Anglo-Saxon at the British Library a. s. g. edwards
The British Library’s latest exhibition, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms Art, Word, War , opened on 19 October and will run until 19 February 2019. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of the same title, edited by Claire Breay and Joanna Story ( isbn : 978 0 5208 4), that contains descriptions of all the items on display by a team of seven- teen scholars, five of whom have also contributed brief introductory essays. (Throughout parenthetical numbers will refer to items in the catalogue.) The exhibition brings together materials not just from the Library’s own collections but from sixteen other repositories in the United Kingdom as well as from others in France, Italy, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden and the United States. It is the most ambitious exhibition of Anglo-Saxon culture ever attempted. First, the exhibition itself. It is not without its minor irritations. Although well captioned, none of the exhibits has the correspond- ing catalogue entry number; and while full shelf marks are given for British Library manuscripts none are given for loan items. The overwhelming majority of the 161 items on display are, unsurprisingly, manuscripts, embodying the ‘word’. ‘Art’ in other respects is restricted to about thirty items. The recently discovered gold and cloisonné Winfarthing pendant (12) and the inlaid silver Fuller brooch (65) display particularly well. There are some items from the Sutton Hoo (13, 14) and Sta V ordshire (15) hoards and some other jewellery. Sculpture is represented by the Lichfield Angel (from the late 8th or 9th century), a cross shaft from Durham Cathedral (80) and a replica of the Ruthwell Cross (88), with passages from the verse The Dream of the Rood . The most brilliant display of this material is of the tiny Alfred jewel (63), so adroitly back lit that every exquisite detail is visible. But it is the verbal and visual dimensions of the ‘word’ in manu- scripts that are most recurrent. These are nearly all well presented,
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