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Despite its effectiveness for evangelical services, the theater‐like church did not become popular after its introduction in the 1830s; in fact, it was virtually ignored as evangelicals at mid‐century embraced High Church Gothic Revival architecture that was seemingly antithetical to their Low Church heritage. Investigating this paradox, this chapter asserts that the political turmoil aroused by the slavery issue led evangelicals to redirect their congregational activities away from revivalism and moral reform work (particularly abolitionism) and toward worship. Illustrating this trend is Ultraist abolitionist Lewis Tappan's indictment by the Broadway Tabernacle Church and the congregation's later efforts to foster cohesion among its politically disparate members by adopting worship as its primary mission. Such redirection of mission was one of several means of fostering cohesion or “Christian unity” among evangelical groups, the most visible of which was the widespread adoption of Gothic Revival architecture. Growing interest in liturgical formalism within the new churches also contributed to efforts to establish Christian unity in the context of political disruption.

This essay examines the long known but little studied relationship between E. A. Freeman and George Gilbert Scott (1811–78), one of the foremost architects of the Victorian age. Given his interests in architecture, it was only natural that Freeman would be drawn within the ambit of the key practitioners of his day. It is argued that the close friendship that developed between Freeman and Scott from the early 1840s influenced appreciably the latter’s historical conception of architecture, thus affecting his architectural output, both theoretical and practical. Their engagement over such topical issues as the ‘national question’ in British architecture, John Ruskin, the cultural origins and significance of Gothic architecture, and the debate over style, particularly with regard to the New Government Offices (1857–68), Whitehall, are all discussed. It is concluded that Freeman’s ideas, despite being overshadowed by those of Ruskin and the Ecclesiologists, had a wider impact in the world of Victorian architecture than previously thought.

This essay looks at E. A. Freeman’s involvement in the Oxford Architectural Society, which provided him with the platform to develop as an architectural historian and writer. The varied interests of the OAS influenced Freeman’s approach to the history of medieval architecture alongside Thomas Arnold’s new philosophy of history. This contribution is set against the backdrop of Oxford in the 1840s and the rapid changes the City and University were experiencing. The OAS also provided Freeman with the opportunity to meet architects and even to act as a client in the restoration of Dorchester Abbey, which the OAS promoted from 1846, eventually using William Butterfield as architect. This experience encouraged Freeman to write about the theory of monument care, which is perhaps his most enduring contribution to the culture of the Gothic Revival.

This chapter reviews the ideological themes associated with these churches and asserts that the auditorium church type lost popularity as the evangelical consensus that had produced it deteriorated. Formalism and a new liturgical movement came to dominate among many defenders of religious modernism, who remodeled their auditorium sanctuaries into new split chancel arrangements or built new Late Gothic Revival churches. Proponents of fundamentalism along with more conservative evangelicals were more likely to retain their auditorium sanctuaries and some even built a handful of new ones by the middle of the twentieth century. With the revival of evangelical influence at the end of the century, however, religious auditoriums were widely revived, in the form of large nondenominational megachurches like Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago.

Focusing on ecclesiastical architecture and the Gothic revival, this chapter argues that church buildings were read in terms of harmonious formal structures and were frequently compared to poems, just as poems about church architecture — from Wordsworth’s Excursion to Isaac Williams’s The Cathedral — used form to represent architectural ideas. The chapter takes in the Cambridge Camdenites and their work, discusses their relation to Tractarianism, and closes by assessing the ongoing relation between poetic and architectural form in the work of Ruskin and Coventry Patmore.

This chapter surveys the background to ritualism in the religious and cultural ferment of the early 19th century. It explains how Tractarianism and Ecclesiology both led to an impetus amongst a minority of Anglican clergy for the development of elaborate liturgical forms based on those of the late medieval English Church which quickly became known as ritualism. This process can be considered as part of the wider phenomenon known as the Gothic Revival in art and architecture. In essence, a romanticised view of the Middle Ages which was itself a reaction against Enlightenment notions of progress and of escape for the supposedly primitive ways of the European past. Perhaps best conceptualised by Pugin, gothic styles were meant to be provide a model for the re-sacralisation of England, particularly its blighted urban areas. It is made clear, however, that Pugin’s vision, like that of most contemporary ritualists, was not based primarily upon contemporary Roman Catholic reality but upon an imaginary and idealised English Catholicism. Therefore, the ensuing battles over ritualism in the Church of England were in fact evidence of a fight over the nature of England and English identity.

This chapter explores the architectural style of Bombay during the period roughly between the second half of the nineteenth century and World War I, a period when most of Bombay's public institutions were founded and the city's image as a Gothic Revival capital was established. It argues that the imperial styles—particularly Gothic Revival—of Bombay reflect the joint partnership between architects, engineers, craftsmen, native philanthropists, and the colonial government, as well as the new public arena they created, rather than simply the virtues of the colonial regime. It also shows what Bombay's Gothic Revival architecture meant to the colonial elite and its native population more generally.

