Propaganda in Stone: Medieval Style in 17th Century Anglican Churches

It has long been realised that it was not until a long time after it was deployed in secular architecture in England that the Renaissance style was used systematically in English church building. The use of Perpendicular Gothic continued until the middle of the 17th century at least. Among those churches which used Gothic style, however, was smaller number of churches which did not use the Perpendicular version, but deployed motifs going back to the 14th century, notably in window tracery. It is suggested here that these features were included in the building of churches under James I and Charles I and to the 1660s in order to reinforce a particular view that the Anglican Church had a special place within the story of the Reformation in general.     

Mural and Other Paintings,in English Churches

In 1825 Lewis Nockalls Cottingham removed Romanesque carvings from the spandrels of the great west window at Rochester Cathedral as part of a comprehensive programme of restoration and repair. The architect's preliminary drawings for this project (held by Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University in New York) permit the accurate reconstruction of these spandrels, and this reconstruction, in turn, reveals some of the principles which guided this important early nineteenth-century restorer. It can be shown that in attempting to clarify the several styles of medieval building at Rochester, Cottingham repressed some features which he saw as hybrids and emphasized others which he judged insufficiently prominent. This desire to make the fabric history more clearly legible as a sequence of stylistic cues reflected recent advances in the writing of architectural history, in particular the taxonometric approach pioneered by Thomas Rickman.     

The Urban White Paper and The Churches

Abstract

Has the Church of England, post Faith in the City, become the ‘Marks and Spencer’ of the English urban scene? Many people lament the Church's absence from the high street but few wish to enter the ‘store’, let alone give it their ‘allegiance’ and ‘custom’. As an Anglican priest working in an urban parish, vicar of a large ancient and historically important town-centre Church, and being the first Social Responsibility Officer in the diocese of Peterborough, I fantasize that the Church is both M/S and S/M to want to persist with such an irrelevant parochial structure and outdated theological model of mission. The recently published Urban White Paper and other recent government reports have given an opportunity to consider possible new mission structures that take seriously the complex social layers of a post industrial urban landscape. Renaissance, regeneration and renewal are needed in the structures of the institutional Church and in our thinking of globalized city living.     

关于淮北新出土石祠画像石的认识

通过对新出土的4块画像石形状、内容及雕刻技法的分析,认为它们应是东汉石祠画像石。并根据其形状、尺寸将它复原成单开间平顶房屋式建筑,填补了淮北市汉画像石祠的空白,并为认识同类画像石找到了实物依据。     

香炉石遗址与香炉石文化

香炉石遗址是鄂西清江中游的一处早期巴化遗址,出土遗物较丰富,计有石器、陶器、骨器、铜器、甲骨和陶印章等物近万件,已被研究命名为“香炉石化”(即早期巴化),其时限为距今4000～3000年间,属我国青铜时代一种地域性的考古学化。香炉石化的人们多居住在河流两旁的台地上,其经济生活以渔猎为主,采集和种植为辅。该化的源头,从陶器中的罐釜等炊具的形制特征看,可追溯到大溪化和城背溪化,香炉石化的明程度较高,这里出土了迄今为止我国最早的陶印章和商周时期的大批甲骨,就是最好的说明。