Duby, G. (1981). The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420. Trans. Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Duby’s magisterial account of the medieval cathedral-building era. The book traces the Gothic impulse to the striving of 11th-century monks and scholars to grasp the concealed order of the universe, and reads the cathedral as the physical compression of an institutional coordination form organized around legitimacy, hierarchy, and authority. The Evolution of Coordination Nodes framework draws on Duby to identify the cathedral as the +I form’s concentrating node.