4 Erasures and Recoveries of Women’s Contributions to Gothic Architecture: The Case of Saint-Quentin, Local Nobility, and Eleanor of Vermandois

Abstract

This essay examines visual and documentary evidence that identifies female patrons, from the lower nobility to Countess Eleanor of Vermandois, as well as the historical assumptions and circumstances that left them invisible. In the traditional narrative of Gothic architecture, Saint-Quentin was for a long time a particularly problematic building, as a series of erroneous hypotheses reinforced one another from the nineteenth century forward. In considering the methods of the historian, Michel de Certeau argued that in order to posit reasons for historical events one must tdiscover through the very stuff of historical information what allows it to be conceived,t that is, twhat makes something thinkable.t The construction of histories that masked women's contributions can be traced back to such seventeenth-century narratives; they became codified with the nineteenth-century processes of history writing and restoration. Keywords:Countess Eleanor of Vermandois; Gothic architecture; Michel de Certeau; nobility; restoration; Saint-Quentin; women's contributions