Introduction: What Lies Beneath

Summary

Early in the twentieth century, Francis Bond devoted the first of his volumes on English ecclesiastical wood carvings to misericords, recognising their value in illuminating ‘a History of Social Life in England in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as it was lived by common folk’. Whilst, as we shall see in the course of the present volume, this is one valuable aspect of misericord carvings for the modern viewer, Bond's analysis – seminal though it is for subsequent studies – is restricted by the then current view of misericords which placed them very much in the category of ‘folk art’. In consequence, Bond's chapter dealing with the symbolism to be found on misericord carvings begins with the assertion that ‘[s]ymbolism is conspicuously rare on the misericords; they were carved by simple folk for simple folk’, and concludes its discussion a mere twenty-one lines later. This view has gradually been superseded, particularly in the past twenty years. Books by Michael Camille, Christa Grössinger and Malcolm Jones, along with the journal Profane Arts of the Middle Ages, have been supplemented by a growing number of essay collections and discrete articles to reveal the rich symbolism to be found on choir stalls and, indeed, across the marginal arts of the later Middle Ages. The present book inevitably owes an immense debt to these studies. Where this study differs, however, is that rather than seeing the vigorous carvings to be found populating the shadowy underside of choir stalls largely as sites of profane exuberance, it places these lively, sometimes surprising (or even shocking) scenes more firmly within the doctrinal and devotional culture of the period. This is not to suggest that recent authors have not taken this into account: far from it. Nonetheless, the contention at the heart of my discussion will be that English late medieval Christianity should provide the primary lens through which we view even the more ‘marginal’ ecclesiastical arts of the period. After all, in late medieval western thought, the variety of worldly existence – sacred or profane, perfect or monstrous – was primarily held to be evidence of the infinite variety of God's creation.In addition to this we must remember that these objects were commissioned by the clergy for installation in the devotional heart of the church, where they would be viewed by an exclusively clerical audience.