More than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the last attempts to write the Gothic Summa. I think particularly of Jean Bony’s French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), much criticized at the time for its “modernistic” viewpoint and for detaching buildings from their historical context in the construction of the big, style-based story of Gothic; also relevant is Die gotische Architektur in Frankreich 1130–1270...