A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Loftstheir Antiquity, Use, and Symbolic Signification

Written in the final year of his short, explosive life, this treatise is Pugin at his most polemical and profound. The great theorist of the Gothic Revival turns his exacting eye to two of medieval Christianity's most sacred architectural features: the screens that divide the holy from the merely human, and the rood lofts upon which the cross itself once presided. Pugin does not merely catalogue these structures he argues for their theological necessity. To remove the screen, he contends, is to blur the boundary between sacred and profane, to rob the altar of its mystery, to abandon the physical language by which the medieval church spoke of heaven and earth. Written with the fire of a man who saw his age's church architecture as a betrayal of everything the faith once built, this is not dry antiquarianism. It is a lament, an argument, and a manifesto. For anyone interested in how buildings preach, how stone and wood can make an argument about the divine, or simply in understanding the mind that remade the Houses of Parliament and defined Victorian Gothic, this is essential reading.