The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity

Jan M. Ziolkowski

Description

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. Volume 3: The American Middle Ages hinges upon two figures influenced by the juggler: Henry Adams, scion of Presidents and distinguished cultural historian whose works contributed to the rise of medievalism in America during the Gilded Age, and Ralph Adams Cram, the architect whose vision of Gothic accounts directly or indirectly for the campuses of West Point, Princeton, Yale, Chicago, Notre Dame, and many other universities across America. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity is a rich case study for the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity. Spanning centuries and continents, the medieval period is understood through the lens of its (post)modern reception in Europe and America. Profound connections between the verbal and the visual are illustrated by a rich trove of images, including book illustrations, stained glass, postage stamps, architecture, and Christmas cards. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski's work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Folk Tales
• Fairy Tales
• Legends
• Ralph Adams Cram
• Architecture of the United States
• Modernity
• Gothic architecture
• Mythology
• Middle Ages
• Henry Adams

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 31 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783745241
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 25 Mo

Extrait

THE JUGGLER OF NOTRE DAME
volume 3


The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity
Vol. 3: The American Middle Ages
Jan M. Ziolkowski






https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that he endorses you or your use of the work).
Attribution should include the following information: Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume 3 : The American Middle Ages . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0146
Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. Copyright and permissions information for images is provided separately in the List of Illustrations.
Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.
In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web
Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0146#resources
Version 1.1
ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-521-0
ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-522-7
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-523-4
ISBN Digital ebook (EPUB): 978-1-78374-524-1
ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-526-5
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0146
Cover image: Postcard depicting the Brooklyn Bridge and Woolworth Building City (New York: H. W. Haberman, ca. 1928). Cover design: Anna Gatti.


Contents
Note to the Reader
3
1.
The Tumbling Worlds of Henry Adams
5
Adams Family
5
Great Scott! Sir Walter
9
Gothic Harvard
18
Photographic Memory
33
Reluctant Professor
37
Five of Hearts
40
Self-Made Medievalist
46
2.
Our Lady’s Tumbler in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
55
The Nature of the Book
55
Madonna of Medieval France, La Dona of Washington
59
Universal Exposition of 1900
71
Old Paris
75
Dynamo and Virgin Suicide
88
Henry Adams as Jongleur
96
Unity and Multiplicity
102
Medievalist Dream of a Dying DC Dynasty?
103
3.
Britain and the Making of the American Middle Ages
107
The Goth Side of Washington
107
Goths and the Meanings of Gothic(k)
117
John Ruskin and William Morris
121
Richardsonian Romanesque
132
Saint John the Divine and Trinity Church
138
Cathedral Culture
143
Kenneth Clark
147
4.
The Boston Bohemians
149
Our Lady’s Tumbler in Boston Bohemia
149
Charles Eliot Norton
151
The Knight Errant and Copeland & Day
154
Fred Holland Day
160
Ralph Adams Cram, Great Goth Almighty
171
Americanized Middle Ages
184
5.
The Rise of Collegiate Gothic
189
American Gothic Colleges: Ogive Talking
189
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Gothic Jazz Age
202
Late Collegiate Gothic at Duke and Rhodes
206
Cathedrals of Learning
211
Gothic Landscaping: Picturesque Perfect
216
Trees as Nature’s Cathedrals
220
Collegiate Gothic Havens
229
Ivy League and Ivory Tower
229
6.
Point Taken: Gothic Modernism and the Modern Middle Ages
239
The Origins of Gothic Skyscrapers: Top That
239
The Cathedral of Commerce
252
The Tribune Tower
258
Giving Gothic: John D. Rockefeller Jr.
264
“Not a Cathedral-Building Age” and Thorstein Veblen
271
Seeing Chicago in Gray and White
274
Hooting at Yale Gothic
278
World War I and Modernism
288
Notes
301
Notes to Chapter 1
301
Notes to Chapter 2
316
Notes to Chapter 3
336
Notes to Chapter 4
353
Notes to Chapter 5
368
Notes to Chapter 6
411
Bibliography
447
Abbreviations
447
Referenced Works
447
List of Illustrations
427
Index
473


To Piero Boitani
Day by day America drifts farther & farther away from Europe . The great currents of cosmic life drive us—immense, floating, unattached continent that we are—farther away from all that is rooted in or anchored to the past. It would be a wretched and unworthy patriotism, or mere love of paradox, or an unmanly timidity and self-distrust, that would hinder one, who has known the best, from saying distinctly, “This is not the best & will not in our time be the best.”
—Charles Eliot Norton


Note to the Reader
This volume is the third of a half dozen. Together, the six form The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity . The book series as a whole probes one medieval story, its reception in culture from the Franco-Prussian War until today, and the placement of that reception within medieval revivalism as a larger cultural phenomenon. The study has been designed to proceed largely in chronological order, but the progression across the centuries and decades is relieved by thematic chapters that deal with topics not restricted to any single time period.
This third installment, entitled “The American Middle Ages,” explores the reasons why the American not-so-public intellectual Henry Adams was drawn to the medieval story and more largely why many of his compatriots in the Gilded Age turned to the literature and architecture of the Middl