ABSTRACT
In 1385, Duke Philip the Bold and Duchess Margaret of Flanders, the founding couple of the powerful Valois house of Burgundy, established a new Carthusian Charterhouse, the Chartreuse de Champmol, as their dynastic mausoleum. Caroline Walker Bynum's argument, that Victor Turner's model of social drama describes the experiences of medieval men better than those of medieval women, is useful in understanding the relationship between gender, architecture and power at the Chartreuse de Champmol. This book argues that architecture at Champmol operates to create and regulate different levels of liminality for different social classes and genders, it is helpful to identify three distinct liminalities following Turner and Bynum. Monasticism gains strength from operating between the ritualized and informal types of liminality. The idiosyncratic Carthusian architectural plan, however, made Charterhouses more costly to found and maintain than other foundations.
