Jane Hawkes has become one of the leading iconographers of Insular, more particularly Anglo-Saxon sculpture, and the volume under review does nothing to disappoint. The Sandbach Crosses: Sign and Significance in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture clearly demonstrates the depth of Insular scholarship from the last twenty-five years, something of which the art-historical establishment remains willfully oblivious. Introductory textbooks present Insular art as though nothing had been written since Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy in 1908, while Fred Orton’s blithe assumption that theory conquers all insults those who sweated interdisciplinary blood for years to reach a deeper understanding. Insular art demands attention to matters not unlike those that infuse the rest of medieval art, East or West, and Hawkes’s painstaking analysis of the interaction of text and object achieves a unified understanding of the whole.

The organization of the book follows a standard type. The introduction reviews the earliest surviving mentions of the site (Domesday Book) and its Anglo-Saxon sculptures (1585) in what was once the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia; the appearance before the Court of the Star Chamber and its release of iconoclasts responsible for destroying crosses in the Sandbach area (1614); the subsequent recorded movements of various cross-shaft fragments and their reconstruction in 1816. The two reassembled crosses now stand in the Market Place in Sandbach, Cheshire. Little decoration survives on five additional fragments collected in the Sandbach parish churchyard. Separate chapters cover the North Cross, South Cross, the churchyard fragments, and conclusions, with appendices providing complete descriptions of the two major crosses and the fragments.

The Sandbach North Cross offers an iconographical feast. Its east face displays the Adoration of the Magi above the central Crucifixion, with an unusual Adoration of the Manger below it; a Transfiguration scene appears above the Traditio Legis cum Clavis toward the bottom of the shaft. Christ is flanked by Mary and John in the Crucifixion, the ox, and the ass in the Adoration of the Manger, Elijah and Moses in the Transfiguration, and Peter and Paul in the Traditio Legis cum Clavis. Hawkes sees the visual repetition in terms of an iconographical unity provided by the ceremony of the Entrance of the Gospel before the celebration of the Eucharist, when the Gospel Book is carried into the church and placed on the altar, followed by the celebrant flanked by attendants. This liturgical practice was adopted in Rome at the beginning of the eighth century, and Hawkes follows Éamonn Ó Carragáin in detecting art-historical evidence for its introduction in Anglo-Saxon England by the mid-eighth century. A Greek commentary on the Entrance of the Gospel written by Germanus of Constantinople ca. 700 compares the Entrance of the Gospel to Christ’s entry into the world, worshipped by angels, and additionally invokes the Adoration of the Manger, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Transfiguration in a procession preceding the celebration of the Eucharist and its acknowledgement of the Passion and Resurrection. The commentary was only translated into Latin in the mid-ninth century, probably after the construction of the Sandbach North Cross, but it draws together iconographical and liturgical concepts already circulating in the Latin West.

The Adoration of the Magi abandons the format of the other scenes on the east face of the North Cross: a canopied throne frames the seated Virgin who faces three gift-bearing Magi busts, each in its own niche. The Child looks toward the Virgin and raises one hand to her breast, ignoring the Magi, in an apparent combination of an Adoration scene with a more hieratic depiction of the Virgin and Child. The source of that image obviously derived from the same setting that informed the Virgin and Child miniature in the Book of Kells and the related scenes on the contemporary crosses of the early medieval Iona School. Accepting suggestions that Isabel Henderson, Michelle Brown, and I have made of artistic links between Mercia and the Columban community centered on Iona, Hawkes points to the participation in southern English church councils by the bishop of Mayo, which was founded by Colmán of Lindisfarne (itself a daughter of Iona) after his defeat by Saint Wilfrid at the Synod of Whitby in 664 and an intervening sojourn at Iona.

The central grouping on the west face of the North Cross sets an unusual Bearing of the Cross on the Road to Calvary above the Annunciation. A soldier leads the bound Christ with a rope, while another soldier precedes Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross. Each of the four figures of the Road to Calvary occupies its own niche, as do the two standard figures of the Annunciation. The framing tendency is peculiar to Sandbach. Depictions of the Road to Calvary are rare before the Ottonian period, although examples are found on the wooden doors of Sta. Sabina and among the frescoes in Sta. Maria Antiqua and later at Müstair. Hawkes has benefited from access to Ó Carragáin’s long-awaited forthcoming book on the liturgical and exegetical background of Anglo-Saxon sculpture, where he apparently expands his earlier work on the association of the Passion and the Annunciation, both celebrated on the same date in the calendar. The two are linked thematically by Christ’s humility in experiencing a squalid human birth and dying a miserable human death.

