INTRODUCTION
Building Stories
Writing about Architecture in Post-Reformation England
In approximately 1536, John Leland began the first of several journeys around various parts of England with the goal of rescuing English history. Leland was driven by a special sense of urgency; for him, the dissolution of the monasteries threatened the loss of England’s historical record. Monasteries and their associated churches had long been both the sources and the repositories of the nation’s most important “antiquitees” and “monumentes,” words that, in Leland’s usage, referred most often to written historical documents and records.1 According to Leland’s admirer and fellow antiquarian John Bale, these valuable items were being recklessly sold off and put to undeserved and undignified uses: grocery wrapping, for instance, and toilet paper.2 Leland went mad and died before publishing a single word of his notes, but Bale would plead with Edward VI in 1549 that Leland’s recuperative project be continued and that ancient written histories be “by the art of pryntynge . . . brought into a nombre of coppyes.”3
This dispersal of the contents of monastic libraries was in part occasioned by the destruction of the library buildings themselves. As Leland’s notes reveal, monastic and ecclesiastical structures were sold off, converted, pulled down, or allowed to fall into the evocative ruins that were by then frequent features of the landscape. Even to strongly Protestant writers such as Leland and Bale, the Reformation produced a sense of loss, as England’s religious houses—which numbered six hundred forty-five, their antiquarian successor William Camden would report—were abandoned and disavowed as part of a Catholic past.4 To Leland’s antiquarian eye, architectural and written forms of history were necessarily intertwined: buildings, like documents, communicated history. We might say that for Leland and others, architecture itself was in danger of becoming illegible, no longer clearly tracing the human histories which had produced it and which it, in turn, preserved and contained. The contents of Leland’s written itineraries are not merely descriptions or catalogues of monastic libraries or even of the monasteries themselves, although these are included. They are also extensive topographical accounts that take note of many building types in every stage of construction, use, or decay, including castles, country houses, churches, and Roman ruins. In Leland’s project of recovery, both buildings and written documents helped to construct the histories that he meticulously wrote down. Buildings, like written “monumentes,” told stories, of the people who built them, destroyed them, owned them, lived in them, died in them, and inherited them, and of those who recorded their histories. It is with this interdependence—between architectural and written records of human history—that this book is primarily concerned. Modern readers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature have much to gain by recognizing this relationship; sensitivity to the historical and narrative functions that architecture can fulfill expands our understanding of how a range of early modern writers viewed and made use of the material built environment that surrounded them.
Leland was not the only English writer to understand architecture and narrative as related forms of storytelling; this perception permeates many sixteenth-and seventeenth-century works, though scholars today rarely focus on these interrelations. Influenced by the aesthetic theories of classical architecture and the Italian Renaissance, modern art and architectural historians often assume that architecture is experienced only visually and spatially and, as a result, that it is most naturally interpreted and talked about in those terms. Suna Güven, for instance, observes, “Standing out as innate to architecture are the components of visuality and space. Visual history and spatial history each constitute a self-referential equation peculiar to the architectural brand of history.”5 We can see this equation at work in the way we organize our academic disciplines. Architectural history is quite often placed by modern universities in art history departments, which, as Dana Arnold writes, “has serious consequences for the way in which the history of architecture is studied,” since the work is made the “institutional preserve” of a discipline “whose primary concern is properly with aesthetics.”6 As a result, perception of the relationship between architecture and narrative, or storytelling, has become institutionally marginalized.
It may seem surprising, but this marginalization has been dominant even in literary scholarship. Arnold’s statement might be perceived as a conservative characterization of the broad fields of art and architectural history in general, but it accurately describes the ways in which these fields have been received by literary studies. So far, studies comprising both the architecture and the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have relied mainly on periodization and aesthetic preference to construct analogies that forge synchronic relationships among works in different media. David Evett, for instance, has written eloquently of how constructing analogies among poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture can help the scholar “learn” or know more thoroughly the members of each group. In the service of this argument, he compares “traditional and renascence styles” and refers to categories such as “earlier Tudor art, whether visual or verbal.”7 Murray Roston has defended the practice of “inferential contextualization,” in which works in one group might be used to deduce the historical and aesthetic pressures and conditions to which works in another responded. Thus, as Roston argues, we might use sixteenth-century country houses such as Hardwick Hall to better understand the “complex yet integrated structure of Shakespeare’s plays” as “not only a mark of the dramatist’s personal talents, but part of a larger Renaissance sensibility.”8 Lucy Gent similarly argues for analogous aesthetic preferences in the painting and poetry of the Elizabethan era, despite the fact that “the obvious clues in literature do not lead to actual pictures” and “the poets’ descriptions cannot be related to their pictorial counterparts.”9 In each case, these scholars offer us useful ways of imagining or explaining the development of certain formal and aesthetic features in both visual and written media, but those ways do not allow us to look in a nuanced way at how early modern writers consciously created an engagement between the two.
I argue that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, much writing about architecture belonged more properly to the fields of literature and historiography than to the fields of visual and material culture. We must recognize that, in the early modern era, talking about buildings was a way to tell human stories, to reflect on history, to discover it or make it up. Using new analyses of texts by a diverse set of authors whose works represent a range of genres (histories, dramas, poems, diaries, and architectural treatises), I examine the narrative dimensions of England’s built environment from the late sixteenth century through the late seventeenth. The texts I consider in each chapter are united by two distinctive qualities. First, all point to features of a real built environment that existed outside their pages. Second, all use those features as a means of telling stories.
