The History of British Art, Volume 1: 600–1600 is the first of an ambitious new three-volume series produced by the Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain. Edited by Tim Ayers, this volume is, temporally at least, the most ambitious of the three, covering the period of the conversion of Britain under Augustine around 600 AD to a rather more difficult period to account for, ca. 1600. The latter date—which denies the normal boundary for the British Middle Ages with the Dissolution of the Monasteries—does much to challenge still prevalent historiographical problems surrounding the inexact relationship between the periodization and stylistic change of British art on either side of the years around 1540.

The volume is divided into nine major thematic chapters, each beginning with a generous essay detailing a specific range of problems over the thousand-year span. The themes selected are topical. The book begins with a chapter by Jane Geddes entitled “Images and Ideas of Britain 600–1600” (to which I shall return), and continues to discuss the relationships of British art to the arts of the Continent, the patronage of the church and the secular aristocracy, the status of the artist, the problematics of the religious image, the uses of art in articulating cultural and sexual difference, and the much expected historical and historiographical chapters “Art and the Reformation” and “Perceptions of British Medieval Art.” All but the last chapter are usefully accompanied by a series of short case studies on major monuments, themes, or artists (such as “The Wilton Diptych,” “John Thornton of Coventry,” “Picturing Romance,” and “The Lindisfarne Gospels”). This arrangement is well-suited to the present context because it allows for a panoramic survey of the material followed by close exegesis on major issues that would otherwise have been overlooked. Typical of Yale’s recent art-history publications, this volume is exceptionally well produced, carefully and lavishly illustrated, and overall a pleasure to read and hold. Scholars and general readers alike owe Ayers a debt of gratitude for producing such a beautiful book.

At the heart of this volume is an attempt—sometimes explicit, other times implicit—to define the boundaries of “British art” during the Middle Ages. Geddes’s excellent opening chapter addresses this idea directly, thereby positioning it at the thematic center of the volume as a whole. As Geddes notes, until 1603 when the Crowns of England and Scotland were unified, “the concept of Britain as a whole barely existed” (20), thereby laying the grounds for a densely layered interpretation of the problematics of “Britishness” over the previous millennium. To avoid the problems of semantics, Geddes avoids “Britain” and “The British Isles” and employs instead “The Isles” (following Norman Davies) as a more apposite term “at times when art may indeed be developing in different directions from obvious political events” (22). This healthy skepticism is continued in Ute Engel’s chapter, “British Art and the Continent,” which usefully begins with a historiographical look at traditions of defining Britishness in early art-historical writings by comparing Dagobert Frey’s overtly fascist Englisches Wesen im Spiegel seiner Kunst (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1942) with Nikolaus Pevsner’s anglophilic The Englishness of English Art (London: Architectural Press, 1956). Engel proceeds, as most authors do in the pages of this volume, chronologically. Notably, she is in agreement with recent meditations on architecture and Englishness (rather than Britishness) characterized by the work of Peter Draper (The Formation of English Gothic: Architecture and Identity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); she argues that the architecture of the Early Gothic period (or “Early English”) can be read as an analogue for the development of a national consciousness that, while borrowing from French Gothic, provided a studied departure from it, based in part on an adherence to established English “aesthetic values” for decoration, variety, etc. (something which returns us to Pevsner’s earlier speculations).

Julian Luxford’s paper, “The Patronage of the Church and its Purposes,” provides a rich account of the historical dynamics of patronage in the period (building upon his recent book on the subject: The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–1540: A Patronage History, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005). His chapter provides a useful and varied account (to quote his own use of utilitas and varietas) of both the documentary sources and the limits of their interpretation within art-historical studies, and draws particular attention to the pitfalls of modern ahistorical readings of medieval documents (such as Matthew Paris’s well-known passage [H. T. Riley, ed., Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani, Rolls Series, London, 1867–89, I, 280] in which he indicates that an Abbot would regularly be called a “patron” of an artwork out of reverence [ob reverentiam] rather than because he had anything to do with the commission itself). The other papers here worthy of particular note are Phillip Lindley’s “The ‘Artist’: Institutions, Training, and Status” and Jennifer O’Reilly’s “Signs of the Cross: Medieval Religious Images and the Interpretation of Scripture.” Lindley’s paper provides a stunning panoramic survey of the craft and status of the “artist,” with a refreshingly broad view of the artistic discourses between “Britain” and the Continent throughout the Middle Ages. Taking as her subject the central image of medieval Catholicism—the crucifixion—O’Reilly expands her earlier meditations on Anglo-Saxon crucifixion imagery (for example, in “The Rough-Hewn Cross in Anglo-Saxon Art,” Michael Ryan, ed., Ireland and Insular Art, A.D. 500–1200, Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1987, 153–58) to construct a narrative of art and theological change that may be said to define English medieval spirituality as well as any short essay now in print. These five chapters provide the backbone of the book: each not only makes a valuable contribution to the volume but also stands alone and deserves to be widely read as surveys for students in the discipline.

