Glory, Laud and Honour

In this volume, Professor Parry tries to retrieve ‘the cultural achievements of the Laudian movement’ which he sees as a ‘whole new world of religious art and expression’, ‘an English version of the Counter-Reformation’ in which ‘all the arts collaborated to enhance the setting of worship’ (pp. 190–2, 23). Drawing selectively on a great deal of recent work by scholars on the architecture, sculpture, painting, prose, poetry, and music as well as the church history of the period, he provides a series of vignettes of the attitudes of the Laudian circle on the bench and at court, and of changes in the decoration and fittings of half a dozen cathedrals, a dozen college chapels at Oxford and Cambridge, a few private chapels, and a few parish churches which were not in the hands of a leading Laudian. There are few surprises among the sponsors and locations selected, though the author hopes that many more minor examples will be found ‘once one has formed a sense of the characteristic traits of High Church decoration’ (p. 191). This hope does not sit altogether comfortably with the comment that the ‘Anglican Counter-Reformation’ lacked ‘a unifying artistic style’ (ibid.), or with the other limitations of his thesis. He readily admits that many of the features he discusses (such as painted glass and decorated monuments) were either pre-Laudian or found in puritan parishes as well as conformist ones; and he acknowledges that the motives for the building of new, or restoration of many old, churches in the early Stuart period were much more diverse than Laudian impetus alone. He could have gone further. Huge numbers of early Stuart churches were given handsome new pulpits, despite Laudians’ alleged desire to downgrade sermons, and many received high-quality communion plate during the rule of the Calvinist James VI and Archbishop Abbott. Moreover, increasing numbers of the two tablets of the Law and other biblical texts which were painted on church walls were given a decorative framework, such as a Moses and Aaron copied from the title-page of the unimpeachably orthodox King James Bible. Pre-Reformation carvings of angels were still found in many churches, and engravings of cherubim appeared in many editions of moralistic emblems well before the 1630s. Popular collections of prayers in print were selling well long before Cosin, and sales of metrical psalters, rather than declining in the face of the Laudian preference for choral music, rose to reach a new peak in the 1630s

Art · Art history · Counter-Reformation · Dozen · Glory · Honour · Literature · Painting · Poetry · Sculpture · Style (visual arts · The arts · Theology · Visual arts · Worship · Classics · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Scottish History and National Identity

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