“Urban Sanctity: Saints and Cities in Thirteenth-Century Stained Glass”
Gerald Guest

The narrative stained glass windows of the thirteenth century take as one of their principal areas of focus the lives of the saints. This paper will argue that the hagiographic turn in gothic glass is also, simultaneously, an urban turn. For the people of the Middle Ages, saints were intimately linked with cities, the sites where (variously) they were born, lived, performed miracles, died, and where their relics were housed. This paper considers some of the ways in which artists and iconographers working in stained glass presented the city as a backdrop for the lives of holy men and women.

Saints and cities are linked to one another in a variety of ways in these picture cycles. Cathedrals often contain windows devoted to local saints (e.g., St. Lubin at Chartres). Conversely, distant cities such as Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Rome are presented as centers of sanctity, sites whose very histories are inseparable from the sacred personages whose lives unfolded within their walls. Beyond this, hagiographic windows are generally structured around the journey of the saint, the journey of life. In this pilgrimage through space and time, the city has a paradoxical role—it is a site that is often fled (e.g., Mary the Egyptian) but it is also a place sought out by missionary saints for evangelization (e.g., Savinien and Potentien of Sens). In short, the stained glass of the thirteenth century presents a vexed image of the city. It is a place of sin but also a place of sanctity.

I will argue that the windows in question cast a sacred net over the space of the medieval city, in an attempt to sanctify it in response to the rapidly changing world of the thirteenth century, a time when society was becoming increasingly urban and secular.