ABSTRACT
The French Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame at Chartres is, without doubt, one
of the most familiar monuments in all of medieval art and architecture (Figure
4.1). One reason for the thirteenth-century building’s justifiable familiarity is
that it has the enviable reputation of having come down to us relatively
unscathed. With the exception of the north bell-tower, it was not significantly
rebuilt in later centuries nor did it lose more than fragments of its impressive
decorative ensembles of sculpture and stained glass. In this essay I propose
to examine the built fabric of the urban precinct around the cathedral in order
to differentiate actors and audiences within the medieval town of Chartres, to
specify more precisely than has yet been done who saw what when and,
thus, which themes were deemed appropriate for target audiences on
different sides of the cathedral. By examining this famous church in terms of
its built environment, I hope to enable the reader to see it quite literally from
new directions – and to glimpse how the programmes and placement of the
cathedral’s decoration responded to urban patterns of land ownership, legal
jurisdiction, demographic distribution, and circulation.
