Bringing the Holy Land Home: The Crusades, Chertsey Abbey, and the Reconstruction of a Medieval Masterpiece

book, focus on effigial monuments of the 11th and early 12th centuries, organized according to the type of person commemorated. So, chapter 2 deals with monarchs (‘Rulers’), chapter 3 with secular aristocrats (‘Patrons’) and chapter 4 with religious women (‘Canonesses’). Each chapter focuses on detailed case studies of three or four monuments, often with one memorial foregrounded (Rudolph of Swabia, the Nellenburg effigies at Schaffhausen and the Quedlinburg abbesses) and the other examples used to elaborate, nuance or extend arguments first arising from its interpretation. Chapter 5 (‘Proliferation’) acts as a kind of epilogue, exploring the rising popularity of funerary effigies across western Europe in the second half of the 12th century. Although memorials from modern-day France, England and the Netherlands are discussed, the core examples that Fozi considers are from modern-day Germany and Switzerland. Romanesque Effigies is an important and innovative book that brings obscure memorials to light, as well as proposing persuasive new interpretations of betterknown effigies. It offers the first overarching history of Romanesque tomb sculpture, taking these monuments seriously on their own historical terms rather than collapsing them into broader teleological narratives, and paying close attention to the fine-grained details of their design and inscriptions. More broadly, Fozi presents an inspirational masterclass in navigating an issue that vexes almost every account of medieval art: how to deal with the gaps in the documentary and material record, especially the absence of any fixed coordinates regarding dating or patronage, without getting mired in the minutiae of these problems. Fozi manages to stay ever-alert to the unknowable, while, at the same time, not shying away from posing broader and more ambitious questions. In doing so, she reminds us of the power and primacy of the surviving object as historical witness.