The Art of the Anglo-Saxon Goldsmith (review)

The Anglo-Saxons are today renowned for their production of visually exuberant and technically exhilarating metalwork. Gold is a significant component of the personal ornaments, weaponry, harness, and religious paraphernalia recovered in modern times from Anglo-Saxon burials, hoards, and ecclesiastical treasuries, and as stray finds. While considerable attention has been directed in the past century to chronological and stylistic analyses of these artifacts, more recently archaeologists have framed questions of their manufacture and distribution within a social context.

Elizabeth Coatsworth and Michael Pinder acknowledge that the small number of objects made by Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths extant and the preponderance of work from the seventh century raise questions of chronological and technological representativeness. Additionally, the largely tenth- and eleventh-century historical, literary, and visual evidence overlaps only slightly with the earlier period from which most gold work survives. Both of these limitations conspire to give their interpretation an almost static cast. Nevertheless, in its sharp observation, lucid presentation, and masterful synthesis of information, The Art of the Anglo-Saxon Goldsmith represents a significant and most welcome contribution to early medieval archaeology, art history, and history of science.

The book can be divided into two parts. In the first, the authors examine archaeological evidence for goldsmiths and their tools, manufacturing and decorative techniques, and construction and design. By referring throughout to ancient workshop literature, as well as to the observations of contemporary metalworkers and to experimental replication, they keep "practice . . . at the heart of this study" (p. 3). This focus enables the clarification of a number of technical points, such as the distinction between repoussé and Pressblech techniques or the apparent smithing by several differently skilled hands of a single object. More importantly, an acute examination of the processes of manufacture, the residual marks of tools, and the revelations of damaged, repaired, and partially completed objects, along with an appreciation of the gemstone, glass, composite, and base-metal components of these objects, allow the authors to position the work of the goldsmith within a broad technical, social, and economic milieu.

The suitability of some tools for working several metals, the multiple metals incorporated into single objects, and the goldsmith's need to have knowledge of iron tools suggest that individual smiths may have been competent working in a range of metals. Borrowing between metalwork and other art forms, such as textiles, wood carving, manuscripts, and stone sculpture, indicates the application of a common stylistic repertoire within high-status workshop settings. Although the authors briefly discuss the influence of technique upon design, they seemingly view the engine for stylistic and technical change as disengaged from external stimuli, such as the drive for political supremacy that Karen Høilund Nielsen has associated with the appearance of Germanic animal art on contemporaneous South Scandinavian metalwork.

The position of the goldsmith, real and imagined, is examined in the second section of the book. Written accounts in secular poetry, legends, Latin colloquies, and Biblical and homiletic commentary, along with figural representations in drawings and carvings, not surprisingly connect the fictional goldsmith with the social and economic elite. The personal histories of named smiths demonstrate that, in reality, this association was not always freely made, as smiths appear as property—as well as the recipients of property—in Anglo-Saxon wills. Charters, laws, inscriptions, and chronicles present a production model that situates goldsmiths in workshop groups at elite secular and ecclesiastical estates. While these smiths may have been itinerant inasmuch as they traveled between venues in fulfillment of commissions or accompanied a peripatetic elite household on property visits, they lacked commercial autonomy. Only with the development of craft areas in towns did goldsmiths, perhaps because of their association with moneyers, emerge as independent figures.

The Art of the Anglo-Saxon Goldsmith assumes a readership conversant with early Anglo-Saxon material culture but less well acquainted with technological terminology. To redress this imbalance, Coatsworth and Pinder...