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JOURNAL OF GLASS STUDIES
VOLUME 56 • 2014
Copyright © 2014 by The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY 14830-2253
Anne F. Harris
Glazing and Glossing: Stained Glass as Literary Interpretation
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are shaped by the emergence of individuated silent reading in the 14th century.3 In this col-laboration between stained glass and literature, I wish to demonstrate the influence that stained glass had on poetic construction and interpre-tation. At stake in this article is an attempt to explain how matter affects perception, and spe-cifically how the visual materiality of stained glass can frame perceptions of literary interpre-tation.4
On what terms could stained glass become an interpretive framework for literature? What ma-terial qualities of the medium engaged percep-tion to open the mind to interpretation? Mate-riality and perception joined forces in new and powerful ways in the 14th century, so that mat-ter increasingly became a conduit for heightened perception. As chronicled by Caroline Walker Bynum in Christian Materiality, relics, reliquar-ies, sacramental objects, and devotional images in all media increasingly framed encounters with the divine in the late Middle Ages.5 Rather than “transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial,” as Suger saw the purpose
STAINED GLASS is an indiscrete medium (Fig. 1). Unlike other visual media, which remain within the discrete boundary of
their material frames, stained glass exceeds its materiality. Its colors steal beyond its architec-ture, marking sunlight; its tracery is heavy or light, plotting characters and stories, or dissolv-ing nar rative into a kaleidoscopic array.1 It is at once material and immaterial, heavy and light. In one of its most powerful anagogic moments, it helped Saint Bernard dematerialize Mary’s con ception of Christ with the claim that, as light pierces glass without breaking it, so, too, God pierced Mary without breaking her.2
It is this amorphous space between the mate-riality of glass and the immateriality of light—the heaviness of matter and the indeterminacy of meaning—that I propose to study. I would invite us to consider the materiality of stained glass, not as a representational surface where iconog-raphy and narrative and social history have al-ready done such important work, but rather as a speculative framework, within which we can ask questions of visuality and literacy, as these
Glazing and Glossing: Stained Glass as Literary Interpretation
Anne F. Harris
1. Many of my perceptual considerations of stained glass are guided by the observations of James Rosser Johnson, The Radi-ance of Chartres: Studies in the Early Stained Glass of the Cathe-dral, Columbia University Studies in Art, History, and Archae-ology, no. 4, New York: Random House, 1965—a work that sought to understand the visual operations of stained glass.
2. For other examples of metaphors of translucence, see Jac-queline E. Jung, “Crystalline Wombs and Pregnant Hearts: The Exuberant Bodies of the Katharinenthal Visitation Group,” in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, ed. Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 223–237 and 358–362. For other glass metaphors that express virginity, see Clarissa W. Atkinson, “‘Precious Balsam in a Fragile Glass’: The
Ideology of Virginity in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Fam-ily History, v. 8, no. 2, 1983, pp. 131–143.
3. Paul Henry Saenger, “Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society,” Viator, v. 13, 1982, pp. 367–414.
4. My interest intersects with new explorations in art history that investigate materiality’s capacity to shape perception and meaning. For a recent example of this exploration, see Aden Kumler and Christopher R. Lakey, “Res et significatio: The Ma-terial Sense of Things in the Middle Ages,” Gesta, v. 51, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–17.
5. Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe, New York: Zone Books, 2011, pp. 25–26.
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FIG. 1. Stained glass–filtered light on stone. Ambulatory, Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Chartres, France. (Photo: author)
of his bejeweled stained glass in the late 12th century, late medieval perception was guided to the divine along a trajectory that stayed in sis-tent ly material.6 Rosaries, books of hours, sacra-ment houses, and birthing girdles are just some of the late medieval innovations that material-ized divine presence and heightened human per-ception.
The materiality of stained glass was also as-serted through the construction and design of ampler apertures within the thinning walls of Gothic cathedrals. Large-scale glazing surfaces, such as the 14th-century windows of Eaton Bishop church in Herefordshire and the York Minster chapter house, expanded the material presence of stained glass and rendered it a more powerful framing device for devotional expe-rience.7 That greater material presence became host to a great narrative and iconographic ex-ploration, so that more and more images of de-votion referring to images of the material world were presented in stained glass windows.8 Through its visual amplitude and increasing re-lation to the world of the viewer, stained glass participated in the late medieval fascination with materiality.
In its response to light, stained glass embod-ied a metamorphic quality that operated with the paradox and change Bynum argues was characteristic of late medieval materiality.9 The material reality of the medium is uneven glass and wrought leads that bind the panels together, but its material experience is variegated color and shimmering radiance. The ability of the rough materiality of stained glass to transform into visual wonder imbued it with a perpetual potential to awaken the viewer to the lumines-cent quality of the divine. The innovation of sil-ver stain in the 14th century increased the bright-ness and clarity of this luminescence by adding
6. Abbot Suger, “De administratione,” in Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 63–65.
7. Richard Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Mid-dle Ages, Toronto and Buffalo, New York: University of Toronto Press, 1993, pp. 141–165.
8. A well-known example from Chartres Cathedral would be the multiple representations of the Sedes Sapientiae that appear in the butchers’ window, or the statues of Saint Nicholas that figure prominently in two windows of the life of Saint Nicholas.
9. Bynum [note 5], p. 128.
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great swaths of yellow color.10 The sun could move nimbly through stained glass surfaces, amplifying the yellow of the silver stain with its own golden rays. Silver stain was that late me-dieval innovation of around 1300 that caused stained glass to become even more vivid and luminescent, thus contributing to a more trans-formative visual experience, and gave vitreous materiality ever more potential to heighten per-ception.11
The metamorphic materiality of stained glass quickened not only the eye but also the mind. Mary Carruthers locates The Experience of Beau ty in the Middle Ages in human sensations. “Medieval aesthetic experience is bound in hu-man sensation,” she demonstrates, and “human knowledge is sense-derived, the agents of which are all corporeal.”12 No longer relying exclusive-ly on prayer and meditation, intellect was stimu-lated by the senses, and human-made arts, from stained glass to song, exercised rhetorical qual-ities of persuasion to guide the mind.
