The Building of Elizabethan and Jacobean England

Abstract

The dissolution of the monasteries ravaged England in the 1530s and resulted in the greatest destruction of the built fabric of the country. It was also, however, a time in which many new initiatives emerged. In the following century, former monasteries were adapted to a variety of uses in both public and private buildings: royal palaces and country houses, town halls and schools, almshouses and re-fashioned parish churches. No new towns were built in England, but the urban environment changed rapidly to reflect the needs of both national and local government. Patrons of buildings spent sometimes wisely, sometimes extravagantly, in managing a balance between their own domestic projects and sponsoring civic buildings that promoted their charitable image in post-Reformation society. In this beautiful and elegantly argued book, Maurice Howard reveals that changes of style in architecture emerged from the practical needs of construction and the self-image of major patrons in the revolutionary century between Reformation and Civil War, and he shows how the transformation of the country's stock of buildings was accompanied by a new language both of word and of vision, as building accounts, government regulation and theoretical writing on the one hand, and pictorial representation on the other, directed new ways of documenting the changed appearance of the buildings in which people lived, worshipped and worked.

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