Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England: Theology, Imagery, Devotion by John Munns (review)

This is a curious book in that it is so hard to see what the author's focus is on. Right at the start he associates the 'affective turn' in devotional practice that began in the late eleventh century with 'the story of the transformation of the image of Christ on the cross from rex triumphansto Christus patiens' (p. 1). And yet he never explains what the association consists of. In fact the book is all about the imagery of the Cross and Crucified as it can be discerned throughout twelfth-century England.

The author has chosen to restrict his choice of evidence to England, and (in the main) to images rather than the written word. He may be right to do so, but this choice incurs two methodological difficulties. Firstly, as all know, the Henrician Reformation entailed the almost entire destruction of illuminated liturgical books and artefacts incorporating precious metals and stones. Secondly, as a consequence of this, the evidence that survives, other than the books, does so in small parish churches, not great cathedral and abbey buildings. The author copes with the first problem by interpreting 'English' as widely as possible, drawing into discussion objects from continental churches but in English style. Some of their connections with England are dubious, some inadmissible. The most notable example of the latter is the so-called Cloisters Cross, formerly known as the 'Bury Cross'. The author is right to say that the case for its having been made at and for Bury St Edmunds Abbey was best advanced in the only monograph on it (Elizabeth C. Parker and Charles T. Little, The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994). But research since has demurred, and current opinion locates its origin within the region where it first reappeared in modern times: central Europe, probably within the territory of the Empire. The second problem merely raises the question of whether objects from small churches mirror those which once adorned the larger, or whether they are quite different; there is no way of knowing. All in all, the author is more comfortable in discussing scholarship on the individual origins than in fitting them into his large theme. I am unsure what light his discussion of them sheds on the larger issue, but they at least introduce the reader to a fascinating group of sometimes obscurely known artworks and their immediate contexts.