Princes of the Church brings together the latest research exploring the
importance of bishops' palaces for social and political history,
landscape history, architectural history and archaeology. It is the
first book-length study of such sites since Michael Thompson's Medieval
Bishops' Houses (1998), and the first work ever to adopt such a
wide-ranging approach to them in terms of themes and geographical and
chronological range.
Including contributions from the late Antique period through to the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it deals with bishops' residences
in England, Scotland, Wales, the Byzantine Empire, France, and Italy. It
is structured in three sections: design and function, which considers
how bishops' palaces and houses differed from the palaces and houses of
secular magnates, in their layout, design, furnishings, and functions;
landscape and urban context, which considers the relationship between
bishops' palaces and houses and their political and cultural context,
the landscapes and towns or cities in which they were set, and the
parks, forests, and towns that were planned and designed around them;
and architectural form, which considers the extent of shared features
between bishops' palaces and houses, and their relationship to the
houses of other Church potentates and to the houses of secular magnates.
