FROM THE PUBLISHER

Although it is often assumed that British writing on architectural theory really started in the eighteenth century, there is in fact a large corpus of writing on architecture pre-dating the introduction of Palladianism by Lord Burlington. Some of it, such as the English editions of Serlio and Palladio, belongs to the Vitruvian tradition. But many texts elude such easy classification, such as the prolonged (but hardly studied) discussions on church architecture, which are both in form and content very different from the way that theme was handled in Italian Renaissance treatises.

This is the first collection of English writing on architecture from 1540 to 1750 to be published in a modern, accessible edition. It offers a large selection of fragments, some of them never published before. They discuss the nature of architecture, the practicalities of building, the sense of the past, religious architecture, and classicism. All fragments are introduced and annotated to facilitate use both by architectural historians and in the classroom. Authors include well-known writers such as Inigo Jones, Roger Pratt, John Evelyn, or Sir John Vanbrugh, but also some writers who are not usually associated with architectural theory, such as John Donne or Walter Montague, who nonetheless have a lot to tell us about the ways architecture was perceived.

British Architectural Theory shows the originality, richness and independence of architectural thought in early modern England.

About the Author:Caroline van Eck is a Senior Research Fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where directs a research program on the role of rhetoric in the visual arts and architecture funded by the Dutch Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO). She has published widely on architectural theory of the nineteenth century and the Renaissance. Recent publications include Organicism in Nineteenth-Century Architecture: An Inquiry into its Theoretical and Philosophical Background (Amsterdam 1994)
The Concept of Style in Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge 1995), and articles on Renaissance architectural theory for Renaissance Studies and The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. With Ashgate she has also published the first English edition of Germain Boffrand's Book of Architecture.

SYNOPSIS