Four Alien Priories in Monmouthshire

Abstract

Inigo Jones is conventionally seen as an isolated genius who had little direct effect on contemporary architects and builders. This is true if his early, elaborately Classical, buildings such as the Banqueting House, are examined in isolation. However, after 1630 Jones developed a very different, astylar domestic manner which proved highly influential among contemporary architects and builders both in London and the countryside.     

Leonor of England,Plantagenet queen of King Alfonso VIII of Castile,and her foundation of the Cistercian abbey of Las Huelgas. In imitation of Fontevraud?

In 1187 Alfonso VIII of Castile and his queen, Leonor of England, founded a Cistercian nunnery, Santa Maria Regalis de Las Huelgas, on the outskirts of Burgos. Despite the clear allegiance of the foundation to the Cistercians from the outset, the idea that the abbey was inspired by and even modelled on the nunnery of Fontevraud in Anjou is an encroaching commonplace in accounts of medieval Spanish history and art history around 1200. This study re-evaluates the arguments for that perception and puts forward a different reading of the early years of Las Huelgas, not as a foreign importation but as a peculiarly Iberian, even Castilian, institution.