Mont‐Saint‐Michel and Chartres

Mont‐Saint‐Michel and Chartres, critical work by Henry Adams, privately printed in 1904, and published in 1913. It is subtitled “A Study of Thirteenth‐Century Unity.” This interpretation of the dominant attitude of mind from 1150 to 1250 precedes The Education of Henry Adams in the author's plan to study historical forces by relating two points in time. He chose the 13th century as “the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe,” in order to “measure motion down to his own time” in his autobiography, “a study of Twentieth‐Century Multiplicity.” In Mont‐Saint‐Michel, he shows philosophy, theology, and the arts to be informed by a spiritual unity, illogical but founded on simple faith and strength of energy. The 16 chapters discuss Norman architecture, giving way to Gothic “flinging its passion against the sky”; the subordinate arts of sculpture and glass; the Chanson de Roland; courts of love; the metaphysical system of Aquinas; and the religious mysticism of a period that found its highest symbol in the Virgin, apotheosis of the feminine ideal. Thus there is a unified attitude of mind in men's reaction to the universe, contrasting with the concept of a 20th‐century “multiverse” which leads to a philosophy and science of multiple aspects and reactions.