The focus of this volume is the former West Riding, now western Yorkshire, a part of England of great cultural potential in the early Middle Ages, containing as it did the residual British kingdom of Elmet, lands forming the disputed border between the kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria, and comprising also some of the estates of the great St Wilfrid, bishop of York and abbot of Ripon, himself a prime mover in the restoration of Roman order both in church discipline and the visual arts. Throughout this volume the location and character of the surviving sculpture is carefully assessed as evidence for the otherwise uncharted social and cultural history of the area. An important introductory chapter by David Parsons on the inscribed sculpture, for example, establishes a direct textual link in the eighth or ninth century between the major sculptural centres of Dewsbury and Thornhill, a connection, as Parson observes, not noticed in the historical commentaries and suggestive of a shared vernacular textual culture. More generally his analysis raises important issues about the extent and nature of early literacy in both the Latin language and the vernacular in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. Of interest too is the dual function of inscriptions in western Yorkshire where they are used mostly for vernacular memorial purposes but in two instances as captions in Latin for figurative scenes such as are found on the Ruthwell Cross. The volume is dedicated to John Higgitt, who was responsible for the inscriptions in many previous volumes. Before his untimely death he contributed here the catalogue entries for the inscriptions in Roman script. In the preface David Wilson expresses eloquently how greatly the loss of John Higgitt is felt by all those involved with the Corpus project.

The principal author of this survey, Elizabeth Coatsworth, is one of the home team, having been associated with the work of the Corpus since 1969. Behind her she has had the support of Derek Craig as editor, and of course, of the General Editor, Rosemary Cramp. On the production side one must congratulate all concerned on the quality of the illustrations, particularly the generous provision of key images at different scales, or taken from different angles. The bulk of the material consists of fragments of crosses, but there are also important examples of architectural sculpture at Ledsham and Rothwell. Much of the sculpture is lavishly decorated with interlace, and often elegant foliate and animal motifs, and with figurative art, some very superior, notably at Otley where there is a clear reflection of the classicising contacts of St Wilfrid. Although the style of the figurative art in the region rarely achieves this distinction, the middling style of Dewsbury, and a quantity of radically stylised figures, maintain a preoccupation with complex figure scenes, some so worn as to make interpretation difficult. What has survived is a tantalising hotch-potch of imagery, Christian and pagan-mythological, including the well-known depiction of Leeds 1, of the Germanic hero Weland straddled on his ‘flying machine’. The curious display of the human figure, the four gymnasts on the cross-head at Bilton in Ainsty, after due consideration are hopefully interpreted here as ‘men casting off the bonds of sin’. Their presence on the four arms of the cross oddly parallels the Lombard habit of decorating the four arms of the cross with four human heads of four figures. Metalwork is the model worth considering here. Coatsworth's sensitive response to the artistic competence of Otley 2 involves just such reference to metalwork, likening the refined balance of ornament to that of the elegant gilt-bronze Rupertus Cross, from Bischofshofen, Austria. Coatsworth's particular expertise lies in the iconography of the crucifixion and in general in this volume she tends to support or make a case for the conventional Christian iconography such as is archived in Schiller's great work (1971–86). Consequently the principal figure on Dewsbury 6C, is evidently not, as one might think, a demon wielding a pitchfork, but the Virgin Mary nursing the Christ child. The difficulty of the pose of the tonsured figure on Dewsbury 9A, nestling up against the legs of a standing angel, is waived away by the assertion, ‘Surely it is a representation of St Matthew accompanied by his man/angel symbol?’ Given that the two figures grouped below the ringed cross on the shaft at Addingham are loosely compared here to the donor figures in the New Minster Liber vitae, it seems strange that the scene on the shaft at Kirkby Wharfe, where a male and a female figure clutch the slender stem of the cross, is read as a crucifixion accompanied by the Virgin and St John, rather than as figures venerating the victory standard of the cross, in the spirit of the New Minster's Emma and Cnut, or indeed of Helena and Constantine, whose connections with Yorkshire might surely be visualised somewhere.

As one contemplates the frontispiece of this volume, a map of England showing the coverage now achieved by the Corpus, it becomes apparent that completion is now in its sights. This admirably ordered mass of detailed artifactual and intellectual evidence relevant to the understanding of Anglo-Saxon culture, as it evolved from immediately post-Roman times to the time of the Scandinavian settlement, to which this painstaking and thoroughly referenced volume contributes significantly, is one which all ecclesiastical historians of this period will want to utilise to the full.