Professor Marks has created a scholarly introduction to, and survey of English medieval glass on a scale never before attempted. This book is the first in the field to function properly as a research tool, constantly directing the reader to sources of further information by means of copious notes as well as cross-references to illustrations (200 in black and white, 30 in colour, the latter of high quality except for two which are out of focus: Pl.XIII, Isaiah from Exeter Cathedral Choir east window, and Pl.XXX, BL, MS Add.32363 f.118). Windows cited are also given their Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi notation so that they may be easily located in situ. This is the first such survey to place the glass firmly in the context of other contemporary visual arts: the chapters on specific styles trace innovations in glass design, colour and drawing, usefully relating them to similar developments in illumination, wall- painting, brass graving, architectural sculpture, and scripts, both here and abroad. The book is not only a long-overdue collection of a great deal of hitherto scattered information, it also offers the fruits of original research. Anyone interested in English medieval glass will need it (hapless UK purchasers will presumably find it worth their while to buy abroad).
The book is overdue partly as a result of the fatally photogenic quality of its subject. Library shelves are littered with glossy, popular and partial accounts of this glass, such as John Baker's English Stained Glass (London: Thames & Hudson, 1960) and English Stained Glass of the Medieval Period (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978); Herbert Read, J. Baker and A. Lammer's English Stained Glass (London: Thames & Hudson, 1960). More serious, but still essentially "popular" are Michael Archer's An Introduction to English Stained Glass, V & A Introductions to the Decorative Arts (London: H.M.S.O., 1985) and Sarah Brown's Stained Glass: An Illustrated History (London: Studio Editions, 1992), which though not limited to England, has a chapter on the Gothic Revival which naturally focusses on English work.
For many years, the standard, focussed works have been Christopher Woodforde's English Stained and Painted Glass (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) and Brian Coe's Stained Glass in England, 1150-1550 (London: W. H. Allen, 1981). The former provided a list of glass county by county, and a chronological survey, but without coloured illustrations and without notes, so that the only source of further information was the bibliography. Coe provided, among other things, a useful list of depicted saints, but relegated his account of "Where to see medieval glass" to brief county lists in chapter 6. Published in the same year, June Osborne's Stained Glass in England (London: Frederick Muller) was primarily a chronological outline preceded by the usual chapter on technique. Unlike the others, this provided a little documentation, but its Regional Index was confessedly drawn from Pevsner's (unrevised) Building of England series, and the illustrations were destructively over-crowded. (No doubt my view of this book is jaundiced by its silly observation—upon which I confess to sensitivity—that the existence of Biblia Pauperum in the late Middle Ages "presupposes both illiteracy and lack of books".)
Any book on English medieval stained glass needs to provide a context for its chronological survey. In deciding what else to include, an author is faced with hard choices between many options. A glance at earlier attempts to make such choices will give some idea of the size of the problem. In some studies of the subject, the "thematic" approach has been adopted. For example, J. D. Le Couteur's English Medieval Painted Glass (London: SPCK, 1926) treated technique, painters, the influence of religious life on the glass, subjects, secular and domestic glass, presentation, and a history of the destruction of glass. Painton Cowen's A Guide to Stained Glass in Britain (London: Joseph, 1985) presented no notes, but in addition to a survey, gestured towards design, very briefly considering canopies, grisaille, borders, donor figures and heraldry, as well as presenting a "thematic guide" and a rapid history of stained glass. All these are treated much more thoroughly by Marks, though not necessarily in discrete sections. Discussion of the destruction of glass, initiated by Le Couteur, becomes in Mark's book something like its emotional heart: a vivid evocation of the bizarre processes by which England lost most of her heritage of medieval glass. A completely thematic approach was adopted in the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments' Stained Glass in England c.1180-c.1540 by Sarah Crewe (London: HMSO, 1987), which treated technique, design, and the donor, as well as offering chapters on Subjects and Sources, Humour and Horror, Glimpses of Medieval Life, The Natural World, and Foreign Glass in England.
