St Salvator’s Chapel

St Salvator’s Chapel

St Salvator’s College was established in the 1450s by Bishop James Kennedy. The new university college was dedicated to Christ the Saviour, and was intended to resist heresy and increase understanding of ‘divine wisdom’. Kennedy wished to create a college along the lines of those at Oxford and Cambridge, and to this end constructed a large complex of buildings including a dining hall and cloister. Kennedy’s foundation was both a religious and an educational institution. During the Middle Ages worship in the college chapel lay at the heart of life at St Salvator’s. In those days the chapel was lavishly furnished with statues (including a large silver image of Christ the Saviour), paintings, and altar hangings of cloth of gold. Few of these treasures survived the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. In the summer of 1559 academics were forced to watch as religious images were burned by Protestant activists determined to purge St Andrews of ‘idols’. St Salvator’s ceased being a place of worship at this time, and in 1564 was described as ‘a void house’. However, in the eighteenth-century St Salvator’s once more became a place of worship as the congregation of the parish church of St Leonard relocated here. In 1904, after a legal dispute, the university authorities removed the parishioners of St Leonard’s and took over the running of the chapel. St Salvator’s remains the focus of the main religious services of the University of St Andrews to this day.

sacredlandscapesoffife

1450

Bess Rhodes

Site

203

05/10/2021

10/08/2023 10:05:08 am

(1) Ronald Cant, The College of St Salvator: Its Foundation and Development Including A Selection of Documents (Edinburgh, 1950). (2) Ronald Cant, The University of St Andrews: A Short History (4th edn. Dundee, 2002). (3) Bess Rhodes, Riches and Reform: Ecclesiastical Wealth in St Andrews, c.1520-1580 (Leiden, 2019).

cm x cm x cm

current,56.341337108162904,-2.794275445426826;

St Salvator’s Chapel

https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/about/history/st-salvators/

TEXT

Building

432

Church of Scotland

true

St Andrews and St Leonards