Theology and Threshold: Victorian Approaches to Reviving Choir and Rood Screens

Abstract

In 1851, A. W. N. Pugin published an influential treatise on rood screens, intending in his irrepressible polemical style to create further Gothic Revival momentum for inserting these iconographically complex and liturgically vital elements into Roman Catholic and Anglican churches throughout Britain and its empire. In the decades that followed, debates regarding ritual, aesthetics, materials, and Eucharistic theology surrounded the design, presence, and indeed absence of these screens. This interdisciplinary article on the borderlands between architectural history and theology explores what was at stake in the religious symbolism of a small number of diverse screens designed by George Gilbert Scott, George Frederick Bodley, and Ninian Comper, considering them in light of the key writing produced by Pugin at the mid-point of the nineteenth century, as well as by priest–architect Ernest Geldart in the century’s end. This study, together with its three short films that explore the screens’ meanings and histories in situ, charts shifts in theology and style as each architect offered innovative views through delicate latticework of stone, paint, and wood towards the Christian sacred epicentre of the Incarnation and the sacrifice of the Eucharist.