Two of these rhetorical qualities help to dem-onstrate the adaptability of stained glass to lit-erary interpretation. Ductus is described as the “intended movement” of a work of art.13 In the context of stained glass, it speaks to how the medium leads the eye through its visual field. Colors, armature patterns, gestural cues, and
bodily forms all direct the viewer’s eye through a series of paths within a stained glass window. The more guided the ductus, the more precise the path.14 The more suggestive the ductus, the more possibilities the eye has as it works its way across the window’s surface. The varietas of col-ors and armature design itself, in turn, shaped the ability of a stained glass window to lead the eye. The more varied and complex the visual ele-ments of the window, the more agile the viewer’s vision must be. Extensive work on medieval vi-sion theory has demonstrated the power of see-ing to shape thought.15 Seeing a stained glass window was to be induced by its forms to think upon its content, thereby engaging with the de-votional effect of stained glass.
This present work explores the effect of the ductus and varietas of stained glass upon litera-ture rather than devotion. The ability of stained glass to lead the mind was operative in both sacred and secular contexts.16 As stained glass created visual opportunity and excitement in sacred devotional spaces, so, as we will see, it created interpretive opportunity and wonder in secular literary contexts.17
Metamorphic materiality and sensational ap-peal rendered stained glass available to literary interpretation. In its expansive and (with light) expanding visual field, in its potentially endless
10. Patrick Reyntiens, The Beauty of Stained Glass, London: Herbert, and Boston: Bullfinch Press Book, 1990, p. 69; E. Lid-dall Armitage, Stained Glass: History, Technology and Practice, Newton, Massachusetts: Charles T. Branford Company, 1959, pp. 29–33.
11. John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, London: Thames and Hudson, 1993. See “From Glass-Staining to Glass-Painting,” pp. 73–75.
12. Mary J. Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 8.
13. Ibid., p. 51.14. Using the framework of viewer reception and narrative
instead of that of rhetoric and ductus, Wolfgang Kemp demon-strated the visual paths that a stained glass window could chart out for a viewer in The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, trans. Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel, Cambridge, U.K.: Cam-bridge University Press, 1997. The ability of stained glass to lead the eye can thus be demonstrated by various methodologies. In a recent article, Beth Samways Williamson argued for the ability of visual art to connote sound, and to lead the viewer’s
mind to music: “Sensory Experience in Medieval Devotion: Sound and Vision, Invisibility and Silence,” Speculum, v. 88, no. 1, January 2013, pp. 1–43.
15. Recent publications include The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Ham-burger and Anne-Marie Bouché, Princeton, New Jersey: Depart-ment of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, in asso-ciation with Princeton University Press, 2006; and Dallas G. Denery, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life, Cambridge Studies in Me-dieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., v. 63, Cambridge, U.K.: Cam-bridge University Press, 2005.
16. I have been inspired to consider this “hermeneutic of both/and” by Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, p. 7.
17. Pamela Sheingorn (“‘The Wise Mother’: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” Gesta, v. 32, no. 1, 1993, pp. 69–80) provides another example of such a crossover.
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variety, and in its multiplicity of forms, stained glass created the framework for open, multi-ple, and shifting interpretation. The difficulty of read ing and making sense of a stained glass win-dow, which has often been considered a chal-lenge by modern viewers, would have benefited late medieval poets who wished to signal inter-pretive possibilities to their audiences.
Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Book of the Duch-ess, written between about 1368 and 1372, and the anonymous author of The Tale of Beryn (about 1420–1460) use the materiality of stained glass to color their narratives. Frame, commen-tary, aesthetic tone, visual delight, and surprising color create the early moments in both narra-tives dedicated to stained glass, and thus demand our attention. They interrupt the narrative flow just as it begins; they ask that we stop and look, in the midst of reading and listening. Stained glass scenarios perform what we might call an aesthetics of suspension within our texts: the same “indiscretion” that allows those colors that steal beyond the frame to capture the view-er’s attention captivates both the protagonists’ and the readers’ imagination, and stops the nar-rative. The process of seeing stained glass pro-vokes a re-examination of how meaning can be obtained, specifically within the new conditions established by silent, individuated reading in the 14th century. As such, the poetics of stained glass become a commentary on poetry itself. Glazing becomes glossing.
What makes the color “indiscretion” of stained glass particularly powerful within archi-tecture is its ability to impinge upon the wall surface that surrounds it. The smooth flow of mostly homogeneous stone is suddenly dappled by color and light. Similarly, the type of expan-sive stained glass window that the readers of Chaucer and the Beryn-writer are asked to imag-ine interrupts the narrative flow of the poem up to that point. This disruption is precisely the kind of varietas that Carruthers argues awakens the mind.18 The mind in question, however, is no longer only the mind of an attentive (or dis-tracted) audience member gathered with others for a performative reading of the text. Rather,
the mind in question can now be that of the si-lent reader, whose singularity individuated the process of interpretation, with all of the possibil-ity and anxiety that this independence entails.19 In the 14th century, Chaucer could write to both vocal and silent readers, whereas the Beryn-writer was probably writing mostly for silent readers.20
Stained glass was that image whose fantastic presence in the text could connect with its view-ing in the lived experience of the audience mem-ber. The expansive stained glass window assem-blages being built in the age of Chaucer, coupled with the innovations of silver stain and grisaille techniques, presented vivid, luminescent points of reference for the poet’s evocation of the me-dium.21 The difficulty and rich beauty of view-ing stained glass persuade the reader of the dif-ficulty and beauty of understanding literary text. This difficulty is both liberating (in that indeter-minacy opens up interpretive possibility) and dangerous (in that meaning is neither as easily found nor as easily fixed), especially in the realm of vernacular literature.
