‘So great a cloud of witnesses’: Shaping Sacred Space in the Victorian Anglo-World

Abstract

This article explores one of the predominant themes in nineteenth-century stained glass: the urge to assemble collections of individual figures into genealogies of spiritual or institutional descent. Beginning with the importance of saints in ecclesiastical stained glass, it argues that this tradition both diversified in the Victorian religious marketplace but also spilled over into non-religious contexts — civic buildings, libraries, and the like — both in Britain and further afield. The stylistic vocabulary and connotations of the Gothic Revival allowed architects and designers to invest what were often very new settings with a sense of reverence and borrowed antiquity, as well as allowing older institutions to assert their lineage. Individual figures — saints in all but name — were at the very centre of this phenomenon. While in one sense this represents the effective secularization of a sacred form, this article suggests instead that stained glass allowed aspects of the sacred to seep into new settings, sometimes incongruously, but more often in ways that shaped people’s experiences of and emotional reactions to them.