You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A comprehensive and authoritative history that explores the significance of one of the most famous buildings and institutions in England Westminster Abbey was one of the most powerful churches in Catholic Christendom before transforming into a Protestant icon of British national and imperial identity. Celebrating the 750th anniversary of the consecration of the current Abbey church building, this book features engaging essays by a group of distinguished scholars that focus on different, yet often overlapping, aspects of the Abbey's history: its architecture and monuments; its Catholic monks and Protestant clergy; its place in religious and political revolutions; its relationship to the monar...
Westminster Abbey is the most complex church in the world in terms of its history, functions and memories - perhaps the most complex building of any kind. It has been an abbey and a cathedral and is now a collegiate church and a royal peculiar. It is the coronation church, a royal mausoleum, a Valhalla for the tombs of the great, a 'national cathedral' and the 'Tomb of the Unknown Warrior'. This new edition recounts the story of this iconic building and the role it plays in our national psyche.
- New edition of this exploration of one of Britain's greatest buildings - A comprehensive, beautifully illustrated survey of Westminster Abbey's art treasures Westminster Abbey has a history stretching back over a thousand years. Founded as a Benedictine monastery in the mid-tenth century, it is the coronation church where monarchs have been crowned amid great splendor since 1066. The present church, begun by Henry III in 1245, is a treasure house of architectural and artistic achievement on which each succeeding century has left its mark. The medieval and Renaissance tombs within the Abbey, though among the most important in Europe, form only a small part of the extraordinary collection of...
The Chapel of St Edmund is one of the last chapels on the visitor route around the Abbey and does not feature on the Audio Guide. It is easy to pass by without entering. Indeed, it is probably the least visited of all the major chapels open to the public. At this stage of a tour most visitors will be keen to take in Poets’ Corner and the not-to-be-missed Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries. Nonetheless, the Chapel contains an interesting collection of ‘residents’, the first arrival being King Henry III’s half-brother, William de Valence in 1296 and the last being Lord Lytton, the popular Victorian novelist, who died in 1837. The Dean of the time thought it appropriate that he be buried here alongside Sir Humphrey Bourchier, rather than in the South Transept with Charles Dickens and the other novelists, because Sir Humphrey, a casualty of the Wars of the Roses, featured as a character in one of Lytton’s novels.
An account of the history, architecture and monuments of the chapel, the final, exquisite flowering of the gothic style.
This book - the study of Westminster Abbey in more than fifty years - places the Abbey's physical and artistic growth in the context of the political and religious culture of its time. Published on the 750th anniversary of the major building program of the abbey, it is a fitting tribute to one of the most ambitious royal edifices and art holdings ever constructed.