Our endearing and enduring tale from the Middle Ages basked in heartwarming sentimentality. In the fin de siècle the miracle of the medieval entertainer began to elicit especial affection when purveyed to readers in beguiling little books. Anatole France stood at the apogee of his popularity. In his own homeland and abroad, he won and retained immense prestige for his short stories, and the one based indirectly on the thirteenth-century poem was no exception. For all that, the impact of the closely related narratives about the tumbler and the juggler was hardly confined to paper and ink. Had the fate...

By having no role for a female soloist, Massenet’sLe jongleur de Notre Dameoccupied an exceptional and even unique place within his operatic oeuvre. Despite this anomaly in the original score, the opera’s lasting international renown, especially but not exclusively in the United States, owes everything to one female. Who was this wonder woman? In her era, she rated as the equivalent of a top pop star and media darling today. She was arguably the most famous diva of her era, as much for the juicy tidbits of the painstakingly cultivated and scripted scandals that she made to swirl...

First, how would listeners in the Middle Ages have conceived of the performance before the Madonna, if they heard the poem recited or the story retold in a sermon? Then, what would a late nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century reader have thought when perusing the medieval French in translation, Anatole France’s story, or Maurice Léna’s libretto? Finally, how do we imagine the scene today? What are the acoustics? Do olfactory elements come into play? Is there anything to taste? What can we imagine touching—nothing but cold stone? Yet beyond the other four senses, sight dominates the setting. Through what color...

The story of the tumbler evokes an entire vertical spectrum, all the way from the depths of the underworld to the heights of heaven. In the medieval French of the tale the protagonist does not descend to the mythical abode of the dead, but he spends much time in a real crypt. There he enacts the rituals of his one-man cult before the Virgin and her image. Once his body has died, his soul has been weighed, and he has been deemed worthy to enter paradise, we are told that the former entertainer will ascend there—but that resolution of...

Crypts may be ideal places for blind devotion, but the time has come to eschew black humor and instead to sound the light motif. The brightness befits the jongleur, who despite his fellow monks’ suspicions has no dark side. Since the romantic era, Gothic architecture has had a reputation in some quarters for being dusky and dismal, connotations it acquired in part under the influence of the Gothic novel and its vast progeny in popular culture. At the same time, the association with murkiness acknowledges structural realities that affect and limit the fenestration of buildings in the style. By extension,...

In both the medieval story and the adaptation of it by Anatole France, the leading actor’s main performance takes place under a self-imposed gag order. In the first he tumbles, while in the second he juggles. The other human beings around this central character are monks, who divide their waking hours between executing their liturgical duties of song and fulfilling their other monastic obligations of wordless work and mute meditation. Both the Madonna and the Mother of God herself stay mute, upholding a long tradition of apparitions in which Mary does not express herself through speech. Instead, she imparts information...

Between the end of the Franco-Prussian War and 1914, most of the European landmass was at peace. Industrialization had given rise to a seemingly stable society with a prospering middle class. Nation-states had imposed themselves as ordering principles upon the peoples, languages, and cultures of the continent, and had forged international economic ties that appeared to hold considerable promise for continuing harmony. But this was not to be. Instead, the long freedom from disturbance turned out to be nothing more than the calm before a storm, the likes of which the globe had never seen. Among many other developments, the...