the stars of Compostela

This book is only av13th century. The ‘essarteurs’ would take a stubborn forest and, in twenty years, turn it into a fertile slope. Jehan le Tonnerre was one of them, wild and fierce as a deer, kept on the edge by the villagers, when curiosity and fate led him to the construction site of a Cistercian abbey. He was soon recruited by the Compagnons Constructeurs, the ‘Children of Maître Jacques’, the mysterious ‘Pédauques’ of whom he would become a member after a long initiation. Vincenot is more than just the chronicler of this singular adventure, at once mystical and everyday, of the builders of cathedrals: ‘These people, these countries, these buildings, I really saw them, touched them, breathed them with the eyes, the hands, the lungs of Jehan le Tonnerre… I thought then that I was the ‘return’ of Jehan le Tonnerre, seven hundred years away, in the circle of Abred… ’

*This book is only available in French*
Published by Folio, 335 pages