The Decorated style: architecture and ornament 1240-1360 (review)

238 Reviews exciting is the notion of the movement as enshrining one of the greatest cases of mythopoeia to be found in all literature. J. S. Ryan Department of English University of N e w England Coldstream, Nicola, 77ie Decorated style: architecture and ornament 12401360 , London, British Museum Press, 1994; cloth; pp. 208; 11 colour plates, 116 monochrome plates, 10 genealogical tables; R.R.P. $75.00 [distributed in Australia by Thames & Hudson]. Unfortunately, Coldstream's study of Decorated architecture does not quite satisfy one's expectations; even though it is a work with many meritorious features. Chief of these is its specificity. There is a superfluity of works entided The Gothic cathedral which tend to reiterate the thirty-year-old observations of von Simson and use the same set of 'definitive' buildings to illustrate them. Coldstream acknowledges the contribution to her work of Christopher Wilson, whose 1990 volume is the last in die procession. The study of medieval English ecclesiastical architecture has often faltered because the English never adopted the French model entirely, especially with regard to height, and English scholars have felt the need to apologize for this delinquency. Thus Alec Clifton-Taylor admits that the 'moderate height' of the English cathedrals is 'very different from, and less exciting than, the soaring aspiration of the great catiiedrals of the Ile-deFrance ' (The cathedrals of England, [1967], p. 12.). John Harvey, while praising the architects of England for their pragmatic solutions, notes that 'England has no perfect type cathedral to set beside Chartres or Rheims; she has no portentous and structurally unsound extravagance such as Beauvais; no exquisite aspiration like Bourges' (The English cathedrals [1956], p. 24). Refreshingly, Coldstream makes no apologies. Her book covers only the middle period of English Gothic, Decorated, which generally receives less attention than the earlier Early English and the later Perpendicular. The 'Prologue' reviews the reasons for this neglect: the extraordinary disparity of Decorated buildings; the identification of Decorated as a 'court style', removed from the preoccupations of the people; and the persistent application of the 'Classical, Decadent and Declining' model of interpretation to English medieval architecture. Coldstream's own approach is twofold: to look at Decorated as a mode of ornamentation rather than a Reviews 239 structural change and to locate the development of the style in 'response to the social, spiritual and intellectual preoccupations of the people who used [the churches]' (p. 13). Chapter One, 'Illuminated architecture', establishes the essential decorative and ornamental nature of the style. ThefirstDecorated building, Westminster Abbey, has historically been characterized as the 'most French' of all English medieval churches. It is here argued that the building 'is very French in an English context, but not very convincing in a French one' (p. 24). The pioneering efforts of Henry of Reyns at Westminster borefruitin the second half of the thirteenth century at Lichfield, Salisbury, and Hereford, with the acceptance of the need to create a 'dramatic interior'. The range of examples used to illustrate the thesis is impressive: ruined buildings such as Tintem Abbey; buildings now lost such as Old St Paul's; small churches such as St Etheldreda's in Ely Place; and non-church structures such as the Hardingstone Eleanor Cross. However, it is here that a major criticism surfaces. The quality of the illustrations is disappointing. A large number of them are muddy and indistinct and, compared to those of W i m Swaan's The Gothic cathedral (1969) or even Wilson's 1990 paperback, they are a handicap rather than an enhancement. The remaining four chapters concentrate on different aspects of Coldstream's sociological analysis of the Decorated style. Chapter Two, 'Kingdom, land and people', gives a sketch of the political and economic changes during the reigns of the three Edwards. Of necessity this analysis is rather superficial, but it serves the author's purpose in that it distracts attention from the buildings as primarily aesthetic objects and directs the reader firmly toward the society which produced them. Marriage, household organization, professional guilds, banking, Papal diplomacy, and the Welsh campaigns of Edward I rush by the reader in a bewildering flurry. Readers without a solid knowledge of England in this period will probably...