Misericords, the narrow wooden brackets found on the undersides of many choir-seats in European churches, were often carved with imagery. The variety of this imagery is greatest in English examples of the later thirteenth to early sixteenth century. Many English misericords--of which hundreds survive--are intricately, finely, and expensively carved, testifying to the interest of the clerics who paid for them in what they show, and implying, perhaps, that patrons were involved in the selection of subject-matter. Collectively, this subject-matter defies easy classification. The misericord-imagery in any one choir may range from the sacred to the frankly erotic. There are also many non-iconographic examples. This heterogeneity, the fact that the carvings were not normally visible, and the fact that they occupied the ritual heart of the country's most solemn religious buildings, combine to pose a problem of interpretation which has never been seriously addressed.
I say this advisedly, aware of the large body of writing that misericords have generated. Certainly, the things which make English misericord carvings hard to understand as a class have also made them attractive to scholars. Betsy Chunko-Dominguez' book is only the latest in a line going back through others by Paul Hardwick (2011), Juanita Wood (1999), Christa Grössinger (whose World Turned Upside-down, published in 1997, remains the most scholarly treatment), George L. Remnant (whose catalogue of 1969 also remains indispensable), and Mary Désirée Anderson (1954), to which bodies of work by others including Charles Tracy and Malcolm Jones should be added. Nor were these scholars first in the field. For the pioneers of misericord studies one has to look back to the pre-Victorian architects and antiquaries who went around churches drawing and describing misericords: John Carter (d. 1817), for example, did a fine watercolour of the carving of a defecating man at Fairford in Gloucestershire which Chunko-Dominguez uses as her point of departure (now London, British Library, Additional MS 29928, f. 17). The field thus has a little historiography all of its own. Yet despite all of this work, no writer to date has been disposed to see a body of medieval sculpture which is exclusively confined within narrow ritual and spatial limits as an intellectual challenge worth taking on: rather, the tendency has been to pick and choose examples according to location or iconographic type, or simply to describe. This is not really surprising, because the nature of misericord imagery is such that art historians, who might be expected to grasp the nettle here, have generally ignored it. The main exception to this is the recent tendency of scholars to lump misericords in with the anti-canonical, suit-yourself category of 'marginal' art, which Michael Camille did, and which Chunko-Dominguez also does. It may turn out that this intellectual coyness about misericords is sensible: perhaps there is no theoretical mileage in them. In any case, it would be nice to see a suitably able scholar make the attempt.
These remarks provide context for the review to follow. Nothing in them is intended as backhanded criticism of Chunko-Dominguez' book, which is clearly and enthusiastically written, refreshingly short, handsomely produced, and tolerably well-documented. The author has evidently followed her interests, and the fact that these reflect the normal focus on secular imagery may be taken to indicate how worthy of attention this aspect of misericord sculpture is. Moreover, it would be unfair to expect the sort of synoptic and cerebral treatment called for above of a first monograph (which this book is). There is a sense in which any extended publication on medieval art helps the discipline simply by adding critical mass to existing discourse. On the other hand, it is only fair to potential readers and buyers to put the book to the test as a resource for its subject. It is always reasonable to ask what a scholarly monograph adds to existing knowledge.
A glance at the table of contents is suggestive here: the focus will be on misericord images as evidence for aspects of social history. To begin with, there is an introduction which censures Émile Mâle (writing in 1898 and thus rather an old strawman) for under-rating the semantic potential of misericords and alludes to this potential by referring to the above-mentioned defecating man at Fairford. Then comes an opening chapter titled "Meanings and Medieval Misericords," which sounds like it might have something to say about the object domain in toto. A healthy, if challenging, ambition to "reintegrate the study of misericords into the study of Gothic art in general, and to recenter them in relation to our understanding of late-medieval culture' is voiced" (7). I am not sure the book does either of these things in quite the way the author intends, although it is fair to say that in giving her subject the exposure offered by a leading academic press, Chunko-Dominguez is at least inviting readers to consider the place of misericords within integrated Gothic interiors. It is perhaps regrettable that the attempt to discuss meaning in this chapter quickly devolves to consideration of single examples rather than sticking with the bigger picture. This approach to socio-historical themes via few and often exceptional examples characterizes the entire book, so that a reader wishing to draw inferences about the whole corpus of misericords is always at the disadvantage of working from the particular to the general. At the end of chapter 1, the reader knows that the rest of the book will be about the meanings of misericord images, but the broad conclusions are limited to the idea that such images can be interpreted in different ways and that what may look subversive to the modern viewer was in fact part and parcel of its religious environment (which is perfectly correct). Running through the discussion is the notion that misericords were somehow marginal due (one supposes) to their imagery. However, this concept is not interrogated, which is a pity, as doing so might have shown it up for the folly it is. Where a scatological or lascivious image exists at the liturgical heart of a church then it is up to its scholarly interpreter to think about, and ideally show, how and why such imagery fitted into mainstream clerical culture. To categorize it as marginal is insouciant as well as spatially and situationally untenable. If this seems a tad too literal-minded about the concept of marginality then I suggest that this concept could use clarification informed by detailed, historically rooted consideration of what medieval people thought of the imagery they paid for and used. With this in mind, it is regrettable that Chunko-Dominguez' book does not seriously engage with the subject of clerical reception of misericord imagery, even though it recognizes the value of the topic. A distinctive "clerical gaze" is mooted (51-54) but it is not defined, and no historical justification of its use is attempted. Of course, definitions can be tedious to stipulate, but ignoring them tends to result in lack of control over a subject.
