Westminster Abbey

by Tatton-Brown, Tim

• ISBN13: 9781843830375
• ISBN10: 184383037X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-12-01
• Publisher: Boydell Pr

Summary

The Lady Chapel constructed at the wish of Henry VII at Westminster Abbey is the last great masterpiece of English medieval architecture, and the culminating achievement of over three hundred years of development in the gothic style, at the point where it intersects with the new movements of the Renaissance. The burial place of some fifteen kings and queens, it houses both the largest surviving programme of gothic figure sculpture and the earliest and finest Renaissance tomb sculptures in England. This new book covers all the most important aspects of the Chapel's history, from the establishment of the cult of the Virgin in the twelfth century to the restoration of the 1990s, which provided an unrepeatable opportunity for close examination of the structure and contents of the building which is the subject of this volume.Contributors: ROGER BOWERS, DONALD BUTTRESS, THOMAS COCKE, MARGARET CONDON, BARBARA HARVEY, JACQUES HEYMAN, PHILLIP LINDLEY, RICHARD MORTIMER, JULIAN MUNBY, JOHN PHYSICK, ANDREW REYNOLDS, TIM TATTON-BROWN, CHARLES TRACY, CHRISTOPHER WILSON. Historians of British Art Book Prize for 2003 RICHARD MORTIMER is Keeper of the Muniments, Westminster Abbey; TIM TATTON-BROWN is Consultant Archaeologist to Westminster Abbey.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction	p. 1
The monks of Westminster and the old Lady chapel	p. 5
The musicians and liturgy of the Lady chapels of the monastery church, c.1235-1540	p. 33
God Save the King! Piety, propaganda and the perpetual memorial	p. 59
The last will of Henry VII: document and text	p. 99
The functional design of Henry VII's chapel: a reconstruction	p. 141
The building history of the Lady chapels	p. 189
An archaeological survey of the vaults of Henry VII's chapel	p. 205
The roofs of Henry VII's chapel	p. 215
The structure of the high vault of Henry VII's chapel	p. 219
The Henry VII chapel stalls and their eighteenth-century re-modelling	p. 227
An appendix on the carpentry of the stalls	p. 253
'The singular mediacion and praiers of al the holie companie of Heven': sculptural functions and forms in Henry VII's chapel	p. 259
The royal, the great and the good: the history of the later monuments	p. 295
Henry VII chapel: the royal connection	p. 315
The earlier restorations	p. 327
Restoring the chapel, 1991-6	p. 343
Index	p. 357
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.