Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

I head home from Paris tomorrow.  I've done a lot of work here: finished drafting an article and wrote my talk for Kalamazoo.  But I've also taken a lot of photographs of the city and done a lot of knitting, producing two now of these yarn-bombs for lamp posts (I'll install the second tomorrow morning before heading to the airport.  It was intended to replace the first, but since it's actually still there, the second will have to go on a different lamp post).  This blog post is meant to tie those last two pursuits together, very visually.  It's also, then, a meditation on one of the things I love about this city; the textures, the patterns, and the details in the architecture, the street furniture, and the street itself. Yarn-bomb in the Place Louis Aragon on the Ile St. Louis.   Crosswalk on the Rue St. Antoine. Yarn-bomb detail.   Detail of wrought-iron work on a tomb in Pere Lachaise.   Yarn-bomb detail.

I'm back in Paris working on a number of projects: an article on transi tombs (see my previous posts on the transis of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendome and Henry Chichele ), a presentation/provocation for the upcoming Kalamazoo congress on Medieval Studies, and the next chapter of my book.  A few days ago, though, I took a day off from all of that and went on a day trip out to Chartres.  My main reason for going was to see the restoration work that has been done to the interior surfaces of the cathedral.  This work has been somewhat controversial: in the US at least, it began with a piece by Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books , continued with responses by Madeline Caviness and by Caviness and Jeffrey Hamburger, and then with Filler's response to their responses.   In going to Chartres, I was following Caviness and Hamburger's suggestion that we should go, see, and judge for ourselves. Having done so, what do I now think?  Well, it sure is different! You can see