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12 results

Art, Faith and Place in East Anglia
  • From Prehistory to the Present
  • Edited by T. A. Heslop, Elizabeth Mellings, Margit Thøfner
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2013
    Print publication:
    20 December 2012
  • The relationship between religious or spiritual artworks and the locality where such objects are made and used is the central question this volume addresses. While it is a well-known fact that religious artworks, objects and buildings can have a power or agency of their own (iconoclasm, the violent defacement of an object which paradoxically testifies to the fear and loathing it has generated, being an extreme example), the sources of this power are less well understood. It is this problem which the book seeks to begin to remedy, using East Anglia, an area of Britain with an exceptionally long history of religious diversity, as its prism. Case-studies are taken from prehistory right up to the twenty-first century, and from a variety of media, including wall-paintings, church architecture, and stained glass; famous sites examined include Seahenge and Sutton Hoo. Overall, the book shows how profoundly religious artworks are embedded in local communities, belief systems, histories and landscapes. T.A. Heslop is Professor of Visual Arts, Elizabeth Mellings a Post-doctoral Research Fellow, and Margit Thofner Senior Lecturer, at the School of World Art Studies, University of East Anglia. Contributors: Margit Thofner, T.A. Heslop, Elizabeth de Bièvre, Daphne Nash Briggs, Adrian Marsden, Timothy Pestell, Matthew Champion, Carole Hill, Elizabeth Rutledge, David King, John Peake, Nicola Whyte, Chris King, Francesca Vanke, Stefan Muthesius, Kate Hesketh-Harvey, Karl Bell, Elizabeth Mellings, Robert Wallis, Trevor Ashwin.

  • CHAPTER 1 - ‘Introduction: On Faith, Objects and Locality’

  • Edited by T. A. Heslop, University of East Anglia, Elizabeth Mellings, University of East Anglia, Margit Thøfner, University of East Anglia
  • Book:
    Art, Faith and Place in East Anglia
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2013
    Print publication:
    20 December 2012, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    East Anglia is a distinct region and has been considered so for over a millennium. This is how one tenth-century writer, Abbo of Fleury, saw it:

    The above-mentioned eastern part attracts attention for the following and other reasons: that it is washed by waters on almost every side, girdled as it is on the south and east by the ocean, and on the north by an immense tract of marsh and fen … But on the side where the sun sets, the province is in contact with the rest of the island, and on that account accessible; but as a bar to constant invasion by an enemy, a foss is sunk in the earth by a mound equivalent to a wall of considerable height.

    For Abbo, East Anglia was a peninsula, separate from yet also joined to the rest of England. Much later, in the 1980s, the author Malcolm Bradbury would unwittingly reiterate this when he quipped that East Anglia was cut off by the North Sea on three sides and British Rail on the fourth. Evidently, the region may be defined clearly and conveniently by its landscape, understood as a conjunction of the natural and the manmade.

    For quite some time now, archaeologists, geographers, historians, art historians and other scholars have understood that landscapes are simultaneously geographical and cultural. That is certainly a sensible way of seeing the East Anglian landscape, where fishing, farming, peat digging, reed harvesting, land drainage, wharf building and a multitude of other human activities have been undertaken across many centuries.