This dissertation explores how architecture is valorized by the cultural artifacts, both visual and text-based, which present and describe it. It examines aspects of the Gothic Revival in early Victorian Britain, to consider the assimilation of models of evolving architectural discourse by one organization with specialized interest in its promotion, and adaptations of that discourse in the realm of popular culture. The dissertation focuses on the ideology of the Cambridge Camden Society, from its inception in 1839 through to 1850. The Society advocated an appreciation of Gothic churches both for aesthetic, and for religious and moral reasons. A key dimension of its mandate, captured in the rhetoric of ecclesiology, was to prioritize an empirical investigation of extant medieval churches. Findings were to be recorded on specially-devised questionnaires, called "church schemes," using a text-based, specially-encoded taxonomy. Given the availability both of extensive documentation by the Society concerning these schemes, and of almost seven hundred completed forms, areas of conformity and divergence between the prescriptive, instructional material, and the descriptive material which indicates the actual reception of the architecture, may be discerned. "Church visiting" hence became the primary means of personal engagement with the architecture, enacted through the elaborate ritual of scripted tourism spelled out by the church schemes and attendant pedagogical documents. The importance, and the implications, of tourism to members of the Cambridge Camden Society are addressed through an evaluation of travel theories and methodologies, developed, especially, since the 1990s. An understanding of ecclesiology in terms of travel theory enables it to be evaluated in a wider context, namely as part of an emerging tourist ethos based on expanding opportunities and incentives to travel through Britain. From this perspective, the Cambridge Camden Society is to be perceived as part of a larger consortium of advocates of tourism to sights of medieval architecture, who employed similar inducements and terminology, and who created such markers of architectural authenticity as travel guides to mediate the traveller's reception of a given sight. As a result, the possibilities of the widespread dissemination of at least the architectural components of ecclesiological ideals, as part of the groundswell of promotional material devoted to all things Gothic, were enhanced.

Thesis (Ph.D.). / Written for the School of Architecture. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/09/28). Includes bibliographical references.

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