The reredos of the fifteenth-century chapel of All Souls College Oxford, with its combination of medieval niches and statuary by George Gilbert Scott, has remained one of the unsung glories of both medieval perpendicular architecture and Victorian restoration. Informed by recent scientific investigation of its stonework and its surviving medieval polychromy, this volume follows the reredos from the phases of its medieval and early Tudor construction, through its covering up with a succession of baroque and neoclassical decorative schemes, to its uncovering and restoration in the 1870s. Through a sweeping survey of the chapel’s architectural and decorative history, this book provides a novel and revealing vantage point on the artistic, cultural, and ecclesiological history of Britain across four centuries.

Peregrine Horden is a research fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, and professor of medieval history at Royal Holloway, University of London.