The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe: Making, Meaning, Preserving, ed. Spike Bucklow, Richard Marks and Lucy Wrapson

Abstract

The genesis of this publication was a conference held in Cambridge in April 2012, prompted by the extensive analytical work on East Anglian rood screens carried out by Spike Bucklow and Lucy Wrapson of the University’s Hamilton Kerr Institute. This explains the (intentionally) hybrid nature of the volume, which combines chapters ranging from the technical (which are limited to England) to more wide-ranging surveys taking in the contributions of Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Scandinavia. It demonstrably does not (and does not claim to) provide a complete overview of the subject, either for the British Isles or the Continent, and is certainly none the worse for that. Paul Binski sets out the aims of the conference in his introduction, which was to combine rather than to compartmentalise art and science in the study of medieval material culture, and to demonstrate how one discipline can inform the other—the latter point being developed with conviction by Spike Bucklow in his chapter ‘Science and the Screen’. The chapters by Lucy Wrapson (on a new methodological approach for interpreting workshop activity and dating medieval church screens in East Anglia), Hugh Harrison and Jeffrey West (the construction and practice of West Country rood screens), and Lucy Wrapson and Eddie Sinclair (the polychromy of Devon screens) continue the theme and provide useful compendia of the physical properties and make-up of several discrete groups of screens. Interleaved between these chapters are the contributions of Richard Marks (‘Framing the Rood in Medieval England and Wales’), who in characteristically stimulating fashion situates the crucifix and its screen in their original context in and above the chancel arch and adumbrates the ‘social frame’ within which the art works were produced; of David Griffith, who investigates the texts and the deletion of inscriptions on late medieval English screens; and of Julian Luxford, who brilliantly interrogates the striking iconography of the sixteen kings on the dado of the screen at Catfield in Norfolk, probably of c.1430–75.