Building a Gothic Cathedral: Credit or Fault?

From the wonderful opening chapter, the book has consistently lost steam. Recent chapters have flattened to null most brothers' optimisim for the upcoming ones. Scott's difficulty, endemic to to his scholarly position, is his exclusive insistence on a modern, atheistic, and "us versus them" anthropology. He writes off medieval Christians as paupers easily fooled into believing most anything about anything. He seems to hold them accountable for not sharing his Enlightenment values. A good historiography of the Gothic cathedral requires the modern writer to work out a relationship with the medieval Christian that opens to readers new and revealing ways of experience and understanding. For this, we will have to look elsewhere.

Brothers' current rating: 2 out of 5

Current page as of 7/14/06: p. 215