It is interesting to see which of these many possible topics Marks chose briefly to examine. We rightly look elsewhere for fully detailed accounts of specific topics. For glazing technique we might consult E. W. Twining, The Art and Craft of Stained Glass (London: Pitman, 1928), or P. Reyntiens, The Technique of Stained Glass, rev. ed. (London: Batsford, 1977) or Vincent O'Brien, Techniques of Stained Glass: Leaded, Faceted and Laminated Glass (London: Studio Vista, 1978). Marks includes only those aspects of the craft which are essential to understanding the operation of the workshop and the construction of the objects. It is also appropriate to look elsewhere for aesthetic appreciation of the medium, for example to Lawrence Lee's interesting The Appreciation of Stained Glass, The Appreciation of the Arts, 9 (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). With the exception of a few passages (such as pp.122-23 in the section on Canterbury Cathedral's glass) Marks's book is not designed to assist aesthetic appreciation of windows cited. It is inevitably all too rare for the details clearly visible in the black and white or colour plates to be discussed in the text, as they are, for example, in the description of the three-dimensional effects created by back-painting when a fifteenth-century gauze headdress at Tattershall is painted on the inside of the glass, while the ear and hair it covers are painted on the outside, so appearing to be seen through translucent material (p.36 and pl.II.b). For the iconography of glass we might consult the pioneering and still useful G. M. Rushforth, The Stained Glass of Great Malvern Priory Church, 5 vols. (Gloucester: Pitcher, 1916-27), or A. Watson The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse (London: Oxford UP, l934)—though Watson's work on the later period is available only in his notes at the Courtauld Institute.
Since topics such as technique, aesthetic appreciation and iconographic meaning are covered elsewhere, it makes sense for Marks to concentrate, in his Part I, on those areas to which his own researches have most to contribute—the patrons and craftsmen whose joint activities produced the topics addressed in the glass—and then to outline those topics (chapters 1, 2 and 3: chapter 4 is perforce brief). The book is in two parts, the larger second part being the chronological survey. After the Introduction, we have:
PART I 1 Donors and Patrons 2 Technique of Medieval Glass-painting & Organization of Workshops 3 Iconography 4 Domestic Glass
PART II 5 c.670-1175 6 c.1175-1250 7 The Decorated Style c.1250-1350 8 The International Style c.1350-1450 9 The End of the Middle Ages 10 The Dominance of the Foreign Glaziers 11 The Reformation and After.
This is followed by Notes, a select Bibliography, and an Index, the latter sometimes performing the function of entire chapters in other books, as when the saints who appear in medieval English glass are listed.
In Chapter 1, "Donors and Patrons", the author maps what is known of these people—the majority anonymous, the rest kings and ecclesiastics, magnates and prelates, families, guilds, fraternities, parish groups and individuals. Some idea of the relative cost involved is conveyed by the fact that donation of an entire window remained "beyond the purses of the less well-to- do throughout the Middle Ages" (p.6). He outlines the ways in which donors and patrons appear in windows—their positions and postures, the associated scrolls and mottoes, the initials by which they are sometimes represented.
A few documents give a real insight into the craft: John Thornton was allowed a mere three years in which to make the York Minster east window (p.23); the whole King's College Chapel scheme of eighteen windows was given five years. On the other hand, some disappointments are due not to the author but to the paucity of original documentation. In the section on the commissioning of windows, one looks for insight into the motives and processes underlying the choice of medieval windows' subjects, "usually determined by the patron", but such thin evidence as there is only suggests that the patron's choice was made "after consulting his or her parish priest or spiritual adviser". There seems to be no evidence, either, to explain why English glass was so inferior to that from the continent that several contracts specify coloured glass from Normandy, one sixteenth-century patron insisting on the use of "no Glasse of England" (p.23); it is as if English craftsmen suffered a failure of confidence in this area, for the Fleming given in 1449 a monopoly of coloured glass in England on condition that he train Englishmen in the skill apparently failed to do so (p.30).