Chapters 2 through 5 are discussions of iconographic types illustrated by examples on misericords. Occasionally, parallels are drawn between misericord carvings and works in other media, although there are not enough of these to make any advance on the reintegration proposed in chapter 1. The types addressed in these chapters reflect current scholarly interests in the iconography of women, the monstrous, sexuality, and other things. Awareness of the terminology of critical theory also emerges passim: Freud, Jung, Lacan, Kristeva, Griselda Pollock, Didi-Huberman, and various others are introduced, although (as commonly in current scholarship) the author simply mentions them and their ideas in parallel with the things she discusses rather than attempting detailed readings of art against theory. While it would doubtless be unreasonable to call for readings of this kind here, one wonders what scholarly value the theorists and their theories have simply as names. What the iconographic focus plus the theoretical allusions undoubtedly do is to bring a text about a (creditably) remote, ostensibly unrelatable set of objects into the comfort-zone of current medieval studies. The author may have calculated this, but one suspects her policy of inclusion arose from her proper scholarly interests. This is a point in the book's favour, for there is little reason to write a book that will not be used. Chunko-Dominguez' book is likely to find, and please, many readers.
A little more detail about chapter-content should be given. Chapter 2 is called "Violent Women and the Clerical Gaze" and focusses mainly on a handful of misericords which show women berating or physically attacking men. The burden of the text is that such images reinforced for clerics the dangerousness of women and consequent value of celibacy. As elsewhere in the book, it is not obvious that all the iconographic identifications assumed here are safe: what, for example, makes an image of a woman hitting a man with a paddle one of husband-beating (as opposed, say, to thief-beating)? The grounds for preferring husband-beating (in fact a traditional identification) might at least have been presented, if only because querying received wisdom tends to throw up interesting alternatives and thus move scholarship on. In chapter 3, "The Abject and Uncanny Human Form," a collection of subjects including hybrids, green men, "scatology and obscaena," disability, and medical imagery is reviewed. There is no room to say much about any of these, and the author seems content to offer literal readings of many of them, as though they were candid snapshots of scenes from medieval life. One might observe (although the book does not) that images to do with sickness are appropriate to misericords because misericords were made to support infirmity (a dining-room for infirm monks was also called a misericord), and that scatological and obscene images were basically and humorously appropriate to objects made to be sat on. Unsubtle interpretations also characterise chapter 4, "The Subject as Sign: Iconography of the Lay Classes." Here are more dubious readings: the "Man beating a boy" on p. 111 is in fact an image derived from the educational practice, or ritual, of birching a student in front of novice pupils; and why are the drinkers illustrated on p. 112 identified as peasants? Again, a series of subjects is presented, and the reader gets little potted histories of things like food-preparation and rogation-tide rituals whose pretext is a particular carving. The breadth and structure of these chapters effectively means that, unlike chapter 2, they have no overarching point to make. In chapter 5, "Image and Anxiety: Iconography of Hell and Damnation," the author parallels certain misericords with such things as patristic theology, chronicle stories, and anticlericalism. I am unsure how the career of Reynard the Fox, which rounds the discussion out (139-142), gels with the chapter's main theme, although it is certainly pertinent to the homiletic literature which might profitably have been discussed here had the author had room to do so. Most of the Reynard material is taken from Bristol cathedral, and as such flags up an unusual lacuna in the bibliography of what is otherwise, as noted, a well-documented book: Christa Grössinger, 'The Bristol Misericords and their Sources,' in Almost the Richest City: Bristol in the Middle Ages, ed. Laurence Keen, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions vol. 19 (Leeds, UK: Maney, 1997), pp. 81-8. This article is worth mentioning because it is also relevant to a striking erotic image illustrated and cited in chapter 3 (68-69).
The book has no formal conclusion, but, instead, a short "Afterword" titled "The Vanishing Mediator," and an appendix about the date of the misericords at Fairford which has been published elsewhere. The Afterword asks what carvers thought they were doing when making misericords and constitutes the most sustained discussion of mentalities in the book. The fact that workbenches are mistaken for misericords in the imagery of the two carvings illustrated on p. 144 does not undermine the argument. A modest hope "simply...that this book provides fodder for further discussion" of meaning in relation to misericord carvings is expressed to draw things to a close (148). As suggested above, it seems likely that this hope will be satisfied, and those ambitious scholars who use English Gothic Misericord Carvings as a gateway to the subject will find that it has left them much to do.