The concept of difference unites the essays in Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. Though comprised of six papers from a day-long seminar at the 1998 International Congress at Leeds, this collection arrives in two parts: essays by Jane Hawkes and Catherine E. Karkov look at relatively little-known examples of Anglo-Saxon eighth and ninth-century sculpture, and contributions by Fred Orton, Richard N. Bailey, Ian Wood, and Éamonn Ò Carragáin engage in an often-argumentative conversation about approaches to the two best-known early-Anglo-Saxon stone sculptures, the monuments at Ruthwell and Bewcastle. The benefit of the collection lies in the chance for the contributors to address directly each other’s work and to explore their disagreements, producing a valuable debate about the interpretation and approaches to early Anglo-Saxon sculpture.

Following a short and politic introduction by Bailey, Hawkes’s essay, “Reading Stone,” compares the varieties of readings performed by antiquarians, modern scholars, and audiences contemporary to the manufacture of the ninth-century crosses at Sandbach (Chesire). Since it is likely that the North Cross at Sandbach was once painted and metalled, Hawkes questions how the presence of color might emphasize specific relationships among the figured panels. More generally, she establishes that the early medieval monument differed materially and interpretively from the one we see today. In “Naming and Renaming: The Inscription of Gender in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture,” Karkov examines a diverse range of artifacts, including seventh/eighth century grave slabs from monastic cemeteries, figural scenes (in particular, those of Martha and Mary and of Anthony and Paul in the desert from the top of the Ruthwell Cross), and a sadly mutilated, fragmentary cross known as Hackness 1. Her interpretations concern the understanding of gender in inscriptions, especially in terms of the masculine or feminine voice with which an object might be said to “speak,” expressing meaning enigmatically or multivalently, as in Anglo-Saxon riddles. Karkov describes the effect of the inscriptions she studies through the notion of “degendered difference” defined as a “state in which difference does not imply inequality, and does not rely on gender, and where, in fact, we may observe an attempt to break down, or at least avoid, what we have come to see as traditional gendered roles and images” (31–32). Somewhat paradoxically, she postulates such “degendered” expressions as distinctly feminine strategies, the possible products of Northumbrian double houses ruled by abbesses.

Orton’s “Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments: Some Strictures on Similarity; Some Questions of History” is the pivotal essay in the collection. Developing and extending arguments made elsewhere (see his articles in Art History 21 and in Northumbria’s Golden Age, ed. Jane Hawkes and Susan Mills [Stroud, U.K.: Sutton, 1999]), Orton revisits his contention that the Ruthwell monument is comprised of two stones that were carved and erected at different times (though just how long an interval between the two is a matter of debate). More than the other essays, this contribution presents a clearly stated theoretical framework, as Orton seeks to underpin his critique of “post-war, archeologically-informed art history of Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture” (65) that he attributes to the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (an ongoing collaborative effort to photograph, record, and describe surviving monuments). Linking theoretical concerns to his own close observation of the Ruthwell monument, Orton argues that Ruthwell is too often seen through the lens of perceived similarities with the other well-known figural carvings at Bewcastle. He seeks to “take a little bit of difference into Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture” (70) by differentiating the Ruthwell and Bewcastle “crosses” in terms of shape, decoration, and context, hence, in the processes of interpretation. (The quotation marks here refer to Orton’s contention that the standing stones at Ruthwell and Bewcastle were not originally intended to be crosses, but instead columns and/or obelisks.) The primary difference that Orton develops here between the monuments is that the carvings at Bewcastle present a predominantly secular viewpoint, one pivoting on a sense of time focused on memory and the succession of (earthly) generations, whereas the Ruthwell monument is predominantly monastic.

