The Romanesque Revival in Britain, 1800–1840: William Gunn, William Whewell, and Edmund Sharpe

The Romanesque revival, like the Gothic revival, was an international movement. It passed easily across national boundaries and its effects were felt throughout Europe and across America. In Britain it was overshadowed by the Gothic revival out of whose historiography it grew, and is easily confused with the Norman revival that enjoyed considerable popularity in the 1830s and 1840s. Both the Norman revival and the study of the Romanesque were the fruit of British antiquarianism, because in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was in this country a well developed scholarly interest in pre-Gothic, round-arched buildings.