Alexandrina Buchanan

Les ego-archives: traces documentaries et recherché du soi

indexes to persons, places and subjects. Although there are useful maps of Warwickshire parishes and registration districts and of ‘Open’ and ‘Close’ parishes’ at the front and back of the volume, anyone unfamiliar with Warwickshire geography is likely to need frequent recourse to the index of places, so perhaps a listing of the registration districts and subdistricts in the

Archives: Principles and Practices

Since its publication in 2006, Caroline Williams’s Managing Archives: Foundations, Principles and Practice has been the first choice of textbook for most UK students wanting to gain a basic overview of archival practice. The recent appearance of Laura Millar’s book offers an alternative and although this review should not be read as an assessment of the relative merits of each, it is likely that many purchasers will be making this choice (and thus for budget reasons alone may well pick the earlier and cheaper publication). What would be gained from acquiring both? Millar’s book, one of the useful series of CILIP publications under the series editorship of Geoffrey Yeo, covers the ‘theoretical, philosophical, strategic, operational, political and logistical issues associated with archival management’— like the UK education programmes and Williams’s book, it is a ‘why-to’, not a ‘howto’. As a textbook it is engaging and thoughtfully written, with useful examples and insights born from wide experience. It will rightfully find a place on core reading lists and forms a useful starting point for anyone wanting to know more about archival practice as conventionally defined in the Anglophone West. Millar is perhaps best known to the UK audience for her Archivaria articles on memory and provenance which are theoretical in emphasis; here she aims at practical guidance, based on an assertion of archival ‘core principles’, basically those of the western Anglophone tradition. She is sympathetic to the notion that most of our practices are culturally constructed, emphasizing the importance of context to the understanding of archives, archival theory and archival practice. One of the book’s many strengths is that key concepts are historically and geographically located, associated with both background circumstances and the individual agency of the author by whom ideas have been articulated. Nevertheless, she suggests that professional ethics offer an identification of the core (i.e. permanent) principles of archival practice in any context and that following international standards is the means by which these principles may best be carried out. Her discussion of the principles may be nuanced, but it is never critical of the associated standards. In areas for which standards do not exist, all depends on circumstances, which the archivist is encouraged to identify and use to frame a mission for the individual repository, from which policies and strategies will follow. Journal of the Society of Archivists Vol. 33, No. 2, October 2012, 207–241

St. Paul's: The Cathedral Church of London, 604-2004

St Pauls is unique among English cathedrals for its association with the richest city in the realm and with the secular and political life of the capital. At the same time it has been a lively site of devotion, often innovative in liturgy, music, and decoration, and sometimes at the heart of conflict between opposing views. The story of St Pauls offers many insights into the history of England as a whole and into the part played by religion in both private and public life. This magnificent book--the first comprehensive history of St Pauls Cathedral in thirty years--opens with a series of historical overviews of the cathedral, of the people associated with it, and of its religious, social, and political significance, from its foundation to the present. Additional essays investigate various topics related to the successive cathedrals on the site, and many well-chosen illustrations underline these themes and present the splendid features of the cathedral as it is today.

Westminster Abbey: The Lady Chapel of Henry VII

The Lady Chapel, constructed at the wish of Henry VII, at Westminster Abbey is the last great masterpiece of English medieval architecture, and the culminating achievement of over three hundred years of development in the gothic style, at the point where it intersects with the new movements of the Renaissance. The burial place of some fifteen kings and queens, it houses both the largest surviving programme of gothic figure sculpture and the earliest and finest Renaissance tomb sculptures in England. This new book covers all the most important aspects of the Chapels history, from the establishment of the cult of the Virgin in the twelfth century to the restoration of the 1990s, which provided an unrepeatable opportunity for close examination of the structure and contents of the building which is the subject of this volume. Contributors include: Roger Bowers, Donald Buttress, Thomas Cocke, Margaret Condon, Barbara Harvey, Jacques Heyman, Phillip Lindley, Richard Mortimer, Julian Munby, John Physick, Andrew Reynolds, Tim Tatton-Brown, Charles Tracy, and, Christopher Wilson, Historians of British Art Book Prize for 2003. Richard Mortimer is Keeper of the Muniments, Westminster Abbey, and, Tim Tatton-Brown is Consultant Archaeologist to Westminster Abbey.

Building on Ruins: The Rediscovery of Rome and English Architecture

Part I Studying Rome: the later 18th-century background the British and Roman archaeology after Napoleon Pompeii in the Napoleonic and Restoration periods the vision of Rome after 1815. Part II Building Roman: architecture in England in the 1830s Birmingham Town Hall The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge The Royal Exchange, London St Georges Hall, Liverpool.