It is not only, however, that architecture contributes to the study of early modern literature and historiography; these texts also supplement or revise what has appeared to some scholars to be a paucity of information concerning the way architecture was regarded and interpreted during this period. An English Short Title Catalogue search for “architecture,” for instance, will turn up only two pre-Restoration works originally written in English: John Shute’s First and Chief Groundes of Architecture (1563) and Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624). Allowing for translated works, we can include Hans Blum’s Booke of Five Collumnes (1601) and Sebastiano Serlio’s Five Books of Architecture (1611) on the list. Architectural historians, among them Eileen Harris, have usefully pointed out and described a variety of other texts that we might see as supplementing our knowledge of English building practices of the time, including works on carpentry and measurement, such as Leonard Digges’s popular A Boke Named Tectonicon (1556) and Richard More’s The Carpenters Rule (1602).10 Judged against the great Continental and classical treatises of their predecessors, however, the English treatises by Wotton and Shute are disappointing. Both Wotton and Shute were readers of Vitruvius, but Wotton’s short treatise deals only with country houses, whereas Vitruvius treats the design and construction of cities and temples, in addition to private buildings. Shute’s (like Blum’s translated work) discusses only the five orders—or types of columns—and Shute, who was trained as a painter-stainer, was quite possibly more interested in the engraving techniques of this richly illustrated work than he was in the construction of buildings.11 And while Serlio’s Five Books does constitute a comprehensive treatise on building, design, and ornament, Anthony Wells-Cole has demonstrated that in England the work seems at first to have functioned mainly as a pattern book for woodwork, masonry, and plasterwork: “The appearance of Serlio’s Architettura did not change the course of architecture in England overnight . . . but it had an irreversible impact on architectural decoration.”12
Literary and historical texts might expand our knowledge of early modern architecture in another way, contributing not so much to our knowledge of its design or construction as to our sense of how it was valued and understood. Pre-Restoration printed treatises on architecture provide evidence of an interest in both building and buildings, but even taken together they do not allow us to construct the comprehensive or systematic aesthetic theory that was exemplified by their classical and Continental predecessors. Put differently, they do not provide a complete methodology or vocabulary for understanding, designing, or evaluating architecture as a visual art. Among others, Gent has lamented that early modern Britain’s “traditions in architecture and painting are relatively voiceless.” The “architectural remains,” she argues, “are surrounded by a singular degree of silence,” because “prior to the assimilation of continental treatises, building in England lacks a body of theory.”13 But this deficiency appears only if we search for accounts of aesthetic tastes or detailed descriptions of what buildings looked like. By understanding architectural writing as a form of narrative or storytelling, we might make the opposite claim: in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the built environment was far from voiceless. Rather, it inspired an unusual amount of literary and historiographic production. Recently, Maurice Howard has noted the possible influence of literature on the way early modern viewers were “prepared” for the “visual exploration” of various building types; I contend that the built environment likewise affected the way writers were prepared to approach, in writing, the representation of historical places and literary settings.14
Leland’s writings answer the methodological question at the center of this book: What do the architecture and literature of early modern England have to do with each other? He suggests answers to this question that have not been recognized by modern scholarship. First, Leland demonstrates how an author might perceive architectural evidence and narrative as related and often interdependent forms of storytelling. A specific example is Leland’s description of Malmesbury, a name that designated both a Wiltshire town and an abbey that had been dissolved in 1539. As we might expect, Leland notes the remaining contents of the monastery’s library, which included works by Apuleius, Tertullian, Albinus, John Scott, and the twelfth-century monk William of Malmesbury. In addition, though, he describes the “very feble” walls of the town, a now-vanished castle “sum tyme . . . of greate Fame, wher yn the Toun hath syns bene buildid,” and “a right fair and costely Peace of Worke in the Market Place made al of Stone, and curiusly voultid for poore Market folkes to stande dry when Rayne cummith.” The church formerly attached to the abbey, once “a right magnificent thing,” was by then partly a ruin, including “2 . . . Steples, one that had a mightie high pyramis, and felle daungerusly in hominum memoria, and sins was not reedified,” and part of which had been converted to a parish church, and “The fair square Tour in the West End . . . kept for a dwelling House.” In a second church on the abbey grounds, “Wevers hath now lomes . . . but it stondith and is a very old Pece of work.”15 Here we see Leland’s combined interest in written and built monuments and the range of buildings to which he attends. A similarly wide range of significant architectural settings will be examined in this study.
More important, though, the history of Malmesbury’s architecture was also a history of its human inhabitants, both past and present. The salient qualities of architecture—even monastic architecture—described by Leland are not those that his post-Reformation historical moment might lead us to anticipate. Rather than mostly evoking reactions to the Catholicism of England’s past, the architecture divulged to him a much more varied range of content. Leland’s architectural description does reflect England’s changing political and religious identities, but it also speaks of the particular biographies attached to those buildings and remains: “The Saxons first caullid it Ingelburne. And after of one Maidulphus a Scotte, that taught good Letters there and after procurid an Abbay ther to be made, it was Maidulphesbyri: Maidulphi curia. The King of the West Saxons and a Bishop of Winchestre were founders of this Abbay. Aldelmus was then after Maiduph Abatte there, and after Bishop of Shirburn. This S. Aldelme is Patrone of this place.”16 A bit later, Leland notes, “Ther was a litle Chirch joining to the South side of the Transeptum of th abbay Chirch, wher sum say Joannes Scottus the Great Clerk, was slayne about the Tyme of Alfrede, King of the West-Saxons, of his own Disciples thrusting and strikking hym with their Table Pointelles.” And then we return to architectural history: “Ther was an Image set up yn thabbay Chirch yn Honour of this John Scotte. This is John Scotte that translatid Dionysus out of Greke into Latine.”17 Then Leland records the legal fate of the property and writes of the next generation connected to Malmesbury: “The hole logginges of thabbay be now longging to one Stumpe, an exceeding riche Clothiar that boute them of the King. This Stumpes Sunne hath maried Sir Edward Baynton’s Doughter. This Stumpe was the chef Causer and Contributer to have thabbay Chirch made a Paroch Chirch.”18
In such passages, we see that Leland’s antiquarian brand of architectural history is anchored in the physical materials of Malmesbury’s buildings but does not rigidly adhere to only a description of them. Instead, the notation of physical features—“an Image set up yn thabbay,” for instance—branches off into the story of the people responsible for or associated with them, in this case, John Scott. And here, the description of Scott’s architectural monument nicely enfolds the history of precisely the sort of written literary or historical “monument” in which Leland was equally interested. Conversely, the retelling of human history feeds back into the description of the building, as one narrative thread leads us from the “hole logginges of thabbay” to the acquisitions of the “exceeding riche Clothiar” Stumpe, to the marriage of Stumpe’s son, before returning to the building itself, when Stumpe is represented as an instrument of architectural change, the story of how “thabbay Chirch” was “made a Paroch Chirch.” Throughout the Itinerary, as here, Leland’s architectural descriptions differ from those of a modern architectural history, being richly studded with the names of owners, occupants, and important historical figures, rather than with names of architects and with architectural terms. Such emphases change the way we see architecture itself, making it part of the historical record, rather than an expression of a particular aesthetic style or of a single architect’s skill.
