Rood Screens: the Jubé

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An excerpt from an article at Canticum Salomonis.


Whatever Happened to French Rood Screens?
Fr. Thiers’ Dissertation Ecclésiastique sur les Jubés

On the heels of Monday’s post on the Jubé/Rood Screen, we now introduce a new translation, Fr. Jean-Baptiste Thiers’ Treatise on Jubés, a polemical treatise written in protest of the widespread destruction of rood screens and ambos led by the Gallican episcopacy and canonical chapters during the 17th century.

Fr. Thiers’ treatise is one of the first systematic attempts to understand the origin, development, and use of the rood screen. Like his other works On Altars and On Choirs, its aim is to explain and defend the Gothic ecclesiastical architecture of France against an aggressive “Baroquification” that often destroyed the ancient elements that once separated the sanctuary and the nave and defined the liturgical experience of Christians for most of history.

The Dissertation seems to have been a source and inspiration for Pugin’s own Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts, which makes frequent mention of “the learned Fr. Thiers.” Pugin’s title introduces the difficulty involved in translating the French term jubé. A fuller etymology follows in the treatise itself, but suffice it to say that jubé is not entirely equivalent to our English rood screen, since it also refers to other types of screens, walls, ambos, and pulpits. A more cumbersome rendering of this title could be: Treatise on All Manner of Screens, Pulpits, Lecturns, Lofts, and Ambos.

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