Glazing the Text
And so let us join Chaucer’s dreamer in The Book of the Duchess as he first appears, engaged in the narrative of Ovid’s tale of Ceyx and Al-cyone from the Metamorphoses, which frames the process of mourning as one of longing to
18. Carruthers [note 12], pp. 146–148. In the monastic set-ting, varietas relieves taedium—as stained glass lightens the heavy surface of stone, and as literary uses of stained glass dis-rupt but enliven narrative flow in texts.
19. See Sarah Kay, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
20. The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle Eng lish Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Ian R. Johnson, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
21. June Osborne, Stained Glass in England, London: Fred-erick Muller, 1981. Osborne believes that the “bryghte bemes” Chaucer writes of in line 337 “suggests that Chaucer had in mind glass stained by a new technique” (p. 46). She goes on to describe the process of making silver-stained glass.
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see.22 As a “transcape” in the “aesthetics of per-meability” that Deborah Horowitz articulates in her work on The Book of the Duchess, the story of Ceyx and Alcyone cautions against an easy understanding between words and images, between utterances and visions.23 In an attempt to fall asleep, the dreamer reads of Alcyone beg ging Juno for a sight of her husband, whose death at sea has made mourning him impossi-ble for her. Ceyx appears to Alcyone in his most immediate and truthful form, as a corpse, a ghastly drowned corpse, who speaks directly to Alcyone and says flatly: “Ye shul me never on lyve y-see. But good swete herte, look that ye / Bury my body, at whiche a tyde / Ye mowe hit finde the see besyde.”24 The effect on Alcyone is immediate: she is dead by the third morning af-ter Ceyx’s apparition, and we shudder to think of the power of sight, of seeing what we cannot possibly understand.
When Alcyone asked to see Ceyx, it was to see him as he had been, not as he had become. It was to be-hold him in her sight as she remem-bered him, to savor the image of him that was her own. Chaucer is here already demarcating sight as a realm of troubled desire, one that can-not be expressed clearly. Seeing, and the desire to see clearly, will drive the stained glass scenes for both Chaucer and the Beryn-writer. Sight is a powerful sensation, and its objects need to
be carefully articulated. Had Alcyone been able to communicate more lucidly and cautiously through her grief, she might have been able to explain to Juno exactly what she desired of her vision. Instead, grief clouds her speech, and she speaks idiomatically. Alcyone’s words to Juno, asking to fulfill a ritual of grief, are taken liter-ally by the goddess and provoke a horror (see-ing the corpse of the beloved) that exceeds grief —indeed, that itself causes death. “With that hir eyen up she casteth, And saw noght; ‘A!’ quod she, ‘for sorwe!’/ And deyed within the thriddle morwe.”25 Juno’s literal reading proves danger-ous and mortifying, and can thus be understood negatively. But it also provides the wrenching narrative moment that makes this tale memo-rable.
Of all the modes of reading to which Chau-cer and the Beryn-writer make their texts avail-able (e.g., allegorical, moral, metaphorical), the literal mode will be the most contested: Should readers ever take a text at face value? Can read-ers ever take a text just at face value?26 And what happens if they do? This question is of monu-mental importance in reading biblical text,27 and traces an anxiety stretching back to Paul, whose proclamation that “the letter killeth” (2 Corinthians 3:6) signaled the problematic limits of literal reading.28 Vernacular literature is not as concerned with “orthodox readings” of its
22. For an analysis of Chaucer’s literary appropriation of Ovid, see Michael Foster, “The Absent Birds and the Squawking Rabble: Chaucer’s Rhetoric of Omission and Consolation in the Book of the Duchess,” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in English Poetry, ed. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Wolfgang Görtschacher, Wissenschaft und Kunst, v. 10, Heidelberg: Winter, 2009, pp. 51–67.
23. Deborah Horowitz, “An Aesthetic of Permeability: Three Transcapes of the ‘Book of the Duchess,’” The Chaucer Review, v. 39, no. 3, 2005, pp. 259–279.
24. Geoffrey Chaucer: Love Visions, trans. Brian Stone, New York: Penguin Books, 1983, p. 27; The Book of the Duchess, ll. 205–208. “For you shall never see me more / Alive. So sweetest heart, therefore / Bury my body lovingly / Whenever you find it by the sea.”
25. Love Visions [note 24]; The Book of the Duchess, ll. 212–214. “At that she raised her eyes and sought / Him vainly. ‘Woe, alas!’ She cried, / And on the third day after died.”
26. John R. Searle (“Literal Meaning,” Erkenntnis, v. 13, no. 1, July 1978, pp. 207–224) argues that literal meaning always recedes and “only has application relative to a set of background assumptions” (p. 214). In other words, literal meaning is not self-contained; it relies on context and background, like other meanings.
27. See Madeline H. Caviness’s classic study, “Images of Di-vine Order and the Third Mode of Seeing,” Gesta, v. 22, no. 2, 1983, pp. 99–120.
28. Ellen Spolsky, “The Limits of Literal Meaning,” New Literary History, v. 19, no. 2, Winter 1988, pp. 419–440. Spol-sky argues that meaning can never stay at the literal level; it moves toward external factors (“conditions”; p. 424) that will provide additional meaning.
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texts and, arguably, revels in the multiplicity of meanings it can suggest. The anxiety for a vernacular poet would be that the poem is un-derstood only literally. Thus moments of literal readings must necessarily open up into other in-terpretations. The necessary volatility of literal reading will become important when the reader must decide how literally to take the stained glass windows described in the dreamer’s bed-chamber. For now, Juno’s interpretation of Al-cyone’s words and desire signals the intense pos-sibility of taking words literally in matters of the heart.
The effect of the tale is more positive on the dreamer than on poor Alcyone. Where the tale brought despair to the Ovidian heroine, it brings relief to the Chaucerian lover: having endured weeks of insomnia and grief himself, he sud-denly feels the pull of Morpheus and is bliss-fully asleep within minutes. He thus misses the end of the story in which Alcyone and Ceyx’s metamorphosis as kingfishers gives the sea its Halcyon Days during their nesting time—and is left with only the literal meaning. Sleep, here, defines the boundary and interpretive possibility of the narrative, and presents fascinating chal-lenges to the literal mode. Everything in a dream is literal (dreams are interpreted upon awaken-ing)—and yet they are full of fantasy.
