Staying In Style: Architectural Fashion in Medieval Parish Churches
The Middle Ages
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1h 0m
Old parish churches are wonderful ways of experiencing the ways in which architectural tastes changed over many centuries. As well as being rewarding in their own right, these ever-shifting styles can be used to help put a date on the parts of a building as it develops. They also help make it a ‘time machine’ to medieval culture and medieval ideas. This lecture will outline the main identifying features of the succeeding styles- known as Anglo-Saxon, Norman or Romanesque, early Gothic or Transitional, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular; it will also aim to give a picture of how these styles unfolded ‘in the present’, and how they might evoke the attitudes of the past.
Jon Cannon is a writer and architectural historian. His book on medieval style, ‘Medieval Church Architecture’, is available from Shire books. He also presented BBCTV’s ‘How to Build a Cathedral’ and wrote ‘Cathedral: the great English cathedrals and the world that made them’, ‘The Secret Language of Sacred Spaces: Decoding temples, mosques, churches churches and other places of worship’, and other titles. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Cathedral Historian at Bristol cathedral, and in demand as a lecturer and tour leader. His ‘Stones of Britain: Geology and history in the British landscape’ is out next Autumn.
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