ABSTRACT
This chapter examines one particular case of a building where stone letters form part of its fabric: the Notre-Dame-des-Marais in La Ferte-Bernard in the South of the Perche region in France, built between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Making words part of the building seemingly essentializes something extrinsic and blurs the distinction between structure and ornament that has organized architectural discourse for centuries. Notre-Dame-des-Marais was founded in 1366, when an older chapel housing a miracle working statue became a parish church. Like countless other European cities La Ferte-Bernard, a town that had emerged around a castle founded in 1027 by the bishop of Le Mans, claimed Mary as its special protectress. When the balustrades at La Ferte-Bernard were built, Roman-style monumental inscriptions had yet to reemerge in Europe. Depicted in a sixteenth-century guise, the constructions cast the contemporary church building and surrounding city as metaphors of the Virgin.
