An urban analysis extended

In positing a ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ the urbanist David Harvey and others have sought a rapprochement between sociologists’ analyses of urban space and geographers’. Nevertheless, Harvey is careful to avoid defining the relationship between social processes and spatial form as uni-directional in causal terms.43 It may be instructive, therefore, to perform a chiastic inversion of his terms, transforming ‘social processes and spatial form’ into ‘social form and spatial processes’. Apparently whimsical, such a move, in fact, reveals further aspects of the society and the urban environment in question. If the phrase ‘social processes’ highlights the dynamism of human behaviours and relationships, ‘social form’ draws attention to the categories and conven­tions that nevertheless structure those relations at any given point in time. If ‘spatial form’, in turn, addresses the architectural and urban environments that concretize those same human behaviours and relationships, ‘spatial processes’ reminds us of the dynamic, kinetic use and kinesthetic perception of those environments.

We might, therefore, continue an investigation of the socio-spatial dialectic at Chartres by asking how the distinctions I have just drawn regarding the spaces surrounding the cathedral were carried inside the building. The north and south entrances mark the termini of a transverse axis established by the High Gothic transept (Figures 4.8 and 4.9). At the time of its construc­tion, the length and breadth of this transept were unprecedented among French Gothic cathedrals (Figure 4.2). Indeed, according to one scholar:

This hypertrophication of the transverse element has no precedent in the earlier development of the style. . . . Despite the apparently competitive spirit of the time, the integral monumentality of the Chartres transept with its six portals was neither achieved nor apparently ever intended by a succeeding building of the thirteenth century.44

At the centre of the transept was the space of the crossing, bounded to the east by a jube or rood screen. The jube on cross-axis provided a mini-fagade to the choir in the cathedral interior, an emphatic boundary between clerical and lay spaces. It was but one of the types of enclosure or spatial divider which provided architectural definition for the elongated choir; other types included the stone choir screen curving around the hemicycle, lined with choir stalls and tapestries which were strung above between the choir piers. Together, these enclosures helped to create a church within a church in that nested structure beloved of contemporary reliquaries as well.

At Chartres, the thirteenth-century jube apparently projected but little into the space of the transept, leaving ample room for lay circulation.45 Because such shallow projection was not the case everywhere,46 the placement of the jube at Chartres may have taken into account the large numbers of people requiring untrammeled movement into the cathedral, both the public coming from the south and the clergy coming from the north (Figures 4.8 and 4.9). At the same time, the jube inhibited lay access to the choir, both physical and visual, perhaps justifiable at a time when the infre­quency of lay communion had decreased the regular sacramental interaction between clergy and laity during Mass – especially so at cathedrals, once the parish system had evolved. In sum, the transverse bidirectionality of the transept firmly differentiated it as a spatial unit from the nave and choir with their simpler, west-to-east progression along an axis traversed largely and most notably by the bishop and canons on Sundays, high feast days, and the main penitential occasions of the medieval church. In this regard, it is note­worthy that construction of the monumental stone jube was roughly contemporary with that of the transept porches.

Updated: 3rd October 2014 — 1:37 pm