The Cathedral Builders

Rating:
Summary: An Easy Read
Review: The fellow up above is being a bit severe. Gimple does go on a rant in a chapter at the end of the book saying things such as-America has reached its peak and will start to decline- and- France is on its way up-. Amazing statements considering he is French and this book was written in the seventies.
Obviously Mr. Gimpel should stick to writing about the past and stop predicting the future (He should have learned from Marx, but hey it was the seventies, the Soviet Union still looked like it would do more than kill a lot of people).
I found the book pleasant reading and it is a must read for an entry level History of Technology buff.
Gimple was one of the firsts in the field, so we must give him respect no matter how off some of his thought turned out to be.


Rating:
Summary: A political book!
Review: If you are expecting a history of cathedral building, look elsewhere. This is slow and a bit dull, concentrates on extraneous issues ( the ego od Suger gets more coverage than St Denis itself), and even worse -- it's political. Yes, marxist-french anti-American screeds in a book on cathedrals. Oy.

Rating:
Summary: a fascinating and full meal on the gothic era
Review: This is the best book I read on the mysterious movement known as the gothic era, which has long fascinated me. It is written by an independent scholar with a quirky, yet erudite, point of view who writes very well, with the Cartesian clarity that we expect of French intellectuals.

I found it absolutely fascinating, as he explained the politics that gave rise to the astonishing building projects that involved entire communities for centuries and whose artisans are, with the exception of Villard, wholly unkown. Gimpel then goes through the crytic notebook of Villard - the only true record of the era's methods besides the works themselves - deciphering it for non-specialists like myself. In his view, built during a late-medieval economic boom, the cathedrals used a new kind of geometry and practical experimentation that foreshadowed the discoveries of the Renaissance. Some would even argue that the gothic cathedral architects and builders presaged the scientific method that emerged during the Enlightenment. Gimpel provides plenty of fodder for that interpretation.

Warmly recommended.