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