Well, Jim, if you don't know anything about the subject and haven't even read
the book and, furthermore, have no rationally- or informationally- based
opinions about either, seems like you shouldn't waste the list's time....

*Plus* you didn't even mention an important recent article on the subject
which breaks new ground and would serve any neophyte quite well as a
methodological introduction to how to approach the various and sundry thorny
questions surrounding the glass of Chartres (and, by extension,
elsewhere):
viz.,

James Bugslag, "Ideology and Iconography in Chartres Cathedral:
Jean Clement and the Oriflamme," _Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte_,
vol. 61, no. 4 (1998), 491-508

The guy is a bit on the pedantic side, but his academic prose is not as turgid
as some, and, the illustrations are pretty good.

Off-the-cuff, aside from your quite unfortunate use of the newly-minted
verb(?) "problematized " in line 87 (please refrain, in future), it seems to
me that you are near to making a point when you note that "Williams pointed
out that there were no guilds per se in early 13th-century Chartres..." and
that "The absence of actual guilds in early 13th-century Chartres, as they
became formalized in the late 14th and
15th centuries, is not to be wondered at, and in fact, some of the evidence
she marshals for proving their non-existence indicates that
there was indeed some kind of trade organization, however informal,
in early 13th-century Chartres...", in view of the fact that a pretty
good common sense --forgive this usage in an academic context-- argument can
be made that *OF COURSE* (as in: DUH!) there were "organisations" amongst
craft people from time-out-of-mind, crafts being, traditionally, passed down
within family groups.... Call them "proto-guilds" if you
must ex post your factoes.

In my view, in order for *written* sources informing us about suchlike matters
to survive seven or more centuries later it is necessary that
(1)there has been some necessity for the creation of documents in the first
place;

and that

(b)they survive (i.e., there was a *reason* for their being preserved,
practically speaking, by some institutional entity) the slings and arrows into
our own benighted era.

That the first of these conditions was met by these "proto-guilds", as i
project them, is, in your happy phrase, "problematical," to say the
least.

A knit to pique:

>One could point, particularly, to the furriers, who I can't believe were
that thick on the ground in early 13th-century Chartres: but their
prominence in the glass is not explained by Williams' arguments.

Seems like i've got the shadow of a memory of *some*one (Chédville? L. Merlet
in a footnote to a cartulary entry?) mentioning the existence of furriers in
and around Chartres from the 11th c.

I *could* run a check on my on-line Cartularly of St. Peter's, if i could
remember the Latin for "furrier" --it seems like there were a bunch of them in
amongst the witnesses to pre-1200 charters in that rich _fonds_.

Best from here, problematiziacally speaking,

Christopher





 



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