Title: Architectural Citation of Notre-Dame of Paris in the Land of the Paris Cathedral Chapter
Description: This study foregrounds the problem of the center and periphery of Gothic architecture near Paris. Taking architectural citation as its interpretive framework, it focuses on a core group of rural parish churches situated in the land of the Paris cathedral chapter. It addresses the visual links between Notre-Dame of Paris and the village churches, the ways in which architectural citation was put into practice, and the institutional context that imbued the resemblances with meaning. It demonstrates that quoting the architecture of the cathedral of Paris was the exception, not the rule, in the villages of the cathedral chapter. When they occurred, the citations were mostly superficial, not structural, and resulted from contact between the community of secular canons installed at the cathedral and the administrators responsible for the village churches. The introduction sets the problem of architectural citation in the land of the Paris cathedral chapter against the backdrop of architectural citation in other contexts in medieval France: namely, Cluniac, Cistercian, and Capetian.

Proceeding according to the Notre-Dame of Paris construction sequence, Part One reveals the architectural citations of the cathedral of Paris found in the chapter’s land: at Saint-Germain of Andrésy, Saint-Hermeland of Bagneux, Saint-Lubin of Châtenay, Saint-Christophe of Créteil, Saint-Germain of Itteville, Notre-Dame of Jouy, Saint-Mathurin of Larchant, Saint-Nicolas of Mézières, Notre-Dame of Rozay, Saint-Martin of Sucy, and Saint-Fortuné of Vernou. Part Two introduces the Paris cathedral chapter as an institution and a community of individual canons, maps the chapter’s rural property as it expanded from the ninth to the fourteenth century, articulates the language the chapter used to describe its villages and land, and explores the canons’ secular and sacred authority in its villages. Part Two concludes by bringing the institutional relationship to bear on the architectural evidence presented in Part One.