Given online for the Society of Church Archaeology on July 4, 2023
Abstract: Reading Abbey was built as a royal mausoleum by King Henry I; a great architectural statement made by a king who has been described as the most powerful of his time in Western Europe. At the same time it has remained something of an enigma, scarcely mentioned in the standard histories of architecture because information about it remained scanty. Most of the fabric was destroyed soon after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and what remained was the site of a siege in the sixteenth-century Civil War. As a source of building stone in the centre of a growing town, the ruins have repeatedly been plundered. Only recently has it become possible to bring together the scattered evidence into a coherent narrative. This talk covers not just the form of the buildings but also a fresh interpretation of the abbey’s significance during the medieval period.
Ron Baxter is an art historian specialising in the medieval period. After a brief flirtation with manuscripts, leading to the publication of Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages (Sutton Publishing 1998), he turned to stone sculpture, and to the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI), for which he is the Research Director and an active fieldworker. He took his first degree and his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he was the Slide Librarian, and later the Conway Librarian, while teaching undergraduate courses. On his retirement from the Courtauld, he taught at York University (UK), but he is now freelance. In addition to his CRSBI work he frequently lectures and continually writes on art and architectural history and has published a monograph on Reading Abbey (The Royal Abbey of Reading (Boydell and Brewer 2016). He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of the Fabric Advisory Committee of Peterborough Cathedral.
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Top Image: Reading Abbey – photo by Chris Wood / Wikimedia Commons
The Rediscovery of Reading Abbey
Lecture by Ron Baxter
Given online for the Society of Church Archaeology on July 4, 2023
Abstract: Reading Abbey was built as a royal mausoleum by King Henry I; a great architectural statement made by a king who has been described as the most powerful of his time in Western Europe. At the same time it has remained something of an enigma, scarcely mentioned in the standard histories of architecture because information about it remained scanty. Most of the fabric was destroyed soon after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and what remained was the site of a siege in the sixteenth-century Civil War. As a source of building stone in the centre of a growing town, the ruins have repeatedly been plundered. Only recently has it become possible to bring together the scattered evidence into a coherent narrative. This talk covers not just the form of the buildings but also a fresh interpretation of the abbey’s significance during the medieval period.
Top Image: Reading Abbey – photo by Chris Wood / Wikimedia Commons
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