Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture ed. by Catherine Karkov, Fred Orton (review)

REVIEWS 287 medieval art and cosmology as well. ERIC JOHNSON, History, UCLA Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, ed. Catherine Karkov and Fred Orton (Morgantown, VA: West Virginia University Press 2003) xi + 219 pp., ill. Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, a collection of essays edited by Catherine Karkov and Fred Orton, grew out of a seminar on theoretical approaches to Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture held at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, July 1998. The six essays both challenge and advance various methodologies in application to Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture, as well as responding to recent developments in the field. In doing so, they create a theoretical discourse that is stimulating and, at times, contentious. As Richard Bailey states in the introduction to the volume, “at least in those sections devoted to the Ruthwell cross, scholars do now begin to indicate how their approach complements (or contradicts) the work of others” (1). In “Reading Stone,” Jane Hawkes offers a hypothetical cross-section of readings of the Sandbach crosses from the perspective of antiquarianism, connoisseurship , and visual, textual and liturgical iconography. Her bold conclusion challenges these traditional readings by suggesting that the monuments would have been read quite differently by an early medieval audience, embellished as they were with paint and metal attachments. She supports her argument with illustrations that demonstrate how paint can literally “color” the meaning of the relief images. Catherine Karkov shifts focus to issues of gender, in “Naming and Renaming : The Inscription of Gender in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture.” In particular she explores the ways that Anglo-Saxon sculpture actualizes the words of St. Paul, that “‘there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Jesus Christ’“ (31). She sees the Ruthwell cross as embodying a rare moment of “‘degendered difference’“ (31) reflecting themes of spiritual and physical embrace , and a resonance between Mary and the cross as bearers of Christ. Like Carol Farr, she posits a double monastery as the most likely audience for such a monument.27 Drawing also on related monuments such as Hackness 1, her essay welds image, text and context into a unified synthesis. In his essay “Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments: Some Strictures on Similarity; Some Questions of History,” Fred Orton critiques what he calls a “‘natural history’ of Anglo-Saxon sculpture” in the multi-volume Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (67). Drawing on Saussurean linguistics and Nelson Goodman’s problematization of similarity, he faults the Corpus for adhering too closely to typology and the inscription of similarity among objects, at the expense of understanding their “‘internal difference’”(67). As an example, he notes a number of dissimilarities between the often-compared Bewcastle and Ruthwell monuments, including his contention that Bewcastle may have been a column or obelisk, rather than a cross. While Orton’s critique 27 Carol Farr, “Worthy Women on the Ruthwell Cross: Woman as Sign in Early Anglo -Saxon Monasticism” in The Insular Tradition, ed. Catherine Karkov, Robert Farrell and Michael Ryan (Albany 1997) 45–61. REVIEWS 288 raises provocative questions, he seems to overlook the fundamental usefulness of the Corpus as a research tool. Richard Bailey, who is one of the editors of the Corpus, ably replies to Orton ’s critique in “‘Innocent from the Great Offence.’” The Corpus, he argues, far from restricting the pursuit of knowledge, is intended to make “the material available to other scholars who can then exploit it for their own various purposes ” (94). He also objects to Orton’s identification of the Bewcastle monument as an obelisk, citing seventeenth century sources which describe it as a cross. One of the recent developments in the study of the Ruthwell cross is Orton’s contention that the upper stone is an addition to the lower stone, which may originally have had the shape of an obelisk or column.28 Building on this reinterpretation , Ian Wood’s essay “Ruthwell: Contextual Searches,” explores the historical context of the Ruthwell monument in two phases, as Ruthwell I and II. He makes the interesting argument that Ruthwell, with its runic inscription and Old English language, may have been “a sign of Northumbrian imperialism ” (129) after the takeover of the British kingdom of Rheged. In...