Introduction

The late twelfth-century glass from the choir aisles and eastern transept arms of Canterbury cathedral is rightly famous on two counts: its superb design and execution and its conceptual ambition as a moralizing cycle, relating the Old to the New Testament and devising much else besides. Although most of the glass is lost, its subject matter is known from transcripts of the accompanying Latin verses, the earliest dating from the late thirteenth century. These present in twelve windows a sequence of about seventy central New Testament subjects with more than 140 parallels (Fig. 1): a large, varied, and complex programme that can seem encyclopaedic in its scope, in line with the developing compendia of biblical commentary from the Glossa Ordinaria of the early twelfth century to the Sentences of Peter Lombard. It fits so comfortably in this maturing scholastic context that it may seem implausible to argue that the scheme was largely conceived in the vanguard of this development c. 1100, and was substantially reconstructed nearly eighty years later. Notwithstanding any such misgivings, the content of the programme suggests that the Gothic glass installed after the fire which devastated Anselm’s choir in 1174 reinstated the essentials of its Romanesque predecessor. In that respect it is similar to the sequence of Christ’s ancestors from the Gothic clerestory which took over the early twelfth-century scheme, though in that case it had to be expanded to fill a larger number of windows. There are two points to bear in mind throughout: first, that by 1125 Canterbury was famous for its display of glass (according to William of Malmesbury ‘nothing like it could be seen in England for the brilliance of the window glass’: nichil tale possit in Anglia videri in vitrearum fenestrarum luce), and second, that the window openings at aisle level which contained the ‘typological’ scheme are to this day those of Anselm’s choir and they are very large. In what follows I set out evidence that suggests the late twelfth-century scheme in the aisles was in important respects a recreation of Anselm’s lost original, but it is as well to begin with a caveat: it will never be possible to reconstruct this putative cycle in its entirety with confidence, and details of its visual imagery are particularly speculative.