This book is, at heart, about form in Insular art and literature, but it is also, inevitably, about theology. This is of course due in part to the absence of a distinctly secular realm of common life in the Middle Ages, meaning that most serious endeavors involved religion in some degree. It is also due to the demographics governing the means of production: much of what survives of early medieval art is in manuscripts and, to a lesser degree, stone sculpture, and both were the domains of the church. And yet the inescapable presence of the church can lead to misunderstanding regarding its influence over individual artifacts and their meaning. For certain features of Insular art are difficult to account for if we assume that all art was controlled by patristic (orthodox) doctrine. While the objects and texts I treat are about the central themes of Christianity, these are often construed in surprising ways, ways that were sometimes explicitly condemned by contemporary authorities. Such waywardness, I contend, deserves to be approached with great interest rather than with discomfort or scorn.
Medieval Christianity inherited several pre-Christian intellectual and aesthetic traditions with diverse premises about the status of the felt world, or the sensible, and its relationship to a transcendent plane of abstractions—if the latter were imagined at all. A central question amid the metaphysical inquiry, both explicit and not, that attempted to sort out these differences was how and whether God could be perceived. It is a conundrum that informed in some way all religious representation (which was, in some way, all representation) and fueled centuries of controversy. Yet one thing was clear: on at least one occasion the divine had come into the world of sense perception, at the Incarnation, when God had deigned to become a man. This was in many ways a hot potato, as the authorities recognized—where do you draw a line, contain divinity, once it has been brought into the world, lest it start popping up under every stock and stone (as it did among the pagans)? The problem would eventually be solved by circumscribing the Incarnation within Christ’s human form, officially restricting it to the physical body plus its trace in the increasingly controlled, prescribed rite of the Eucharist. Later medieval commentators would therefore emphasize the Incarnation as an act of humility, God lowering himself into a body for the purpose of suffering, and the need for all Christians to emulate that humility, if not that suffering. In early medieval Britain, however, amid diverse attitudes informed by distinct intellectual, cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions, an expansive rather than a restrictive interpretation of the “Word that was made flesh” prevailed, according to which the Word might in fact be sensed in the world in surprising ways. Understanding how form, as a manifestation of the sensible (not “form” in the Aristotelian or Platonic senses), embodies and construes theological precept is crucial to understanding the products of this tradition.
The particular character of Insular Incarnationalism has been obscured by several factors, notably the tendency of the study of Insular Christianity to bifurcate into Celtic studies, on the one hand, and “Anglo-Saxon” studies on the other (more on this term in the next chapter). The scholarship on the latter then tends to be overwhelmed by the copious evidence from Carolingian Francia, which provides tantalizing but also potentially misleading material. For the Carolingians had empire on their minds, and continuity with Rome foremost in their rhetoric. The trends toward circumscription of the body of Christ, toward regulated and uniform observance of the mass, were Carolingian projects, ones that had English contributors (notably Alcuin of York) and acolytes (Ælfric of Eynsham), but whose influence only trickled into England, widening with the Benedictine reform in the tenth century and again with the Conquest, with its influx of Continental power both sacred and secular. Insular artworks, however, often make it clear that they did not get the imperial memo. They embody the flesh of the Word in ways that show unconcern with their evident materialism, ways that emphasize Christ’s divinity and its effect on his and our humanity as well as the ontological mystery of the hypostatic union. As Johanna Kramer has recently demonstrated the early English church to have had a characteristic way of conceiving of the Ascension (as limen and transit), this book will attempt to show that it had a similarly characteristic reception of the Incarnation.