The inhabited vinescroll on the south face of the Sandbach North Cross is of a Mercian type, with cognates in the Book of Cerne and the Canterbury Bible. The north face features a winged beast with a triple-forked tongue above eleven figures individually placed in a series of stepped frames. The composition has been identified as a Pentecostal scene, with the beast doing duty as the Holy Spirit, but Hawkes argues instead for a representation of figures ascending a ladder to heaven, a scene otherwise unknown before later medieval Byzantine art, where it is found, for example, on a twelfth-century Mt. Sinai icon. Despite the centuries between them, Jennifer O’Reilly has shown that the devil in the Book of Kells Temptation miniature corresponds closely to the devils in the same icon.

The Sandbach South Cross is more problematic. Original decoration only survives on the lower half of the west face, within a tightly meshed border of narrow interlace. Hawkes rejects earlier identifications of the whole panel as a Final Resurrection, a variation on the Last Judgment, with Christ the Judge between Peter and Paul above the dead rising from their graves, a cramped jumble of small niches. Hawkes sees the upper group of three figures as another Transfiguration, reflecting Insular and continental exegetical texts that considered the Transfiguration a confirmation of the Second Coming. Instead of seeing the lower set of figures in niches as a single grouping, Hawkes follows J. D. Bu’Lock’s identification of the figures in the upper niches as an Adoration of the Virgin and Child, drawing comparisons with the mosaics commissioned by Pope John VII (705–707) for Old St. Peter’s, the eighth-century Sta. Maria in Trastevere icon, and the late-eighth-century Enger Reliquary. The figures in the lower niches are even more badly abraded than those above, but Hawkes tentatively identifies them collectively as a Veneration of Christ.

The interlace border on the east face of the Sandbach South Cross frames a vertical series of lozenges, with bosses at their corners and human and animal figures filling the triangular interspaces between the lozenges and border. Hawkes relates the composition to the late-eighth-century Tasillo Chalice, but there may also be a metallic echo here of the trellised vinescroll patterns that Henderson and I have discussed. The figures within the lower lozenges may be seated, rather than standing (as Hawkes sees them), the bosses at their sides doubling as the rounded ends of the bolsters used by seated Evangelists elsewhere in Insular art. The “exact interpretation of the east face remains elusive” (103), but Hawkes is right to suspect intimations of the prominent lozenge in the Book of Kells Chi-Rho and analogous devices in Carolingian Majestas Christi images. Inspired by the north face of the North Cross, the north face of the later Sandbach South Cross has a series of individual figures in stepped frames, while a set of the Ancestors of Christ in round-headed niches completes the south face of the South Cross.

Lack of contemporary documentation and chronological insecurity often drive non-Insular specialists to dismiss the field altogether, while those within the field know that this is the real art history: the objects document themselves and textual validation must be sought elsewhere. After reviewing figural iconography and style, along with animal and foliate decoration, Hawkes dates the Sandbach North Cross to the early ninth century, with the more decorative South Cross slightly later but still within the ninth century. She is to be commended for adopting a conventional chronology, one that owes a debt to the hard-won conclusions of the ongoing Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, although it has suffered attack by Fred Orton (critical theory offers little help here), while a more radical chronological revisionism currently affects other areas of Insular art, particularly in Pictland.

Hawkes has mastered the liturgical and exegetical context and the wide-ranging artistic comparanda necessary to her task with a breadth of scholarship not uncommon among the greatest Insular art historians, although it remains unrecognized outside the field, while introductory art-history textbooks continue to trot out hackneyed comparisons so trite they beggar description. It is worth noting that the author completed all of her degrees in the School of English of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where her Ph.D. supervisor, Richard Bailey, held a chair of Anglo-Saxon and Viking Age studies. She now teaches art history in York, something that would not be permitted in American academia, with its narrower vision, unless she were trained in philosophy and affected critical theory. One is reminded that Françoise Henry, who wrote her Docteur ès Lettres thesis under Henri Focillon, first taught French at University College Dublin.