It is birdsong that awakens the dreamer into the dreamscape of the poem, a sensual call to consciousness that the dreamer delights in, as he awakens naked in a bed. Sight follows sound, and the dreamer narrates a panoramic descrip-tion of the room that is all around him. It is here, in this moment of renewed narrative ini-tiation at the beginning of the dream proper, as the dreamer is about to embark upon his adven-ture, that Chaucer suspends the narrative even further as the dreamer gazes upon the remarka-ble stained glass surfaces before him. Their gleam and light appeal to the vision of the dreamer, and quicken that of the reader to imagine such a splendid sight.29
And, sooth to seyn, my chamber wasFul wel depeynted, and with glas
Were al the windowes wel y-glased,Ful clere, and nat an hole y-crased, That to beholde hit was gret Ioye. (ll. 321–325)30
The verses fairly burst with the windows’ re-splendence: “wel depeynted,” “wel y-glased,” “ful clere,” “nat an hole y-crased.” The lumines-cent quality of the glass’s materiality is the po-et’s first fascination. The windows are the epit-ome of the medium: their surfaces are marked by the expert hand of a stained glass painter (“well-painted”), their substance is rendered translucent by a master glazier (“well-glazed”), the metalsmith’s excellent armatures foreground the legibility of the glass (“all clear”),31 and the absence of any holes in the windows reveals an integral surface without flaw. The “joy” the dreamer feels is nothing less than a full-blown aesthetic response to the glass.
The integrity of the glass supports a totalizing vision of its narrative content: “For hoolly al the storie of Troye / Was in the glasing y-wroght thus.”32 I have sought in vain for a stained glass cycle of the entire legend of Troy, the absence of such a cycle signaling Chaucer’s turn to the fantastic, and his expansive vision of stained
29. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Op-tical Theory and Medieval Allegory, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Throughout her analysis of “Chaucer’s Dream Visions” (pp. 178–210), Akbari emphasizes the poet’s prizing of the sense of sight in his early works. In The Book of the Duchess, “Vision is the solution to the problem of media-tion between subject and object, and also the key to the resolu-tion of dichotomy” (p. 189). Although she does not mention the stained glass windows, her observation elucidates the medi-ating role that the stained glass windows have between the lover and his dreamscape, as well as the reader and the poem.
30. Love Visions [note 24], p. 30; The Book of the Duchess, ll. 321–325. “To tell the truth my chamber was / Adorned with pictures, while with glass / Were all the windows glazed and clear; / And not a single hole was there / So that to see it was great joy.”
31. See Nancy Thompson’s article in this volume, which an-alyzes the effect of armatures upon the visual field of stained glass.
32. Love Visions [note 24], p. 30; The Book of the Duchess, ll. 326–327. “For truly all the tale of Troy / Was in the glass de-picted thus.”
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glass.33 A wondrous disconnect is triggered by these stained glass windows between the limits of physical reality and the limitless possibilities of the (narrative) imagination. The practicalities of such a stained glass cycle, as well as the pos-sibilities of a literal interpretation, provoke ques-tions of narrativity and literal reading: what is “al” of the story of Troy? 34 Where does the story begin, exactly? How, precisely, does it end? How does the denouement of the whole story unfold: what will be its climax? Who gets pride of place? Why? Where a gathered audience may pause to marvel at the mental image of the entire cycle of Troy encapsulated in stained glass, a silent reader can more easily take the time to ask a probing set of questions, to let the distracting effect of this fantastic stained glass proposition take over.
To imagine the stained glass window within The Book of the Duchess, one must rethink the story of Troy. The boundaries of stained glass (tracery, frame) become the boundaries of nar-rative (character, plot). The incertitude of these boundaries, their reliance on the reader’s imag-ination, places the stained glass windows in the ekphrastic position of Achilles’s shield within the Iliad, the doors of the Temple of Juno at Carthage in the Aeneid, or the bedchamber of Countess Adele.35 But instead of providing a descriptive ekphrasis, Chaucer begins a process
of re-thinking, or perhaps un-thinking, the leg-end of Troy with a series of pairings that in-creasingly undermine its narrative coherence: “Of Ector and of king Priamus / Of Achilles and king Laomedon, / Of Medea and of Iason / Of Paris, Eleyne and Lavyne” (ll. 328–331).
Bracketing off the ninth character (Lavinia, who is an unneeded third in the pairing of Paris and Helen), we are invited to think of any num-ber of stained glass displays privileging form over content: lancets in alignment or in pairs, quatrefoils arranging four characters each, and a combination of roundels and quatrefoils. The formal permutations, and the associations they create, are an ekphrastic invitation to the imag-ination of Chaucer’s audience. Narrative flow in stained glass windows, as explored by Wolfgang Kemp, was anything but linear. “[L]arge and complex patterns, in figures that functioned de-spite their adherence to material and formal con-straints, as areas for free experiments”36 could describe a window from Chartres Cathedral as well as Chaucer’s description of the window of Troy in The Book of the Duchess.
Chaucer uses the complexity of stained glass patterns to evoke the complexity of the pairings of love and betrayal that make up the narrative of Troy. Stained glass both forms and informs literature here, and each pair (or each quatre-foil, depending on how the reader wishes to
33. Mary Carruthers writes of the importance of the bed-chamber as the initiatory space of the dream poem in “‘The Mystery of the Bed Chamber’: Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess,” in The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony, ed. John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000, pp. 67–87. She highlights the stained glass cycle of Troy and the wall painting of the Roman de la Rose of the dreamer’s bedchamber as “contain[ing] much of the dicta et facta memorabilia of late medieval society” (p. 78). For patronage of Troy cycles at the court of Burgundy, see Anne Hagopian Van Buren, “The Model Roll of the Golden Fleece,” The Art Bulletin, v. 61, no. 3, September 1979, pp. 359–376.