In his attention to real architectural materials that existed outside the pages of his notes, Leland offers a way of formulating the relationship between architecture and literature that differs from the synchronic, aesthetic, and analogy-based approaches that characterize much modern inter-art scholarship. He also perceives a relationship between the two that is not strictly conceptual or immaterial. Scholars such as Roy Eriksen and A. W. Johnson have located the intersection of architecture and literature in metaphor, noting numerous examples in which the processes of building and composition or the qualities of architectural and textual structures are seen as representing each other.19 Here, for instance, we might place John Donne’s determination to “build in sonnets pretty rooms” or Ben Jonson’s famous assertion that “in the constitution of a poem, the action is aymed at by the poet, which answers place in a building; and that action hath his largeness, compass, and proportion.”20 Here we might also locate the tradition of memory houses, in which imagined architectural structures are used as mnemonic devices and which have been thoroughly discussed by Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers.21
Endorsing the value of Leland’s method does not invalidate these other approaches or disprove the importance of architecture as metaphor in Renaissance thought. It does, however, suggest that literature and historiography might engage architecture in a way that is both more literal and more self-conscious. Critics can construct analogies between one work and another without claiming that the two were deliberately positioning themselves in relation to each other or that writers and artists were mindful of the cultural conditions to which they responded. For Leland, as for the other writers I consider here, the interrelation between written text and built environment was quite consciously perceived: it is one thing to write a poem that shares some general aesthetic characteristics with contemporary country houses; it is another to write a poem about a specific country house. It is certainly possible to argue that the fragmented and often disordered quality of Leland’s historiography reflects the disorder of the built environment he confronted.22 But the relationship between the buildings Leland observed and the stories he wrote down was not one of analogy or shared style. It was one of contingency: the stories emerged from the process of architectural description itself, and they depended on buildings outside their pages to be remembered and told. Without the looms and dwelling houses in Malmesbury Abbey, for instance, there would have been no occasion to tell the story of the wealthy clothier Stumpe. Conversely, architectural description required narrative; Leland’s Itinerary could not have been fully expressed in maps or diagrams, even if Leland had had the technical skill to produce such items. Instead, his notes require characters and verb tenses as they imagine biographies and move, diachronically, between present and past. Howard Marchitello and others have explored the temporal dimensions of cartographic development during this period, especially in chorographic texts such as Leland’s: “In both instances,” Marchitello writes, “the representations produced (maps and chorographies) are images of the world engendered by a narrativizing of topography and history: both are made to tell historical tales, and these tales, moreover, are deployed in the service of specific political and cultural ideologies.”23 By spanning the gap between verbal history and a built environment, Leland introduces us to a kind of architectural history that is not entirely invested in either architecture or history; it is not a study of architectural structures in their own right, but its stories continually gesture toward buildings which, from Leland’s perspective, were real and at least partly present. A building, to Leland, was an object of explication and interpretation, but it was not a figure of speech.
Leland’s perception of a close relationship between material or built architecture and verbal narrative as two forms of historical record illustrates a complex understanding of a very basic literary term: setting. Here, architectural setting acts as source material, contributing content that, like any other literary or historical source material, was adapted by authors to various strategic ends. For Leland these ends were both antiquarian and nationalistic; architectural description was a way of preserving what Bale would call the most “worthy monumentes” and “noble Antiquitees” of England’s past and of mapping the expanses of his nation.24 (When the project was done, Leland would claim, Henry VIII, to whom he intended to give the work, would have his “worlde and impery of Englande . . . sett fourthe in a quadrate table of sylver.”25) The generic variety of the texts I consider here demonstrates the very broad range of stories architecture can be used to tell. In order to perceive this dynamic sense of architectural setting in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts, however, modern readers must dismantle the categories that have isolated the academic disciplines of literature and architectural history from each other. Once we develop a broader sense of what architectural writing as a category might comprise, we come to see the sophisticated and conscious ways that texts traditionally classified as literature or history engage the real built environment.
Leland’s attention to the dissolution of the monasteries also grounds the particular modes of architectural interpretation with which this book is concerned in a specific time and place. An analogic or inferential approach might be used to connect the literary and architectural developments of any period or location, but Leland’s view of this connection is quite clearly a post-Reformation idea. This is not to claim that the texts I discuss in this book are all in some way about the Reformation; it is to suggest that certain effects of the Reformation provide a useful way of accounting for or tracing the history of characteristics that these texts share with Leland’s writing and with one another. James Simpson has recently praised studies that historicize both the “break” between the pre- and post-Reformation periods “and, more profoundly, the forms of understanding that flow from it.”26 I focus here on how Leland models the development of a “form of understanding” that has particularly to do with architecture. As Jennifer Summit shows, “Leland’s project was to rewrite the violence of the Reformation and to reincorporate the ruins it left into a topography of the newly Protestant nation.”27 The broad strokes of this project—using the stories of buildings to remake the past and adapt it to the interests of the present—apply as well to the aims of several of the later writers I discuss here.
