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Text is from:
“A Treatise On Chancel Screens And Rood Lofts.
Their Antiquity, Use, And Symbolic Signification”.
By: Augustus Welby Pugin.
First Published in 1851 by Charles Dolman, London.
This 2005 edition published by Gracewing Publishing,
who have given permission for this Article.
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INTRODUCTION.
By: Roderick O’Donnell,
Feast of The English and Welsh Martyrs,
4 May 2005.
“A Treatise On Chancel Screens And Rood Lofts.
Their Antiquity, Use, And Symbolic Signification”
is Pugin’s last Book.
Published in the Spring of 1851, it was a considered response
to the attacks made on him during the so-called “Rood Screen Controversy”, which had broken out in 1848 over the role of the Rood Screen in the new and long-awaited Saint George’s Cathedral in Southwark. These attacks had been orchestrated in the pages of the “Rambler” magazine.
Pugin worked on the Book intermittently from 1848 to
its printing in December 1850 and subsequent publication,
by Charles Dolman, a few months later. In it, he returns to
the methods, first deployed with devastating effect in “Contrasts” (1836), of combining polemic with antiquarian scholarship, the latter ranging from Notes and Sketches of Churches he had seen, to published and drawn records culled mostly from his own remarkable Library.
Although the polemics of “Contrasts” are largely avoided,
the four vignettes on the “Ambonoclast” and the “Conclusion” show him still relishing controversy.
“Ambonoclasm” — Rood Screen smashing — is a term that Pugin borrowed from the historian Abbé J.-B. Thiers, whose “Dissertations Ecclésiastiques sur les principaux Autels des Eglises, Les Jubés des Eglises, La Clôture du Chœur des Eglises” (1688) had first cited in his “Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England”.
The “Treatise” is a strongly-argued and well-laid-out work,
far less muddled than the publications of his mid-career, and while some stock themes are repeated, there is no suggestion here of Pugin having reached the end of his tether.
Though it was reviewed by the “Tablet” in May 1851 and in
the “Ecclesiologist” in June 1851 — as part of a campaign to distance the “Ecclesiologist Society” (formerly the “Cambridge Camden Society”) from Pugin — the Book has never received the attention it deserves.
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