Chapter 2, "Technique of Medieval Glass-painting and Organization of Workshops", gives a satisfyingly detailed picture of the medieval craftsman's working environment: sites and costs, weights and measures, prices and payments, white-washed drawing tables and translucent cartoons, the penny-pinching use of fragile unfired paint, modelbooks, the emergence of enamelling techniques as opposed to stained glass proper. (Here some methods are perhaps described with overmuch economy: anyone unfamiliar with glazing techniques might wonder exactly how "closing nails" secure pieces of glass inside their leading.)
In contrast, Chapter 3, "Iconography", brings no surprises. The well-known mystical significance of light is rightly reiterated (p.59), for it is more important to the meaning of medieval glass than any subject matter. The familiar multiple function of the scenes depicted also needs to be repeated: instruction, devotion, intercession, moral enlightenment. We also need to be reminded that window subjects derived from sources as mixed as books, private devotions, personal careers, church dedications, local relics and pilgrimages. The rarity of complete glazing schemes like that at Canterbury is noted (p.64). Apart from this, the chapter merely lists motifs: biblical themes (typological schemes, the much rarer independent Old Testament scenes, the Jesse Tree, the Passion cycle); saints; didactic and moralizing themes—the Creed, Sacraments, Seven Works of Mercy, Blasphemy and Gossiping in Church; mortality and the Last Judgement; liturgical themes (the Magnificat, Te Deum and Nunc Dimittis as well as hymns and antiphons); secular and historical subjects (something of a ragbag). A brief paragraph on marginal imagery is inevitably thin, as research into borders' origin and possible meaning is only just gaining momentum—but it would have been helpful to have a brief list of some of the more notable stained-glass borders (the east window of St Mary's, Shrewsbury, for example); heraldry is included here, as are kings and benefactors. It is probably unfair, since this is a survey, not an aesthetic study, to observe that this chapter reads rather dryly: one longs for an indication, however brief, of the power which these subjects held. The dryness of Chapter 4, "Domestic Glass", is unavoidable, since the literary splendours of windows like those in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess seem themselves to be a literary figment. We hear instead of heraldry, rebuses, and secular topics such as the Labours of the Months. The Chronological Survey begins with Chapter 5, "c.670-1175". It is particularly interesting to have an outline of the latest findings with regard to the earliest Anglo-Saxon (10th-century) painted glass known to have been used in England (p.107); less is now known about glazing in England c.1100-75 than in the Saxon and early Norman periods (p.109). The paradox described in Chapter 6, "c.1175-1250", is that the glass mentioned in records does not survive, while surviving glass (York, Canterbury, Lincoln, etc) is almost undocumented. The detailed treatment of grisaille is particularly welcome.
By the period covered in Chapter 7, "The Decorated Style c.1250- 1350", so much more survives than from earlier periods that the author is able to provide a very useful stylistic overview, mentioning the use of greater translucency, more elegant postures, heavier drapery, more naturalistic foliage (all but the first, of course, reflected in other media). The passage on the styles of architectural niches breaks new ground. Chapter 8, "The International Style c.1350-1450" treats a period the early years of which are characterized by a decline in artistic activity partly explained by the Black Death. Marks suggests that another factor might be that many rebuilding programmes embarked upon by the great cathedrals and monastic establishments from the end of the thirteenth century had been very largely completed by c.1350. This chapter in includes an account of the extensive work of Thornton at York, and its local influence.
