The Deluge 1920 by Winifred Knights

Fresh research into Knights’s dramatic depiction of the biblical flood charts its relationship to religion, conflict, dance and gender, and suggests new art historical sources for the painting

Theology and Threshold: Victorian Approaches to Reviving Choir and Rood Screens

In 1851, A. W. N. Pugin published an influential treatise on rood screens, intending in his irrepressible polemical style to create further Gothic Revival momentum for inserting these iconographically complex and liturgically vital elements into Roman Catholic and Anglican churches throughout Britain and its empire. In the decades that followed, debates regarding ritual, aesthetics, materials, and Eucharistic theology surrounded the design, presence, and indeed absence of these screens. This interdisciplinary article on the borderlands between architectural history and theology explores what was at stake in the religious symbolism of a small number of diverse screens designed by George Gilbert Scott, George Frederick Bodley, and Ninian Comper, considering them in light of the key writing produced by Pugin at the mid-point of the nineteenth century, as well as by priest–architect Ernest Geldart in the century’s end. This study, together with its three short films that explore the screens’ meanings and histories in situ, charts shifts in theology and style as each architect offered innovative views through delicate latticework of stone, paint, and wood towards the Christian sacred epicentre of the Incarnation and the sacrifice of the Eucharist

Resurrection, Re-Imagination, Reconstruction: New Viewpoints on the Hereford Screen

The Hereford Screen is one of the most complex and intricate choir screens of the Victorian era. Positioned in the gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s main entrance, its glistening metalwork, brass, and terracotta effect surfaces, incrustations of wrought floral forms, Gothic Revival lettering, and semi-precious stones combine with delicate slivers of glinting glass that wink at each of the museum’s visitors, whether they journey up the stairs to gaze at this monument up close or regard it from afar on their way to the galleries beyond. The Hereford Screen is one of a family of screens produced by the architect George Gilbert Scott and the metalwork firm of Francis Skidmore for British cathedrals in the mid- to late nineteenth century. The Hereford Screen was perceived by many to be the pinnacle of Victorian Gothic Revival metalwork. Before its installation in Hereford Cathedral it was shown at the 1862 International Exhibition in London

The Museum of Renaissance Music: A History in 100 Exhibits

This book collates 100 exhibits with accompanying essays as an imaginary museum dedicated to the musical cultures of Renaissance Europe, at home and in its global horizons. It is a history through artefacts—materials, tools, instruments, art objects, images, texts, and spaces—and their witness to the priorities and activities of people in the past as they addressed their world through music. The result is a history by collage, revealing overlapping musical practices and meanings—not only those of the elite, but reflecting the everyday cacophony of a diverse culture and its musics. Through the lens of its exhibits, this museum surveys music’s central role in culture and lived experience in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, offering interest and insights well beyond the strictly musicological field