Liturgical Space ─ Christian Worship and Church Buildings in Western Europe 1500-2000

This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the internal arrangement of church buildings in Western Europe between 1500 and 2000, showing how these arrangements have met the liturgical needs of their respective denominations, Catholic and Protestant, over this period. In addition to a chapter looking at the general impact of the Reformation on church buildings, there are separate chapters on the churches of the Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions between the mid-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, and on the ecclesiological movement of the nineteenth century and the liturgical movement of the twentieth century, both of which have impacted on all the churches of Western Europe over the past 150 years. The book is extensively illustrated with figures in the text and a series of plates and also contains comprehensive guides to both further reading and buildings to visit throughout Western Europe.

Nigel Yates is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Wales, Lampeter. As well as having written extensively on church buildings over the past twenty years, he was between 1981 and 1991 a member of the Executive Committee of the Council for the Care of Churches, advising the Church of England on reordering schemes as part of the faculty jurisdiction process, and has since spoken at major conferences on church buildings and their furnishings.