It is important, however, not to overemphasize Reformation rupture or controversy as the lens through which the architecture of this period might have been viewed. As Leland shows, although many of the histories that architecture preserved or implied were necessarily by or about Catholics, they were not, in themselves, histories of Catholicism. Camden, for instance, would praise William of Malmesbury, “unto whom for his learned industry, the Histories of England both civill and Ecclesiasticall are deepely indebted,” and Philip Schwyzer has noted that few literary works of the period deal with the subject of monasteries.28 When it comes to architecture, we might see the Reformation inheritance of these texts differently, not as a preoccupation with the architectural relics of the Catholic past, but as a distinct approach to the built environment more generally, one that focuses on the excavation and retelling of history rather than on the judgment of religious categories or identity. Taking Leland’s account of Malmesbury once again as an example, we can see how a former monastery is made to tell stories on several topics, from a dinner-time death to a present-day marriage. Freed of the notion that the post-Reformation built environment produced only traumatic reminders of an inconvenient historical truth, we are better able to see how that environment offered an attractive subject to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers working in a range of historiographic and literary genres.
Recent scholars in many fields have attempted to transcend the boundaries of aesthetic judgments and genealogies by replacing the term “visual arts” with “visual culture,” what Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxley have designated a “history of images” rather than a “history of art.”29 This shift in terminology, they argue, “offers the prospect of an interdisciplinary dialogue” between art history and cultural studies in other fields.30 With regard to the early modern period specifically, studies of funeral monuments by Nigel Llewellyn and Peter Sherlock have amply illustrated the alternative cultural and historical fields in which funerary sculpture might participate.31 Countering the art historical periodicity of such works as Margaret Whinney’s Sculpture in Britain (1964), Llewellyn (2000) asserts that “quite anachronistically, post-Reformation monuments have invariably been judged according to Italian criteria and the narrative history of English art has been presented as a series of steps towards or away from such criteria.” In fact, Llewellyn argues that “we should instead establish an account grounded in a unique set of circumstances: for every funeral monument, there was a funeral; for every funeral a death; for every death a life.”32 Once these historical meanings are taken into account, it comes as no surprise that funeral monuments were a favorite subject of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarians, who deplored their destruction and decay.33
Early modern descriptions of architecture such as Leland’s prompt a reconsideration of the word “visual” as well. Although Llewellyn, Paul Hunneyball, and others have fruitfully questioned the usefulness of judging English patrons and craftsmen by Italian standards that they were not, in many cases, trying to imitate, the Italian Renaissance has continued to influence our conception of painting, sculpture, and architecture as related and primarily visual forms of expression.34 The concatenation makes sense when applied to Italian luminaries such as Michelangelo, whose genius was manifested in all three media, but early modern England does not afford us such examples, and it is difficult to imagine that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers or viewers shared this sense of the field. Thus, while the change in terminology—from “visual arts” to “visual culture”—has admitted a much greater range of materials and interpretive methods, it has not really redefined our sense of where the word “visual” might be applied. While it is certainly true that architecture itself is perceived visually and that sixteenth-century English people evidently enjoyed looking at it, Leland’s record reminds us that it is possible to write about it in a way that renders its appearance the least interesting or dependable of its features.
To some degree, the concept of spatial practice and experience has supplanted or supplemented the study of aesthetics in architectural history over the past several decades; and, at a distance, literary and historical criticism of early modern architecture and culture have followed this shift. In the 1957 treatise Architecture as Space, Bruno Zevi famously argued that space is “the protagonist of architecture,” and many studies over the past two decades have turned on the idea of social space.35 Following Michel de Certeau’s assertion that “everyday stories . . . are treatments of space,” these approaches draw on patterns of use and daily habit to translate the discussion of architecture from the realm of the aesthetic to that of the “everyday.”36 The synthesis of these studies often consists of classification, as locations are designated public or private, male or female, urban or domestic. The work of Lena Cowen Orlin has been particularly influential in this regard.37 Such work has provided a liberating opportunity to talk about buildings that may have been designed with use, much more than aesthetics, in mind. It has been of particular interest with respect to London architecture, which, as archaeologists such as John Schofield have pointed out, often appears hardly to have been designed at all, except insofar as its space might have been useful to someone who was willing to pay for it.38 In viewing architecture from the perspective of users, instead of architects or elite connoisseurs, these studies have taken into account the perceptions and habits of a much broader range of social classes.39
At the same time, however, these approaches are less attentive to other dimensions of architectural description that appear in texts such as Leland’s. Few spatial depictions of early modern architecture exist, and such artifacts as the floor plans of Ralph Treswell, the—never realized—sketches of John Thorpe, and the city views of Wenceslaus Hollar have received much attention partly because they are such rare examples.40 The classification of these cultural spaces is historical only from our modern point of view; for early modern viewers and users, these perceptions and spatial practices would have been contemporary. Yet architecture often had a historical dimension, even from the perspective of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century writers, readers, and viewers. For Leland, as for the other authors discussed in this book, the practices that defined the built environment were narrative as much as spatial; architecture was necessarily positioned in time as well as space. Malmesbury Abbey, for instance, appeared to Leland both as what it had been and what it was; change and history were constitutive features of its identity.41 Moreover, early modern descriptions of architecture tend to be far more interested in the extraction of particulars and idiosyncrasies than in the identification of cultural or aesthetic categories. The most prominent qualities of Malmesbury Abbey lay not, from Leland’s perspective, in its representation of religious, political, or social ideology but in a dinnertime stabbing, a sheaf of manuscripts, and the benefactions of a wealthy clothier named Stumpe. Different as they are from one another, the authors I discuss shared an interest in particular architectural histories that preserved individual identity. Part of a building’s utility consisted in the stories it might inspire and its capacity to say things that might be written down and retold for various purposes, to be something more than material and produce something more than space.
