Anglo-Saxon Styles

Catherine E. Karkov · George Hardin Brown

feb 2012 · State University of New York Press

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Art historian Meyer Schapiro defined style as "the constant form—and sometimes the constant elements, qualities, and expression—in the art of an individual or group." Today, style is frequently overlooked as a critical tool, with our interest instead resting with the personal, the ephemeral, and the fragmentary. Anglo-Saxon Styles demonstrates just how vital style remains in a methodological and theoretical prism, regardless of the object, individual, fragment, or process studied. Contributors from a variety of disciplines—including literature, art history, manuscript studies, philology, and more— consider the definitions and implications of style in Anglo-Saxon culture and in contemporary scholarship. They demonstrate that the idea of style as a "constant form" has its limitations, and that style is in fact the ordering of form, both verbal and visual. Anglo-Saxon texts and images carry meanings and express agendas, presenting us with paradoxes and riddles that require us to keep questioning the meanings of style.

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Catherine E. Karkov is Professor of Art at Miami University and the author of Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript, the editor of Basic Readings in Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, and the coeditor (with Robert T. Farrell and Michael Ryan) of The Insular Tradition, also published by SUNY Press. George Hardin Brown is Professor of English at Stanford University and the author of Bede the Venerable and Bede the Educator.