In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Catholic Historical Review 87.1 (2001) 108-110



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Hawksmoor's London Churches:
Architecture and Theology


Hawksmoor's London Churches: Architecture and Theology. By Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2000. Pp. xviii, 179. $37.50.) [End Page 108]

This book carries through the sort of project which is often talked about but rarely achieved. It illuminates one area of intellectual endeavour by examining it in the light of another. That is to say, early eighteenth-century church architecture in England is here interpreted in the light of the preoccupations of contemporary clergymen and ecclesiastical historians.

It has long been appreciated that the body of commissioners charged with the implementation of the Act of 1711 for building Fifty New Churches in the Cities of London and Westminster and their suburbs included senior churchmen. But Du Prey is the first to have investigated these ecclesiastics and the concerns which they brought to the commission's deliberations. He is able to show that although they formed a close-knit group of Tory high-churchmen, they had links to a wider theological interest within the Anglican church at the time. This was inspired by the desire to emulate primitive Christianity, indeed to validate the Church of England as an authentic successor to the primitive Church.

Du Prey investigates in his first chapter successive paper reconstructions (or 'restitutions' as he prefers to call them) of the Temple at Jerusalem by English authors during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and links them methodologically to the 'restitutions' by Wren, Hooke, and Hawksmoor of lost pagan monuments. In the second chapter Du Prey shows how Hawksmoor's celebrated plan of the "Basilica after the Primitive Christians," adapted to a site in Stepney in London's east end, is related to ideas expressed in the third volume of Joseph Bingham's Origines Ecclesiasticae of 1711, which was drawn to the commissioners' attention by the Reverend George Hickes. Wren's and Vanbrugh's memoranda on the form and character of the new churches have long been known, but to these Du Prey has been able to add a document now in the Beinecke Library at Yale, Hickes's "Observations on Mr Vanbruggs proposals about Buildinge the new Churches," and to show that Hickes's ideas in a number of important respects conditioned the instructions given by the commissioners to Hawksmoor and his fellow surveyor as to the layout and fittings of the churches.

The final chapter is a closely argued analysis of the six churches built to Hawksmoor's design under the Act, showing how in each case the architect in a highly personal way drew on the whole tradition of church building and design, medieval as well as early Christian, and also on heathen Greek and Roman models. Given Hawksmoor's fertile and flexible imagination, which developed and transmuted ideas at will, a process illustrated, as the author shows, by the many surviving design drawings, it is often hard to pin down precisely his initial stimulus. But the general thrust of Du Prey's argument is thoroughly persuasive. Furthermore, his enthusiasm for his subject carries the reader through the intricacies of an often dense discussion.

The book is impressively produced, with four important documentary appendices, a full bibliography, and an excellent index. The illustrations are numerous [End Page 109] and well chosen, with only a few desirable drawings not included. The set of sensational color plates which show the churches gleaming white against deep blue skies is essential to the impact made by the book.

John Newman
Courtauld Institute of Art

...

pdf

Share