Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Endre Abkarovits: Teaching the Englishness of English Gothic cathedral architecture

2.3 The origins of Gothic and the influence of France on English cathedral architecture in the Early English period As is well-known, Gothic architecture was born in France, and what is rare in the history of arts, it can be traced to the exact building. Its birthplace was the abbey church of St. Denis near Paris, the burial place of French kings. (The rebuilding of the choir took place between 1140 and 1144.) Even the man behind the whole scheme is known: Abbot Suger. Suger 'argued that we would come to understand absolute beauty, which is God, through the effect of precious and beautiful things on our senses. ... This was a revolutionary concept in the Middle Ages. It was the intellectual background of all the sublime works of art of the next century and in fact has remained the basis of our belief in the value of art until today.' (Clark : 50) The fact that Gothic architecture was born at St. Denis does not mean that its main features had not existed before, but they were used here for the first time as an entity to organize the whole space. The combination of the already existing motifs were used for a new aesthetic purpose. (Pevsner: 89) Earlier, Normandy and Burgundy had been architecturally the more progressive parts of the French lands, but during the 12th and 13th centuries the Ile-de-France, the central area around Paris, became more important and several stupendous cathedrals were erected in the new style in this region. (Chartres, the Notre Dame of Paris, Reims, Amiens, Beauvais, etc) What was typical of all these cathedrals was the quest for one perfect solution, the consistent application of vertically, the priority of height. They were usually built during one continuous building period, sometimes within the lifetime of a single architect, although most of them were never completed, at least as far as the towers and their spires are concerned, so we cannot know exactly what they would have looked like if their construction had been finished. England had been influenced by the architecture of the cathedrals of the French lands well before this, since the time of Edward the Confessor, who was brought up in Normandy. From the time of the Norman Conquest Normandy had a decisive influence on English architecture. (Normandy became part of the French kingdom only in 1204-6.) Now the new Gothic style of France also played a strong initial influence on England, especially in Canterbury and Westminster Abbey, the latter being only architecturally a cathedral, otherwise, apart from a short period, it has not been the centre of the see of a bishop, which is the requirement of the title 'cathedral'. But 'the introduction of Gothic into England was neither a single event, nor a continuous process, but rather a series of disconnected events'. 49