassler’s acknowledged reliance upon Adelheid Heimann’s important studies from the 1960s. At times Fassler appears to read liturgical documents toward the end of identifying authoritative meanings for works of art. Yet the ever-shifting emphases of the medieval liturgical calendar, even the various offices performed over the course of each day, likely served continually to inflect how medieval viewers understood Chartres’s visual arts. Construed from such a vantage point, the sculptures and stained glass might have been cast as much more than an elaborate backdrop to performances, but as agents in the shaping of medieval viewers’ experiences.

Despite any minor criticisms that might be raised, this is a superb book. Among its chief virtues is the subtle presentation of a wide range of evidences that engender nuanced connections in the mind of the reader. What results is something akin to a thick description, in the anthropological sense of the term, of the Virgin’s cult at medieval Chartres. Moreover, the book repeatedly and generously imagines productive trajectories for future inquiries, especially with respect to the political implications of the liturgy. One could extend Fassler’s admirably interdisciplinary approach to subsequent artistic and architectural campaigns of the cathedral, as well as to broader trends within the monumental arts throughout the region. Did, for example, the Thibaudians have an agenda in the construction of history that can be observed in other churches? What role might the Virgin have played in forging regional identities beyond the city limits of Chartres? Fassler has provided a great service in offering future generations of scholars a formidable and flexible model for approaching these and many other questions. For this reason, her study will likely endure as essential reading not only for students of Chartres but for all those interested in examining the multifaceted ways that medieval communities constructed their own histories.