Rood Screens


Book Description

The rood screen was the visual focus of the medieval parish church, dividing the nave from the chancel. Most were built of wood and were adorned with intricate carved decoration painted in bright colours, often with images of saints. Defaced and often dismantled during the Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century, most surviving screens have been restored to their former glory since the nineteenth century and are now among the most prized treasures of our parish churches. This fully illustrated book explains the symbolic and practical significance of rood screens and describes the ways in which they were constructed and decorated. There is also an extensive list of churches in England and Wales where screens can be found.




Rood Screens


Book Description

The rood screen was the visual focus of the medieval parish church, dividing the nave from the chancel. Most were built of wood and were adorned with intricate carved decoration painted in bright colours, often with images of saints. Defaced and often dismantled during the Reformation in the mid-sixteenth century, most surviving screens have been restored to their former glory since the nineteenth century and are now among the most prized treasures of our parish churches. This fully illustrated book explains the symbolic and practical significance of rood screens and describes the ways in which they were constructed and decorated. There is also an extensive list of churches in England and Wales where screens can be found.




The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe


Book Description

Fresh examinations of one of the most important church furnishings of the middle ages. The churches of medieval Europe contained richly carved and painted screens, placed between the altar and the congregation; they survive in particularly high numbers in England, despite being partly dismantled during the Reformation. While these screens divided "lay" from "priestly" jurisdiction, it has also been argued that they served to unify architectural space. This volume brings together the latest scholarship on the subject, exploring in detail numerous aspects of the construction and painting of screens, it aims in particular to unite perspectives from science and art history. Examples are drawn from a wide geographical range, from Scandinavia to Italy. Spike Bucklow is Director of Research at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge; Richard Marks is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of York and currently a member of the History of Art Department, University of Cambridge; Lucy Wrapson is Assistant to the Director at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge. Contributors: Paul Binski, Spike Bucklow, Donal Cooper, David Griffith, Hugh Harrison, JacquelineJung, Justin Kroesen, Julian Luxford, Richard Marks, Ebbe Nyborg, Eddie Sinclair, Jeffrey West, Lucy Wrapson.




Temlau Peintiedig


Book Description




Art and Drama on a Late Medieval Rood Screen


Book Description

With little scholarly attention having been given to the late medieval iconography that features on rood screens in the southwest of England, the significance of the figures painted at Berry Pomeroy has long been underappreciated. The unlocking of their meaning by the author has led to the discovery of a unique iconographic program. The gestures adopted by many of these figures belong to a common visual culture in the art and drama of the medieval church. The iconography, which reflects a Gothic Mannerist style of the early sixteenth century, displays a marked theatricality giving expression to the mysteries of the faith in the form of a drama. The narrative recorded has notable similarities to that found in a dramatic trilogy which was once performed in Cornwall called the Ordinalia. This book makes an important contribution to scholarship in the genre of mysticism in art and to our understanding of popular devotional practices on the eve of the Reformation.




The Gothic Screen


Book Description

This book reveals how Gothic choir screens, through both their architecture and sculpture, were vital vehicles of communication and shapers of community within the Christian church.







English Panel Paintings, 1400-1558


Book Description

The art of East Anglia was pre-eminent during the late thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century. Wooden screens with painted panels were one of the most essential fittings of late pre-Reformation churches, serving both to protect the high altar and to define the division between the chancel and the nave and aisles. Whereas very few screens dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries survive, the extant fifteenth-century rood-screen paintings in East Anglia form the largest body of late mediaeval painting to be found in England. Details of more than a thousand panels from over one hundred screens are listed, described and in many cases illustrated in this volume, accompanied by commentaries on their design, techniques and materials used in their making and who paid for them.




Thresholds of the Sacred


Book Description

This collection of essays considers the development and meaning of the iconostasis, the screen used in churches to separate the sanctuary from the nave. The contributors approach the history of the icon screen from a variety of disciplines, including art history, theology, and architecture.




Fires of Faith


Book Description

The reign of Mary Tudor has been remembered as an era of sterile repression, when a reactionary monarch launched a doomed attempt to reimpose Catholicism on an unwilling nation. Above all, the burning alive of more than 280 men and women for their religious beliefs seared the rule of “Bloody Mary” into the protestant imagination as an alien aberration in the onward and upward march of the English-speaking peoples. In this controversial reassessment, the renowned reformation historian Eamon Duffy argues that Mary's regime was neither inept nor backward looking. Led by the queen's cousin, Cardinal Reginald Pole, Mary’s church dramatically reversed the religious revolution imposed under the child king Edward VI. Inspired by the values of the European Counter-Reformation, the cardinal and the queen reinstated the papacy and launched an effective propaganda campaign through pulpit and press. Even the most notorious aspect of the regime, the burnings, proved devastatingly effective. Only the death of the childless queen and her cardinal on the same day in November 1558 brought the protestant Elizabeth to the throne, thereby changing the course of English history.