Matthew Reeve: ‘Henry de Gower’s Choir Screen at St Davids Cathedral’.
March 30th (6 pm). Online
This lecture presents a monographic appraisal of the choir screen or pulpitum of St Davids cathedral. Although glowingly praised by ecclesiologists and antiquaries, the St Davids screen has been very little studied and it has featured in neither recent studies of medieval choir screens nor of the Decorated style in general. But a key example of Decorated architecture the St Davids screen certainly is, and this lecture attempts to illustrate precisely that. Like many great church screens, that at St Davids was subject to regular interventions from the Late Middle Ages onward. In this, its rebuilding by G. G. Scott and J.B. Clear during their nineteenth-century restoration of the cathedral was but one episode in a history of change that characterised its history overall. Because the screen as it now stands is quite different than it was when it was completed around c. 1340, I will begin by exploring the archaeological and antiquarian record of the screen before turning to questions of date, form, style, and function. The screen emerges as a unique work of architecture and a central component of Henry de Gower’s transformation of St Davids in the fourteenth century.
This is an online Members only event – login details will be circulated closer to the time.