Saints of North-East England, 600–1500 ed. by Margaret Coombe, Anne Mouron and Christiana Whitehead (review)

This volume is the product of a conference held at Oxford in 2015, providing some much-needed foci for medieval north-east England. This region and period, as the introduction itself states, is often neglected not just in medieval studies but also more generally. When one thinks of the North it is usually of an industrial or post-industrial landscape. By contrast, what this volume's contributors aim to do, and I believe achieve, is to aid in the revival of an intellectually and culturally vibrant North-East, charting this through the ecclesiastical lens of the Middle Ages, feeding into the revival narratives we can see in the region today. The introduction is a well-considered piece that really sets the tone for the rest of the volume, and this work has much to recommend it to a broad and multidisciplinary medievalist audience. It must be noted that despite the large chronological span mentioned in the title, this is a volume predominantly dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman Church, with the postscript providing the later medieval and early modern context.

As an archaeologist with a background in medieval studies I find this volume at once very stimulating (due to the supposed multidisciplinarity) but also at points disappointing. The editors and authors repeatedly attempt to engage with material culture and other archaeological content, talking of landscape, churches, coffins, bodies, and saintly objects. However this is done with what I feel is a fundamental lack of critical engagement with the archaeological literature on these places, objects, and theoretical frameworks. For instance the project led by Chris Gosden at Oxford on English Landscape and Identities (EngLaID) would be useful here (<http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/englishlandscapes-introduction.html>), or any work by David Petts and Sarah Semple, who specialize in the archaeology of early medieval Northumbria. Alan Thacker's chapter, titled 'The Saint in his Setting: The Physical Environment of Shrine in Northern Britain before 850', is particularly lacking in archaeological content despite its premise, with the now rather outdated three-volume survey by H. M. Taylor and Joan Taylor on Anglo-Saxon Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 1965–78), the works of David Rollason, and Tomás Ó Carragáin's study on the early medieval churches in Ireland (Yale University Press, 2010) being the only archaeology mentioned. It is missing key texts such as John Blair's The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford University Press, 2005), Tom Williamson's Environment, Society and Landscape in Early Medieval England: Time and Topography (Boydell Press, 2012), or any other environmental and landscape archaeology, or even palaeoecology. Such scholarship would have benefited the chapter, making it more rounded, and not just strictly architectural in terms of the physical environment. It should perhaps be rephrased as 'the built environment' to better reflect the mostly ecclesiastical architecture and church archaeology bent in the piece.

Similarly, Allan Doig's contribution, 'Sacred Journeys/Sacred Spaces: The Cult of St Cuthbert', whilst interesting and well conceived, might have considered some archaeological and material culture theory in terms of sacrality and the use of space. Whenever saints and especially the relics or bodies of these saintly individuals are mentioned throughout the work, I found myself yearning for a discussion over the concepts of the corpse, embodiment, necroagency, archaeothanatology, and decomposition; and how medieval people might have interacted with these saintly bodies in life as well as in death (an approach developed by Howard Williams). In terms of the ever-present Cuthbert, it seems a shame to not bring these considerations to any discussion of his incorruptibility. However, this book is primarily historical and literary in focus and achieves some good breadth across these disciplines, also incorporating (as mentioned above) architecture and art history. The visual experiences conveyed by Richard Sharpe and Lynda Rollason are welcome additions and add great...