Despite these differences between the texts I consider here and modern practices of architectural history, recent work on the development of architectural historiography helps us to imagine and perceive these alternative forms of architectural writing. Critical examinations of genre in architectural historiography allow us to “unthink” some of the categories that have excluded the sorts of texts this study comprises. Among many others, Gent, Catherine Belsey, and Arnold have questioned approaches that cast the architectural history of this period as a halting but inevitable progress toward the classical ideals of the eighteenth century, judging even indigenous traditions by a standard that was not yet available.42 At the very least, as Belsey acknowledges, “this was not a smooth and easy transition.”43 Following the Second World War, as Arnold has pointed out, scholars began attempting to establish relationships between England’s architectural history and that of the Continent.44 Classicism, according to Arnold, has generally been accepted as the conceptual framework that enables such comparisons. In these comparative methodologies, early modern England invariably comes up lacking, and scholars are forced to admit that during this period, at least, England never achieved the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance in the visual arts. The Palladian-style works of Inigo Jones have certainly received a disproportionate amount of attention, in part because when classicism is the standard, they contribute so readily to a sense of architectural progress. Jones’s genius was indeed singular and his career worthy of attention,45 but it is precisely this singularity that makes them a slippery ground on which to construct a general account of how the English perceived architecture during this period.46 John Wilton-Ely, for instance, has noted that “significant as Jones is as the first true architect in the modern sense, his career is unrepresentative of the general current of English architecture until the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the idea of a single figure, responsible for both design and supervision, began to be widely accepted.”47
Because Leland grounded his intensive study of architecture in the English Reformation, his Itinerary overturn an ingrained explanation of the differences between English and Continental architecture. The general explanation for the belated development of classical architecture in England is that the English were Protestants and that their suspicion of religious imagery and church ornament extended to every field we have subsequently designated a visual art. John Peacock, for instance, considers these iconoclastic impulses to be one of the challenges Jones himself faced in introducing the principles of classical aesthetics to his countrymen: “Like other Protestant states, England had developed a culture wary of the visual arts.”48 Without entirely disproving this possibility, Leland, along with the writers treated in subsequent chapters, suggests that the Reformation did not inhibit England’s interest in architecture—at least, it was not that simple. Instead, the peculiar characteristics of the post-Reformation built environment produced an alternative tradition manifested in a form of description that was carried out in narrative rather than visual terms. Nor does writing influenced by this tradition generally show any awareness of, or interest in, classical style. Nonetheless, each chapter of this book demonstrates that the art of architectural interpretation in early modern England was sophisticated, well developed, and ingeniously employed. The authors I consider allow us to speak of architecture—and of writing about architecture—during this period in terms of its content and contribution, instead of its deficiency and absence. They provide us with possible solutions to what Belsey has identified as the “difficulty for us now of recovering the meanings and values that preceded a world influenced by the Renaissance appropriation of classical models.”49
This book’s approach, then, might be called predisciplinary as much as interdisciplinary. It is less an attempt to impose the methodologies of one academic discipline on the materials of another than it is an exploration of a historical moment in which architecture and literature were not yet separated but, in fact, overlapped each other in their interests and emphases. In her recent book, Reading Architectural History, Arnold has pointed out two other generic limitations, besides a penchant for classicism, that have characterized the architectural history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: an overemphasis on the career of the architect and on the art historical aesthetic period (gothic, classical, perpendicular, Palladian, etc.). These organizing principles, Arnold proves, are historically acquired, with the former being linked to the rise of the architectural profession—which arguably remained incipient in England until after the Restoration—and the latter arising after the Second World War as an attempt to create a nationalistic idea of style that then subjugated the idiosyncrasies of the individual to a broader sense of cultural progress.50 Both, Arnold notes, have been well established since the appearance of seminal and authoritative works of architectural history such as John Summerson’s Georgian London (1945), Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 (1953), and Howard Colvin’s Biographical Dictionary of English Architects (1954).51
It is worth calling attention to these conventions here precisely because they are so familiar to most modern readers and were so entirely unfamiliar to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers, readers and viewers of architecture. Even in the very few instances when the names of architects are known, the buildings seem often to have been the collaborative effort of a builder or surveyor with practical skills and an amateur patron; Robert Smythson’s work for Bess of Hardwick at Wollaton Hall and Hardwick Hall is perhaps the most famous example of this model. William and Robert Cecil, as well, are well known to have played important roles in both interior and exterior designs at Theobalds and Hatfield House.52 Only two of the works I study in detail mention the names of particular architects: Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624) and John Evelyn’s translation of Roland Fréart’s Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern (1664). Both works were attempts to import the principles of foreign treatises to English soil, but, as architectural historians have noted, neither work had much direct impact on English building. Moreover, despite Wotton’s exact contemporaneity with Inigo Jones, the architects he mentions are all classical, French, or Italian. Evelyn is the only author in this study to show either a sophisticated awareness of architectural styles or the capacity to associate them with different historical periods, and his treatise was not published until after the Restoration. In the sixteenth century and early in the seventeenth, buildings were instead dated in human terms, that is, not through their associations with particular architects, but through their associations with owners, occupiers, and local histories. In texts they are also sometimes located within the scheme of human generations, either through their inclusion in aristocratic pedigrees or through their retention in human memory. Leland’s phrase “in memoria hominum” is a popular antiquarian tag, along with such variations as “in our grand fathers remembrance,” “in our fathers remembrance,” or “to our fathers daies.”53
Early modern texts, then, often do not reflect the interests of much of modern architectural history. By attaching their texts to a built environment that existed beyond their pages, however, they have seemed conveniently to share a focus with some recent studies in material culture. In the influential collection Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, Margreta de Grazia and Maureen Quilligan call for a study of Renaissance culture that will “insist that the object be taken into account.” “With such a shift,” they write, “it is hoped that new relations between subject (as position, as person) and object (as position, as thing) may emerge and familiar relations change.”54 Leland seems already to be carrying out such a project; one way to characterize the Itinerary is as a sustained study of objects, with the human subjects of the narrative being mainly introduced and defined through their relations to historical things. The same might be said of other texts: in country house poems, for instance, it might be argued that the house creates its owner as much as the owner creates the house. Speculating on a fourteenth-century inscription—“This made Roger”—at her beloved Brougham Castle, Anne Clifford framed the question in grammatical terms: “Which words are severally interpreted for some think Hee meant it Because Hee built that, and a great part of the said Castle . . . And some think hee meant it, Because hee was made in his fortune by marriage with Isabella de Veteripont, By whome hee became possessor of this Castle.”55 It is unclear to Clifford, in other words, whether the inscription means that Roger made the building or the building made him, because both are, in some sense, true. In its solidity and duration, architecture may seem to be an obvious topic for object-centered reconstructions of the past, and Gent has argued that, in the absence of a clearly articulated body of aesthetic theory, the architecture of this period will become accessible only through “an intervention on behalf of materiality.”56
Subsequent critics have questioned what they see as the underlying fantasy of studies in material culture, that is, the notion that the unselfconscious material byproducts of everyday life allow us to perform an end run around the obfuscations of authorial self-fashioning and hence to achieve a moment of unmediated contact with a moment in the past. The result, Alan Sinfeld says, has been “attention to clothes, pots and pans, needles and pins, as objects, they are, after all, stuff, they are made of material, let’s touch them, you can’t get more material than that.”57 Jonathan Gil Harris has also challenged the premise that studies of the material open wormholes to synchronically perceived points in history. Objects, he points out, cannot be interpreted independently of their “diachronic trajectories . . . through time and space” or outside the contexts in which they arrive as much as those in which they originated.58 It is true that the idea of material culture has penetrated the study of literature so thoroughly that many scholars have sometimes come to take things more seriously than words. Writing about seventeenth-century developments in antiquarian historiography, for example, Graham Parry writes, “What the study of antiquity needed was more attention to Things: inscriptions, coins, physical remains from the earth—other forms of evidence than the verbal.”59 Fikret Yegül voices a common assumption about the study of architectural evidence when he writes that architecture “has little use for traditional, written text, and can be considered to be relatively free of textual distortions. Dealing directly with the raw material of building, it evades . . . linguistic instabilities of meaning.”60 If architecture is less eloquent than poems or treatises or plays, it seems, it is at least less capable of active self-fashioning or misrepresentation.61
Rational as Yegül’s statement may be from an archaeological perspective, it does not accurately represent the view of architecture we encounter in early modern texts.62 Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda have noted a reductive tendency “to equate the ‘material’ with the ‘physical’,” and in early modern texts architecture is both physical and not.63 Far from viewing architecture as a site of unmediated contact with the conditions of either past or present, these authors used it precisely as an opportunity to mediate that experience; it was the intervention of authors and texts between readers and environment that made writing about architecture such an attractive prospect. Regarding antiquarian writing in particular, Angus Vine has argued that “English scholars and writers . . . sought not only to collect the scattered traces of the past, textual, material, and so on, but also to restore that past through the process of writing.”64 In my study, we see a similar approach to material “traces” of both past and present but across a broader range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors and genres. Moreover, these authors’ relationships to their physical subject matter were, in most cases, more skeptical than those of many modern studies of material culture; underlying the possibility of direct contact was always the unavoidable—and fortunate—necessity of mediation. The translation between media, from building to text, created a space that allowed for reinvention, for interpretation, as well as sometimes for fiction.
Clearly, my study is indebted to recent scholarship in material culture insofar as it examines not only texts but their relationships to objects and places. Each chapter of this book is partly grounded in features of the material post-Reformation built environment. At the same time, though, this book might be seen as a rejoinder to such approaches, in questioning the degree to which such distinctions—between the verbal and the material—are necessary or, indeed, actually relevant to some early modern texts. Jonathan Gil Harris, drawing on Nietzsche for his terminology, characterizes the material aspects—real or imagined—of several Renaissance texts as “untimely,” that is to say, that “like a palimpsest,” a material aspect “exhibits a temporality that is not one.”65 Harris’s choice of the word “untimely” evokes Freud’s concept of the “uncanny” (and indeed Harris goes on to use the word “unheimlich” in a subsequent chapter); and this, along with his overarching figure of the palimpsest, aggressively scraped and imperfectly erased, suggests that the perception of multiple time frames is somehow antagonistic, traumatic, or unsettling.66 In fact, as I argue in Chapter 1, to view matter through multiple temporal lenses is not necessarily as strange or disorienting—to early modern writers or to us—as Harris’s “untimely” would suggest. It is the work that narrative does all the time, through either the construction of linear histories or the collation of sometimes incongruous sources. In Chapter 3, I replace Harris’s figure of the palimpsest with that of the anthology, in discussing Stow’s and Jonson’s descriptions of London architecture, suggesting a less fractious interplay between past and present yet still accounting for the multiple histories that the architecture of the city can encode. As a whole, my approach softens distinctions between extratextual material and more traditionally “literary” matter. Each chapter recentralizes textual interpretations of the architectural environment, rather than seeking to decode them in search of something that is more solid and authentic because less consciously intended. For these authors, architecture became significant in part because it was made so through storytelling. They did insist on the reality, and to some degree the authority, of objects, but they also insisted on writing about them. Their texts do not represent their architectural settings transparently, but as literary scholars we ought to be interested in their textual reinventions and authorial strategies not as the obfuscations of material truths but as original and valuable productions in themselves.
