Knight & Dei
Sir Ninian Comper: An Intorduction to His Life and Work
With Complete Gazetteer
and Of the Atmosphere of a Church
by Sir Ninian Comper
by Anthony Symondson, S.J., and Stephen Arthur Bucknall
Spire Books & the
Ecclesiological Society, 2006
(available in the U.S. via David Brown Book Company)
(336 pages, $60.00, paperback)
reviewed by Matthew G. Alderman
When the Anglican architect Sir Ninian Comper passed away in 1960 at age 96, it seemed that the dwindling Gothic revival died with him. Within a decade, the moral and aesthetic landscape that he had known—a world of Latin plainchant and the Book of Common Prayer—had utterly vanished. This cheerful white-bearded Victorian seemed the deadest of dead white males.
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Matthew G. Alderman is a freelance writer, liturgical artist, and contributor to several blogs, including www.thenewliturgicalmovement.blogspot.com and www.holywhapping.blogspot.com. He was recently named an assistant editor for Dappled Things, an online literary magazine for young Catholic writers. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he lives in Manhattan, where he works in the field of architecture and attends the Catholic Church of Our Saviour.
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