George Forrest Browne, Early Medieval Sculpture and Nineteenth-Century Reformation Historiography

Abstract

George Forrest Browne, as Disney Professor of Archaeology and bishop of Bristol, was one of the I9th century's foremost clerics and archaeologists. These two roles came together in his interpretation of Anglo-Saxon crosses—including that at Bradbourne in Derbyshire. This monument was probably destroyed through the ‘logocentric iconophobia’ of the late I6th and early 17th centuries, a period during which the interior of Bradbourne church was whitewashed and ‘decorated’ with Biblical texts. Browne was responsible for recovering the fragments of the Bradbourne cross, which he then situated within a ‘reformationist’ history of medieval England—a history which charted the corruption (under increased papal influence) of English church and society through to the eventual ‘re-formation’ of the Church of England in the 16th century. For Bishop Browne the Reformation was more than an event in history. The advances made by Catholicism in the 19th century made it a matter of contemporary concern, and reinforced his commitment to the idea that the Church of England was always ‘Ecclesia Anglicana…never Romana’.