Sculpture and identity in late Saxon East Anglia

Bailey has observed that pre-Conquest stone monuments are umque historical
artifacts.l Acknowledging their general immobility, such objects have rarely been
disassociated from their original contexts; as 'such, they are important records of
local and regional taste/ and of the social, economic and religious milieux informing
their production and resultant styles. As public art, stone sculpture is also invaluable
to elucidating identity and the apparent semiotic systems through which it is
negotiated, expressed and understood. This thematic investigation of East Anglia's
Late Saxon sculpture is informed by these premises and examines their regional
specificity through an interdisciplinary study of sculpture and its corroborative and
comparative evidence. It demonstrates that sculptors in tenth- and eleventh-century
East Anglia utilized oolitic limestone characteristic of the Bamack quarries; it also
suggests that monasteries (particularly Ely) controlled quarrying and carving in the
region. Finally, in comparison with East Anglia's Late Saxon metalwork, it
hypothesizes that elite identity was multivalent and its expression(s) were seemingly
context-dependent. While this study engages with the typological complexities of
East Anglia's Late Saxon stone monuments, it also interrogates the methodologies,
theories and supporting evidence that have informed and influenced interpretation of
this material. It demonstrates that the region's extant sculptures (seemingly products
of a specific intellectual milieu) are unique and that existing approaches to
contemporaneous evidence in England may not be applicable to this corpus.