Bouquet, Alan Coates 1884-1976

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BOUQUET, Alan Coates 1884-1976

PERSONAL: Born May 24, 1884; died 1976. Education: Cambridge University, B.A., 1905, M.A., 1910, B.D., 1918, D.D., 1922.

CAREER: Minister and writer. Lecturer on religion at Jesus and Trinity Colleges.

WRITINGS:

A Point of View, 1913.

When He Is Come, 1917.

The Greatest Relationship, 1919.

Is Christianity the Final Religion?, Macmillan London, England), 1921.

Man and Deity: An Outline of the Origin and Development of Religion, W. Heffer (Cambridge, England), 1933.

Jesus: A New Outline and Estimate, W. Heffer (Cambridge, England), 1933.

The Doctrine of God, W. Heffer (Cambridge, England), 1934.

(Translator) P. Erich Przywara, Przywara's Philosophy of Religion, 1935.

(Translator) P. Erich Przywara, Polarity: A German Catholic's Interpretation of Religion, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1935.

A Lectionary of Christian Prose, Longmans, Green (New York, NY), 1939, revised and enlarged, 1965.

Comparative Religion, Pelican (Harmondsworth, England), 1941, revised, 1971.

Hinduism, Hutchinson (London, England), 1949, revised, 1969.

Everyday Life in New Testament Times, B T. Batsford (London, England), 1953, revised, 1956.

Sacred Books of the World, 1953, revised, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1967.

The Christian Faith and Non-Christian Religions, J. Nisbet, 1958, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1976.

Religious Experience: Its Nature, Types, and Validity, W. Heffer (Cambridge, England), 1968.

European Brasses, Frederick A. Praeger (New York City), 1968.

Also author of Modern Handbooks of Religion, four Volumes. Contributor to various encyclopedias and theological publications.

SIDELIGHTS: Reverend Alan Coates Bouquet was an English minister and theologian whose many books focus on religion—all except one, European Brasses, which examines the medieval engraved plaques installed in churches as memorials to kings, queens, nobles, churchmen, and merchants. Coates is not officially an expert on funerary brasses, a fact he cheerfully admits, but as James R. Mellow noted in the New York Times Book Review, "what a pleasure [it is] to come upon his easy, rambling and informative essay in this most improbable of art books!" The text, Mellow wrote, is "a model of sanity," with clear discussions of the history of brasses, how they were made and installed, and their quality, as well as the fact that many of them were destroyed by bombing during World War II. The book contains reproductions of most of the brasses, which date from 1302 to 1668. "In the end," Mellow noted, "one becomes as fond of Dr. Bouquet as of the departed souls under his charge. One can almost picture him in some church in Margate or Great Tew, bending over a slab and judging from the thickness of a plate that it is a palimpsest with a fine bit of Flemish scrollwork on its back. And being right."