The Romsey Rood: an Anglo-Saxon artefact in the Anglo-Norman World
-
Wednesday 26 November 2025
(6pm following the Society's AGM at 5pm) - The Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AT
- Lecturer: Richard Plant
This members lecture is available as both an in person and a recording only event. The recording will be made available to ALL attendees on the Monday following the event and will be available for 4 weeks.
Attached to the west wall of the South Transept of Romsey Abbey, a prestigious house of nuns in Hampshire, is an approximately life-sized image of the crucified Christ. The sculpture, though decayed, is of high quality and almost certainly older than the 12th-century building to which it is affixed. It raises a number of questions: among them, how might the sculpture have been viewed by the community and what role did it play in their religious life?
The image is far from a unique survival: there are a surprising number of Anglo-Saxon stone images of the crucified Christ surviving on post-Conquest buildings: surprising because images of that date find few counterparts in stone in continental Europe, and such reuse is rare elsewhere. This talk will also address how these images relate to the wider visual and religious culture of late Anglo-Saxon England and ask why they have been neglected in much scholarly literature.
Lecturer
Dr Richard Plant is an architectural historian and lecturer specialising primarily in the Middle Ages with a strong interest in the modern. He studied English Literature at Cambridge before going on to do his MA and then PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has taught at a number of institutions, and was Deputy Academic Director at Christie’s Education. He has published on English and German architecture and has contributed to the British Archaeological Association’s International Romanesque conferences and co-edited the proceedings. He is currently Secretary of the BAA.
Completed