Insular Iconographies: Essays in Honour of Jane Hawkes ed. by Meg Boulton and Michael D. J. Bintley (review)

Professor Jane Hawkes will be a figure familiar, in person or in print, to most Anglo-Saxon scholars. In a career not yet over, despite the appearance of a volume in her honour, Hawkes has made an immense contribution to the study of Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture, and Anglo-Saxon art more broadly, with her cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary approach. One of her crowning achievements appeared recently: Volume XIII: Derbyshire and Staffordshire, produced in conjunction with Philip Sidebottom, in the British Academy series Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (2018).

Insular Iconographies consists of twelve papers by the honouree’s own research students or examinees, many now early-career scholars in academic posts. These papers emerged from a symposium held at York, UK, in 2015. Giving voice to young scholars in this way is indeed a fitting enterprise for acknowledging a scholar who has guided and fostered postgraduate students so well throughout her career.

Several papers focus on individual Christian stone monuments and explicate them in varying ways. Most take a broad interdisciplinary view, encompassing comparanda from the stone corpus and other art media, placing objects in socio-cultural context, and exploring the depths of religious and scriptural reference that underpin the sculptural programs. Carolyn Twomey examines the baptismal font at Wilne, repurposed from a section of a cross column; Colleen M. Thomas explicates a vine scroll panel from the South Cross at Kells; Elizabeth Alexander discusses the Old Testament scenes (relatively rare in the corpus of stone sculpture) on the Newent Cross, and in particular the scene of Abraham and Isaac. Meg Boulton explores the interplay of scenes on the fragmentary Rothbury Cross, focusing on the panel that appears on the book cover—a host of angels looking down at the hellish scenes depicted at the foot of the same side of the cross.

In one of the most outstanding papers of the book, the appropriately named Heidi Stoner surveys the tradition of stone sculpture on the Isle of Man, and the problematic history of scholarship pertaining to it. She raises important theoretical questions about the traditional methodologies of periodization, localization, and classification in relation to the study of sculpture more broadly within the British Isles, as well as on Man itself. Another impressively broad-ranging paper is Tom Pickles’s ‘Conversion, Ritual, and Landscape: Streoneshalh (Whitby), Osingadun, and the Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Street House, North Yorkshire’. His main point of departure is the high-status female bed-burial, which, he argues, signals a kin group’s response to the new role of females, particularly aristocratic ones, dedicated to God in the 640s and 650s, rather than being required to conform to the traditional patterns in their society.

The remaining papers deal with textual or other art-historical topics. Michael Bintley neatly combines consideration of the role of stones and sculpture in Anglo-Saxon society with the accounts of stone and marble messengers in the poem Andreas. Michael Brennan considers Alcuin’s possible authorship of the Propositiones, only to confirm the pseudo-Alcuinian status of the text. He nevertheless provides an illuminating discussion of the mathematical tradition at the Carolingian court, and Alcuin’s involvement with it. Harry Stirrup examines the unusual Hell Mouth Initial of the twelfth-century Laud Bible; Mags Mannion provides a survey of Irish glass beads, their production and decorative motifs; and Melissa Herman discusses the iconography of the human face in pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon art.

One or two papers might have benefited from a little more pruning and compression, but collectively the contributions offered here offer much that is new and interesting, and many will be essential reading for those in the field. The editors have been meticulous in their work, and I noted only a couple of small errors in references.