Essay On The Ruthwell Cross

The Ruthwell cross is a stone, Anglo-Saxon monument which breaks down and disrupts several different societal and culturally defined binaries and is an example of how one object can exist as multiple things/ideas at once. This essay will focus on the disruption of the narrative of past and present, human and non-human, male and female, and wood and stone. Many different aspects and elements of the cross come into play when doing a diffractive reading of the Ruthwell cross. The cross was created by Northumbrian craftsmen, shortly after the kingdom of Northumbria had expanded into the southwest area of Scotland in the early to mid 700s. Although the Ruthwell cross originally existed outdoors, it was later moved inside of the Ruthwell Parish church, where it currently resides. It was Heather Pulliam that suggested that by …show more content…
The large stone cross stands at approximately 17 feet tall and is covered in ornately carved imagery as well as poem in old English which has greatly deteriorated and prose inscriptions in Latin which has stayed legible and relatively intact over time. The different types of text on the cross demonstrate both the world being in the cross and the cross being in the world for different reasons. Factors such as the location and environment of the cross, both past and present, the materials it is made up of, and the translation and understanding of the texts and carvings and images, all play a vital role in understanding how the cross exists and how it has been experienced by different types of people throughout history and demonstrate how important it is to examine an object using multiple and intersecting tools of measurement and interpretation.
The East and West side of the cross are covered in biblical carvings, done in an Anglo-Saxon style. Meyer Schapiro refers to style as “the constant shape or confiuguration of an intentional object and sometimes the constituent parts of an object or the distinctive attributes or