Review: The Architecture of the Scottish Medieval Church, 1100–1560, by Richard Fawcett

Abstract

Richard Fawcett. The Architecture of the Scottish Medieval Church, 1100–1560 New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011, 432 pp., 100 color and 300 b/w illus. $100, ISBN 9780300170498 Richard Fawcett has fulfilled his wish to write a detailed history of ecclesiastical architecture in Scotland across the entire Middle Ages. In 2002, he introduced Scottish Medieval Churches: Architecture and Furnishings with a lament that there had been “little attempt to sort out what may be described as the chronology of the Scottish architectural vocabulary through correlation of the structural and documentary evidence.”1 Fearing that one individual could not shoulder a task done for other European countries in the nineteenth century by an entire generation of architectural historians and that no publisher would adequately commit to such a project, Fawcett instead composed Scottish Medieval Churches as a chronological stylistic overview of the churches’ individual elements, such as windows, porches, and lecterns. The structure mirrored much older guides to medieval architecture elsewhere, specifically Francis Bond’s Gothic Architecture in England from 1905.2 Fawcett’s latest work, however, reads more like Christopher Wilson’s textbook of 1990, The Gothic Cathedral , for its encyclopedic ambition, direct chronological structure, and attention to historical context alongside a narrative of changing architectural forms.3 Fawcett aims to leave no monument unexamined in his survey, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art has generously afforded him the pages and plates to achieve this. Grand cathedrals, ruined monasteries, and remote parish churches all find a place along a timeline stretched as tautly as primary documents and formal comparisons will allow. When considered beside his previous effort, The Architecture of the Scottish Medieval Church reads as an attempt to make up for the century of scholarship between Bond and Wilson that Fawcett believes has not been accorded to Scotland. The impulse to allow buildings from all regions and all levels of the ecclesiastic hierarchy to participate in an architectural history seems admirably twenty-first century, but the …