Featured in the May issue of Lancashire Life

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Product Description

Misericords, carved into the underside of choir stall seats in major churches and cathedrals, reveal the otherwise lost skills of medieval craftsmen, together with important insights into the thought of the period. The images, as pwoerful representations of the constant struggle between sin and virtue, and often drawing on the fantastic, depict many strange monsters alongside scenes that are domestic in character; the mother watching the fox stealing the cock, or marital disharmony in the kitchen. The medieval misericords of England's North West are regarded as one of the finest regional sets in the country. This clear and compelling account of the major collections across Cheshire, Cumbria and Lancashire explains how to interpret the images and brings vividly to life the philosophy, as well as the humour and capriciousness, of the monks' lives. The volume, based on first-hand fieldwork by the author, and accompanied by specially commissioned photographs and an extensive bibliography, casts new and fascinating light on the hidden and secretive world of the misericords.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #926782 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

About the Author
John Dickinson grew up in Canada, and first laid eyes on a misericord during his 1996 honeymoon in England. As an academic administrator at Lancaster University since 2000, he has been able to take full advantage of the wealth of North West misericords, indulging a passion that has culminated in this book.

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Customer Reviews

Worthy but flawed.
A book on the misericords of the North-West is, perhaps, long overdue, and one with so sound an academic footing as this would appear to have is therefore very welcome indeed. However, the experience is somewhat marred by the frequent inaccuracies of spelling (both the village of Cliviger and the folklorist Marcia MacDermott fall victim to this) and the somewhat careless attention to detail regarding the carvings themselves. They soon mount up, creating the impression of a rather slipshod work which, for an academic book, I find somewhat perplexing and rather dispiriting, especially when there is so little otherwise to make up for it - such as a more complete description and illustration of the sets under discussion which would have made for book more worthy of both its title and its price tag. In its favour, it's heartening to see a more common-sense approach to the so-called Green Man than the Pagan / Folkloric approach that is more or less the orthodoxy these days, and one is similarly heartened by the contextualising of the misericord imagery within the overall ecclesiastical fabric, both architectural & theological, rather than viewing them as the result of the whims and caprices of recalcitrant woodcarvers cocking a snook at the piousness, or else hypocrisy, of the owners of the bums so mercifully seated. With a little more attention to detail, to both the carvings and the writing, this would have been a very worthy book indeed. As it stands, however, it's disappointments are rather too grave a compromise to its overall integrity and the appreciation thereof.