34. For the specifics of Chaucer’s treatment of characters from the cycle of Troy, see José María Gutiérrez Arranz, The Cycle of Troy in Geoffrey Chaucer: Tradition and “Moralitee,” Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.
35. For the relationship of classical ekphrasis to the Roman de la Rose, see Stephen J. Nichols, “Ekphrasis, Iconoclasm, and
Desire,” in Rethinking The Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992, pp. 133–166. For more on the specifically medieval ekphrastic scenario of the Norman Conquest in tapestry form, see Michael Herren, “Baudi de Bour-geuil, Adelae Comitissae,” in The Bayeux Tapestry: History and Bibliography, ed. Shirley Ann Brown, Woodbridge, U.K.: Boy-dell Press, and Wolfeboro, New Hampshire: Boydell & Brewer, 1988, Appendix III, pp. 155–164; and Monika Otter, “‘To Countess Adela,’” Journal of Medieval Latin, v. 11, 2001, pp. 60–141.
36. Kemp [note 14], p. 7. Elizabeth Pastan (“Glazing Ro-manesque and Gothic Buildings,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph, Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers, 2006, pp. 443–465) begins her study with an analysis of Kemp’s observation that highlights the role of material form in narrative construc-tion.
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combine the panels/characters) creates an invi-tation to think through a different aspect of the story of Troy.
Hector and Priam, son and father, are the first pair offered up for consideration: valor, heart-ache, death, ritual, loyalty; the two evoke some of the most anguished familial concerns of the epic. The pairing of Achilles and Laomedon (the second king of Troy, Priam’s father) is less co-herent: perhaps a meditation on arrogance, on the causes of war? The mention of Medea and Jason, a myth whose narrative sequence begins well before and far away from the Trojan War, would jar if not outright stop any kind of nar-rative flow within the “all Troy” stained glass cycle.
While Paris and Helen are a classic couple, the inclusion of Lavinia, the woman promised to Aeneas, combines narratives of the Iliad and the Aeneid, skipping generations and geogra-phies. One interpretation could argue that La-vinia’s presence offers a thematic meditation on love, and conjures up the absent Aeneas. An-other could suggest that Lavinia exists to push the boundary of the legend of Troy all the way to the end of the Aeneid. In its suggestive to-tality, Chaucer’s Troy exceeds the boundaries of nar rative, projecting characters beyond the frame of the story—it behaves as stained glass does when it projects colors beyond its frame.
A debate could well ensue about the goals of narratives and images, both visual and literary: their obligation to recount chronology, as well as the aesthetics of presenting themes for con-templation.37 Do we ascribe these confused pair-ings to Chaucer’s ignorance of classical antiq-uity? No. The Book of the Duchess is one of Chaucer’s poems most permeated by mythology, filled with classical references and citations.38 Ceyx’s speech to Alcyone, for example, para-phrases that of Creusa from the Aeneid. Chau-cer knew his texts, and, using stained glass as an ever-expandable frame for those texts, he plays with our understanding, making meaning as elusive as a stained glass hue. In multiplying interpretive possibilities with the visual forms of stained glass, Chaucer enacts what Carruthers
has termed the “polyfocal perspective” of vari-etas.39 Eliciting his readers’ experiences of see-ing stained glass, the poet can create a vivid and multivalent image of a window that frames a complex arrangement of figures from the cycle of Troy. The multiplicity of characters provides an almost bewildering varietas, with numerous perspectives and points of view—but a varietas that primes the reader to think of epic emotions.
My windowes weren shet echon, And through the glas the sunne shon Upon my bed with brighte bemes, With many glade gilden stremes. (ll. 335–338)40
Chaucer’s last mention of stained glass in the poem returns us to a material consideration of the medium. Where his first mention focused on the integral and dazzling quality of the glass, and his second on its puzzling content, here he casts our gaze upon the “many glade gilden stremes” that the colors of the glass splay upon his bed. Stained glass does not just implicate the mind of the dreamer; it also permeates his body. The pervasive material presence of stained glass, and the reach of its colors beyond its frame into the viewer’s physical space, evokes the power of
37. Robert Edwards (“The Book of the Duchess and the Be-ginnings of Chaucer’s Narrative,” New Literary History, v. 13, no. 2, Winter 1982, pp. 189–204) sees narrative as an “aes-thetic problem” that Chaucer first tackles in The Book of the Duchess.
38. For more on Chaucer and mythology, see Alfred David, “How Marcia Lost Her Skin: A Note on Chaucer’s Mythology,” in The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medi-eval Literature, ed. Larry Dean Benson and Bartlett Jere Whit-ing, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974, pp. 19–30; and John P. McCall, Chaucer among the Gods: The Poetics of Classical Myth, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979.
39. Carruthers [note 12], p. 151. Based on her analysis of Procopius’s description of the Hagia Sophia, Carruthers cites a “harmony built from strong contrasts of diverse colours and ma-terials and sudden shifts of view” that pertains aptly to stained glass.
40. Love Visions [note 24], p. 31; The Book of the Duchess, ll. 335–338. “My windows there were closed each one, / And through the panes the bright sun shone / Upon my bed in glitter-ing streams / Of merrily shimmering golden beams.”
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literature to similarly imbue its readers.41 Chau-cer’s earlier specificity about the dreamer’s state of undress (“and in the dawning there I lay / Me mette thus, in my bed al naked”) couples sug-gestively with the haptic explorations of the sun’s beams through the windows’ colors upon the dreamer’s lap. A luminous annunciation bathes the dreamer with the fecund possibility of poetry.
