Exploring how power and political society were represented and reflected on visually in medieval England, this book seeks to show that art and architecture together constituted an important means by which political ideas were developed, debated and inculcated in everyday political thought and culture.

Tracing her theme across the two centuries from Henry ii’s accession to the middle of Edward iii’s reign, Laura Slater maintains that by the period’s end a major change had occurred in the literary and artistic discourses of power. In the thirteenth century political reform was seen as a form of devotional action, equivalent in sacral importance to reform of the Church and pastoral care for the salvation of souls. Political actors, guided by scholastically trained clerics, and absorbing their ideas from texts and images shared between court, monastery and university, saw documents such as Magna Carta and the Provisions of Oxford as invested with a salvific importance, sustained by the ‘living stones’ of the Christian commonwealth and buoyed by the ancient saints of Anglo-Saxon England. The main preoccupations of political reformers were the proper limits of sovereign power and the control and punishment of tyrannical rulers. Drawing on such sources as the Lambeth Apocalypse, the Song of Lewes and wall paintings in palaces and cathedrals, king and barons instinctively thought in terms of such stock-in-trade images as those of the model virtuous king, Edward the Confessor, on the one hand, and the trampled down tyrant, King Swein, on the other.

In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, however, such ideas were to undergo change. Although notions of vice, virtue and sacral struggle remained fundamental to the imagined nature of power and political society, the growth of a more exacting kingship generated the need for new constitutional responses and so led to the development of new discourses of power. Alongside the traditional depictions of such figures as Archbishop Becket and St Edward, there were now images glorifying the chivalric warrior, honouring the competent administrator and, in recognition of the rise of parliament, acknowledging the communal and collective aspect of politics. In Walter Milemete’s treatise on government, presented to Edward iii after his accession in 1327, images of divine intervention were balanced by a depiction of the king’s subjects as active visual presences, pivoting around the throne, gesturing, talking and intervening in government. The role of God and the estates of the realm were given broadly equivalent visual and ideological emphasis.

This subtle argument is developed in stages through the book, and as a broad description of the shift in the discourse of political power for the most part it carries conviction. While it is true that notions of sacral struggle remained constant throughout the period, by 1350 there was undoubtedly a new emphasis on political virtue, chivalric glory, and a pragmatic concern with royal competence in the legal and documentary business of government.

From the perspective, however, of a book seeking to bring text and image together, the argument, at least in the form in which it is presented here, is open to one very serious objection: namely, that it can be sustained on the evidence of literary texts alone, without the need to draw on the parallel evidence of visual imagery as a form of buttressing. In parts of the book, indeed, for example in the discussion of clerical thought in the 1250s and 1260s, the visual imagery supposedly the main subject is largely lost sight of, and the examples cited are solely of literary imagery. What the book fails to establish is that the use of images in medieval England was, as the author maintains, ‘crucial to the development and expression of political arguments’. It is one thing to show, as the author does, that images of good and bad kingship were commonly inserted at key points in political texts; it is quite another to insist that these were ‘crucial’ in shaping the reader’s responses when those responses might well have been shaped principally by words.

Part of the problem which the author faces is that so little is known about the audience, reception and use made of the images that she discusses. Very few of the images – those on the royal great seal constituting the main exception – reached a wide audience, and many were seen only by the person for whom the book in which they appear was commissioned. A number, such as the collection of Effigies Regum, were read principally by female patrons who, as the author admits, were not political actors. At the end of the author’s discussion, the question still unresolved is this: did the images simply illustrate and reflect the prevailing political ‘worldview’? Or were they actively instrumental in shaping it? Dr Slater believes they were instrumental; the sceptic, however, might think differently.