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Exhibition Catalogue: Claire Breay and Joanna Story, eds., Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War . London, The British Library, 2018. 424 pp., full color illustration and maps, £25, ISBN: 9780712352079. To enter the British Library's landmark exhibition, visitors assumed King Edgar's place in the famous frontispiece to the 966 New Minster Charter, the image that also serves as the cover to Claire Breay and Joanna Story's intricate catalogue (where Edgar returns to his usual spot on fol. 2v; cat. 112, click link for an image). The male and female saints who ordinarily flank the king appeared as sentinels on the doorframe, ushering visitors into the exhibition space as their right hands holding attributes bent around the corners of the posts, making a gateway of cross and key. Having been greeted by figures due to reappear in the second half of the show, visitors next approached the fifth–sixth-century starting point for the exhibition's long chronological arc. A large photograph of green forest defined the initial installation space, along with a wall map depicting the movements of Picts, Dal Riata, Irish, Britons, Franks, Saxons, Frisians, Angles, and Jutes (this map inaugurating a magnificent set distributed throughout the galleries and abbreviated in the catalogue, at pp. 398–403). The first vitrine set up a vivid confrontation, presenting the enigmatic earthenware figure sitting elbows to knees on the fifth-century urn lid found at Spong Hill, Norfolk (click link for an image). The opening of the exhibition established several themes key to the projects of the catalogue and installation. Beginning with the Spong Man's stare, “Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms” staged an extraordinary set of encounters with a range of objects, including 130 manuscripts. All the objects embody the centrality of the written word and its crafted media of transmission in the medieval history of (primarily) the land that is now England.1 The curators and catalogue authors effectively emphasized objects’ histories of movement as a factor just as crucial to the show's story as the works’ original … |