Ranging across antiquarian studies, executed architectural projects, romances, letters, essays, and topographical writing, this chapter seeks to show how the Gothic fictional aesthetic, in both its pro-Catholic and anti-Catholic extremes, was merely one manifestation of the broader discourse on ecclesiastical Gothic architecture and architectural ruin in the long eighteenth century. While, for many antiquaries, ecclesiastical ruins were ‘venerable’ and deserving of respect, for other, more popular writers they were ‘nurseries of superstition’, painful remainders (and reminders) of England’s Catholic past. Having explored the ceaseless vacillation between the poles of ‘venerable ruin’ and ‘nurseries of superstition’ across a range of architectural theorists, essayists, and Gothic writers of the period, the argument shows how Gothic architecture, particularly the architecture of ecclesiastical ruin, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation’s Gothic past, an age not only characterized by Catholic ‘darkness’ and ‘superstition’, but one also felicitously inhabited by ‘enlightened’ English Catholics.

Although it was eventually adopted by Episcopalians across the spectrum of “churchmanship” as well as by a wide variety of other American denominations, the use of the Gothic was for Anglo-Catholics the only proper style for the sacramental worship they deemed central to true Christian practice. A distinctly English form of Gothic had become the norm for American Episcopalians by the later nineteenth century, with a few striking exceptions, such as Boston’s Trinity Church. The copious accumulation of detail in Gothic architecture has several points directly related to the relationship of the Anglo-Catholic version of Episcopal worship to the material realm. Both in England and America, the Arts and Crafts Movement was closely linked with the Gothic revival. In the decades between the Civil War and World War I, the U.S. experienced not only the dizzying growth of its cities, but also a corresponding drive to create cultural institutions that would place those cities on par with Europe; the great urban churches of this period were also cultural institutions.

Extending the discussion of Walpole’s architectural imagination in Chapter 1, this chapter pays sustained attention to the assumption that the eponymous castle in his The Castle of Otranto (1764) is based on, or inspired by, the author’s architectural work at Strawberry Hill. Having outlined the history of the Otranto/Strawberry Hill relationship, the chapter subjects these presumed correspondences between text and house to careful scrutiny, eventually arguing that if the two are related at all, it is primarily through the language of romance that is common to both. Both the Castle at Otranto and Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, the argument shows, are versions of the ‘enchanted castles’ that Walpole discovered deep in the annals of ‘Gothic story’. The chapter ends with an account of the extent to which Walpole arrogated to himself the ability to call up so many ‘enchanted castles’ in a number of contemporary literary and architectural experiments.

Anglicans produced distinctive Victorian art and architecture, both in Britain and throughout the complex contexts of the British Empire. The visual arts and the transformation of sacred spaces through the rediscovery of traditional crafts and motifs alongside the implementation of new materials and techniques constituted a unique cultural contribution. In churches, galleries, and many global public and private spaces, nineteenth-century art continues to assert a vast legacy. Key characteristics of the Church of England’s Victorian approaches to the arts include the Gothic Revival, Pre-Raphaelitism, and diverse quests undertaken by practitioners ranging from William Butterfield to John Byam Liston Shaw to articulate the beauty of holiness.

New Zealand’s first architecture was shaped by the country’s geographical remoteness, its seismically active geology and its natural abundance of timber. Māori settlers, from around 1250–1300 CE, developed a unique timber architecture embellished with decorative carving. British colonization from 1840 resulted in timber variants of contemporary Victorian building types being erected in the principal settlements, although by the 1870s these were being replaced by brick and stone structures. Wooden Gothic Revival churches were a distinctive feature of the colony. British influences remained strong into the early twentieth century but were supplanted, after World War I, by American technological Modernism. Adoption of European Modernism, from the 1930s onwards, paralleled growing political independence. The search for a local modern architecture became a dominant theme of the 1950s.

This chapter looks at a little-known episode in church history to think about how ritual became such a market force. In the nineteenth century, the Anglophone world was caught up in a crisis defined by a debate about right ritualization. In this elite squabble, the label “Ritualist” was deployed as an epithet to describe a revival of interest in church sacraments. Anglican and Episcopalian Ritualists advocated “High Church” ceremonialism to counter what they perceived as secularization. This secularization was not an irreligious force as much as it was—to the Ritualists—a diminished ritual force. The term scientia ritus is coined to describe the way in which the literature produced in the crisis offered a certain exacting diagnostic technology for right ritual behavior and ritual analysis. This chapter focuses on the depiction of these debates about ritual as indicative of a broader pattern of religious life in the emergent modern American consumer culture. This is not to suggest that rituals vacated their content to become commodities; rather, it is to argue that the debates about ritual became articulated through the mediated marketplace that formats religion.

This chapter describes the form of ecumenism stemming from a number of Roman Catholics under the influence of a group of converts led by Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle who began to re-imagine their newly adopted church as the historical embodiment of the great undivided western church of medieval Christendom. Their profound influence on religious aesthetics and taste, which was dominated by the vision of the great pioneer of the Gothic Revival, the architect and designer, A. W N. Pugin, quickly spread beyond their own church, with some members of the Church of England, including F. G. Lee, reconceiving their own church in similar terms, often accompanied by a revival of medieval ritual. It describes the history of the first major ecumenical organisation with significant support from the two churches, the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom.