Resources

On this page you can find links to additional resources and other projects working in this area. A basic introduction to church carvings is given in Bob Trubshaw’s Gargoyle Hunting Guide (12 pages) which is a short version of book he published some time ago and now out of print. Bob has also done a short video presentation on Project Gargoyle:

Introduction to Project Gargoyle

There are two presentations about carvings in Leicestershire and Rutland narrated by Bob Trubshaw.

Introduction to the Medieval Carvings of Leicestershire and Rutland (46 minutes).
Understanding Leicestershire and Rutland’s Anglo-Saxon and Romanesque Carvings (36 minutes).

Although we are accustomed to seeing Romanesque and later medieval carvings as bare stone, this is not how they would have been envisaged by their makers and patrons. Before the nineteenth century Gothic Revival such sculpture would have been painted, often in ways which now might seem rather garish. Medieval Carvings in Colour is a response to requests for information about how Romanesque and later medieval carvings would originally have been painted.

Medieval Carvings in Colour – pdf download for free here (size 11 MB)

LARC project

These three PDFs relate to the aims of the LARC Project:

What can a gargoyle tell us? (2 MB pdf)
Mawming and Mooning: Towards an understanding of medieval carvings and their carvers (14 Mbyte pdf)
Demon Carvers and Mooning Men: The East Midlands School of Church Carving By Lionel Wall (5 MB pdf) work on Rutland carvings by a local historian.

Other Church Sculpture Projects

Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland (CRSBI)

The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture will be a complete online record of all the surviving Romanesque sculpture in Britain and Ireland, at more than 5000 sites. It provides us with a unique window on the aesthetics, beliefs, daily life, preoccupations, humour and technical skills of the artists and people of this creative and formative era from the late 11th century to the late 12th century. It is a searchable database.

The Corpus of Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture

The Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture identifies, records and publishes in a consistent format, English sculpture dating from the 7th to the 11th centuries. Much of this material was previously unpublished, and is of crucial importance in helping identify the earliest settlements and artistic achievements of the early medieval and Pre-Norman English. The Corpus documents the earliest Christian field monuments from free-standing carved crosses and innovative decorative elements, to grave-markers.

Published resources

There is very little on later medieval stone carving. The Shire Books (Oxford) Library Guides are very useful small books that give an introduction to their subject.

Gargoyles and Grotesques. Alex Woodcock. 2012.
Medieval Masons. Malcolm Hislop. 2014.
Medieval Church Architecture. Jon Cannon. 2014.
Church Misericords and Bench Ends. Richard Hayman, 2013.
Medieval Church and Churchyard Monuments. Sally Badham, 2014.

The most detailed book on church sculpture of this period is ‘Liminal Images – Aspects of Medieval Architectural Sculpture in the South of England from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries’ by Alex Woodcock, BAR British Series 386, 2005. It is however currently out of print and can only be obtained from second hand shops if available. The British Library can also loan out a copy.