NARRATIVE studies of the stylistic evolution of stained glass are relatively plentiful, but Virgina Chieffo Raguin’s new work offers something different. By focusing on selected monuments, Raguin enables viewers to engage with “the moment of their creation and the motivations of their patrons”. She also seeks to reconstruct some of the associative meanings that the works carried for their first viewers.

Raguin’s geographical range stretches from 12th-century France (Chartres Cathedral) to the 20th-century American Midwest (Frank Lloyd Wright’s domestic interiors). Three of the most interesting chapters, however, concern English churches now in Anglican use: Canterbury Cathedral; All Saints’, North Street, York; and St Mary’s, Fairford, in Gloucestershire.

The Canterbury scheme dates from the last decades of the 12th century and the first decades of the 13th. It embraces three thematic elements: the ancestors of Christ; a set of theologically intricate typological subjects; and, last, a series depicting the life, martyrdom, and posthumous miracles of Archbishop Thomas Becket, murdered in the cathedral by knights loyal to Henry II in 1170.

Some of the most quirkily arresting images are those of Becket’s ghostly apparitions from his casket-shaped shrine (originally positioned within feet of the windows) to effect cures. Raguin notes that, despite a contemporary focus, there is also a strong implicit Christological referent here: “miracles are often grouped by type, such as resurrections to teach the validity of the belief in the Resurrection.”

michel m. raguinVision at the Shrine of Thomas Becket, Trinity Chapel (1213-15/20). From the book

There is a homely immediacy to some of the windows in the 15th-century cycle at All Saints’, York. The subject choice for the seven Works of Mercy meshes closely with contemporary programmes for lay catechesis — the subject of devotional primers of the sort that (in another window) St Anne seems to be using to show the Virgin Mary how to read.

The Pricke of Conscience Window illustrates a poem, attributed to Richard Rolle (1300-49), about the last 15 days of creation. Raguin offers fascinating, if tentative, suggestions about convergences between the window’s visual registers and that of the contemporary York Mystery plays acted out in adjoining streets.

Fairford’s early-16th-century windows, probably made by Dutch glaziers, are remarkable in themselves. They are also notable, however, for their early post-Reformation celebration in verse by the Anglican priest-poets Richard Corbet (1582-1635, Bishop successively of Oxford and Norwich) and his friend William Strode (1602-45), a Canon of Christ Church. Both hymned praises in works titled, identically, “Upon Fairford Windows”.

Raguin speculates that the Fairford depiction of Christ’s being lifted down from the cross may have been influenced by the “hanging fleece” heraldic emblem of the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece established at Bruges, Flanders, in 1430. That argument gains force when we consider the poignant last line of Strode’s stanza reflecting on the image:

See where he suffers for thee: see
His body taken from the Tree:
Had ever death such life before?
The limber corps, besullyd ore
With meager palenesse, doth
   display
A middle state twixt Flesh and
   Clay:
His armes and leggs, his head and
   crowne,
Like a true Lambskinne dangling
   downe. . .

The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.

The Illuminated Window: Stories across time
Virginia Chieffo Raguin
Reaktion Books £30
(978-1-78914-793-3)
Church Times Bookshop £27