Chaucer expands his meditation on seeing and reading in these three lines:
And alle the walles with colours fyne Were peynted, bothe text and glose, Of al the Romaunce of the Rose. (ll. 332–334)42
As Nancy Thompson has argued in her work on the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, stained glass windows and wall paintings called for highly articulated ways of seeing in the Mid-dle Ages (Fig. 2).43 Narratives operated within different visual frameworks, ritual associations provoked different physical placement and ges-tural action before the images, and artists en-gaged a variety of techniques from very different geographical locations in making their images. And yet Chaucer picks up on the idea of the liveliness (“fyne”) of color and glides his gaze over a wall painting depicting “al” of the text of the Romance of the Rose—and its gloss.44 Chaucer materializes the interpretive process by imaging it as a wall painting next to a stained glass window.45
41. Hannah E. Smithson and others (“A Three-Dimensional Color Space from the 13th Century,” Journal of the Optic So-ciety of America, v. 29, no. 2, February 2012, pp. 346–352) discuss the “three-dimensional conceptual space of color” ar-ticulated by Robert Grosseteste (1175?–1253) in his medieval treatise, De colore, available in translation: Greti Dinkova-Bruun and others, ed., trans., and interdisciplinary analysis, The Dimensions of Colour: Robert Grosseteste’s De colore, Durham Medieval and Renaissance Texts, v. 4, Durham: Institute of Me-dieval and Renaissance Studies, Durham University, and To-ronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013, www .pims.ca/pdf/dmrt4.pdf (accessed October 13, 2013).
42. Love Visions [note 24], pp. 30–31; The Book of the Duchess, ll. 332–334. “And on the walls in varied hue / Was painted, with its text and gloss, / All The Romance of the Rose.”
FIG. 2. Stained glass and wall painting. Baroncelli Chapel, Church of Santa Croce, Florence, Italy. (Pho-to: by kind permission of Nancy Thompson)
43. Nancy Thompson, “St. Francis, the Apocalypse and the True Cross: The Decoration of the Cappella Maggiore of Santa Croce in Florence,” Gesta, v. 43, no. 1, 2004, pp. 61–79.
44. For a study of the intersections between another of Giot-to’s frescoes and Chaucer’s House of Fame (which is itself made of glass), see Michael Hagiioannu, “Giotto’s Bardi Chapel Fres-coes and Chaucer’s ‘House of Fame’: Influence, Evidence, and Interpretations,” The Chaucer Review, v. 36, no. 1, 2001, pp. 28–47.
45. The juxtaposition of media that Chaucer uses and the multiple citations that a stained glass cycle of Troy and a wall painting of the Roman de la Rose and its gloss entail resonates with R. Barton Palmer’s characterization of The Book of the Duchess as “bricolage.” R. Barton Palmer, “Rereading Guil-laume de Machaut’s Vision of Love: Chaucer’s Book of the Duch ess as Bricolage,” in Second Thoughts: A Focus on Reread-ing, ed. David Galef, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 169–195.
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The cycle of Troy in stained glass and the Roman de la Rose in wall painting make no ob-vious sense together: disparity characterizes the ensemble. It is up to the viewers/readers to make connections between the media, genre, and char-acters, and to make sense of the puzzles before them. One could look for connections between characters in both literatures, or constructions or narrative developments. A stubbornly literal reading might purposefully ignore the definition of “gloss” as interpretation and instead choose to see the luster of the gloss in relation to that of the windows.
As was the stained glass cycle of Troy, so, too, the wall painting of the Roman de la Rose and its gloss is a visual impossibility (for already by Chaucer’s time, the Rose had caused much ink to be spilled—some Chaucer’s, in his translation of the section written by Guillaume de Lorris).46 This visual fantasy prompts another critical term: to gloss. The combination of glazing and glossing is what I will turn to next, in our under-standing of Chaucer’s use of stained glass with-in the experience of reading his text.
Glossing the Text
The reading of the stained glass sequence in The Book of the Duchess that I have just per-formed can be characterized as “stubbornly lit-eral.”47 Another characterization of this perfor-mance is that of a “close reading.” Both phrases signal the two materialities that I am now inter-ested in intersecting: that of stained glass and that of literature. Reading Chaucer with a stub-born literalism allowed me to take all of his sug-gestions about stained glass seriously, to think through all of the possibilities of the medium: its physical integrity, its totalizing vision, and its far-reaching content.
If we are stubbornly literal about this stained glass passage, it becomes exactly that: a passage, a place through the text, a “transcape” onto nar rative, effect, and reading. For we cannot stay literal: the consequences of an absolutely literal understanding were made all too gro-tesquely clear in Juno’s literal interpretation of
Alcyone’s request. But we can revel in the mate-rial fantasy that understanding a stained glass cycle of Troy initiates. The bright colors of stained glass spilled out on the lap of the dream-er call attention to the new materiality on the lap of the reader: the individual manuscript, read in silence.
Paul Saenger’s work on the development of silent reading, as well as his specification that “vernacular authors of the fourteenth century began to assume that their audience was com-posed of readers rather than listeners,” interests us greatly here.48 Recent scholarship on reader-ship of secular texts confirms new concerns with emerging reading practices that localized the act of reading to an individual, and therefore shifted the process of interpretation from that of a communal understanding to that of indi-vidual meaning.49 The ambiguous relationship of stained glass to materiality (at once material and immaterial) coincided with the contempo-raneous ambiguities emerging with transforma-tions of written text: in the late 14th century, text, too, was moving between the material and the immaterial as readers began to read more and more often in silence.
46. A first work addressing the connection between Chaucer and the Roman de la Rose is John S. P. Tatlock and Arthur Gar-field Kennedy, “Romance of the Rose,” in A Concordance to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and to the Romaunt of the Rose, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washing-ton, 1927. For a fuller accounting of the medieval reception of the Roman de la Rose, see Pierre-Yves Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle: Etude de la réception de l’oeuvre, Geneva: Droz, 1980.
47. “Stubbornly literal” is a phrase that I borrow from a talk given by Vin Nardizzi about reading poetry: “Tree Huggers and Other Philodendrists in Early Modern Poetry,” at “Animal, Veg-etal, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” George Washington Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, March 11 and 12, 2012.
