Perhaps the main strength of this rewarding book is that it takes seriously the related ideas that art and architecture are shaped by contexts of patronage, display and function, and that a balanced, historically rooted understanding of them can only be achieved through sympathetic investigation of these contexts. This is surely the best way to tackle the built and embellished environment of a complex, multifaceted institution like a monastery. Numerous art historians of the past have been attracted intellectually as well as aesthetically to the charterhouse of Dijon at Champmol, but have found themselves encumbered with a methodology that privileged quality over meaning and dealt in subject classifications largely unknown to medieval people. There has also been an assumption that members of the religious orders – particularly those that observed monastic enclosure scrupulously, such as the Carthusians and the Bridgetines – were passive recipients of art and architecture, and are best understood, where documents show them actively involved, as go-betweens, with lay practitioners on one side and illustrious lay patrons on the other. These approaches and habits of mind are steadily disappearing, and secularist cultural historians are now attempting to understand and write about Catholic institutions and beliefs in a self-consciously sympathetic manner. The results are mixed, as anyone speculating about such a state of affairs a century ago would have predicted; but for her part, Sherry Lindquist has succeeded in explaining the motivations and intentions underlying the foundational art and architectural programme at Champmol in ways which all readers should find enlightening. Her book is an excellent complement to Renate Prochno’s recent, detailed study of the charterhouse (2002).

Prochno’s book, which regards Champmol essentially as an expression of Valois polity and self-fashioning, nevertheless divides up the monastery for the reader into a traditionally art-historical series of objects and spaces: the surviving portal and its sculpture, the nave, the choir, various chapels, the sculptures, the paintings and so on. It is meticulously documented and acutely thought out, even if, as Susie Nash has shown in a compelling series of articles in the Burlington Magazine, not definitive in all respects. Lindquist, on the other hand, turns for her account of reception and meaning to the Carthusian Rule, embodied in the order’s Statuta antiqua (composed in 1127, authorized 1271). She examines closely the relationship which Champmol’s monks had to images, the role of the visual as a surrogate language of piety in lieu of the speech disparaged among the Carthusians, and the associations that religious iconography established in an order renowned for its concern with biblical accuracy.

This approach is signalled in the first chapter, ‘The monument’, which is more an examination of ideology than the object-domain to be covered. The following chapters, ‘Agency’, ‘Visuality’ and ‘Society’, contribute to the proposal that this object-domain is, to borrow from Lindquist (p 189), a quote from Guy Debord, ‘not a collection of images [but] a social relationship between people that is mediated by images’. Thus, ‘Agency’ examines the idea that the artistic skill and judgement reflected in surviving works (those of Claus Sluter and Jacques de Baerze are the principal referents) may have been grounded in sympathetic understanding of the requirements of patrons and users. ‘We can attribute a certain stylistic cohesiveness at Champmol to … attempts [by artists] to anticipate the tastes of Philip, Margaret and the Carthusians.’ While obviously problematic in some respects, not least the idea of a style or manner diffuse enough recognizably to inhabit such different categories of object as paintings, sculptures and buildings, this fertile idea would be worth testing in other patronage-intensive contexts (the Certosa di Pavia would be an obvious place to start).

The chapter on ‘Visuality’ deals first with innovation and then with ‘the intervisual image’. As a concept in late medieval art, innovation is understood as a tactic for pleasing patrons, in opposition to the theories of traditional art historians. ‘We must view artistic innovation [in this period] as a forceful vehicle for conveying the desires of patrons rather than artists’ personal thoughts and feelings.’ This will be to take the artist too much out of the art for some; but, again, the ideas are worth conjuring with in respect of other locations. Intervisuality is essentially a restatement of the idea, as it is used by art historians, of Gesamtkunstwerk: a programme of architecture and (particularly) images coalesced not only visually but also intellectually, with sculptures, paintings and stained glass less meaningful individually than as components of integrated wholes.

The final chapter, ‘Society’, which is rather shorter, is a contribution to Champmol’s reception-history. Although the charterhouse was a private, exclusive space to which lay, and particularly female, access was forbidden, its location in ‘the public imagination’ (present as well as past) was ‘significant and ambivalent’, as any ‘powerful, conservative and repressive’ monument which contributed so handsomely to the spiritual health of Valois Burgundy (and by extension its inhabitants) was bound to be. In the final analysis, the power and esprit de corps of the largely destroyed monastery remain in its surviving, recontextualized relics. It is for us to resituate them intellectually.

As a whole, Lindquist’s book can be characterized as informative, intelligent and imaginative. It is warmly recommended here for these qualities, and also because it draws welcome attention to Carthusianism in the late Middle Ages. The strength of its reaction to past scholarship (particularly past art historians, who come in for perhaps too unsubtle a drubbing here – ‘they’ often boil down to Panofsky, an inauspicious straw-man for anyone) will not please some readers, while others may note that, as in Prochno’s study, the materially accretive and routinely unglamorous life of the charterhouse at the end of the Middle Ages is overlooked: for example, neither author seems interested in or even aware of the breviary made for Champmol c 1473 and now at Keble College, Oxford (ms 29), with its abundant patronage data (fol 418v), undistinguished illumination and wealth of liturgical information. However, even the ‘traditional art historian’ will find him or herself well compensated for the time they spend reading this book.