In his recent novel, The Sense of an Ending (2012), Julian Barnes describes a school history lesson in which students are asked to characterize the reign of Henry VIII. No one knows how to answer, and someone finally ventures, “There was unrest, sir” (Barnes 5). The narrator sees unrest as a kind of fundamental truth about the past, and the novel ends with the statement, “There is great unrest” (Barnes 163). “Unrest,” or, indeed change in any of its forms, has not typically been a term assigned to the period called the Middle Ages, which has remained in popular conceptions largely “static and stagnant” (2), despite many recent scholarly attempts to complicate earlier accounts of homogeneity in its religious beliefs and practices, ethnicities, and economies. Positing change as the defining factor of the medieval world is rather refreshing, and the nineteen essays in this handsome volume, The Art, Literature and Material Culture of the Medieval World, offer a set of rich and varied perspectives for reassessing transition, mostly in early England.
In their brief introduction, the editors Meg Boulton, Jane Hawkes, and Melissa Herman propose three critical terms for approaching change, all of which also appear in the subtitle: “transformation,” “transition,” and “taxonomy.” These are terms that are broad enough to be fairly meaningless, and Boulton, Hawkes, and Herman do not locate them securely in a particular set of theoretical approaches or methodologies. In just a few pages they mention the influential anthropologists Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, the historian Fernand Braudel, and the literary scholar Franco Moretti. Neither these names nor critical terms derived from their work (such as “thresholds” or “systematic modes of assessment” [6]) reappear in subsequent essays.
Luckily a number of the essays explicitly position themselves in a conversation about transition. For example, Aleksandra McClain explores the Norman Conquest, a long-accepted radical change, from the perspective of buildings. She argues that the Normans built new buildings on preexisting Anglo-Saxon sites of importance as a way to “compel and persuade” the populace (40). Similarly, Neil Christie's chapter looks at early medieval accounts of conversion to Christianity in Europe, most of which give a sense of its rapidity, and then argues for a sluggish, two-generation delay, which he finds in burial records. Finally, Meg Boulton explains the way in which Anglo-Saxon skeumorphs, objects that imitate the design of a similar artifact in another material, encode an acknowledgment of change.
It would have been helpful to have all of the contributors begin with a few words on what it means to study change. The essays by D. A. Lenton, Jane Hawkes, Phillipa Turner, and Harry Stirrup all offer persuasive readings of complicated objects that have, in the editors' words, “defied clear categorization” (2): medieval houses in Córdoba, the Ruthwell Cross, the reliquary of St. Everilda, and a leaf from the Winchester Bible (called the Morgan leaf), respectively. But the reader is left to guess what is precisely at stake, whether the Eastern influences on Anglo-Saxon art, or the influence of the Normans, or increased Christianization in Spain.
With such a large collection of essays, it is perhaps unsurprising that some do not seem to fit the topic as well as others. The word transition is used to describe an Irish fourteenth-century pilgrimage account by Małgorzata Krasnodębska-D'Aughton (chapter 8), perspectives on the Orkney Isles by Diarmuid Scully (chapter 9), and compunction in the Anglo-Saxon period by N. G. Baker (chapter 18). How and why these are transitions would be worth discussing. Other essays fit the provided rubric but are somewhat too narrow in scope to be of much interest to non-specialists, such as the discussion of Old English bird taxonomies in Eric Lacey's essay (chapter 10) or Carol Farr's account of recycled pictures in two Anglo-Saxon gospels (chapter17).
The most important contribution this volume makes has to do with its focus on material culture. In the introduction, the editors ask how we recognize change, and the answer given by many of the essays is to look closely at different kinds of objects and material traces, such as buildings. That is, given the paucity of written records surviving from the early Middle Ages, scholars must reevaluate what they think they know from written accounts (both contemporary and later) in light of what they can see and touch. Investigating the conversation between texts and objects follows somewhat traditional, but rewarding, pathways in the essays by Victoria Symons on Old English wisdom poetry and the Franks Casket, Zoe Dumelow on the sculptures of Joseph in the Salisbury Cathedral chapter house, and Heidi Stoner on architectural images in a life of St. Cuthbert. It takes a mysterious and fascinating turn in the essays of Michael D. J. Bintley and Melissa Herman, who discuss objects for which there are minimal or no surviving texts to which one might refer: the wic, a pre-Viking mercantile settlement in England, and the rare instances of the human figure in Anglo-Saxon art. Both of these traces are worth investigating further. Indeed, the possibility that new material discoveries will continue to complicate our understanding of the Middle Ages is a question directly taken up by Colum Hourihane in his discussion of the Index of Christian Art.
Although the title uses the phrase “medieval world” to refer to the volume's contents, the essays are focused, with few exceptions, on the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman worlds. Perhaps it would have been better to make the volume more narrowly about transition in that particular context. Nevertheless, the essays and illustrations offer much food for thought and remind readers that even in this long-studied area there is still much change that remains to be explained.
