Review: Building Anglo-Saxon England, by John Blair
Richard Hodges
John Blair Building Anglo-Saxon England Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018, 471 pp., 109 color and 43 b/w illus. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780691162980

“One of the most intractable problems in whole range early medieval studies concerns dwellings Anglo-Saxons. It is generally agreed that they were wood no example survives above ground. Beyond this student must rely on incidental references literature scanty data provided by excavation.” C. A. R. Radford's opening remarks house inaugural issue Medieval Archaeology (1957) belong to another age.1 In sixty years since Radford wrote, archaeology has revolutionized our understanding architecture. This much clear from Blair's majestic new book, . The amount archaeological evidence scholarship amassed 1957 remarkable, uses it his subject advance a history England. result promises myriad directions for studies.

A tacit objective book revisit W. G. Hoskins's Making English Landscape (1955)—a canonical interpretation England's topographical history.2 view, Anglo-Saxons “behaved within constructed space : rural farms, ritual holy landscapes, administrative defensive forts installations, hierarchical great halls proto-manorial sites, commercial towns” (3). As with other art forms, argues, approach architecture was distinctive elegant. assertion diverges boldly both Hoskins prevailing postmodern postprocessual approaches echo historians such as Erwin Panofsky Walter Horn, who before just after World War II outlined programmatic guiding ideas studying Continental Carolingian Renaissance.

The innovative …
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians