ABSTRACT
Henry Brooks Adams, an American historian whose claim to the attention of medievalists depends on one improbable book, was born in Boston on 16 February 1838 and died in Washington, D.C., on 27 March 1918. Except for some passages in The Education of Henry Adams, which was written as a companion volume in 1906, and an earlier essay on “The Anglo-Saxon Courts of Law” (1876), Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904) stands alone in his oeuvre as holding a significant place in medieval studies. It engaged the imagination of a wide public. Continuously in print for nearly a hundred years, it is still widely used for teaching in North America. Adams undertook the book in secrecy in 1897 and treated even its printing in 1904 as a private matter, paying for 150 copies, which he distributed to his closest friends. A second private printing of five hundred copies (1912) contained some emendations. Soon thereafter, with an elaborate show of reluctance, Adams allowed the book to be released to the public in 1913.
