Meetinghouses of Early New England

Abstract

Meetinghouses of Early New England By Peter Benes Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. 446pp. Maps, illustrations, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-55849-910-2.For several decades now, historians of architecture have been appropriating an increasing variety of perspectives and interpretive frameworks in an effort to counter the seemingly ever-present tendency to reduce architecture to matters of narrative, concept, or style . Laudable and necessary as this agenda continues to be, an unintended and unfortunate consequence is that too often the scholar, and so the reader, loses sight of the building itself. Yet this methodological expansion of the field has also encouraged serious consideration of genres and types that have previously been ignored . And so vernacular traditions are now routinely taken seriously. No contemporary historian would be satisfied with Nikolaus Pevsner's mid-twentieth-century distinction between a bicycle shed (mere building) and Lincoln Cathedral (architecture), at least not in its dubious implications regarding how and why our knowledge of the built environment matters . Is it not clear that history aims to illuminate human culture and its endeavors, and that these encompass more than the monumental? Even so, some building types and periods present special difficulty, the early New England meetinghouse being a case in point .The remarkable achievement of Peter Benes's Meetinghouses of Early New England is perhaps best understood in the context sketched out above . His subject is emphatically vernacular from the outset, yet becomes gradually caught up, albeit never fully, in the development of architectural practice, the reception of official institutional styles, and the requirements of newfound political identity The wide variety of uses to which meetinghouses were put belies any easy typological conception In some places meetinghouses slowly become churches, as Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist societies looked to Anglican practice, while even the sparest Puritan meetinghouse held multiple meanings . And of the more than two thousand buildings under study here, ranging from 1622 to 1830, only about a quarter survive, most dating from 1790 or later. The subject is difficult to pin down, to say the leastThe book is divided into three parts: The Background, The Architecture, and Conclusions The middle part is by far the longest and conveys the bulk of the discussion of architectural particulars, including plan typologies, likely sources, and characteristic features (from seating to furnishings to massing to ornament and more) Across three chronologically ordered chapters Benes clarifies the detailed variations of the three basic period styles . First-period meetinghouses (1631-1720) tend toward squarish enclosures under steep roofs with gables on each side and central turrets; second-period (1699-1820), low-profile roofs running longitudinally, with an occasional bell tower; third-period (1770-1830), street-facing fronts, entry porticos with spires above, and loosely Basilican plans . Here Benes thoroughly traces the variants throughout the region and makes valuable use of many illustrations . An attentive reader comes away with a solid comprehension of the formal developments as they emerged in and through social, liturgical, and political change . It is in the first and third parts of the book that the most substantive contribution lies .Benes brackets the material story with two perspectives upon the social story Part I begins with a thorough account of the early meetinghouse as a central, and in no way merely religious, focal point within the community of the early American town . By chapters the focus narrows, from civic roles to explicitly congregational and ecclesiastical functions, to the labor and construction traditions that raised these buildings, and finally to the complicated and subtle matter of who would sit where within the meetinghouse At all stages the architectural implications of the social facts are suggested, but only fleshed out in Part II . …