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George Zarnecki PhD

Professor Zarnecki's thesis, entitled Regional Schools of English Sculpture in the Twelfth Century: the Southern School and the Herefordshire School, was submitted to the Courtauld Institue of Art, University of London, in 1950. It was the first expression of a framework for the study of English Romanesque sculpture that would see the discipline established as one worthy of international study. Despite this it was never published, and George's ideas were disseminated through his short books, English Romanesque Sculpture 1066-1140 (1951) and especially Later English Romanesque Sculpture 1140-1210 (1953), but especially via his students at the Courtauld Institute.

After his death in 2008 his widow, Anne, gave the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture permission to make his thesis available through the website, and we therefore offer the text (but not yet the plates) to our users. Anyone who has seen a thesis produced in the early 1950s will appreciate the difficulties involved. The text was typed on a manual typewriter on thin, semi-transparent paper using ribbons that varied in their intensity throughout the work. It was then edited by hand. It was illustrated largely with small, black and white photographs stuck onto card and bound into a volume. Some of these are lost, and adding them to the thesis will be a difficult and time-consuming business.

Having digitally scanned and cleaned up the text pages we found that Optical Character Recognition programs simply did not work; the output was always a garbled mixture of symbols. We therefore took the decision to simply publish the scanned pages, which are legible and transport the reader back to the time of its production, a few years after the Second World War. Readers will need Adobe Acrobat reader to read the text, and be patient as it may take some time to load.

Click here for George Zarnecki's PhD text