Anti-Judaism and “American Genealogy” in Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres Available to Purchase

This essay argues that in Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)—his seemingly romantic survey of medieval architecture, poetry, and philosophy—the many odious anti-Jewish slurs are grounded in the book’s attempt to trace “American genealogy” to its Anglo-Norman origins in the militant and homogeneous ethnic Christian society he portrays in medieval France. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres affirms Adams’s convictions that Anglo-Christianity is foundational to his ideal of ethnic nationalism in the United States and that the nation’s heritage begins in the medieval Gothic tradition.