Arriving in print in 2008, the very idea of a new series on “British art” demands comment—indeed, it demands more comment than is possible in the context of a brief review. The definitions of British art have changed greatly in recent years, and naturally feature as part of a discourse on postcolonialism in current art-historical discussion (witness the 2010 College Art Association conference session focusing on the changing conceptions of British art in the era of globalization). As general editor for the three volumes, David Bindman offers a loose definition that characterizes the approach of the series as a whole: “One of the chief aims of these volumes is to reinterpret British art in the light of Britain’s inherent instabilities of identity, which still define it in a global world. British art is not, therefore, limited to artists born in Britain, but encompasses art made in Britain, or made abroad by artists resident in Britain or its colonies” (13).

Such a characterization of “British” art, and by extension “Britishness,” is challenging: depending on one’s perspective it is either a comfortably liberal and all-encompassing definition or one that still feels embedded in the discourses it claims to question and critique, and if so, it is debatable if not highly contentious. If Bindman’s definition is challenging to modern (and especially non-British) readers, it may nevertheless be considered topical for the period covered by this book, which witnessed the subjugation of England by Scandinavians and the Normans, and in turn the Anglo-Norman “appropriation” of Ireland in 1169, and Edward I’s (1272–1307) conquests of Wales and Scotland—the latter campaigns being the subjects of some of the headiest nationalist political spin-doctoring known from the High Middle Ages. As this volume argues, the creation of art in Britain between 600 and 1600 was regularly the product of the collisions of cultures—Norman and Anglo-Saxon (the Bayeux Tapestry), Anglo-Saxon and Italian (the influential Gospels of St. Augustine at Canterbury), England and France (the rebuilding of the eastern arm of Canterbury Cathedral by William of Sens), English and Welsh (Caernarvon Castle), etc. In the Middle Ages at least, the production of art within “the Isles” ultimately structured many of the subsequent discourses on Englishness, even if in many cases the awareness of this by their patrons and makers is debatable.

While the volume holds together very well, it is in itself not free of the discourses on Britain and Britishness that it isolates as a field of study. It must be noted and arguably regretted that a wider net was not cast when looking for contributors. The volume is populated almost entirely with British writers or writers in British institutions—many of which cluster around that central institution of English medieval art history, the British Archaeological Association—leaving many of the most prominent specialists on Medieval Britain in Europe and North America almost totally unrepresented. There can be little doubt that a more diverse, less conventional, and more international list of contributors would have imagined the problematics of “British art” very differently indeed. This alone reminds us of the still prevalent national and nationalistic boundaries in the practice of English medieval art history.

It is perhaps worth asking some larger questions about this project in the context of current debates on Britishness that are raging throughout the United Kingdom, and which frame the project as a whole. Although this review only considers the first volume, the series seems poised to comment upon Britain’s own remarkably fractured sense of identity—in the Middle Ages, as now. As a major statement of what “British art” is or might be, this series may be understood in the context of what many cultural historians currently consider a pivotal period in renegotiating a British identity that is postcolonial but also now re-colonial, as Britain becomes conscious of its own “colonial” status—artistically, culturally, politically, economically—at the hands of its former “colonies” in North America, Asia, and elsewhere. Indeed, it is, it seems, emblematic that this project was not conceived entirely in Britain but was negotiated between the Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain—a major publishing enterprise made possible and affordable through close ties to a central U.S. art-historical institution. For these reasons and others, this excellent volume does much to reframe debates about Britishness in the Middle Ages and today and will inspire healthy debates in both arenas.