Between the Embodied Eye and Living World: Clonmacnoise’s Cross of the Scriptures

Abstract

More than two hundred monumental, carved stone crosses survive from medieval Ireland. Art historians have cast them either as romantic survivals from an exotic, pagan past or as scientific specimens requiring classification and categorization by an objective, detached observer. Shifting to focus on the whole iconographic program and drawing from phenomenological methodologies resituate the tenth-century cross of the scriptures at Clonmacnoise within a living, dynamic world, demonstrating how changing perspectives, audiences, times of day, seasons, weathers, viewing pathways, and proximity to the beholder elicit a series of encounters with a polymorphic, performative object.