Richard Fawcett has fulfilled his wish to write a detailed history of ecclesiastical architecture in Scotland across the entire Middle Ages. In 2002, he introduced Scottish Medieval Churches: Architecture and Furnishings with a lament that there had been “little attempt to sort out what may be described as the chronology of the Scottish architectural vocabulary through correlation of the structural and documentary evidence.”1 Fearing that one individual could not shoulder a task done for other European countries in the nineteenth century by an entire generation of architectural historians and that no publisher would adequately commit to such a project, Fawcett instead composed Scottish Medieval Churches as a chronological stylistic overview of the churches’ individual elements, such as windows, porches, and lecterns. The structure mirrored much older guides to medieval architecture elsewhere, specifically Francis Bond’s Gothic Architecture in England from 1905.2
Fawcett’s latest work, however, reads more like Christopher...
University of California Press