The remaining three contributors counter different aspects of Orton’s arguments as they advance their own interpretations. Bailey contests Orton’s charges of “corpus scholarship” in his short essay, “Innocent from the Great Offence.” He briefly describes and defends the aims and methodologies of the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture and reviews the evidence for identifying the Bewcastle monument as a “cross.” Wood, meanwhile, acknowledges Orton’s contribution to the study of early-Anglo-Saxon sculpture in his chapter, “Ruthwell: Contextual Searches,” before reevaluating the multiple historical contexts for the construction and interpretation of Ruthwell and Bewcastle. While Orton seeks to problematize the notion of “context” as a general, theoretical construct, Wood refigures the specific problem of the “monastic audience” of early Anglo-Saxon sculpture. He substantiates just how difficult it is to grasp what a “monastic audience” encompasses by demonstrating how varied monastic experience in Northumbria was informed by gender, religious orientation, cultural distinctions, and social and political connections. The longest contribution in the collection is Ò Carragáin’s “Between Annunciation and Visitation: Spiritual Birth and the Cycles of the Sun on the Ruthwell Cross: A Response to Fred Orton.” Though acceding to Orton’s demonstration that the Ruthwell monument consists of an upper stone and lower stone sculpted in two separate campaigns, Ò Carragáin stresses the unity of the Ruthwell monument by focusing on one figured panel, with a contested identification of either “Martha and Mary” or the “Visitation.” In his view, this panel visually resonates with the “Annunciation” found lower on the cross, the two in turn bracketing two scenes of the “Man Born Blind” and the “Woman Taken in Adultery.” This visual sequence, he argues, coalesces around a Lenten theme of conversion, repentance, and baptism. He stresses the integral nature of the vernacular poem carved on the cross to its overall design; the poem verbalizes themes that he claims are consistent with his reading of a relationship between the Visitation-Annunciation sequence and gospel lectionaries originating in Rome. In his view, the monument was always meant to be a cross (in the poem, the Cross, like Mary, bears Christ)—countering Orton’s claim to the contrary.

This said, it must be noted that the title of the collection seems to promise a different kind of book than what these essays provide. While “stone sculpture” is indeed the focus of all the contributors, the essays cover only a limited sample of Anglo-Saxon sculpture prior to the Viking invasions of the late ninth century (thus, as Bailey points out in his introduction, the collection covers an uncharacteristic sample of surviving “Anglo-Saxon” sculpture in terms of number, type, style, and content). Likewise, “theorizing” may seem to be a rather strong word for the actions of most of the essays, at least if we take the term to mean something beyond a general sense of a focus on methodological flaws in others scholars’ work or a generalized “seeing, making sense of, telling” (71). Only in Orton’s essay do we find any clear attempt to construct an interpretive, theoretical framework (in his case, through reference to T. S. Kuhn, Nelson Goodman, Michel Foucault, and T. J. Clark). Therefore, Orton’s essay literally plays a critical role in this collection’s claim to “theorize” Anglo-Saxon sculpture, not only because of his explicit theoretical stance but also because it is his work to which others work against or respond. It is his theme of “difference,” purposefully or not, that in hindsight unites the remaining essays, as Hawkes differentiates the audience or “readers” of the cross at Sandbach; Karkov elucidates difference even as she seeks to elide it in her concept of “degendered difference”; Wood differentiates among the types of potential monastic audiences; or as Ò Carragáin distinguishes between the reading of private, scholarly individuals and communities of the faithful.

The difference this collection makes for those interested in early medieval art is to illustrate the strains in Anglo-Saxon scholarship between those who prize traditional archeological, iconographic, and stylistic approaches and those who seek to inject modern critical theory into the mix. The resistance to theory lies, in part, in an anxious concern for the potentially open-ended way that theory complicates the discovery of dates of construction and the fixing of interpretations (expressed here in Woods’s apologetic summary of his own contribution: “… when we say that Ruthwell was monastic, we are not saying anything that is in any way precise” (118). But, as Orton summarizes, one goal of theorizing is “to make a historia of several possible moments of production and use” (91). What is useful in this book is that it makes such historia possible, bringing together multiple views in such a way that permits them to enter into a dialogue, one that permits us to relish (almost in spite of the individual author’s desires at times) the differences and contradictions of those stories. Although students of Anglo-Saxon England often remain resistant to the inroads of critical theory, the field is rapidly changing, and Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture will contribute to that change.