Art, Faith and Place in East Anglia: From Prehistory to the Present Ed. by T. A. Heslop, Elizabeth Mellings, and Margit Thøfner (review)

East Anglia is an ill-defined region on the east coast of England, sticking out into the North Sea. Like many places in a similar situation—Cornwall, at the southwest corner of England, springs to mind, as does Brittany, in northwest France—East Anglia has tended to evolve its own culture and to draw its influences from across the water rather than from its inland neighbors. Before the nineteenth century, after all, it was usually easier and quicker to get to places by sea than by land, and East Anglia has always been in the front line when it came to invasions, whether defending the coast from Germanic pirates in the third century, or providing the bases for bombing raids on Germany in the twentieth. Trade across the North Sea was important for England for many centuries and brought with it language, customs, and buildings not always found elsewhere in the country: the use of the Old Norse word gate to mean street, for example, and the abundance of churches with round towers, now generally thought to be following models from northern Europe. Such regions also tend to have their favorite saints.The prevalence of churches dedicated to St. Margaret of Antioch is discussed in this volume, and Ethelbert, Etheldreda, and Edmund are popular locals who achieved sainthood. Paganism, too, is liable to continue in regions far removed from the center long after it has been suppressed elsewhere.

This wide-ranging volume comprises twenty chapters examining the relationship between sacred works of art (mostly but not exclusively Christian) and the location in which they were made or used. The examples include Roman and Anglo-Saxon artifacts, medieval wall paintings and stained glass, nineteenth-century church buildings, and twentieth-century war memorials; most readers of this journal will find something here to interest them. But in one important respect the volume is not so wide-ranging after all. The region of East Anglia is nowhere defined (nor is there a general map, to help those unfamiliar with the area), but by the end of the introduction it is clear that what is meant is the area covered by the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk; various other definitions of East Anglia (for example, the present Roman Catholic diocese of that name, not to mention the Anglo-Saxon kingdom) include Cambridgeshire. In fact, fourteen of the twenty chapters deal exclusively with Norfolk, including Norwich.

This is not altogether surprising, as the three editors are from the School of World Art Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, and the origin of the volume is the research project “Icon: 2000 Years of Art and Belief in Norfolk.” Unfortunately, no information is provided about the other seventeen contributors, beyond the fact that they “range from professional scholars to enthusiasts and from the devout to the openly atheist” (p. 3).

The book is well produced and illustrated, and it is a pleasant surprise to find footnotes as opposed to endnotes, as well as a comprehensive bibliography. It is a shame that as much trouble was not taken with the index, which is virtually useless. Quite apart from the mistakes it contains, it seems to have been compiled without a logical system. Worst of all, in a book about “place,” it indexes only a tiny proportion of the places mentioned.