Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Following the publication of two monographs on the medieval glass of specific buildings (Ayers 2004; King 2006) the CVMA returns to the Summary Catalogue Series with this, the second county volume by Dr Hebgin-Barnes. Her Medieval Stained Glass of the County of Lincolnshire (1993) covered 650 parishes, whilst rural and sparsely populated medieval Lancashire has less than a tenth that number. With this in mind, a joint volume with Cheshire was originally envisaged, but so much unknown material was uncovered that it was decided that both counties deserved separate volumes. However there are many affinities between the two. These include styles of glass, the patrons who commissioned windows and, as Richard Marks has suggested, various workshops located in the north west supplying the local regional demand for glass. For these reasons the 'Introduction' will be common to this and to the forthcoming Cheshire volume.
One surprising aspect of the volume is the decision to push the terminal date forward to 1800, from the previous CVMA benchmark of c 1540 or 1559. Two main reasons are cited. Firstly, the now-perceived wisdom is that the Reformation was slow to make itself permanent in the north west because of the underlying religious conservatism and the physical difficulties in establishing the new doctrine in such far-flung places. This lack of clarity makes it almost impossible to date with any precision some of the glass which may generally be regarded as sixteenth century but not necessarily pre-Reformation, and the Catalogue would be...