These ten papers were given at a colloquium in 2014, which marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Jean Bony’s The English Decorated Style: Gothic architecture transformed (1979). Moreover, twenty years had elapsed since the appearance of Nicola Coldstream’s The Decorated Style: architecture and ornament 1240–1360 (1999). The same year as the colloquium (2014) also saw the publication of Paul Binski’s Gothic Wonder: art, artifice and the Decorated style 1290–1350. Articles by Coldstream and Binski, therefore, book-end pieces by younger scholars in which aspects of Bony’s attractive and perceptive synthesis are scrutinised and revised in the light of new research.

Nicola Coldstream offers a lively historiographical account of the fortunes of Decorated style from its vulnerability to moral judgements in the nineteenth century, to the mid-twentieth when a preoccupation with the origins of the Perpendicular style inhibited a full and nuanced understanding of this many-stranded creative episode. The determinist search, it is argued, was strong on architectural analysis while weak on other media, especially the applied arts in which the intricate and the ornamental were areas of creative fertility around 1300. James Hillson looks at Bony’s analysis of Decorated and of Early Gothic as active forces generated from centres that met with acceptance or resistance in regions. This taste for strategic movement, which Bony demonstrated with maps, is seen as a possible by-product of his war experience or – more convincingly – the result of his training as a geographer and perhaps the influence of Henri Focillon. Bony, like others, sought the springs of modernity in the patronage of the court, and Hillson notes that in recent studies characterising these centres as more eclectic, flexible and retrospective, the privileging of the court as a creative leader persists. Andrew Budge selects stylistic change in fourteenth-century collegiate foundations for the application of Innovation Diffusion Theory and Frequency Distribution Analysis, tools of the social scientist. The results derived from fifty-eight buildings confirm the findings of conventional art history. A much larger sample might produce more striking conclusions, but the difficulty of selecting truly significant stylistic features to enumerate imposes limitations on the usefulness of such surveys. Jeffrey Miller complements Hillson’s chapter by looking at the nave of York Minster as ‘a monumental challenge to the interlinked concepts of experiment and regionalism that have persisted in discourses about the architecture of the Decorated style’. Cosmopolitan and subtly innovative, commissioned by well-connected and independent-minded patrons, the nave owes little to the king’s work at Westminster. Its scale and grandeur were hard to assimilate in local building projects. If York supplied them with novel detail, local masons were also open to ideas from Lincoln and the East Midlands. Jon Cannon celebrates the extraordinary inventiveness of the ‘Bristol Master’ and his ability to adopt particular modes of design in different contexts and for different clients at St Augustine’s and St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol.

Unorthodox flexibility and a brilliant diversity of invention certainly distinguish English Decorated from some Continental Late Gothic buildings, but Bony’s claim that England around 1300 assumed the influential lead in the development of Late Gothic has been looking more doubtful for some time. Jana Gajdošová’s essay here on the evolution of curvilinear tracery by Peter Parler at Prague cathedral goes some way to undermine it. Citing very early examples of ogee forms noted by Paul Crossley at Salem and at Basel as well as windows at Constance, she shows that the Prague window patterns were probably assembled without English ingredients. Sophie Dentzler-Niklasson illuminates a vital part of the medieval mason’s creative stimulus by focusing on the problems posed when new vaulting had to contend with the unusual plans of older buildings. At Pershore Abbey she rightly points out that attempting in c 1300 to put a tierceron vault over an early thirteenth-century polygonal eastern apse may have prompted a spontaneous innovation of lierne ribs in the adjacent rectangular bays. A similar creative adaptation, she suggests, led to the introduction of two-bay diagonal ribs, forming a lierne pattern over the uneven bays of the Romanesque nave of Saint-Jouin-de-Marne as early as c 1220–30. In the light of this, Jakub Adamski’s study of the similarities between English tierceron vaulting and buildings in the Southern Baltic and Poland might prompt questions about which patterns could be English-inspired and which might arise from local problem-solving. Michalis Olympios puts forward evidence to support Bony’s claim that cloisters of Bellapais Abbey, in Cyprus, register the influence of English Decorated.

Paul Binski closes the volume by analysing Bony’s contribution as a remarkably perceptive and articulate historian of form whose interest in the culture that produced it – and in human agency generally – was somewhat limited. Original meaning, linguistic inflection in design, the significance of contrasts in relative scale and the dynamic between simplicity and complexity (including its economic implications) are subjects where he identifies scope for progress in understanding the remarkable artistic movement that we call Decorated.