A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts

This is Pugin’s last book. Published in the Spring of 1851, some eighteen months before his untimely death, it is Pugin’s answer to those critics who questioned the need, and indeed the rationale for rood screens in the new Catholic churches of the nineteenth century.  In this work Pugin argues the case – a first class one in his view – for providing screens in churches, tracing their history back to the early Christian times, and illustrating his argument with a galaxy of examples drawn from all over Europe, and not just medieval ones. Largely ignored at the time of its publication, and since, it has never been reprinted, now available again in a facsimile of the original Victorian edition.