Founded as the main church of the Knights Templar in England, at their New Temple in London, the Temple Church is historically and architecturally one of the most important medieval buildings in England. Its round nave, modelled on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, is extraordinarily ambitious, combining lavish Romanesque sculpture with some of the earliest Gothic architectural features in any English building of its period. It holds one of the most famousseries of medieval effigies in the country. The luminous thirteenth-century choir, intended for the burial of Henry III, is of exceptional beauty. Major developments in the post-medieval period include the reordering of the churchin the 1680s by Sir Christopher Wren, and a substantial restoration programme in the early 1840s.
Despite its extraordinary importance, however, it has until now attracted little scholarly or critical attention, a gap whichis remedied by this volume. It considers the New Temple as a whole in the middle ages, and all aspects of the church itself from its foundation in the twelfth century to its war-time damage in the twentieth. Richly illustrated with numerous black and white and colour plates, it makes full use of the exceptional range and quality of the antiquarian material available for study, including drawings, photographs, and plaster casts.
Contributors: RobinGriffith-Jones, Virginia Jansen, Philip Lankester, Helen Nicholson, David Park, Rosemary Sweet, William Whyte, Christopher Wilson.
- ISBN10 1843834987
- ISBN13 9781843834984
- Publish Date 21 October 2010
- Publish Status Inactive
- Out of Print 3 March 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Imprint The Boydell Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 314
- Language English