Click on the picture to see an enlarged view.

Note that this book is out of print.

This book, published by the Society in 2001, will appeal to anyone who loves the old parish churches of East Anglia. It will also be of great interest to historians of iconoclasm, and the religious changes of the 1630s and 1640s.

William Dowsing was a puritan, living in Suffolk, England, in the seventeenth century. In late 1643 and 1644, during the Civil War in England, he visited parish churches, breaking up pictures, crosses, crucifixes, stained glass, monumental brasses, and altar rails.

Some 250 churches in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk were subject to his attentions, as were all the Cambridge University Colleges.

Dowsing kept a diary, or Journal, of his church-smashing activities. He lists what he destroyed in each church and chapel. This diary is unique. The full diary, combining Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, has never been published in complete form before. 

As well as the Journal itself, the new edition (550 pages in all) contains:

                       40 maps, showing Dowsing's activities and progress

                       130 photographs and illustrations, many of things he damaged

                       notes on every one of the 250 churches Dowsing visited, and the Cambridge college chapels,
                       describing what can be seen today

                       more than sixty sets of churchwardens' accounts, allowing us to track Dowsing and co-workers
                       across seven counties in East Anglia

                       much new material on Suffolk, showing how Dowsing's colleagues were working over most of the
                       county

                       considerable new work describing the appearance of the Cambridge college chapels in the late
                       1630s after their Laudian re-ordering, based on unpublished manuscript material and college
                       accounts;

                       a chapter on Dowsing the man and his times, including an analysis of his library and the
                       marginal comments he wrote in his book

                       a careful review of the theory that Dowsing visited north Cambridgeshire, but that those pages
                       of the Journal are missing

                       a chapter on iconoclasm in Norfolk, identifying the man who dealt with churches to the south of
                       the county, and dealing in detail with Norwich and less fully with other towns

                       a chapter on other neighbouring counties, demonstrating that church interiors were being
                       destroyed under Parliamentary auspices all over East Anglia

                       a chapter which discusses what physical evidence in a church safely demonstrates Civil War
                       iconoclasm

                       in all, nine explanatory chapters, and numerous appendices

                       a long-lost portrait, thought to be Dowsing