A fascinating exploration of Suffolk’s historic churches. Will be of interest to all those who live in or are visiting this attractive county in England.

Church Woodwork in the British Isles, 1100-1535: An Annotated Bibliography is a thoroughly researched bibliographic guide to monographic, serial, archival, and graphical resources that deal with all aspects of late Romanesque, Gothic, and early Renaissance ecclesiastical woodwork in churches throughout the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Dealing with both the decorative and structural elements of wooden church furnishings fittings, this authoritative reference tool includes more than 900 annotated citations for works published from the mid-19th century to the present. The extensive and informative annotations provide a synopsis of each cited resource. Resources are categorized in separate chapters by their specific location in the church, their decorative features, their structural function, or other pertinent criteria. This annotated bibliography represents the most comprehensive reference tool for material that deals with church woodwork that has yet been published.

Shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards 2016! It has been estimated that over 90% of England's figurative medieval art was obliterated in the image destruction of the Reformation. Medieval angel roofs, timber structures with spectacular and ornate carvings of angels, with a peculiar preponderance in East Anglia, were simply too difficult for Reformation iconoclasts to reach. Angel roof carvings comprise the largest surviving body of major English medieval wood sculpture. Though they areboth masterpieces of sculpture and engineering, angel roofs have been almost completely neglected by academics and art historians, because they are inaccessible, fixed and challenging to photograph. 'The Angel Roofs of East Anglia' is the first detailed historical and photographic study of the region's many medieval angel roofs. It shows the artistry and architecture of these inaccessible and little-studied medieval artworks in more detail and clarity than ever before, and explains how they were made, by whom, and why. Michael Rimmer redresses the scholarly neglect and brings the beauty, craftsmanship and history of these astonishing medieval creations to the reader. The book also offers a fascinating new answer to the question of why angel roofs are so overwhelmingly an East Anglian phenomenon, but relatively rare elsewhere in the country.

The classic guide to Suffolk's rich heritage of churches.

Because of the unauthorized sale, loss, or deteriorating condition of parochial libraries in the 1930s and 1940s, a postal survey of surviving collections was undertaken which resulted in a detailed report and directory finally published under the general editorship of Neil Ker as The Parochial Libraries of the Church of England: Report of a Committee appointed by the Central Council for the Care of Churches to Investigate the Number and Condition of Parochial Libraries belonging to the Church of England, with a Historical Introduction, Notes on Early Printed Books and their Care and an Alphabetical List of Parochial Libraries Past and Present, by Faith Press in 1959. This book is a thorough revision of that work and incorporates much of its apparatus while reflecting new discoveries and recent research. The Directory in particular has been greatly expanded to include libraries established up to c. 1900, and, especially, a broad sample of what have come to be known as desk-libraries, with one or more pre-1700 prescribed books. Many of the reports, documents, and tables, including the historical introduction, have been reprinted in this new edition, edited and modified to take account of new developments and findings. A Postscript, 2000 briefly outlines research in this field over the last 50 years or so, and there are a number of new lists and tables, one including statistical information. The index is a key to the whole book and should be especially consulted for references to former owners and donors and subject strengths.

First published in three volumes, 1988, 1990, and 1992.

Norman Scarfe explores place names, the Sutton Hoo ship burial, the coming of Christianity, and the abbey at Bury St Edmunds, concluding with an evocative study of five Suffolk places - Southwold, Dunwich, Yoxford, and Wingfield and Fressingfield. The modern landscape of Suffolk is still essentially a medieval one, though much of it is even earlier: the five hundred medieval churches and ten thousand 'listed' houses 'of historic or architectural interest', and the 'Hundred'lanes going back at least to the tenth century, are often found to be set in a landscape created before the Roman conquest. Suffolk in the Middle Ages opens with a discussion of the earliest written records, the place-names, as a guide to settlement-patterns, including the setting of Sutton Hoo. Among the grave-goods found in that celebrated ship and discussed here was the whetstone-sceptre; asked to carry it from its showcase in the British Museum to the laboratory, the author acknowledges a closer feeling of involvement even than helping to re-open the ship in its mound in 1966. His explanation of the presence of the whetstone-sceptre, printed here, has never been challenged. The identification of a carved Anglo-Saxon cross at Iken in 1977 prompted the essay here on St Botolph and the coming of East Anglian Christianity. This leads to a consideration of the Danish invasion of East Anglia, and a reexamination of the posthumous victory of King Edmund and Christianity as portrayed in an imaginary Breckland warren on the front of this book. Scarfe's carefully reasoned argument that the Metropolitan Museum's famous walrusivory cross was made for the monks' choir at Bury has never been refuted. Life in Bury abbey is vividly reconstructed: it was the most richly documented flowering of the work of East Anglia's apostles, Felix and Fursa, which alsoled to the phenomenal establishment in Suffolk by 1086 of four hundred of the five hundred medieval churches. In four East Suffolk essays, Southwold, Dunwich, Yoxford and Wingfield are exposed to Norman Scarfe's interpretativeskills. He reveals a past few could have guessed at, often quite as curious as the 'Two Strange Tales' unravelled in his concluding pages.

The definitive work on church archaeology.