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  • Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in Soissons:Approaches to its Architecture, Archaeology and History
  • Madeline H. Caviness
Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in Soissons: Approaches to its Architecture, Archaeology and History. Edited by Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines . [Bibliotheca Victorina, Vol. XV.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2003. Pp. 568; 85 b&w figs.c120.)

This substantial volume is both a monograph on a little-studied Augustinian monastery in northern France and a broader study of the institutional and material history of several comparable houses in the region. It summarizes their fortunes from the eleventh through the seventeenth century in a useful Appendix (pp. 457-473). Architectural historians have not focused on canonial sites to the same extent as on Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, though the subject is important (p. 19). The present study goes far in redressing the balance, despite the lacunae caused by the ruined state of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes.

The editors, who actually wrote all the chapters except four in which they collaborated with Edward Boyden or Katherine Jackson-Lualdi, are drawing upon two decades of excavation and archival work. They have examined the stonework that remains above ground, including the twin-towered façade which is one of the most spectacular Gothic ruins seen anywhere (figs. 37-45), the refectory (figs. 54-63), and an almost complete fourteenth-century fortification wall. They have also sought the foundations of an eleventh-century church and every sign of deconstruction and construction since, including capitals and piers from the Romanesque church that were re-used in the Gothic structure (p. 179, figs. 35-36). With the help of the cartulary and nineteenth-century drawings of the monastery before serious dilapidation, they are able to trace changes to the fabric that were an almost continuous process.

Emphasis on this continuity is a hall-mark of their approach, as is the recognition of all parts of the complex, including a rare thirteenth-century siphon-driven aqueduct that brought water to the abbey from a spring on Mont Sainte-Geneviève two kilometers away (chap. 9, figs. 73-79). Minute observation of the [End Page 754] way stones are worked and foundations laid are never redundant; the authors use them to bring the reader into dialogue with the medieval engineers and masons, though without personifying them as Master This and Master That. Their account is replete with historical figures whose names appear in the documents—the donors and canons who underwrote and oversaw the work. And an original viewing community comes to life in sections on the ritual uses of the refectory for reading and dining (chap. 8), and on the more mundane aspects of daily life (chap. 9).

Overall, this is a very finely crafted scholarly edifice, alternating dense argument in the main chapters with lucid observations on the methods and approaches available to the historian of material culture in the introductions to the five parts. It is to the credit of the series editors and of the press that there is no stinting on scholarly apparatus (such as we now see all too often in the productsof the university presses in the United States); notes give full references on every page, and in a bibliography, and an index includes technical terms as well as people and places. The general reader might, however, wish for explanations for some terms such as moyen and petit appareil for different building stones (pp. 156, 159). The illustrations are so well organized that they give a clear account ofall the monastic buildings even without the text; especially valuable are the many maps, plans, and line drawings that complement the authors' textual exegesis.

If I were to quibble at all about the scope and aims of this study, I might wish the authors had made more use of the few churches of reformed canons that are intact, in order to consider a greater range of possible decoration than they envisage. Within their region they overlook the rich colored glass and dense polychromed sculpture that provide abundant figural programs in the Premonstratensian church in Braine, though further north the Augustinian church of Saint-Martin-aux-Bois has mainly grisaille glass. Such examples indicate that not all reformed monastic communities...

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