Medieval Wall Paintings in English and Welsh Churches

In this book Roger Rosewell offers a thorough and welcome overview of medieval wall paintings surviving in parish churches throughout England and Wales. This important medium has not received such extensive coverage since E. W. Tristram's seminal work of the 1940s and 1950s, which charted developments from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. (Unpublished notebooks for the fifteenth century are in the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.) Lately, much research has been orchestrated by David Park of the Courtauld Institute of Art, though an increasing number of scholars have come to recognize the value and significance of wall paintings for an understanding of medieval devotion and related matters (e.g., Ellen Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England [1997]). Rosewell's work fills a significant gap in current studies and lays important foundations for future work in this and related fields. Supported by a remarkably generous number of color photographs (in excess of 250), it encourages reassessment of a major yet undervalued aspect of English medieval art and patronage.

The book looks to a wide readership, both academic and popular, and there will be much to interest general enthusiasts and scholars alike working in a range of disciplines including literature, history, art history, and theology. It is particularly rewarding for those interested in the nature of English liturgical and devotional culture, the parish and its community, and the interrelations between textual and material culture, as well the technological context for the production of the wall paintings themselves. The quality and number of the photographs, and the detailed gazetteer to surviving paintings across England and Wales, will allow easy identification of appropriate material for study. This geographical index also enables the book to be a practical aide to visiting the churches under discussion, and the bibliography is sure to be a support and spur for future study.

The appeal to a broad readership largely determines the structure and content of the study. The chapters are effectively freestanding, and the presentation of illustrative material on almost every page provides a focus and aide to analysis. Rosewell begins with a historical survey of wall paintings—here stylistic developments are mapped against broad architectural movements following the standard Victorian categories of Romanesque and Gothic. A consideration of the range of subject material then follows; this features narrative sequences drawn from the Old and New Testaments, notably the birth, life, and Passion of Christ, and those drawn from the apocryphal scriptures and more contemporary writings, such as legends of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Doom scenes and the depictions of saints (e.g., Saint Christopher and Saint George) were also popular and receive close attention in both the text and illustrations. There is also useful discussion of more obviously catechetical material—the schematic depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Works of Corporal Mercy are prominent—and instructional or admonitory images like the warnings against gossips and the legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead. It is pleasing to see secular and decorative features given prominence, and there is assessment of the nature and role of heraldry and donor portraits (a fourteenth-century one at South Newington, Oxfordshire, is particularly well captured). Rosewell rightly gives space to an examination of practical matters, such as how wall paintings were made, who might have made them, and in some instances, who paid for them. The chapter "Meaning and Understanding" aims to provide an interpretive examination of a range of paintings and examines a number of key issues (subject matter, donors and patrons, sources, function). There is, finally, a brief account of the fate of medieval wall paintings from the time of the Reformation until the present day.

The author and the publisher are to be particularly congratulated on the quality of the images. The sharpness of this photographic record demonstrates a wealth of important technical and iconographical features. Realistic detail and previously inaccessible images are particularly well served in this regard. The spittle projected from the mouths of Christ's tormentors in a sixteenth-century image from the church of St. Teilo, Llandeilo Tal-y-bont (now removed to Cardiff) reinforces the role of paintings in the culture of affective piety where every injustice done to Christ becomes a focus for devout meditation. So too previously unseen images—often on soffits and ceilings—allow us to better reconstruct the iconographical schemes associated with commemorative art. A prime example is the set of images of the Annunciation and Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint John the Baptist that decorate the lower canopy of the cadaver tomb of Alice de la Pole (Chaucer's granddaughter) at Ewelme, Oxfordshire (dated to 1475).

It is inevitable with such a wide-ranging survey that one is left wanting to know more. Although material is incorporated from other artistic media—there are references to analogous material in stained glass and on painted wooden panels—there are no supporting illustrations. Further consideration of such materials and reconstruction of these contexts would also have developed an understanding of the broader devotional and textual contexts of medieval wall paintings. Some use is made of contemporary textual materials, and there are reference to wills, churchwarden accounts, and poetic, devotional, and religious texts (including those by John Lydgate, Richard Rolle, and John Mirk). While these help to illuminate a consideration of the production, function, and destruction of wall paintings, the centrality of wall painting in the devotional life of the parish merits a stronger frame of reference in this regard, and some areas receive only limited attention. One such lacuna is analysis of the inscriptional texts that feature in many paintings, especially those of the later period. Labels and more extensive passages in Latin, French, and Middle English are associated with many standard images, including the Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child and the legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead. In this regard, Tristram's work, which includes transcriptions and consideration of the sources and analogues of the inscriptions in the wall paintings, is a necessary accompaniment. Although this is a crossover book designed to be accessible to a range of readers, negotiation of the extensive bibliography and further development of aspects of the wide-ranging analysis would have been helped through the use of footnotes.

Though these gaps do make the book a little less valuable for the specialist, they do not seriously detract from the book's many achievements. By casting new light on this area of study it is to be hoped that a new generation of readers and viewers will recognize the beauty and significance of this material and come to offer practical support to the conservation of this most fragile corpus of work. It is also a timely reminder of the need for a formal systematic catalog of wall paintings with appropriate sponsorship in line with that provided for medieval stained glass (Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevum). On a lighter note, it is expected that this study will become a staple accompaniment to future English and Welsh church-crawling, a companion volume to Pevsner no less.