This book is in many ways an extraordinary achievement. Margot Fassler, although a card-carrying musicologist, has always looked beyond the conventional bounds of music historiography into the wider world of medieval thought, as witness her Gothic song: Victorine sequences and Augustinian reform in twelfth-century Paris (Cambridge 1993). She works intensively with primary sources of all sorts, including musical and liturgical, and tackles medieval writings with gusto. Such articles as ‘The office of the cantor in early western monastic rules and customaries’ (Early Music History v [1985], 29–51) are required reading. During the last couple of decades she has produced essays about Chartres (The Art Bulletin lxxv [1993], and Speculum lxxv [2000]), including a penetrating paleographical study of one of the few liturgical chant books from Chartres to have survived complete: ‘Liturgical books and book production in the thirteenth-century diocese of Chartres: the case of Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 4756’, in John Haines (ed.), The calligraphy of medieval music (Turnhout 2011), 125–51.

The considerable anticipation with which one therefore turns to Fassler's substantial new book is not disappointed. Here is all the energy and insight we have come to expect, the engagement with original documents, the wide view embracing liturgy, art, architecture, music, theology and political and ecclesiastical history. One can see at a glance that this is not a ‘straight’ account of the legend of Chartres's most precious relic, the Virgin's gown (the Sancta Camisa, Sainte Chemise or Voile de la Vierge), or the building of the cathedral, the creation of the stained glass windows, or the development of the liturgy in Chartres, including its chant. To be sure, these things are all there, if one wishes to look for information on one aspect exclusively. There are copious appendices, covering nearly a hundred pages, including a classified list of liturgical sources from the medieval diocese of Chartres, full translations of key liturgical lessons and sermons, transcriptions and translations of chants, tables of and information about historical persons. The endnotes also occupy nearly a hundred pages, the bibliography forty, and there is a good index. But the ‘facts’ are only the starting point for a major work of interpretation, a valiant attempt to recapture the thoughts, intentions and motives of those who created the facts in the first place, what they knew and believed and thought worth perpetuating in the all-embracing liturgical life of the great cathedral.

Fassler organises the book roughly chronologically, with twelve chapters grouped in four parts: ‘Mary before Fulbert’, ‘Mary's time: from Advent to the Nativity of the Virgin at Chartres’, ‘Politics and religious fervor in twelfth-century Chartres’ and ‘History revealed: the cult of the Virgin and the visual arts in the mid-twelfth century’. There is a great deal of local history, concerning not only great figures like Bishop Fulbert (c. 960–1028: he appears on almost every page of chapter iv) but also the family of the counts of Chartres. Chapter iii, ‘Adventus and Advent’, by contrast, is almost wholly exegesis of liturgical texts. Some of the most interesting chapters, such as chapter ix, ‘The Virgin and the Tabernacle’, or those on the iamb statues and other figures on the west façade, and on the lancet windows, bring liturgical and other medieval texts to bear on the well-known sculptures. If the role of some of the historical personages who throng these pages in determining particular parts of the building programme often remains unclear, as Fassler admits, we are amply informed about who was in the right place at the right time, and what their spiritual priorities might have been. There is constant cross-referencing across the chapters. The book teems with ideas and information to such an extent, the range across the different types of subject matter is so wide, the narrative so charged with energy, that Fassler is sometimes led to recollect another part of the discussion in a slightly abrupt way. And the elegance of her prose is sometimes sacrificed to the overwhelming need to communicate a mass of data and thought. One is sometimes also aware of another problem for any writer of a book centred on one particular Church. Many things done at Chartres were also done elsewhere, many attitudes and impulses were common to religious and civil societies all across medieval Europe. In reconstructing the situation in Chartres, which Fassler does so vividly, it is not always easy to separate the local from the universal. That said, many books like this would have to be written before we could appreciate the full dimensions of what was shared and what was individual. And Fassler's book would still, I venture to predict, stand out as a thoroughly individual achievement in itself.