4 - Evidence and its Uses in Architectural History

Summary

And in listening to him, his hearers knew that they were listening to one who was pre-eminently trustworthy, to one who, though doubtless not privileged against error, certainly fell into fewer errors than almost any other man. In no other case did an audience so distinctly feel that they were sitting at the feet of a teacher. There was in truth a degree of professorial dignity, and even mystery about him. Other speakers might be disputed against; at any rate they might be asked questions. In the case of him who was before all men the Professor, it seemed to be silently understood that neither process was to be dared. There was a kind of feeling that it was not so much a man as an oracle that was speaking.

‘Professor Willis’ from The Saturday Review, 13 March 1875

In The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral (1845), whose genesis will be discussed in Chapter 5, Willis would produce the first work in the English language to call itself an ‘architectural history’. Through this, Willis was participating in the construction of a domain that had not hitherto existed as an independent and recognized entity. The historian E.A. Freeman, the first English author to publish a ‘History of Architecture’ (1849), later claimed Willis as ‘absolutely the creator of a branch of knowledge’ – a view shared by many contemporaries (probably including Willis himself) – but in reality architectural history was a response to existing debates and also a discourse whose perceived relevance gave Willis both the audience and the collaborators needed for establishing it as a subject area, a method and a literary genre.