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Reviewed by:
  • Envisioning Christ on the Cross: Ireland and the Early Medieval West ed. by Juliet Mullins, Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh, and Richard Hawtree
  • Michelle P. Brown
Envisioning Christ on the Cross: Ireland and the Early Medieval West. Edited by Juliet Mullins, Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh, and Richard Hawtree. (Dublin: Four Courts Press; distrib. ISBS, Portland, OR. 2013. Pp. xiv, 370. $74.50. ISBN 978-1-84682-387-0.)

The cross has long been the prime symbol of Christianity; yet this was not always so. Early Christians, especially during persecution, generally favored cryptic symbols such as the anchor, the dove, the chrismon or chi-rho, and the fish—the ichthys symbol, created by combining the Greek letters ΙΧΘΥΣ in a backronym/acrostic that translates as “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” With Constantine’s vision of the cross and his mother’s amateur archaeological discovery of its burial place, the instrument of torture became (as the Dream of the Rood so movingly relates) the crux gemmata—bejeweled symbol of salvation.

Crucifixion iconography does occur in early Christian art, including the earliest dated illuminated manuscript, the Syriac Rabbula Gospels of 586, but its rise in popularity stems from the Monothelete controversy, which caused schisms in the [End Page 141] Christian Orient and spread to the West, contributing to Pope Gregory the Great’s decision to help evangelize the Anglo-Saxons and to subsequent attempts to draw the British and Columban churches into the international Orthodoxy of Chalcedon. The Synod of Whitby (664), with its focus upon the dating of Easter, was not merely an Insular affair but also part of international church politics. The Sixth Ecumenical Council, held in Constantinople in 681 (and preceded by the council in Hatfield in 679), proclaimed that the divine and human wills were united in Christ who, being incorruptible, never conflicted with the divine will, his incorruptibility stemming from his conception from the Virgin by the Holy Spirit. Iconographies of the Virgin and of the cross, symbolizing the key moments of conception, redemption, and integration of the wills, thereafter assumed wider popularity in Eastern art, rapidly pervading the West.

There has been much recent scholarship on the subject and the editors of the volume under review have done a fine job in assembling contributions that range across Europe from fifth-century Rome to twelfth-century Parma. As the volume’s title indicates, its primary purpose is to situate the contribution of early-medieval Ireland in establishing the iconic status of the cross and in exploring its spiritual, exegetical, liturgical, and aesthetic potential. Two aspects of this sweeping task underpin the volume: “God Hanging from a Cross” and “Contemplate the Wounds of the Crucified.” The first section examines the mystery of God’s divinity revealed upon the cross and the second his humanity, expressed through his suffering and the tradition of affective piety. This tradition is traced back beyond its usual association with Ss. Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux to Augustine of Hippo, blurring the traditional distinction between an emotive, empathetic Romanesque response and an earlier Insular emphasis upon Christ’s triumph on the cross and integrating what has often been romanticized and misrepresented as a distinctive “Celtic” contribution into the mainstream.

In a series of excellent, nuanced contributions the development of Crucifixion iconography is examined in the first section (Felicity Hartley McGowan on the Greco-Roman background to early Christian iconographies; Jennifer O’Reilly on the exegetical interpretation of Insular manuscript iconography; Carol Neuman de Vegvar on numerological symbolism and the wounds of Christ; César García de Castro Valdés on the function and iconography of the cross in Asturia; Hawtree on the conflation of Insular and Carolingian thought in Eriugena’s Carmina, Louis van Tongeren, Beatrice Kitzinger, and Cellia Chazelle on aspects of the liturgical framing and reception of teaching on the significance of the cross). In an equally impressive second section the interaction of text and image in prompting those contemplating Christ on the cross to inwardly reflect on their salvation is discussed (Mullins on the Middle Irish material in the Leabhar Breac; Elizabeth Boyle on Echtgus Úa Cúanáin’s eucharistic treatise and its relationship to the work of authors...

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