Peopling Insular Art: Practice, Performance, Perception

The International Conference on Insular Art (IIAC) is the leading forum for scholars of the visual and material culture of early medieval Ireland and Britain, including manuscript illumination, sculpture, metalwork, and textiles, and encompassing the work of Anglo-Saxon-, Celtic- and Norse-speaking artists. The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the eighth IIAC, which took place in Glasgow 11-14 July 2017. The theme of IIAC8 - Peopling Insular Art: Practice, Performance, Perception - was intended to focus attention on those who commissioned, created, and engaged with Insular art objects, and how they conceptualised, fashioned, and experienced them (with ‘engagement’ covering not only contemporary audiences, but later medieval and modern ones too). The twenty-one articles gathered here reflect the diverse ways in which this theme has been interpreted. They demonstrate the intellectual vibrancy of Insular art studies, its international outlook, its interdiscplinarity, and its openness to innovative technologies and approaches, while at the same time demonstrating the strength and enduring value of established methodologies and research practices. The studies collected here focus not only on made objects, but on the creative processes and intellectual decisions which informed their making. This volume brings Insular makers – the illuminators, pattern-makers, rubricators, carvers, and casters – to the fore.

Table of Contents

Preface

Practice
1. Carol A. Farr ‘Red-Handed in the Barberini Gospels: The Rubricator Did It’
2. Donncha MacGabhann ‘Turning the Tables: An alternative approach to understanding the canon tables in the Book of Kells’
3. Cynthia Thickpenny ‘Making Key Pattern in Insular Art: The Harley Golden Gospels and Kilmartin Cross’
4. Michael Brennan ‘Coincidences, or common conceits, in the large Rogart and Ardagh brooches?’
5. Stephen Walker ‘Manufacturing the thin, openwork panels on the Cross of Cong’
6. Griffin Murray ‘Viking influence in Insular art: Considering identity in early medieval Ireland’
7. Susan Youngs ‘Lions on Iona’
8. Kate Colbert ‘Artistic and cultural transmission across the Irish Sea: The ‘marigold’ stones of Wexford and their Welsh connections’

Performance
9. Caroline Paterson & Craig Stanford ‘Power-dressing in the Irish Sea area: An interesting group of Hiberno-Scandinavian strap-fittings’
10. Sue Brunning ‘Touching the Past: The Breadalbane Brooch and its Bearers’
11. Niamh Whitfield ‘Was the Staffordshire Hoard a trophy hoard? Some evidence from Ireland’
12. Anouk Busset ‘Connecting places: Insights on Pictish sculpture from Swedish rune stones’
13. David Petts ‘Patterns in Monumentality: Characterizing sculptural assemblages at early medieval monastic sites in Northern Britain’
14. Kelly A. Kilpatrick ‘The Hackness Cross: Landscape, Patronage, and International Influences’
15. Stephenie McGucken ‘“The Correct Path to Heaven”: Motherhood & Mothering in English Manuscript Art, c. 970 to 1030’

Perception
16. Victoria Thompson Whitworth ‘Uncanny Monsters and Telling Absences: Ways of Reading the Meigle Recumbents’
17. Amanda Doviak ‘What has Sigurd to do with Christ? Reassessing the Nature of Anglo-Scandinavian Sculpture in the North of England’
18. Megan Henvey ‘Crossing Borders: Re-assessing the ‘Need to Group’ the High Crosses in Ireland’
19. Rachel Moss ‘Resilience, restoration and revival: Insular art in later medieval Ireland’
20. Jane Hawkes ‘Stone, paper, scissors: Visualizing the Anglo-Saxon High Cross’
21. Mark A. Hall ‘Show and Tell: Re-articulating the monumentality of power, or Picts in the Museum’

Cynthia Thickpenny completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2019 with an artist-focussed study of Insular key pattern. In addition to her interest in geometric ornament, she has published on aspects of Scottish sculpture and Pictish symbols.

Katherine Forsyth is Reader in Celtic and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow. She has published on early medieval inscribed stones from Scotland and Ireland, on aspects of Pictish sculpture, Celtic boardgames, and on Scotland’s oldest manuscript, the Book of Deer.



Kate Mathis completed her PhD in Medieval Gaelic literature at the University of Edinburgh in 2011 and now teaches in the department of Celtic and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests and publications span the early Medieval to the Celtic Revival, with a particular focus on women’s poetry and elegy.