The International Conference on Insular Art (IIAC) is the leading forum for scholars of the visual and material culture of early medieval Ireland and Britain, including manuscript illumination, sculpture, metalwork, and textiles, and encompassing the work of Anglo-Saxon-, Celtic- and Norse-speaking artists. The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the eighth IIAC, which took place in Glasgow 11-14 July 2017. The theme of IIAC8—Peopling Insular Art: Practice, Performance, Perception—was intended to focus attention on those who commissioned, created, and engaged with Insular art objects, and how they conceptualised, fashioned, and experienced them (with ‘engagement’ covering not only contemporary audiences, but later medieval and modern ones too). The twenty-one articles gathered here reflect the diverse ways in which this theme has been interpreted. They demonstrate the intellectual vibrancy of Insular art studies, its international outlook, its interdiscplinarity, and its openness to innovative technologies and approaches, while at the same time demonstrating the strength and enduring value of established methodologies and research practices. The studies collected here focus not only on made objects, but on the creative processes and intellectual decisions which informed their making. This volume brings Insular makers – the illuminators, pattern-makers, rubricators, carvers, and casters – to the fore.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Section 1: Practice
  • 1. Red-handed in the Barberini Gospels: The rubricator did it
  • 2. Turning the tables: An alternative approach to understanding the canon tables in the Book of Kells
  • 3. Making key pattern in Insular art: The Harley Golden Gospels and Kilmartin Cross
  • 4. Coincidences, or common conceits, in the large Rogart and Ardagh brooches?
  • 5. Manufacturing the thin, openwork panels on the Cross of Cong
  • 6. Viking influence in Insular art: Considering identity in early medieval Ireland
  • 7. Lions on Iona
  • 8. Artistic and cultural transmission across the Irish Sea: The ‘marigold’ stones of Wexford and their Welsh connections
• Section 2: Performance
  • 9. Power-dressing in the Irish Sea area: An interesting group of Hiberno-Scandinavian strap-fittings
  • 10. Touching the past: The Breadalbane brooch and its bearers
  • 11. Was the Staffordshire Hoard a trophy hoard? Some evidence from Ireland
  • 12. Connecting places: Insights on Pictish sculpture from Swedish rune stones
  • 13. Patterns in monumentality: Characterizing sculptural assemblages at early medieval monastic sites in Northern Britain
  • 14. The Hackness Cross: Landscape, patronage, and international influences
  • 15. ‘The correct path to Heaven’: Motherhood and mothering in English manuscript art, c. 970 to 1030 151
• Section 3: Perception
  • 16. Uncanny monsters and telling absences: Ways of reading the Meigle recumbents
  • 17. What has Sigurd to do with Christ? Reassessing the nature of Anglo-Scandinavian sculpture in the north of England
  • 18. Crossing borders: Re-assessing the ‘need to group’ the high crosses in Ireland
  • 19. Resilience, restoration and revival: Insular art in later medieval Ireland
  • 20. Stone, paper, scissors: Visualizing the Anglo-Saxon high cross
  • 21. Show and tell: Re-articulating the monumentality of power, or Picts in the museum
• Plate section