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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
In two of its aspects the writing of architectural history has as long a pedigree as any kind of historical scholarship. In the first place, the urge to study buildings has been provoked by the sense of loss at their destruction, from the time of the Reformation onwards. The shocked response to the sight of monastic ruins was a spur to recording their past, so producing some of the earliest achievements in historical research and writing. John Aubrey's plea—‘I wished monastrys had not been putte downe, that the reformers would have been more moderate as to that point’—underlines the sentiment that led his contemporaries Sir William Dugdale and Roger Dodsworth to compile their Monasticon Anglicanum (3 Vols., 1655–73), as well as the publication of more purely architectural works such as Dugdale's History of St. Paul's Cathedral (1658) and Anthony Wood's Antiquities of Oxford (1674). Three hundred years later it is easy to observe the same kind of impulse in the countless books written from a sense of outrage at the destruction of buildings by war and redevelopment. Architectural history derives much of its energy, and its wide popularity, from the desire to preserve tangible reminders of the past.
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16 Girouard, M., Sweetness and Light. The ‘Queen Anne’ Movement 1860–1900 (1977), 3, 118.Google Scholar The architectural confusion at the end of the century as the Queen Anne movement lost its hold has been summarized in Summerson, J., Turn of the Century: Architecture in Britain Around 1900, 5th. W. A. Cargill Memorial Lecture in Fine Art (Glasgow, 1976).Google Scholar
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