International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

When Chester Howell of Boston, Massachusetts, came to Rheims in June of 1917, he very likely had no thoughts of cultural memory or the future of the past.  His mind was surely occupied with more pressing things: his duties as an American ambulance driver with the French Army in the Great War.  It was in the course of his work, transporting the dead and wounded to safe ground, that Howell first visited the city’s great cathedral.

Chester Howell never became a scholar of medieval architecture, and he possessed no formal training in the history of art.  But he was profoundly moved by the lofty vaults of Rheims Cathedral and the heavy damage that they had suffered during the war.  As he searched the cathedral for broken bodies to place in his ambulance, Howell also began to collect pieces of the shattered stained glass windows.  He had no thought of looting or stealing; he believed that the fragments were too small to be of any monetary value.  But upon his return to the United States in 1919, Howell made sure that his glass keepsakes were given as a gift to Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner. 

Howell’s choice was appropriate, because Mrs. Gardner’s museum, filled with salvaged bits of medieval art and architecture, is among the most prominent of Gilded Age memorials to the past.  Her attitude tinged with romanticism, Mrs. Gardner viewed the bits of glass as precious relics of the war.  It is her respect for the Rheims fragments, along with the care and attention paid to them by Mr. Howell, that form the core of this paper and give us one vivid example of how visual memories of the Middle Ages, forged in France during a time of conflict, could be translated and treasured in the United States.