Chapter 9, "The End of the Middle Ages", deals with the years between c.1450 and the Reformation, when English glazing shows "less contact with Continental art than in any previous century" (p.190), whereas Chapter 10 discusses "The Dominance of the Foreign Glaziers", illustrated by such well-known windows as those at Fairford and Kings College Chapel, Cambridge. Chapter 11, as alredy suggested, is different in tone and impact from any other part of the book. "The Reformation and After" shows that so thorough was the despoliation of buildings during the dissolution of the monasteries (1536-41) that "very little can be said of the glazing of monastic churches" (p.229) except for a few former Benedictine establishments: we realise what a wealth was lost in "the stained glass of the Cluniacs, Pre-monstratensians, Cistercians, Gilbertines, Carthusians and the Mendicant Orders" (pp.229-30). This chapter strongly conveys the sad plight of both the glass and the glazier at this time. We hear of the destruction of windows (even those depicting the Trinity) first by Edward VI, and then by decay and neglect. Unemployed glaziers were reduced to abject poverty. Even in York, where some glaziers remained in work, by 1551 they could only manage to pay one-third of the cost of the Corpus Christi play which used to be jointly funded by glaziers and saddlers (p.234). There is a wonderful account of the Recorder of Salisbury's defence, when proceedings were brought against him in the Court of Star Chamber for destroying a Creation window in St Edmund's Church, Salisbury: [Fo]r that it contained divers forms of little old men in blue and red coats, and naked in the heads, feet and hands, for the picture of God the Father, and that in one place he was set forth with a pair of compasses in his hands, laying them upon the sun and moon; and the painter had set Him forth creating the birds on the third day, and had placed the picture of beasts and men and women on the fifth day—the man was a naked man, and the woman naked in some parts, as much from the knees upwards, rising out of the arm. (Given such objections to standard medieval Creation conventions—the conflation of Days seems to have given particular offence—let alone objections to the biblically correct nakedness of our first parents, it is easy to understand the ferocious defacement suffered by the carved Creation sequence in the nearby Salisbury Cathedral Chapter House.)
During this later period, records give us vivid insights into the past: John Aubrey recalls Oxford's study-room window still holding crucifixes and saints until 1647; Richard Culmer delights in his breaking of the glass in Canterbury's north-west transept; in a painting, dated 1657, of a view down the interior of Canterbury Cathedral (p.239), we notice with a shock the tiny figure in one of the great Norman window-bays of the south aisle, breaking glass in accordance with the instruction of the officers gathered round a table in the nave. In 1788 cart-loads of medieval glass from windows broken up for their lead were disposed of in Salisbury's city ditch (p.241). This chapter also treats continental glass transferred to England during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the copying, imitation, study and recording of medieval glass in the 19th and 20th centuries (pp.244-46).
The book's intended audience is not easy to determine. The extent to which the reader intending to make best use of the book has to work with marginal cross-references and endnotes suggests that specialists are the target. Yet, apart from its sometimes untranslated Latin, the book is largely accessible to the committed non-specialist. The reader has to work hard, not only with marginal refences and notes, but also with the condensation of the material. Information in this survey is necessarily pelleted—dehydrated, as it were, for easy storage, so that we have little choice but to "add water" by turning to the illustration and chasing the footnotes. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect such necessarily capsulated information to excite us, but the pellets are often a little hard. For example, it is observed (p.61) that Canterbury Cathedral Library MS C246, a 14th-century roll bearing inscriptions from the Cathedral's typological windows, has been regarded as an interpretative aid to them. The reader would be in a much better position to weigh the likelihood of this debatable theory if offered a verbal snippet from the roll. On the same page, a brief quotation from the post-Chaucerian Tale of Beryn's puzzled medieval observers of stained glass would be worth a thousand indirect descriptions of them. The observation that the "habit of blasphemous swearing by God's body was quite a common topic in English medieval sermon literature and poetry" is true enough, but a brief quotation from the most famous example of all, The Pardoner's Tale, would make the point more powerfully: Hir othes been so grete and dampnable That it is grisly for to heere hem swere. Oure blissed Lordes body they totere... These small carpings are perhaps subjective and insignificant. However, very occasionally the pelleted information raises more questions than it answers, so that the reader struggles. Fig.67 shows a window from St Andrew's, Norwich, in which Death seizes "a bishop or abbot" which "may be a variation" on the subject of the Three Living and the Three Dead—but no mention is made of the foregrounded gaming board which suggests the "Lost Game with Death" motif. On p.20, it is not clear whether the quotation from a will directing that a window be "broken down and made new" is evidence of the destruction or re-use of old glass. It is not clear whether the quotation on p.21 is evidence of a new window's repetition of an existing subject, or of an old window's restoration or re-use (the answer apparently lies in the cited Antiquaries Journal 54 (1974): 272-74, pl.LIV). We are told that Henry VI's part in the foundation of King's College Chapel was ironic in view of his simultanous foundation of a "reform movement which has as one of its consequences the ending of glass painting as a major artistic medium" (p.4), but not until Chapter 11 does it become clear how reform, as opposed to fashion, demoted glass painting.
