Northumbrian Identity in the Eighth Century: The Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments; Style, Classification, Class, and the Form of Ideology

By style is meant the constant form—and sometimes the constant elements, qualities, and expression—in the art of an individual or group. The term is also applied to the whole activity of an individual or society, as in speaking of a "life-style" or the "style of a civilisation."

—Meyer Schapiro, "Style" ¹

The notion of style has long been the art historian's principal mode of classing works of art. By style he selects and shapes the history of art.

—George Kubler, "Style and the Representation of Historical Time" ²

When scholars commit themselves to working with "style," all too often they do so by conferring on it a worth unrelated to and unaffected by whatever form it may take in the production and consumption of knowledge. The use-value of "style" bears little, if any, systematic quantitative relation to its value in cognition. One of several unsettling aspects of the now outdated but still fecund modern texts that laid the foundations for studying Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture of the pre-Norman age is that though their authors were inclined to use the idea of style to denote and group, identify and order, shape and limit, interpret and explain their objects of study, they frequently were at odds with each other as to which of those objects were in or of the same style. One scholar might see, for example, the Ruthwell and Bewcastle monuments as having the same style (cp. figs. 1- 2 with 3 - 6).³ Another scholar might see them as having different, even incompatible, styles; indeed, this scholar might see the style of one or other of the monuments as made of two different styles. ⁴ Scholars might also see the Ruthwell