ABSTRACT
Poitiers, the ‘Capital of the Romanesque’, seems to owe its individuality to some fortunate hazard that has preserved its monuments of that style. The claim of aesthetic irredentism that was supposed to have resulted in Poitou’s retention of the Romanesque fails to take into account other factors of a socio-historical nature that would have had much the same consequence, that is, in stifling the expression of a new and very costly architectural style. The revenues of Poitiers’s bishop were never brilliant and the active cathedral-building campaign that had been conducted for almost four decades could well have left them in an embarrassing state. Much of Poitiers cathedral’s architecture is marked stylistically by what have been loosely called ‘Romanesque survivals’. Poitiers’s charter likewise established a built-in weakness in the city’s rights of jurisdiction, with high justice reserved to the crown, thus shunting the most important cases away from burgher control.
