A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts: Their Antiquity, Use and Symbolic Signification / Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin

A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts is Augustus Welby’s Pugin’s last book. Published in the spring of 1851, some eighteen months before his untimely death, it is Pugin’s answer to those critics who questioned the need, and indeed, the rationale for rood screens in the new Catholic churches of the nineteenth century. This argument – the so-called ‘Rood Screen Controversy’ – had been ignited by hostile reaction to Pugin’s own great screen at St George’s Cathedral in Southwark.

 In this work Pugin argues the case – a ‘first class’ one in his own view – for providing screens in churches, tracing their history back to the early Christian times, and illustrating his argument with a galaxy of examples drawn from all over western Europe, and not just medieval ones. It comes as a surprise to find Pugin, of all people, here revealed as an early researcher into the history of post-Reformation screens. Surprising too is his treatment of the destruction of medieval screens across Europe (ambonoclasm), which he deals with in a series of historical recreations – ‘factions’ in modern parlance – demonstrating a perhaps unsuspected talent for narrative writing. This is a strongly argued and well laid out work, far less muddled than those of Pugin’s mid-career, and showing him to be a great antiquarian and liturgical scholar.