Occasionally, footnotes or commentary which would allow us to "add water" are absent. Where can we find the portrayal of episodes in the lives of saints drawn from "liturgical books like the Breviarium ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Sarum" (p.61)? In two places (pp.16, 55) mention is made of a link between three objects: the Pilgrimage window at York Minster in which male and female figures lead horses whose riders hold flags or lances, a drawing from a window once at Drayton Basset church, and a well- known Luttrell Psalter page. Unfortunately, the nature of the link is not stated, and though all three scenes show important persons mounted and standing, they do not obviously suggest derivation from a common source. Similarly, we are told (p.46) that a window at Easby (Pl.VIIIb) is parallel in colour and style to panels in York Minster, but this is not evident in the illustrations.
Sometimes the author may unwisely assume that his readers know as much as he does. What is meant by this donor's instruction: And so often as they repair the glass windows, in whole or in part, they shall be bound, if so ordered by the keeper of the works, to make one roundel with an image in each (p.50b)? What is the purpose of the roundels? Are the "images" likely to be portraits or scenes? Are they make-works, or some kind of sequential record of a glazier's activity, or could they even be a form of payment? On another matter, how is it that "in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the priority given to light and translucency was at the cost of the complex narrative cycles seen in profusion at Chartres and Canterbury" (p.65)? There is nothing, on the face of it, to preclude complex narrative in the "translucent screen" created by "rectilinear, thin membrances of mullions and transoms" (p.165). Marks claims that some representations of The Seven Works of Mercy show the influence of contemporary literature, various personifications being associated with them: "Thus in Deguileville Mercy performs them and the Porter brings messengers (Prayer and Alms) to show the dying Pilgrim the way to the Heavenly City" (p.79). This observation is not documented; pleasing though it would be to think that readers need no guidance to The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, EETS os 188 and 192, they probably do. Will all the readers of this book recognise the reference (p.123) to Nicholas of Verdun, and be aware of R hrig's Der Verduner Altar (Munich: Herrold, 1955)? Footnote 3 on p.59 refers to Gregory's calling pictures are libri laicorum: we are given the source of the offered translation, but not the Moralia reference. Quotation from Piers Plowman (p.229) is from Skeat's 1873 edition: a passus reference (B Text Passus III, 60) would enable us easily to locate the context of the passage (for example in A. V. C. Schmidt's imminent revised edition). It is no doubt unreasonable to expect a complex book which must have been long In Press to cite an article which appeared only two years before the book's publication, but to the mention of the Jesse Tree ceiling paintings in Abingdon Church (p.171) it is important to add: Anna Hulbert, "The Recovery of the Jesse Tree Sequence of Panels in St. Helen's, Abingdon and Workshop Notes", The Conservator as Art Historian: Papers Given at a UKIC Wall Paintings Section Conference on 20 June 1992 at Abingdon, Oxfordshire, ed. Anna Hulbert, Julie Marsden and Victoria Todd (London: United Kingdom Institute for Conservation, 1992) 7-14.
