Church of Notre-Dame in Montreal: An Architectural History. Rev. ed.

James A. Love is an associate professor of environmental design at the
University of Calgary.

This is the second edition of this book, minimally altered after 20
years. The earlier edition was awarded the Society of Architectural
Historians’ Alice David Hitchcock Book Award for “the most
distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture
published by a North American scholar during the year 1970.” The book
was the fruit of Toker’s master’s thesis research, in which he
pursued a “method of questioning which attempts to minimize the role
of personal value judgements in architectural history . . . a
relativistic criticism, based on the response of the architect to [the]
problems and opportunities at every step.”

In the preface to the second edition, Toker notes that the book was
remarkable for its time because it was then common to devote serious
scholarly efforts only to the monuments of Europe and Asia. He also sees
it as having been out of step with the current of scholarly Québécois
sentiment in the value it placed on a work post-dating the Treaty of
Paris. In keeping with this recognition, the treatment of the subject is
extremely thorough, although annotations based on the added insight of
20 years’ experience would have been a welcome addition.