I appreciate Julia Barrow's bringing up Lindy Grant's new biography
of Suger
(_Abbot Suger of St. Denis: Church & State in 12th c. France_, New
York [& London?]: Longmans. xix, 338pp.),
which I have been trying to get time to carefully go through for the
better part of a month.
Though hampered a bit by (I think) the semi-popular nature of the series
in which this work appears--which may have restricted somewhat the
number and content of the scholarly apparatus (footnotes abound but seem
to be more constrained than would be the case had the book been published
by, say Oxford)--Lindy Grant has delivered herself of a serious, scholarly
and historiographically very important study--far and away the most
thorough to be found in any language, to my knowledge.
An art historian herself (curator of the Conway photographic library @ the
Courtauld Institute), she has performed something of a "Nixon goes to China"
for her collegues in that field: only a chapter (c. 30pp. out of 330) is
devoted
to Suger as a patron of the arts, thus placing his artistic activity in very
much needed historical perspective. Only an art historian could do that and
get away with it--at least in art hysterical circles.
So the book is largely a personal, professional and political biography
based on a thorough reading of both the secondary material and no small
amount of primary sources, including some very obscure, unpublished (!)
cartulary sources.
I, for one, look forward to giving it the time it deserves.
Best from here,
Christopher
Christopher Crockett
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Christopher's Book Room
P.O. Box 1061
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Future owner of: Centre des Etudes Chartraines,
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from all disciplines, comming soon to a web site near you.
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