Notre-Dame in Thines, France, is a jewel of a Romanesque church that I will definitely incorporate in my Medieval class this coming fall. It sits high up the hillside of Thines. Cars can’t go into many of the town’s tiny streets, so we walked along a dirt trail for about a kilometer to see it. Check out the stone roof of one of Thines’ buildings in the second picture.
The church belonged to a local abby (St Chaffre, if you are wondering) and was built in the late 11- to early 12-hundreds. It is fabulous in so many ways. For one, it’s got a checklist of typical Romanesque features that also appear in a lot of Norman church architecture (like Durham): barrel-vaulting, alternating bands of stone color around windows, and whimsical rounded sculptures that echo the ways figures were shown in illuminated manuscripts (check out the harpy-esque chicken dude monsters).
But also, those who built this Church were part-and-parcel of the newly broadened Christian identity of the time. The Crusades had something to do with this, but regardless of the causes, Western Europeans were seeing themselves as part of a common culture in a new way. So, the very name: “Church of Notre Dame” was deliberately evoking other churches that were similarly consecrated. It was also on one of the main pilgrimage routes going to Santiago de Compostela, which physically connected Western Europeans. The stripey-patterned rock — made possible because of an abundance of local supply — was popular in much fancier and more urbane cathedrals. But the stripes and statues were conscious ways that the builders of this church in Thines mimicked the flourishes on the much more sumptuous cathedrals of Western Europe.