Leland’s writing thus illustrates the relationship between architecture and literature—as interdependent forms of storytelling—with which each chapter of this book is concerned. Each author I treat here contributes to a new and more inclusive sense of what architectural writing might comprise. From this revised and broadened category emerges a more complex and interdisciplinary view of their literary and historiographic productions; we come to understand not only that literature and history might participate in the field of architectural history but that architecture and its histories might participate in the creation and significance of literary and historical works. Architectural setting, even when attached to the physical environment, becomes a dynamic category that contributes its own adaptable source material; it is not a static spatial or scenic detail that anchors a text in a solid layer of reality.
Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for my study by turning to William Camden’s Britannia (Latin 1586, English 1610), the first printed work to realize Leland’s plans for a comprehensive historical topography of Britain. Like Leland, Camden extracted history from buildings, including former monasteries, Roman remains, castles, churches, cathedrals, and dwelling houses. The Britannia’s wide readership during the seventeenth century suggests that interest in Camden’s approach extended far beyond an antiquarian audience, and Chapter 1 uses this work to illustrate and project three important characteristics of the period’s architectural writing that will be taken up in subsequent chapters. First is Camden’s mixture of archaeological, documentary, and what we might call literary or folkloric forms of evidence, all of which converge in his narratives about buildings and architectural remains. Second is Camden’s attention to the connections among architecture, landscape, and aristocratic history. Third is the secular nature of most of the Britannia’s architectural histories, which disproves the persistent critical assumption that architecture was necessarily associated with Catholicism and idolatry. Even as Camden follows an antiquarian tradition that emerged from the Reformation, his focus is not post-Reformation polemic. Rather, the description of buildings—even of religious buildings—turns to miscellaneous storytelling, about people who lived in them, died in them, paid for them, inherited them, destroyed them, and wrote their histories. In providing an alternative to both classicism and Protestantism as lenses through which to interpret architecture, the Britannia illustrates the other kinds of stories that architecture might be used to tell.
Chapter 2 turns to what is generally considered the first Vitruvian-style architectural treatise in English, Sir Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624). I examine the tensions that emerge as Wotton attempts to impose the visual aesthetic models of Vitruvius, Alberti, and Palladio on the native, historical modes of architectural interpretation that characterize such works as the Britannia. As Camden’s work reveals, country houses in particular invited historical interpretations, because they provided opportunities to celebrate the ancestral authority of the house’s current owner. Pairing The Elements of Architecture with seventeenth-century country house poems by Ben Jonson (“To Penshurst” c. 1612), Thomas Carew (“To My Friend G.N. from Wrest,” 1639), and Andrew Marvell (“Upon Appleton House,” c. 1654), I argue that each work acknowledges conflicts between visual and historical approaches to architectural writing. Wotton clearly designates his treatise a manual for the gentleman amateur, that he “may . . . be made fit to judge of examples.”67 Each of these poems offers its own lesson in the judgment of architecture, and each pointedly rejects visual perception as a way of comprehending a building’s significance. Faced with these traditions, Wotton strategically adapted his Continental sources; and, despite its classical and Italian trappings, The Elements of Architecture grows equally out of English soil. Wotton understood that aesthetics must reinforce, rather than efface, the story of the patron, and that the measured proportions of the Italian villa must not erase the historical dimensions of the English country house. In elaborating the differences between visual and historical ways of “seeing” a building, the chapter casts the period’s architectural history in a new set of terms; less than a competition between native and foreign architectural aesthetic styles, we witness a tension between conflicting modes of architectural literacy.
Stemming from the discussion of Wotton’s Elements and the country house poems is an examination of the architectural profession in early modern England. Taken together, I argue, these texts identify problems that the figure of the professional architect presented to the antiquarian views exemplified in the Britannia. English writers of this period conceived of architecture in a way that is more indebted to the profession of the antiquarian chorographer or estate surveyor than to the practically and aesthetically skilled architect described in classical and Continental treatises. In an interpretive tradition that understood architecture through its relation to both landscape and the history of its owner or patron, there was simply no room for the professional architect, and his influence was deliberately marginalized in literature about the English country house. The work of Wotton and the country house poets suggests a reason for the scarcity of professional architects in pre-Restoration England: the skill of the architect was irrelevant or even inimical to the ancestral stories a building was meant to tell.
In Chapter 3 we move from the country house to the architecture of early modern London, juxtaposing two very different texts about the city. John Stow’s Survey of London (1598) and Ben Jonson’s comedy The Alchemist (1610) transpose historical modes of architectural interpretation from the ostensibly stable world of the country house to a London environment where architecture visibly implied the political and social disruptions of post-Reformation English history. Stow’s Survey presents to readers a cityscape haphazardly made over by rapid population growth and the conversion of monastic properties. Former churches had become stables and storehouses, while monasteries and nunneries were used as dwelling houses, armories, or, in the case of Jonson’s Black-friars, theaters. I argue that Jonson also responds to—and exploits—the problems of crafting coherent narratives about an architectural setting that points constantly to change. As “To Penshurst” is unmistakably a country house poem, we might equally view The Alchemist as a kind of city house play. In The Alchemist the absence of a genteel landowner breaks down the ancestral narratives that order accounts of the English country house, and the alchemical process itself emerges as an alternative form of history that might serve to legitimize claims to ownership and social status. If realized, the culmination of the alchemical process would solidify the possibility of a new social hierarchy. Like the country house poems, Jonson’s play shows how literature might adapt antiquarian ideas by using architecture as a way to think about history. In both the Survey and The Alchemist, however, the kinds of stories that organize the country house poem are evoked only to be dismantled, revealing the instability of London’s future through an exploration of its past.
