Publication Notices

Vidimus hopes to provide reviews of these publications in future issues. If you would like to express your interest in reviewing any of the titles listed, or to submit a publication notice or review request, please email editor@vidimus.org.

Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass: Revised New Edition. Edited by David Caron, Nicola Gordon Bowe, Michael Wynne. Hardback, 320 pp. (Newbridge, Irish Academic Press, 7^th June 2021), £29.99. ISBN: 978-1788551298.

Some thirty years since its first publication, David Caron returns with an updated, redesigned, and greatly expanded edition of the Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass, the definitive guide to Irish stained glass from 1900 to the present day.

This is a practical and comprehensive guide, for glass aficionados and those new to the art form, that lists all of Ireland’s significant stained-glass works, county by county, and the most noteworthy pieces abroad by Irish artists. Beautifully illustrated with vibrant new photography, the Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass is bursting with colour and brimming with information about our most famous stained-glass artists, those who deserve to be better known, and the best contemporary artists working in the medium today.

With over 2,500 entries, two essays, and biographical notes on major artists, this is the key reference book for both academics and all who wish to learn more about Ireland’s celebrated stained-glass and where it can be found.

Click here to buy online at Irish Academic Press (€35.00)

Silver-Stained Roundels and Unipartite Panels Before the French Revolution: Flanders, Vol. 5: Medium-Sized Panels and Fragments of Large Stained-Glass Windows (Corpus Vitrearum, Belgium, Checklists). By Cornelis J. Berserik and Joost Caen. Hardback, 720 pp., 500 colour illustrations. (Turnhout, Brepols Publications, 2^nd July 2021), £106.50, €125.00 excl. tax., ISBN 978-2503593821.

This volume refers to medium-sized panels and fragments of stained-glass windows from the Middle Ages up to the end of the 18th century, found in public buildings, churches, museums and private collections in the present five provinces of Flanders (Belgium).

The present volume contains the panels and fragments encountered and researched by the authors since they started their research more than thirty years ago. Many of these panels and fragments are totally unknown to the public as they have never been displayed, nor published. Nevertheless, they demonstrate an important aspect of stained-glass production and stained-glass conservation. Where large windows in churches are well known to the public, it is often forgotten that even more stained glass was created for dwellings of the noble or patricians, house chapels, guild rooms, smaller spaces in abbeys, etc. It also became clear that virtually no glass was thrown away and larger fragments and panes were recycled as ‘stop gaps’ or integrated in composite panels, the so called ‘vitraux d’antiquaires’. Furthermore, archaeological sites nearly always reveal quite small pieces of glass, which could not be used for repairs or as ‘cullet’ in the glass production cycle. A selection of these archaeological finds is also presented in this volume. At the end of this volume ‘Addenda’ to the previous volumes are also added.

Available to buy through Brepols’ online shop (click here), or by sending an email to info@brepols.net.

York: Art, Architecture and Archaeology (The British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions). Edited by Sarah Brown, Sarah Rees Jones and Tim Ayers. Paperback, eBook, 264 pp., 118 b/w illustrations, (London, Routledge, 20^th July 2021), £120 (Hardback), £34.99 (Paperback), £31.49 (eBook). ISBN 978-1032019642.

York explores the archaeology, art, architecture and cultural heritage of the city in the late Middle Ages.

In the years since the resurrection of the British Archaeological Association conference in 1976, the association has met in the city only once (in 1988), for a conference that celebrated Yorkshire Monasticism. As a consequence, the secular and vernacular architecture as well as the architecture, art and imagery of York Minster were excluded from its scope, something redressed in the meeting that took place in 2017. As many recent publications have focused on York in the earlier medieval period, this book shines a much-needed light on the city in the later medieval ages. Starting with a range of essays on York Minster by authors directly involved in major conservation projects undertaken in the last ten years, the book also includes information on the vernacular architecture and transport infrastructure of York, as well as the parochial and material culture of the period.

Illuminating the extensive resources for the study of the late Middle Ages in England’s second capital, this book provides new research on this important city and will be suitable for researchers in medieval archaeology, art history, literature and material culture.

Click here to preorder online from Routledge (Hardback £120, Paperback £34.99).

The Rood in Medieval Britain & Ireland, c.800-c.1500. Edited by Philippa Turner and Jane Hawkes. Hardback, 248 pp., 14 colour, 48 b/w illustrations, (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2020), Hardback £60.00. ISBN: 978-1783275526.

The rood was central to medieval Christianity and its visual culture: Christ’s death on the cross was understood as the means by which humankind was able to gain salvation, and depictions of the cross, and Christ’s death upon it, were ubiquitous.

This volume brings together contributions offering a new perspective on the medieval rood – understood in its widest sense, as any kind of cross – within the context of Britain and Ireland, over a wide period of time which saw significant political and cultural change. In doing so, it crosses geographical, chronological, material, and functional boundaries which have traditionally characterised many previous discussions of the medieval rood. Acknowledging and exploring the capacity of the rood to be both universal and specific to particular locations and audiences, these contributions also tease out the ways in which roods related to one another, as well as how they related to their physical and cultural surroundings, often functioning in dialogue with other images and the wider devotional topography – both material and mental – in which they were set.

The chapters consider roods in a variety of media and contexts: the monumental stone crosses of early medieval England, twelfth-century Ireland, and, spreading further afield, late medieval Galicia; the three-dimensional monumental wooden roods in English monasteries, Irish friaries, and East Anglian parish churches; roods that fit in the palm of a hand, encased in precious metals, those that were painted on walls, drawn on the pages of manuscripts, and those that appeared in visions, dreams, and gesture.

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