CHAPTER 10
On the Origins of Concordian Gothic
To avoid taxing the gentle Reader’s patience, the Author will follow convention in referring to Concord’s cathedral as St Eco’s1 until 1347, and thereafter as the Molè Bernoulliana. Whatever name the cathedral goes by, its foundations are inseparable from the Re-Formation’s.
Some ambitious young historians have argued that we will not find those foundations in Concord, nor even Etruria; they tell us we must venture to that water-scarred land of dark savage forests: Europa. We are accustomed to thinking of the Re-Formation as uniquely Concordian, but they suggest that many of the larger Europan cities also had the necessary conditions at the turn of the century.
This is not the place to dissect that argument;2 while it may be true that every city important enough to have a cathedral3 had a similarly unstable dynamic of tight-knit engineering firms working for unimaginative clerics, only Concord had Girolamo Bernoulli.