Preserving the Nation's Zeal: Church Buildings and English Christian History in Stuart England

The quest for an appropriate past was of huge importance in late Tudor and Stuart England. Henry VIII's break with the Roman Catholic Church not only created the National Church of England but left this newly established State Church with a historical vacuum. While the dissolution of monasteries and the iconoclastic "cleansing" of churches took place in the first decades after 1534 and were repeated a century later during the Civil War; the establishment of a Church on firm English roots continued well into the 17th century. Church historians started to rewrite the history of Catholicism in England, while architects and theologians dug into antiquarian studies in order to define the status of and reflect upon the architecture of church building in the Church of England. Biblical history, early Christian proto-archaeology and antiquarian studies of the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval past, are the sources upon which these reflections are based. If we read architectural descriptions in antiquarian writings of the seventeenth century, and treatises of architects, such as Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren and Roger North, together with testimonies of patrons such as those of Anne Clifford, it emerges that the fundamental debate on church architecture is less concerned with the well-known opposition between Gothic and Classical architecture than with finding a dignified expression of religious ideas that does not succumb to charges of idolatry or parsimony. This resulted sometimes in mixed forms drawn from medieval and classical architecture in order to shape a legitimate past for the Church of England, linking its genuine English roots with the biblical early Christianity. Or to put it in George Hickes’s words: The faith and other chief doctrines of the English-Saxon Church to be the same with ours, and perfectly answer that never ending question: where was your Church before Luther? In this paper I want to study the interaction between the emergence of antiquarian studies and the development of theories and design on "good" church building practice for the Church of England. I will also pay attention to the English interpretation of a shared set of Christian references (biblical history and Early Christian Past) within the cross-confessional discussions on church building and trace the influence of contemporary architectural practice on the description and interpretation of English religious antiquities.

ISBN:978-90-04-37821-6

Publication year:2018

Accessibility:Open