Some flaws are the responsibility of the publisher, not the author. One is all too common in modern books. The unpleasant inter-word spacing inevitable when narrow columns are right- justified is more than a cosmetic blemish: computer-setting and the demands of economy are eroding the ancient understanding of the effect which word-spacing and letter-spacing have, not only on the aesthetic effect of the written word but also on its apprehension and recall. Everywhere in this book inter-word spacing is uncomfortably large, and often the eye, instead of flowing unimpeded over the lines of text, must leap like a frantic frog from word to word, for example on p.58:10: "borrowing by manuscript painters from"; p.105:-4 "foundations of the domestic quarters at"; p.110:-10,11 "vessells ... albas". It is a pity that a book printed on good paper, in the lovely and legible Perpetua, should be the victim of inadequate automated setting. Of course, the double column format allows both the frequent insertion of figures into the text, and very full marginal references to those figures. Nevertheless, if it would have obviated this horrible type-setting, I should have preferred single-column format with illustrations on interleaved pages.
The copy-editor has ignored some infelicities: "The condition of the window is too poor to illustrate" (p.82); on the great east window of the Gloucester choir: "However, as Kerr has demonstrated, the heraldry also represents those who fought in Edward III's Scottish expedition and furthermore that the arms are in fact a General Roll of the leading nobles of the period" (p.165). Deficient punctuation makes one stumble over: "Long before the middle of the fifteenth century the elaborate designs of Decorated windows had been supplanted by a grid pattern of mullion and transom and tracery had been reduced in both size and prominence" (p.166). Misprints must be very few, but there is "houe" for "house" on p.176:2.
Apart from minor omissions noted above, the wealth of information in the notes is unmatched in earlier books on this subject. So full are they that, with endnotes for each chapter separately numbered from 1, it would have been helpful if the running title on pp.247-79 indicated relevant page-numbers ("Notes to pages...). The bibliography, on the other hand, though admirably catholic in content, is so select that it does not always include even cited items (eg. David O'Connor and Peter Gibson's article on The Chapel Windows at Raby Castle, County Durham, which is mentioned on p.279, n.66).
This is not a book to read at a sitting, but one to digest in separate meals. Great breadth of knowledge is massively compressed into managable format. (I found myself wondering what database had been used to control all this material). A great store of information has been put, as it were, through a series of sieves, so that each particle finds its way into the correct context. This method disguises some of the most original material, for example in the sections in each historical chapter which deal with windows' border and canopy designs.
With characteristic modesty, the author does not claim to provide the "full appreciation of the contribution of stained glass to English medieval culture and society" which is "long overdue". However, he does provide a firm foundation for such a multi-volume and monumental edifice. This book illuminates the variety of English medieval glass and the scholarship surrounding it with a thoroughness hitherto unapproached. Still more importantly, it actively encourages other scholars to take up the torch, as when the author notes that the Cotehele glass "has not been the subject of a detailed study" (p.96 n.17), or that a group of Jesse Trees all by the same workshop "would repay detailed investigation" (p.164).
We are used to reading medieval texts through the essential filter provided by editors whose function, if the history of the text allows it, is to remove or at least identify centuries of accumulated error, making the original accessible by commentary. Until recently, most of the texts which are English medieval stained glass windows were virtually "unedited". Of all the medieval pictorial arts, stained glass is the one which has been most subject to corruption: to the loss of parts, to the erosion of material (thinning of the glass altering the whole tonal and colour balance of some windows), to misarrangement, to uninformed insertion, to inadequate recording of the object and its vicissitudes. Only in the last three decades has the work of Corpus Vitrearum resulted in comprehensive studies (Canterbury Cathedral; King's College Chapel, Cambridge; York Cathedral, etc).
As Marks points out, it is impossible to be definitive at the present stage of our knowledge, for much remains to be discovered and researched in English parish churches. Unfortunately, as the closing paragraph of this book sadly observes, English medieval stained glass is "facing what is arguably its greatest crisis since the Reformation" as a result of church closures, pollution and underfunding. We are made to realise that the Reformation depredations which chapter 11 brings to life for us are echoed by subtler modern forces of destruction to which we pay little heed. Marks's book is, as far as a survey can be, a plea for our awakening. The need for further discovery and research is urgent. This book provides a stimulus and a starting point for both.