That it is the Virgin and not the cathedral who headlines in Margot Fassler's The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts is a telling signal of the originality of this important new study. Rather than pivot around the monument, the preferred method of art and architectural historians, or the liturgical manuscripts, as one might expect from a music historian, Fassler tries to sketch for us how the “character” of the Virgin developed in the imaginations of the medieval people of Chartres, and how it inflected the decisions of those who built the cathedral and designed the liturgy, as well as the responses of their audiences. Fassler's enterprise is to examine the process of how medieval people forged identities by constructing customized histories.

Throughout the book, Fassler makes a convincing argument that a neglected treasure trove of sources for this endeavor is the liturgy, such as chant, which she calls “a sonic kaleidoscope of historical meanings” (65). Few medievalists would contest that the liturgy played a central role in medieval societies. But our understanding of how it operated across interlocking cultural arenas is limited because we lack interdisciplinary interpretations that translate the often highly technical and discipline-specific studies by music historians and liturgists for medievalists in other fields. There is reason to be thankful, therefore, to music historians like Margot Fassler and Nancy van Deusen, among others, whose work goes some way toward closing the gap.

Fassler reminds us of the extent to which worshippers conceived the Virgin as a potentially active participant in the complex geo-political events that shaped their lives. She divides her study into four roughly chronological parts. In Part 1, she reconstructs the foundational history of Chartres, the fearsome battles and fires, the psychological scars they left and the ideological salves that were applied. In the power vacuum that greeted the beginning of the eleventh century, for example, when Chartres lost its royal protectors and bishop designate, the sequence “Hac clara die” offered up a more reliable ruler, the fertile Virgin, who had the power to bring much longed for peace and whose eternal reign was not subject to the turmoil and loss of prestige brought about by the consanguineous, childless, and eventually annulled marriage of King Robert II and Berta of Chartres/Blois.

The public veneration of Mary continued to evolve in conjunction with the needs of the community of Chartres. In part 2 of her study, Fassler demonstrates that it made especial sense for the Virgin's Chartrain personality to be expressed in the liturgy of advent. The advent liturgy, which heralded the lineage and the arrival of Christ the King, was a powerful tool with which to shape contemporary concerns about the legitimacy and authority of rulers, as well as the relationship between Christians and Jews. Fassler offers fine and detailed readings of the liturgical sources to show how Chartrain liturgists such as Fulbert emphasized the Virgin's role in advent in order to highlight the power that she exerted, or could exert, through her relic on behalf of the cathedral and town.

When Fassler reaches the twelfth century in part 3, she begins to weave what is known about the circumstances surrounding the building of the twelfth-century church into her narrative, an operation that culminates in a liturgically sensitive reading of the sculpture and glass of the west façade in part 4. Among several key figures discussed in part 3 is Bishop Ivo of Chartres, whose writings, Fassler shows, articulate the connections between the liturgy, the spaces in which it is performed, and the decorative elements of the church that realize and clarify its messages.

In the fourth part of her book, Fassler explains how the themes and motifs on the Royal Portal intersect with the liturgies of the major feasts of the Virgin at Chartres. She creates a synthetic reading that reiterates standard iconographic interpretations, but which is distinguished by the way that she draws on her previous analysis to evoke liturgical performances that must have taken place and to imagine the responses of viewers. Very important contributions to our understanding of the west façade include her proposal that the pilasters of the Royal Portal function as “exegetical arrows” (286) that unite the static, genealogically-oriented Old Testament jamb figures with the lively New Testament narrative of the capital frieze, as well as her discussion of the inscription on the book of the Christ child in the Belle Verrière, which is from an antiphon of Ember Saturday in Advent. Fassler deserves credit for trying to envisage the implications of her interpretations not only for the clerical experts and elite patrons responsible for their content, but also for a broadly conceived medieval constituency capable of “high-level speculation” and “extraordinary curiosity,” even though they may “lack great formal educations” (283).

The Virgin of Chartres is studded with insight, lively story telling and some brilliant passages. And yet it must be said that it is an unwieldy book that sometimes loses sight of its reader. The omission of in-text references to the many figures and plates is frustrating; there are frequent redundancies; and it is not always clear whether the text is pitched to the general reader or the specialist. Fassler's larger arguments as well as her reading of the artistic program at Chartres would have been enhanced by further engagement with recent scholarship on reception theory, theatricality, and performance, such as is represented in Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, edited by Elina Gertsman (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2008). But given the intellectual ambition, originality, and erudition of the volume, not to mention the great gift represented by the appendices, which gather together and translate key primary sources, it may be churlish to make these complaints.

Margot Fassler's magisterial study should be incorporated into standard survey lectures on Gothic architecture. Her compelling account of the complex interaction of liturgical performance and built environment, of sight and sound, of local tradition and scripture, of corporate and individual identities, of political ideology and devout veneration at Chartres makes this an invaluable book that will undoubtedly transform the scholarship on the great cathedral.