Overview

This book presents a highly illustrated art-historical assessment of a group of 9th-century Anglo-Saxon stone carvings at Sandbach in Cheshire. As such, it represents one of the first modern studies devoted to a specific group of Anglo-Saxon high crosses, as well as a new, iconographic, approach to that material. The crosses are examined largely from the point of view of their figural decoration, which is used as a source of information about the symbolic significance of the carved scenes, their role as public monuments, their date, and the contacts that existed between Sandbach, in the west of Anglo-Saxon Mercia, and other areas of the early medieval world - Ireland and the Columban community to the west and Carolingian Europe to the east. Overall, the decoration of the Sandbach crosses suggests the presence in the region of an ecclesiastical centre that sought to express its power and authority in the land through the production of large-scale stone monuments whose iconography exhibits an esoteric but orthodox concern with the power invested in Christ's Church on earth.

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9781851826599

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Jane Hawkes is a lecturer in the history of art at the University of York. She has published widely on Anglo-Saxon art and material culture, and is joint editor of Northumbria's Golden Age (1999).

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