48. Saenger [note 3], p. 411.49. Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public
in Late Medieval England and France, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, v. 26, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1996; Laurel Amtower, Engaging Words: The Cul-ture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages, New York: Palgrave, 2000; Deborah L. McGrady, Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and His Late Medieval Audience, Studies in Book and Print Culture, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
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A text that had been materialized in the body of the performer, and re-materialized as sound in the course of its performance, was now ma-terial in the form of the manuscript held in the hands of the reader. Sarah Kay’s essay “Legible Skins” emphasizes the animal materiality of man uscript pages, and the “uncanny kinship” between the reader and the manuscript when the reader’s touch reveals it vividly to be an animal’s skin. 50 A stubbornly literal reader of Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, one with the time and solitude to consider the implications of the Troy stained glass narrative, would be brought into alignment with the poem’s dreamer by the ma-teriality of stained glass. As stained glass shines upon the dreamer, so, too, does a manuscript weigh upon the reader.
The alignment between reader and dreamer continues into the poem, as the narrative engag-es in further participatory actions designed to res onate with the lived experiences of Chaucer’s audience. A call to hunt pulls the dreamer out of his bedchamber, and he joins the fray in the pursuit of the hart. The prey soon becomes a pun, and with the meeting of the dreamer and the Man in Black, we engage in a pursuit of the heart. The interpretive possibilities initiated by the stained glass earlier in the poem return in full force, however, with the narration of the chess game by the Man in Black. The story of the chess game played with Fortune has all the
markings of an allegory, but its tragedy is re-vealed when we realize that it must be under-stood literally51: when Fortune took the queen of the Man in Black in the game, she died in actuality, leaving him bereft and wandering the woods of the dreamer’s landscape, seeking sol-ace. The epic emotion of the cycle of Troy am-plifies that of the Man in Black; the interpretive possibilities of the stained glass window open up those of the chessboard.
Glazing and Glossing in the Prologue of The Tale of Beryn
Chaucer’s use of stained glass spills out of the frame of his own production in the 15th-century continuation of The Canterbury Tales known as The Tale of Beryn, a poem whose prologue has received more scholarly attention than its central narrative.52 The Tale of Beryn itself is a swash buckling adventure of fortune, betrayal, travel, chess, thievery, trickery, lies, and safe re-turn told on the way back to the Tabard Inn in Southwark.53 The prologue has retained schol-arly attention because, in it, the pilgrims arrive at Canterbury Cathedral, a goal whose desire had been almost endlessly prolonged by the narrative excursions of Chaucer’s The Canter-bury Tales. After a visit to the shrine of Thomas Becket, the pilgrims disperse into the city of Canterbury, and the prologue follows just the
50. Sarah Kay, “Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Me-dieval Reading,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, v. 2, no. 1, 2011, pp. 13–32. See also Bruce Holsinger, “Of Pigs and Parchment: Medieval Studies and the Coming of the Animal,” PMLA, v. 124, no. 2, March 2009, pp. 616–623.
51. Guillemette Bolens and Paul Beekman Taylor (“The Game of Chess in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess,” The Chaucer Review, v. 32, no. 4, 1998, pp. 325–334) pursue the metaphor of the chess game according to individual moves.
52. Peter Brown (“Journey’s End: The Prologue to the Tale of Beryn,” in Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen, London: King’s College, 1991, pp. 143–166) delineates the textual tradition and “anxiety of influ-ence” of the poem (p. 165). On the issue of imitation, see Karen A. Winstead, “The Beryn-Writer as a Reader of Chaucer,” The Chaucer Review, v. 22, no. 3, Winter 1988, pp. 225–233; for a counter-opinion on the Beryn-writer’s departures from Chaucer,
see Jean E. Jost, “From Southwark’s Tabard Inn to Canterbury’s Checker-of-the-Hope: The Un-Chaucerian Tale of Beryn,” Fif-teenth-Century Studies, v. 21, 1994, pp. 133–148.
53. John M. Bowers, Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, Kalamazoo, Michigan: published for TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in association with the University of Rochester by Medi-eval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1992. Ben Parsons (“‘For my synne and for my yong delite’: Chaucer, the ‘Tale of Beryn,’ and the Problem of ‘Adolescentia,’” The Modern Language Review, v. 103, no. 4, October 2008, pp. 940–951) treats The Tale of Beryn proper, as does Guillemette Bolens (“Narrative Use and the Practice of Fiction in The Book of Sindibad and The Tale of Beryn,” Poetics Today, v. 29, no. 2, Summer 2008, pp. 309–351), who argues for the eastern origin of The Tale of Beryn in the “Merchant and the Rogues” tale from the Book of Sindibad via the Seven Sages of Rome.
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Pardoner, who had arranged for a tryst with Kitt, the tapster of the Checker-of-the-Hope Inn.54 What follows is a ribald tale in which the Pardoner is bested by Kitt in fabliau fashion.55
The stained glass windows appear at the very beginning of the poem, as the pilgrims first set foot in Canterbury Cathedral. The framing de-vice of stained glass has shifted from the dream-scape of The Book of the Duchess to the land-scape of the Canterbury pilgrims. Pilgrimage, too, is a liminal endeavor, however, and stained glass proves useful to the Beryn-writer, as it did to Chaucer, to open up the interpretive possi-bilities of this imaginary space. The pilgrims’ interaction with a stained glass window offers a brief but telling narrative digression just before the pilgrims reach the shrine of Thomas Becket. Literal interpretation remains a contested act, but this time in the comic mode, as the pilgrims disagree about what they are seeing.
Diskyveryng fast the peyntour, and for the story mourned And ared also – right as rammes horned!
“ He bereth a balstaff,” quod the toon, and els a rakes ende.”
“ Thow faillest,” quod the Miller, “thowe hast nat wel thy mynde. It is a spere, yf thowe canst se, with a prik tofore To bussh adown his enmy and thurh the sholder bore.”
