Beyond puginism by Gerard Hyland
- Title: Beyond puginism by Gerard Hyland
- Author: Gerard Hyland
- Publisher: Fleming H. Revell Company
- Binding: Paperback / softback
- Art treatments & subjects
- No. of pages: 68
- Dimensions (approx. mm): 210 x 148 x 5
Product Description
The present work based on the author’s Pugin Lecture in Ramsgate in
September 2017 addresses a little-explored area of Pugin studies namely the
way in which during the final years of his life AWN Pugin’s ecclesiology
underwent a significant development possible reasons for which will be
identified. After the opening of St Giles’ Cheadle in 1846 Pugin started to
experiment with various forms of asymmetry and began to relax his earlier
strict compliance with the rubrical requirements of the Use of Sarum - a
Mediaeval variant of the Roman Rite. Indeed in the year before his death
Pugin actually admitted that he had perpetrated ‘great errors in former
time’ maintaining that ‘… our churches should now combine all the beauty
of antiquity with every convenience that modern discovery has suggested
or altered ecclesiastical discipline requires.’
This was an implicit admission that his earlier conflation of Gothic with
the Use of Sarum (‘Puginism’) had been flawed and that Gothic could
indeed be validly used in the service of the Tridentine Rite that was then
normative in England and he actually made proposals as to how the ‘all
seeing all hearing’ liturgy that the Council of Trent had sought to promote
could be facilitated by reconfiguring the chancels of Gothic churches.
Pugin’s untimely death in 1852 however prevented him from personally
implementing this paradigm shift although intimations of it can be detected
in his own church of St Augustine in Ramsgate which was opened in 1850.
A detailed exposition of this important and fascinating topic chronicling
Pugin’s own attempt to move beyond ‘Puginism’ is the subject of this
publication.