ABSTRACT
The history of the Christian world is presented in the cathedrals as it is in Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum historiale, where periods are reckoned not by the deeds of emperors and kings but by the lives of saints. The lives of many of the saints equalled the most romantic of novels, and the legends of eastern saints compiled by Greek or Coptic hagiographers read like fairy-tales. The legend of the saintly king Gontran of Burgundy, who guided by rats found a subterranean passage filled with gold, was no doubt a popular song of the Burgundian tribes. In the thirteenth-century cathedral the great saint is glorified in two ways; either his whole life is recounted in a series of scenes, or his likeness with well-defined characteristics is placed before men's eyes. After the Gospels, the story of the lives of the saints is of all human documents that which has had the most profound influence upon art.
