Designing Norman Sicily: Material Culture and Society

easily struggles to convince against the more compelling conclusions of Manuela Beer’s masterclass in visual analysis. A second submission by Klaus Endemann (previously published in German) constitutes the book’s most substantial single contribution to the general history of the ‘rise of monumental wood sculpture’. Section 3 contains seven individual case studies of medieval crucifixion sculptures. The first four of these relate more or less closely to the Boston Crucifix and include the most celebrated member of the family, the Gero Cross in Cologne. The last three case studies take us beyond the German lands and into the later decades of the 12th century. They are perfectly good essays, but they sit slightly uncomfortably in a collection primarily focused elsewhere. The essays of Section 4 further extend the study’s intellectual horizons to consider issues of audience, theory and theology. They also bring the chronological focus back to the centuries before 1100. All are excellent. The contribution by Kahsnitz (also previously published in German) offers an elegant account of the Ottonian crucifixes’ theological and art-historical backstory. Beatrice Kitzinger’s erudite meditation on the complexities of the cross-crucifix relationship — in both the Middle Ages and modern scholarship — is especially impressive. It leads neatly to an enjoyable epilogue by Jacqueline Jung, in which she reminds us of the inherent and abiding ‘strangeness’ of the crucifixion image and brings the medieval image into a more direct cultural conversation with the present day. In their Introduction, the volume’s editors explain that in bringing these essays together they hope ‘to introduce the Boston Crucifix to new audiences and raise its profile among specialists, and also to provide a forum for fresh research on the emergence of large-scale images of Christ on the cross’ (p. 15). This fine and thoughtful collection — perhaps more properly described as bilateral than truly international — undoubtedly succeeds in these central aims, and it does so with some style. To the extent that this is a study of developments in large-scale Ottonian and Salian wooden crucifixion sculpture, it is a very good one. As a collection, the coverage of material from after 1100 or much beyond the German lands is less coherent. The Crucifixion image’s intellectual, devotional, architectural and art-historical contexts change significantly through the 12th century and the number and variety of surviving examples increase considerably. The collection’s lacunae here — both in terms of object domain and engagement with relevant scholarship — are the weak point of an otherwise admirable volume.