New readings demonstrate the centrality of the rood to the visual,
material and devotional cultures of the Middle Ages, its richness and
complexity.
The rood was central to medieval Christianity and its visual culture:
Christ's death on the cross was understood as the means by which
humankind was able to gain salvation, and depictions of the cross, and
Christ's death upon it, were ubiquitous.
This volume brings together contributions offering a new perspective on
the medieval rood - understood in its widest sense, as any kind of
cross - within the context of Britain and Ireland, over a wide periodof
time which saw significant political and cultural change. In doing so,
it crosses geographical, chronological, material, and functional
boundaries which have traditionally characterised many previous
discussions of the medieval rood. Acknowledging and exploring the
capacity of the rood to be both universal and specific to particular
locations and audiences, these contributions also tease out the ways in
which roods related to one another, as well as how they related to their
physical and cultural surroundings, often functioning in dialogue with
other images and the wider devotional topography - both material and
mental - in which they were set.
The chapters consider roods in a variety of media and contexts: the
monumental stone crosses of early medieval England, twelfth-century
Ireland, and, spreading further afield, late medieval Galicia; the
three-dimensional monumental wooden roods in English monasteries, Irish
friaries, and East Anglian parish churches; roods that fit in the palm
of a hand, encased in precious metals, those that were painted on walls,
drawn on the pages of manuscripts, and those that appeared in visions,
dreams, and gesture.
