England used to be filled with crosses: crosses painted on the walls of churches, crosses mounted on rood screens, crosses used in processions for the liturgy. Almost all of these crosses, including crucifixes, have been destroyed since the sixteenth century, making it very difficult for modern scholars to understand what they meant. But to understand them, first we need to find them – in itself no easy feat, as Munns's admirable interpretive survey makes clear.

Munns's primary purpose in Cross and culture is to catalogue the ways in which the cross was part of Anglo-Norman religious culture. He explains at the outset that he purposefully limited himself to the use of the cross in ‘religious culture and imagination’ (p.5), itself a potentially problematic category for a culture so steeped in religious imagery. So, for example, he does not treat crosses as they appear on legal and commercial documents or coinage, on ordinary funerary sculpture, or in gestures. Even within the limitations of crosses used in ‘religious’ contexts, however, he is spoiled for types.

Particularly welcome is the attention that Munns gives to crosses that appear in imagery other than that associated primarily with the event of the crucifixion. Indeed, one of the earliest images that he highlights – a late eleventh-century wall-painting discovered as recently as 1992 at Houghton-on-the-Hill in Norfolk – depicts not the historical crucifixion so often associated with Anselm of Canterbury's vivid meditations on the suffering of Christ, but rather the Trinity in the form of the Gnadenstuhl or Throne of Mercy. This is one of the earliest known examples of this iconography, here painted over the altar in a small church in East Anglia, whose then Norman bishop, Herbert de Losinga, had close associations with the abbey of Fécamp in Normandy. Fécamp was dedicated, like Herbert's new cathedral at Norwich, to the Holy Trinity.

As Munns points out, citing Herbert Kessler, with the image from Houghton-on-the-Hill already we are in a rather different place from that which we have come to expect from previous studies of the importance of the crucifixion in medieval devotion and religious thought: ‘[The] Gnadenstuhl image attests to a ready capacity for complexity in high medieval crucifixion imagery, and militates against our assumption of too crude a dialectic in the medieval understanding of the divine-human nature of the crucified Christ’ (p.52). In his opening discussion of Anselm's theology, Munns makes much the same point. While modern scholars (myself included) have tended to focus on Anselm's prayers and meditations as instances of devotion to Christ in his humanity, what the Gnadenstuhl imagery as well as Anselm's own theory of the atonement emphasise is rather the importance of the relationship between Christ's crucifixion and his coming in judgement, both his humanity and divinity at the same time.

Munns brings the same sensitivity to context to his discussion of crosses across many different theological, devotional and liturgical milieu: the use of crosses and crucifixes in the meditations on the Passion encouraged by hermits like Godric of Finchale and Cistercians like Aelred of Rievaulx in his instructions to his sister; crosses used in the consecration of churches (evidenced only from the late twelfth century) and in the decorative metalwork schema on church doors (four extant examples); crosses on baptismal fonts (far more examples); crucifixes hung from the ceiling in churches and mounted on rood screens (all destroyed by the sixteenth-century reformers, with the exception of a single surviving head and foot from Gloucestershire); portable altars (one extant); altar and processional crosses (four extant that have been usually assigned to the twelfth century, none of which gives any clear indication of how they were used); metalwork corpora that would have been attached to such crosses (approximately three dozen extant in public collections, by far the most numerous iconographic type in Munns's survey); the crucifixion depicted narratively in individual psalters from Canterbury, St Albans, Bury St Edmunds and Winchester, and in six from northern England; crosses associated with the representation of the death of Thomas Becket; reliquaries containing fragments of the True Cross; and rites for bestowing the cross on pilgrims to the Holy Land, especially those associated with the crusades.

Each of these contexts presents its own particular difficulties of interpretation. The crosses associated with the hermits’ meditations seem to point to concerns with transcending the sensory experiences upon which the meditations depend, while the metalwork on church doors seems to point more to the association of the cross with the Tree of Life. The crosses on baptismal fonts challenge the argument that the cross was primarily associated with the sacrament of the mass, while those on the rood screens were (arguably) often paired with representations of Christ in Majesty, for example in wall-paintings. The extant corpora suggest that it may have been craftwork rather than theology driving the development of the three-nail crucifixion iconography, while at the same time challenging the argument that Christ was shown less – rather than more – regally over the course of the twelfth century. Throughout Munns is careful to mark the limits of the available evidence, while steering clear of more sweeping interpretive claims.

While this reader is sorry that Munns did not choose to venture further into the more affective elements associated with the devotion to the cross, I appreciate the need for caution. With an image so multifaceted as the cross, it is hard to know where to start. What Munns's catalogue makes abundantly clear is how central the cross was to almost every aspect of Anglo-Norman religious life, from the most sophisticated theological meditations on the meaning of Christ's death to the everyday practice of the liturgy. Whether this means that the ‘rough-hewn wood’ (p.274) of the cross was more accessible to the ordinary medieval Christian than the loftiness of Christ enthroned is, however, another question altogether.