Chapter 4 explores forms of local history that were originally associated with the parish church porch. Centering on George Herbert’s neglected poem “The Church-porch” (1633), the chapter argues that the poem’s proverbial style and didactic content—features that modern readers have found distasteful—are deliberate reflections of its architectural setting. Although “The Church-porch” has been marginal in recent scholarship, the church porch itself would not have been at all marginal in seventeenth-century parish life: the first part of the baptismal and marriage ceremonies, for instance, were solemnized in the church porch, where also children were taught, contracts witnessed, alms disbursed, and debts paid. In the church porch, religious principle met secular practice, and the life of the individual intertwined with the traditions, histories, and values of a community. Herbert’s didactic and moral precepts thus represent a common verbal and moral currency whose circulation and constant reuse mirror the kind of public exchange that took place in the church porch. Sources in local history and ecclesiology reveal earlier associations of this poem’s architectural setting, and we see that even church architecture can be viewed from a historical, rather than a doctrinal, perspective. In fact, as the traditional centers of local history, religious buildings are particularly susceptible to this sort of interpretation.
In Chapter 5, my reading of the late diaries and architectural works (1650–1676) of Anne Clifford entwines several threads from previous chapters: the capacity of architecture to record ancestral and individual histories, the narrative interrelation of built environment and written text, and the antiquarian’s use of architecture as a way of discovering the past. In 1605, when Clifford was fifteen years old, her father died, leaving his lands to his brother and his brother’s heirs, rather than to his only child, a daughter. She and her mother spent years attempting without success to prove that his bequest was illegal. Not until her cousin died without issue in 1643 did Clifford inherit the properties. In 1649 she traveled north to her holdings in Cumberland, Westmorland, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. There, she dedicated herself to two interdependent pursuits: the compilation of autobiography and family history and an aggressive program of architectural repairs to her castles and their surrounding churches. I argue that Clifford’s written and built works shaped each other. First, Clifford’s diaries—journals that were as much legal as personal documents—were meant to point outside of themselves, asserting ownership over buildings and places known to the writer and, presumably, the reader. Explicating the significance of real castles and monuments, they are patterned, in part, after architectural inscriptions. At the same time, the buildings themselves were shaped by the concerns of legal documents; Clifford inscribed each building with a triumphant proclamation of her ownership, creating a record that was not confined to the pages of her books. I argue that, as the diaries and architectural works shaped each other, both were in turn influenced by seventeenth-century antiquarian writing—such as the Britannia—with which Clifford was familiar. Surprisingly, such works informed not only her books but her buildings; the plaques, initials, arms, and funeral monuments with which she adorned them were exactly the sort of features that itinerant antiquarians like Leland, Camden, and Stow used to tell the histories of great families. In her architecture, then, Clifford practiced a kind of forward-looking antiquarianism; her castles and churches both record the past and anticipate their inclusion in some yet unwritten antiquarian text. Clifford’s conversation with these writers counters the modern scholarly treatment of antiquarianism as an isolated (and entirely male) tradition and demonstrates that in the seventeenth century, antiquarian approaches to architecture were current enough to influence the logic of both built and written works.
Chapter 6 extends my analysis past the Restoration, which is generally viewed as a turning point in English architectural history.68 At last, architectural historians observe, the influence of Continental models produced such skilled and aesthetically inspired professionals as Christopher Wren. In this period of newness, however, John Evelyn displayed an acute sensitivity to the connection between architecture and historical narrative. Even as he dedicated his 1664 translation of Roland Fréart’s Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne (Paris, 1650) to the newly restored Charles II, Evelyn attempted to integrate visual aesthetics with the historical interpretation of architecture. He sought to introduce classical and Continental models into England but also to make them tell the story of a new English king. I argue that for both Evelyn and Fréart, the figure of the virtuoso—a collector of virtù, or antiquities and curiosities—becomes the model for a new kind of architectural patron. The disarticulation and disintegration of history are precisely what allow architectural fragments of the classical world and the Italian Renaissance to be realigned and rearranged under the guidance of a new collector, to be enlisted in the construction of histories that are geographically and temporally distant from their own original sites. Through the reordering of ancient and foreign architectural artifacts, the patron becomes an architect of history, with the capacity not only to recollect the past but to repair its discontinuities. While post-Restoration architecture and architectural writing fit much more easily into art historical categories of period and aesthetic style than do earlier English examples, this chapter demonstrates that the historical modes of architectural interpretation and writing traced in previous chapters did not become obsolete. Instead, they remained legible and relevant to post-Restoration authors as a way of imagining and describing both present and past.
The Coda traces the afterlife of this balance among history, fragmentation, and aesthetics in the architecture of one modern London building. In 1993, the medieval church St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, which had survived both the Great Fire and the air raids of World War II, was partly destroyed by a series of IRA bombs. Architect Quinlan Terry was hired to redesign the church. Terry has been styled a “new classicist” and professes to believe that the proportions of the classical orders (or types of columns) were divinely communicated to Moses for use on the Temple of Solomon. The controversy produced by Terry’s redesign centered partly on the conflict between architecture’s capacity to preserve layers of history—what we might call its accretive or antiquarian function—and its capacity to reflect the aesthetic integrity of an architect’s unified design. Visually, Terry’s restored church recalls Evelyn’s use of the architectural artifact. Medieval, Jacobean, and Victorian furnishings, along with a fine collection of funeral monuments, have been neatly rearranged, balancing historical with aesthetic integrity and creating a symmetry and order that is carefully reconstructed from the material fragmentation of the past.
The Coda finds Leland’s antiquarian footsteps in the twentieth century. The assertion that even contemporary architecture can speak on narrative and historical registers, even as it attends to visual aesthetics, brings Literature and Architecture back into conversation with the modern critical questions raised in this introduction. As mentioned, architectural historians have recently explored alternatives to visual aesthetics and periodic classification as the organizing concepts of architectural history and design. Taken as a whole, this book adds a historical dimension to these discussions: questions about how architecture is perceived and written about are not new, and approaches that appear to be the products of modern theoretical inquiry might be equally understood as the most recent chapters in a long and largely unexamined story.
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