ABSTRACT By considering reaction to revolution in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in relation to the rise of the Gothic Revival, this article offers a bold assessment of the interplay between responses to the Middle Ages and political culture. It examines the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie (1801–05) at the Vaccheria of the royal site of San Leucio, Caserta, in southern Italy, with a view to exploring the reciprocity between what can be seen as a neo-Gothic ’revolution’, wider political and industrial upheaval, and the historic ties between southern Italy and Sicily within the Mezzogiorno . In focusing on this neglected church, which was commissioned by Ferdinand IV of Naples and III of Sicily, the article aims to transcend the tendency in modern scholarship to discount the Gothic Revival in Italy as merely a superficial matter of taste. Recognising revivalism’s political agency, it is argued that Santa Maria delle Grazie bore witness to a profound stylistic crisis as classicism’s absolutist hegemony waned amid the epochal crisis of monarchical absolutism during the period. In tracing architectural and urban experimentation with respect to reactionism, proto-industrialism and medievalism in southern Italy, both before and after late eighteenth-century revolutionary activity, the Gothic Revival is situated within its proper revolutionary context. By extending considerations to Sicily and situating Santa Maria delle Grazie within the Mezzogiorno — through resonances with its medieval histories, including Norman and Swabian rule, and with contemporary ambitions for cohesion between the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily — the article argues for the reactionary yet transnational visual and political dimensions of neo-medievalism. In so doing, it elucidates a symbiosis between architecture and medievalism as a formidable conduit for expressing and enacting power in the Age of Revolutions.

ABSTRACT This article examines the development of Catholic places of worship in Ireland from the initial relaxation of the penal laws in 1778 to the passage of An Act for the Relief of His Majesty’s Roman Catholic Subjects , popularly known as the Act of in 1829. Focusing on parish chapels, three distinct forms are identified — the ‘transitional chapel’, the ‘improved chapel’ and the ‘grand chapel’ or ‘great chapel’. Many of these chapels have been reworked, replaced or demolished, and therefore a range of sources have been used to examine this important period of Catholic infrastructural development, including drawings, written descriptions and analysis of the surviving built fabric. This period of Catholic architecture has been largely overshadowed in the historiography by the more extensive and elaborate buildings constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The chapels built during the earlier period are varied in design and scale, ranging from the grandeur of the ‘Metropolitan chapel’ (called the Pro-Cathedral until November 2025) on Dublin’s Marlborough Street to modest cruciform chapels with minimal external decoration in the rural landscape. This article examines the architectural strategies used in both urban and rural contexts to assert a recognisable Catholic architectural identity in public space while negotiating a precarious and uncertain legal environment during a period of considerable political instability. Finally, it examines the increasing use of professional architectural expertise in order to participate in a culture of ecclesiastical building and to express the institutional capacity of the Catholic church emerging from the legal restrictions of the penal laws.