Kindred Spirits: Communal Making and Religious Revival in Arts and Crafts Movements, 1870-1920

Abstract

Communal work, community support, and collaborative art production defined William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, and these tenets were also central to late-nineteenth-century religious practices. My dissertation chronicles the relationship between religious patronage and Arts and Crafts production in the United Kingdom and United States, by examining designers, artists, and their spaces, including convents, embroidery schools, architectural firms, and printing houses. Practitioners often worked in shifting media: book designers also made stained glass, architects supplied embroidery designs, and typographers also devised architecture. Such fluid, collective practices are key to understanding this networked artistic exchange. These communities were practicing a resistance both radical and conservative, pushing for dignity in labor through an almost archaic aesthetic, within a seemingly conventional, medievalist, and patriarchal structure—yet this structure also allowed for dissident behavior. By focusing on the communal, we can examine these spaces and their connections between religious artmaking, subversion, and understudied but vital aspects of Arts and Crafts production, engaging art history, material culture studies, gender studies, and scholarship on print culture and book arts. Religious fervor driving artistic production is more commonly associated with earlier centuries, yet it was just as potent at the turn of the twentieth century, when religious vocation, Arts and Crafts communities, and communal living were all tinged with revolutionary and anti-industrial assumptions. Gothic Revival was championed as inherently conservative and pure, but these religious spaces also allowed for homosocial living and greater opportunities for female artists. Communal activities and the Gothic Revival also became associated with Anglo-Catholicism, a form of High Church Anglicanism that was widespread but controversial. High Anglican Gothic was sensorially grand and overwhelming: incense, embroidered vestments, and heavy ornamentation created a glittering, refracted environment. These immersive aspects relate to Arts and Crafts medievalism, as well as the Decadent movement, a literary practice tied to Aestheticism. I argue that the integration of art and architecture in Arts and Crafts production led to intense, encompassing experiences, possible only through a sophisticated transatlantic networking and collaboration: a combination of direct experience and diffuse systems of actors. This dissertation examines three Anglo-American communities: the Society of St. Margaret, the Merrymount Press, and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s bookmaking and architectural firms. Centering on embroidery, bookmaking, and architecture, these communities all contributed to Gothic Revival church design and decoration. The activation of their art objects in these spaces created meaning for both the makers and the viewers.