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18.11.15, Bucklow et al., eds., The Art and Science of the Church Screen
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This well-illustrated volume is the product of the two-day conference, "The Art and Science of Medieval Church Screens," held in Cambridge, England, in April 2012. The conference marked the culmination of a three-year survey conducted by the Hamilton Kerr Institute of over five hundred rood screens in East Anglia. Organized by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, the Hamilton Kerr Institute, and the Department of History of Art at Cambridge University, the conference brought together historians and scientists for an interdisciplinary exploration of screens as material, religious, and aesthetic objects. In his introduction to the volume, Paul Binski identifies several of the conference's aims, which included the creation of an authentic dialogue between conservators, scientists, and historians and the inclusion of both regional and international perspectives. The resulting volume shares the richness of the conference agenda. It features a variety of voices, from the scientific to the philosophical and from essays that provide regional surveys to those that offer a detailed examination of a single case study. It achieves the interdisciplinary spirit noted in Binski's introduction.

The book can be divided into two broad sections; chapters 1-7 primarily consider screens in England and chapters 8-11 focus on screens in continental Europe. The English emphasis of the volume is justified not only by its genesis in the East Anglian Rood Screen Project but also by the large number of screens that survive there. The first essay by Richard Marks introduces the reader to English and Welsh rood screens and their associated structures, which Marks understands as an integrated but mutable schema at the east end of a church. As the title of the volume suggests, several of the essays stress the productive resonances between scientific and art historical investigations of screens. Spike Bucklow's essay "Science and the Screen" provides a particularly compelling argument for interdisciplinary work by underscoring how the analytical sciences often rely on the same type of visual connoisseurship that has more traditionally been associated with art history. For example, he compares the identification of pigments based on Polarized Light Microscopy to the identification of a religious figure based on his attributes. Thus, rather than positioning the scientific and humanistic disciplines as oppositional in their presumed objectivity and subjectivity, Bucklow recognizes the ambiguity within both fields and makes room for an interdisciplinary discourse based on shared skills and a common language.

The integrated methodology advocated by Bucklow is demonstrated in the following chapter by Lucy Wrapson, which combines technical analysis of 544 medieval rood and parclose screens in East Anglia with documentary evidence in the form of wills and inscriptions to develop a typological chronology. Study of the physical evidence included stylistic evaluations, pigment analysis, and dendrochronology, thus very much straddling scientific and visual analysis. Based on her detailed study of transom moldings and jointing techniques over the course of the late Middle Ages, Wrapson suggests that discrete structural and painted features are indicative of a screen's date or practices particular to individual workshops. She dedicates the second half of her essay to the identification of these workshops, a project that she suggests could be further refined through the use of network analysis. Two later chapters, "West Country Rood Screens: Construction and Practice" by Hugh Harrison and Jeffrey West and "The Polychromy of Devon Screens: Preliminary Analytical Results," by Lucy Wrapson and Eddie Sinclair similarly highlight the utility of technical analysis. "West Country Rood Screens" pays especially close attention to vaulted screens and the variety of techniques used by craftsmen to reconcile structural necessity with aesthetics. Harrison and West are more reticent than Wrapson to interpret variations in joints as indicators of date, although they leave this open as a possibility. They suggest that modified joints reflect desirable proportional relationships between the screen and the dado rail. "The Polychromy of Devon Screens" considers materials and techniques of polychromy decoration. It includes the initial publication of pigment analysis of several secular screens used in late medieval West Country residences as well as a review of materials and techniques used in church screens in Devon. Wrapson and Sinclair propose that the widespread use of red grounds in Devon was prompted by the presence of gilding and polychromy of the loft, which was of greater importance than the figure paintings of the dado. Pigment analysis also revealed that Devon screens utilized the full range of medieval pigments, which suggests a sophistication that is not immediately apparent from the simplicity of their designs.

Whereas some essays explicitly addressed interactions between art and science, David Griffith's chapter considers the relationship between text and image, particularly in the context of early Reformation England and the supplementation of images by texts in parish churches. One of the more historically-centered chapters of the England-focused section of the volume, Griffith considers a corpus of approximately 200 inscriptions on English church screens, which he divides into six categories: simple names or labels, sacred monograms, scriptural and liturgical texts, records of benefaction, devotional texts, and post-reformation scriptural texts. He posits that many of these texts reflect increased lay involvement in the construction and decoration of screens in the late Middle Ages. The final section of Griffith's essay considers the erasure and mutilation of texts as a consequence of the Reformation, which he argues suppressed the textual dynamism of English screens available to previous generations in favor of uniformity. Julian Luxford's essay on the rood screen at Catfield in Norfolk presents a detailed case study focused primarily on Catfield's unusual iconography of sixteen kings. Using comparisons to genealogies in late medieval English manuscripts, Luxford argues that the Catfield screen offers an image of the transfer of power from the divine through the apostles to the living community.

The final four essays of the volume consider church screens on the continent. Jacqueline Jung's chapter focuses primarily on screens from Germany and France, considered primarily through the lens of movement, whether it be the movement of actors performing a liturgical drama, the implied movement of sculpted images, or the movement of visitors through church space. She argues that this real or implicit physical movement paralleled a conceptual movement within the viewer. Justin E. A. Kroesen considers screens in the Netherlands, which survive in some thirty-five churches. In the first part of the essay, Kroesen examines these survivals typologically and chronologically. The final section considers the survival of screens in the context of Calvinism, suggesting that they continued to function as a useful partition that set the chancel aside as an area reserved for the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Kroesen points out that Protestant screens outnumber medieval exemplars in the Netherlands, demonstrating a point of continuity between medieval and Reformation church architecture. Donal Cooper considers rood screens in medieval and Renaissance Italy. Although very few Italian screens survive, Cooper points to the number references to screens in historical texts, including Vasari's Lives, that were long overlooked. His essay addresses the materiality, function, decoration, and destruction of tramezzi, importantly demonstrating the need for further research on this topic and highlighting the fact that a preponderance of evidence contradicts the traditional notion of the systematic removal of screens following the Council of Trent. The volume concludes with an essay by Ebbe Nyborg that focuses on screens in the parish churches of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

The great strength of this volume is the wide variety of approaches and methodologies represented within its covers. In many respects, it forms the ideal introduction to church screens, one that witnesses the present state of research, the richness of the material, and the many avenues for future investigations. The expansive nature of the project is equally evident in its breadth of subject. Although the focus is predominantly on parish churches, it incorporates material from cathedrals and secular buildings as well. At the same time that the material is wide-ranging, the technical language of the volume seems predictive of a specialized audience. It is perhaps a small point, but a glossary, set of labeled diagrams, or even more numerous in-text definitions would have gone a long way to making the many scholarly achievements of this publication more accessible. That said, this is a work of considerable value to scholars of medieval and early modern church architecture and religious practices.