Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Culture: Toller Lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text ed. by Charles Insley and Gale R. Owen-Crocker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Culture: Toller Lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text ed. by Charles Insley and Gale R. Owen-Crocker Greg Waite Insley, Charles, and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, eds, Transformation in Anglo-Saxon Culture: Toller Lectures on Art, Archaeology and Text, Oxford and Philadelphia, Oxbow Books, 2017; paperback; pp. xviii, 136; 30 colour and 16 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £38.00; ISBN 9781785704970. This volume contains five lectures delivered at Manchester University between 2009 and 2014, with an introduction by Gale Owen-Crocker, and an index. As proclaimed in the title, 'transformation' is a key theme explored in the lectures, highlighting the Anglo-Saxon capacity for 'adaptation to new circumstances' (p. xv). All contributors have long and distinguished careers and the experience and breadth of vision necessary to explore successfully such a theme. In different ways, each lecture provides a window into and a summation of their respective research interests. John Hines's contribution is titled 'A New Chronology and New Agenda: The Problematic Sixth Century'. This lecture arises out of the large-scale, multi-authored research report edited by Hines and Alex Bayliss, Anglo-Saxon Graves and Grave Goods of the 6th and 7th Centuries ad: A Chronological Framework (England Society for Medieval Archaeology, 2013). Hines discusses the team's revision of major material-cultural dates bounding the period of particular types of furnished burial, previously placed with the period c. 570–720, but, under the revised chronology, considered to span the period c. 530–680. Within the first half of this period, observed shifts in material culture in both male and female graves raise new questions about the environmental and sociopolitical circumstances that may lie behind the steep decline in burial with grave-goods around 570, followed [End Page 261] by a resurgence, particularly for female graves, after the first quarter of the seventh century. In 'Anglo-Saxon Art: Tradition and Transformation', Leslie Webster draws on themes explored in her major study, Anglo-Saxon Art (Cornell University Press, 2012). Ranging over six centuries of Anglo-Saxon art, from zoomorphic decoration and figural decoration on the earliest metalwork (and the brooding pottery figure on a cremation urn lid from Spong Hill) to the Bayeux Tapestry, Webster focuses on the nature of visual literacy and the decoding (as in riddles) of artistic motifs in the pagan period, running through their adaptation and fusion with imported traditions mainly introduced with the advent of Christianity. Both before and after this watershed in artistic traditions, the Anglo-Saxons succeeded in transforming traditions unique to their particular insular environment. Barbara Yorke's 'King Alfred and Weland: Tradition and Transformation at the Court of King Alfred' assesses the degree to which Alfred had transformed himself into a philosopher king (as his biographer Asser portrays him) in relation to the traditional expectations of a war leader. The appeal to Alfred of heroic and martial figures like Weland and Hercules, either already present or inserted into his translations, and his idiosyncratic treatment of free will in the translation of Boethius suggest (together with his portrayal in the Chronicle) that he wished to present himself as a martial figure as much as if not more than an intellectual one. Michelle Brown, in a wide-ranging lecture titled 'Strategies of Visual Literacy in Insular and Anglo-Saxon Book Culture', explores the 'complex cognitive challenges of fully integrated word, sound and image' (p. 99) initiated in book culture in early medieval Britain and Ireland. Brown's mastery of her field is evident in, for example, her exegesis of the Ezra portrait in Codex Amiatinus as encapsulating the dynamics of scholarship and pastoral care in early book production. In 'The Vercelli Book as a Context for The Dream of the Rood', Éamonn Ó'Carragáin examines how the poem fits into a context of thematically selected texts dealing with approaching death and Judgement. He considers the manuscript to be an old-fashioned one, reflecting the culture of pre-Benedictine reform houses of canons. Equally interesting is the author's discussion of the other two texts of the Dream in context: that is, on the Brussels Cross and the Ruthwell Cross respectively. This book will be essential...