“ Pese!” quod the Hoost of Southwork. “Let stond the window glased. Goth up and doth yeur offerynge. Ye semeth half amased.” (ll. 145–162)56
As a document recording medieval responses to stained glass, the prologue to The Tale of Beryn is unnerving: the pilgrims cannot agree on what they are seeing. Had iconographic clarity of the windows of Canterbury already been lost by the 15th century? Was determining the meaning of stained glass already a recuper-ative work? Identities as disparate as a laborer, a farmer, and a knight shone before their audi-ence. Or had stained glass images always been
open to individual interpretation? Clarity is not the problem: each viewer is certain of what he or she sees. It is agreement that is the issue. One pilgrim sees a figure bearing a staff; another, a rake; a third, a spear.
The insults begin (“thowe hast nat wel thy mynde”), and the Host cries “Pese!” and dis-perses the stained glass audience. In doing so, he leaves the interpretation open-ended. Were the pilgrims before a saint figure, or the famous Adam of Canterbury, or a knight? The poem leaves the communal interpretation unarticulat-ed, allowing the individual interpretations to remain instead. The individuality of interpreta-tion initiated by private reading in the 14th cen-tury is in common practice 100 years later, and the Tale of Beryn scene before the stained glass windows of Canterbury Cathedral valorizes it further. The scene also accommodates the read-er to an indeterminacy of personhood that is per vasive in The Tale of Beryn proper. Beryn changes from wayward son to rube to victim to traveler in the course of the long poem, and the “real” Beryn remains elusive.
The act of seeing a stained glass window in the prologue to The Tale of Beryn performs an indeterminacy of meaning whose critical bound-ary rests with the spectator. It could be that just this figure of a man with an attribute provokes
54. In his analysis, Robert S. Sturges (“The Pardoner in Can-terbury: Class, Gender, and Urban Space in the ‘Prologue to the Tale of Beryn,’” College Literature, v. 33, no. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 52–76) prioritizes 15th-century audience-response over Chaucer’s influence.
55. After a prolonged nocturnal pursuit, the Pardoner is beat-en by Kitt’s lover for his efforts and spends the nights with the dogs of the inn. See Bradley Darjes and Thomas Rendall, “A Fabliau in the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn,” Mediaeval Studies, v. 47, 1985, pp. 416–431; and Stephen Harper, “‘Pleyng with a Zerd: Folly and Madness in the Prologue and ‘Tale of Beryn,’” Studies in Philology, v. 101, no. 3, Summer 2004, pp. 299–314.
56. The Tale of Beryn, ll. 145–162. “Swiftly explaining the depiction, and meditation upon the story / and interested also, straight as a horned ram! / “He bears a staff,” says one, “or else the end of a rake.” / “You’re wrong,” says the Miller, “You’ve lost your mind. / It’s a spear, you can well see, with a sharp point / To push down his enemy and pierce him through the shoulder.” / “Peace!” says the host of Southwork. “Let the win-dow stand glazed. / Go up and do your offering. You seem half dazed.”
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multiple interpretations, or we can consider this “stubbornly literal” refusal to settle on just one interpretation as a performance of reading Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and The Tale of Beryn themselves. The materiality of stained glass overtakes any easy legibility of meaning—but produces interpretations to be debated, be-coming a gloss on the process of reading itself. The Host’s command to “Let stond the window glased” moves the pilgrims along toward the scripted ritual of their “offerynge” and away from the unscripted space of interpretation. It renders the window a monument: fixed, inscru-table, waiting for its next interpreter.
Conclusion
In concluding, I return to a window that first inspired thinking about stained glass as a mate-rial thing that could elicit pursuits other than those of iconography and social history (Fig. 3). In writing “Stained Glass Window as Thing,” I used Heidegger’s ideas on matter and presence to make sense of this image in which, impossi-bly, a window is held above an altar by a guild of shoemakers in the Relics of Saint Stephen window within the ambulatory of Chartres Ca-thedral.57 The interconnectedness of tracery and armature makes it impossible to lift a window as a singular object. The heaviness of the glass also presents problems for this fantasy.
In scenarios we have explored here, the in-discrete materiality of stained glass is intimately connected to productive impossibilities of per-formance, space, and voice. The material “in-discretion” of stained glass provokes indetermi-nate epistemologies, in which meaning becomes purposefully elusive and prompts a perpetual (glorious, shining, ultimately meaningful) work of interpretation, shaped by its viewer’s and reader’s imagination. In collaborating with lit-erature, stained glass quickens the mind of the reader and opens up an interpretive field, call-ing upon the viewer’s lived experience with the medium to recall the ability of stained glass to project light, shift color, and interact with its surroundings.
The collaboration of stained glass and devo-tion also relies on a fantasy of materiality, and opens up possibilities of interpretation, here in relation to the divine. In the hands of the shoe-makers of Chartres, the materiality of stained glass becomes transubstantive: placed upon an altar, it sublimates the mundane work of sutur-ing shoes that gives them their name in the nave window. “Sutores O” reads the text, perhaps inviting a prayer (“Orant”) or other orations in the performative spaces of the nave and the am-bulatory of the cathedral. Within this devotion-al context, we can also be stubbornly literal in the manipulation of stained glass, in noticing all of the hands-on gestures that move the stained glass window to an altar, or up to God. As impossible, rare, or unmentioned as touching
FIG. 3. Shoemakers of Chartres, Good Samaritan window (about 1205). Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Chartres, France. (Photo: by kind permission of Henry Feraudy)
57. Anne F. Harris, “Stained Glass Window as Thing: Hei-degger, the Shoemaker Panels, and the Commercial and Spiritual Economies of Chartres Cathedral in the 13th Century,” in the online journal Different Visions, 2008, www.differentvisions .org/issue1PDFs/Harris.pdf (accessed October 5, 2013).
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could roam over manuscript pages. It reopens the question that I have asked here in involving stained glass with literary interpretation: of how stained glass might matter.
stained glass is, the fantasy of touching a win-dow is frequently represented within donor por-traits. It is a fantasy that would become a ma-terial reality and an interpretive opportunity for 14th- and 15th-century readers, whose touch
