Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams [1961 PAPERBACK]

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams w intro by Ernest Samuels

FIRST PAPERBACK PRINTING [1961] MENTOR BOOKS

Antique paperback, still clean, tight and unread; shelf wear and some tanning to wraps. 

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres is a record not of a literal jouney but of a meditative journey across time and space into the medieval imagination. Using the architecture, sculpture, and stained glass of the two locales as a starting point, Adams breathes life into what others might see merely as monuments of a past civilization. With daring and inventive conceits, Adams looks at the ordinary people, places, and events in the context of the social conventions and systems of thought and belief of the thirteenth century turning the study of history into a kind of theater.As Raymond Carney discusses in his introduction, Adams' freeedom from the European traditions of study lends an exuberance—and puckish wit—to his writings.