The Master Masons of Chartres

by John James

James' analysis of Chartres is likely to be the best and most detailed we shall have.' JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS The great cathedral of Chartres is the most impressive and exciting building surviving from the middle ages, andis preserved almost intact. Yet we know nothing of the men who created it. John James, in this masterpiece of detection, shows how he came to identify the master masons from the stones themselves. His meticulous `reading' of the cathedral has revealed much about those how they solved problems of engineering and design, how they raised two-ton stones forty metres into the air, and how one mason controlled over 300 men in this gigantic workshop. JOHN JAMES is an Australian architect. His first visit to Chartres, in 1969, led to a continuing passion for the early Gothic buildings of northern France, and he has been `reading their stones' ever since.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published February 7, 1982

About the author

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Dr. John James is an Australian architect, builder, farmer, transpersonal therapist and medieval historian with a passion for discovery. For 30 years he has been searching to understand the workings of the human psyche, and for the origins of the Gothic style. In the latter pursuit he became a world authority on Chartres cathedral, and is currently producing a nine-volume thesaurus on early gothic in France. He has received many awards for this. In therapy he founded the Crucible Centre in the mountains west of Sydney described in his book "The Great Field."