A Box of Alabaster

Abstract

Of late, and unexpectedly, alabaster sculpture has become a fashionable topic with medievalists. This may have something to do with its material and visual character, which seems to generate an irrational sort of excitement. Certainly, when discovered, a fragment of alabaster sculpture will usually get more attention than one made of another sort of stone. It may also be that alabaster, in its suavity and religious associations, is more rhetorically generous than other materials. Whatever the reason, the past five years have produced, along with many essays and catalogue entries, a long monograph by Kim Woods, an important thesis by Lloyd de Beer, and essay-collections edited by Marian Debaene and Zuleika Murat.1 Reassessing Alabaster Sculpture in Medieval England is an interesting addition to this literature, not least because it is the only book on English alabasters organised and mainly written by scholars based in North America, as opposed to Europe. North American work on late medieval English art often has a literary orientation absent in British scholarship: as the poetics of alabaster sculpture arise from medieval literature as much as anything else, the reader may expect subtle and refreshing insights, particularly given the distinction and experience of the authors. This expectation is to some extent met, but the book as a whole does not say as much about its subject as its title might suggest. To justify this opinion, and manage the potential reader’s expectations, a little more needs to be said about the book’s focus and scholarly context before turning to the essays.