This volume comes hot on the heels of Éamonn Ó Carragáin's Ritual and the rood (2005). Very different in approach and tone, they provide between them the essential guides to current thinking about the Anglo-Saxon sculptures at Bewcastle and Ruthwell. In contrast to much previous work, the two studies also interact with each other's ideas. Large sections of this book have already appeared in preliminary form elsewhere, but it is valuable to have this full statement and to see the way in which the authors have addressed criticisms made of their earlier publications: arguments have been tightened and more fully explained; in significant cases they have been silently amended and there is a welcome deletion of attacks on the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon sculpture which so muddied the impact of those early papers. The result is a provocative and, quite deliberately, a loosely-structured study which is accompanied by a set of excellent illustrations.

Ian Wood's chapters, which come towards the end of the book, provide an authoritative overview of the known history of the post-Roman Wall area and south-western Scotland, emphasising the role of the British kingdom of Rheged in the background to the Ruthwell monument. He presents a conservative interpretation of the iconography of Ruthwell which does, nevertheless, allow for the validity of more complex ways of understanding the monument. His chapters also supply a most useful study of the cult of the cross in Northumbria and, in a stimulating section, point to the possibility of a significant role for Bede's ‘bogus monasteries’ in the development of Northumbrian stone crosses. He also has some cautionary observations about the limitations of our knowledge of liturgical practices in Northumbria,

Fred Orton's sections occupy the early part of the volume and are written in a very different style. For the first time, Ruthwell and Bewcastle are here subjected to the scrutiny of a scholar who trained as a historian of modern art, and brings to their study the theoretical understandings – and the language – of that training. This approach yields important fruit. Among other observations Orton very precisely identifies distinctions between the upper and lower stones at Ruthwell. He has identified new sources of information about the later history of the monument and he provides the most perceptive analysis yet achieved of the distinctions between the Majestas panels on the two crosses. He also pays welcome attention to the immediate and wider setting of the Bewcastle stone. Two contentious arguments, however, remain central to his chapters: that the present Ruthwell cross began life as a pillar to which an upper section with cross was later added; and that the Bewcastle carving should equally be seen as an obelisk and not as a cross which has lost its cruciform top. For this reviewer neither argument is convincing, and this scepticism is increased by a constant sense of ‘special pleading’ which runs through crucial sections. Thus, to strip Bewcastle of its original cross-like shape, Orton has to side-step the existence of a mortice hole in the top of the stone. More seriously he has to reject two early seventeenth-century descriptions of the carving. The first was by the Appleby schoolmaster, Reginald Bainbrigg, who describes the monument as crux whilst the second comes from Nicholas Roscarrock who refers to the ‘Crosse of Buechastell’. Neither writer was so linguistically impoverished that he could not have found other words to label the sculpture, and Roscarrock in particular, a Roman Catholic who had been tortured for his faith, would have been all too aware of the need for precision in choice of religious vocabulary. Both would have been attracted by the notion of a Roman-looking obelisk if it had been present. Orton's grounds for rejection of their evidence pushes theoretical objections to the very limits of credibility: ‘Both … were very learned men. They certainly knew what a cross was; but knowing what a cross is and seeing an object as a cross, referring to it as a cross, are not the same kinds of knowledge.’ Similarly, his case for Ruthwell as an obelisk which was then turned into a cross, though it has more justification, fails to confront Ó Carragáin's arguments about the medieval acceptability of variations in style within the same workshop, and about what Bainbrigg saw when he visited Ruthwell. None of this is to deny the existence of sculptured obelisks in Anglo-Saxon England. But the clear examples Orton cites, at Wolverhampton and Masham, are cylindrical not rectangular in section and his additional invocation of a rectangular shaft from Dewsbury ignores the fact that a cross-head from the site almost certainly belongs with that carving. Equally, the so-called ‘Acca's cross’ from Hexham is quoted as yet another early sculpture which previous scholarship has accepted as a cross despite being allegedly ‘cross-headless’. Yet the lower arm of its cross-head still survives unambiguously on the top of the monument in the abbey.

As the third member of the authorial triumvirate, Clare Lees discusses Ruthwell's runic inscription and its relationship to the Vercelli manuscript text of the Dream of the rood. This section is theoretically heavy and, in its emphasis on differences of context and text, often seems to beat at doors which have been open for some time. In summary, this is a book which excites both a greater understanding and further argument. It is essential reading for the student but should not be taken as the sole guide to these two important early Christian monuments.