Building for England: John Cosin’s Architecture in Renaissance Durham and Cambridge

Building for England focuses on the architectural patronage in Renaissance Durham and Cambridge of John Cosin, a cleric of the Church of England. The book draws together evidence for his extensive activity as a patron from the 1620s until his death in 1672. Situating his architecture in the context of his religious and political outlook, this volume argues that in addition to Cosin’s theology of free will and pursuit of the beauty of holiness, there was a national impulse underlying his desire to build and an authoritarian basis to his architecture. This volume focuses on his architectural projects before and after the English Civil War in the Diocese of Durham and at the University of Cambridge, where Cosin’s interventions in settings for worship were highly controversial and the target of iconoclasm. Less controversially, but equally central to his ideology, Cosin promoted a series of libraries during his career at Durham and Cambridge. This study draws together the connections between Cosin’s various architectural projects for worship and learning in Durham and Cambridge.