The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy

Meredith Cohen is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in the art, architecture, and urban development of high medieval Europe, particularly in France and England. She has published articles on the Sainte-Chapelle, the Court Style, medieval Paris, nineteenth-century restoration, and the historiography of Gothic architecture. In addition, she has edited a series of interdisciplinary volumes on medieval history and culture. In 2010, she curated an exhibition (with Xavier Dectot) on medieval Paris at the Musée national du Moyen Âge. She has received fellowships and grants from the British Academy, the Châteaubriand Foundation, the Société des Professeurs de Français et Francophones d'Amérique, the Whiting Foundation, and UCLA for her research. Cohen is the founder and was the first president of the International Medieval Society of Paris, an interdisciplinary scholarly society based in Paris.

• 1. The making of a royal city: Paris and the architecture of Philip Augustus; 2. The Sainte-Chapelle: Parisian Rayonnant and the new royal architecture; 3. The architecture of sacral kingship; 4. Private, public, and the promotion of the cult of kings; 5. Louis' later patronage in Paris; Conclusion; Appendices.

'Meredith Cohen's study of the Sainte-Chapelle belongs to the distinguished tradition of studies of thirteenth-century Parisian and northern French Gothic architecture inaugurated in the United States by Robert Branner and continued by her teacher Stephen Murray … It does for the Sainte-Chapelle what the studies of the late Stephen Gardner did for the abbey of Saint-Denis, providing a contextual perspective on a well-known monument, without pretending reductively that context wholly explains any building. It is a study of the way the Sainte-Chapelle fitted into a new urban Gothic as well as promoting a cult of very special relics, and of kingship itself … What Meredith Cohen has done in this very useful and thoroughly documented book is to extend our understanding of a great single monument by contextual analysis, in which objective she has succeeded admirably.' Paul Binski, Journal of the British Archaeological Association