‘The Windows of this Church are of several Fashions’: Architectural Form and Historical Method in John Aubrey’s ‘Chronologia Architectonica’

Abstract

Thomas Rickman has been credited, perhaps for too long, as the first figure to ‘discriminate’ the styles of medieval architecture and create a chronological analysis of Gothic architectural forms. Not only were there several authors who published on the subject immediately before Rickman, but there was also, as early as the mid-seventeenth century, considerable interest in the discernment and classification of periods in medieval architecture. One of the chief figures in this was John Aubrey, who pioneered a method for deducing the date of a medieval building by analysing the shapes of its windows. This intellectual initiative, 150 years before Rickman, has been either overlooked or interpreted as a ‘false start’ in Gothic revivalism. It is, however, worthy of fresh appraisal as a significant development in historical method and as an indicator of one way in which architecture was understood in the seventeenth century. Aubrey’s idea was that objects of a given type, in this case medieval windows, had a particular shape during a particular historical period, and that their morphology could be used to create a system for establishing the date of any given building. The context for this scheme was the innovative proposal of several early modern antiquaries that shapes in themselves could convey historical information, and that specific historical periods had their own distinctive forms. These scholars, many of whom were associated with the Royal Society, took faltering steps towards taxonomies of historical form which foreshadowed the methods of analysis that became — and arguably remain — central to the discipline of architectural history. That their interest focused upon medieval architecture at a time when the Gothic was largely rejected as irregular and barbarous is also notable. Examining the origins of a technique for dating historic buildings through visual analysis reveals how an intellectual circle of the seventeenth century perceived and understood architecture at a time when in England architectural commentary and criticism were still in their infancy.