Project History
Late 10th/early 11th-century limestone grave-cover.
Balsham 3A (Everson and Stocker 2023, Ill. 9).
Photograph and © P. Everson and D. Stocker and Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture.
Project History
The Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture project was developed and led for over half a century by the late pre-eminent British medieval archaeologist Professor Dame Rosemary Cramp. The project’s official start is generally recorded as 1972 when the British Academy recognised the project in their programme of supporting major long-running initiatives producing fundamental works of scholarship. CASSS’s aim, then as now, has been to publish fully illustrated catalogues of the carved stones of pre-Conquest England in a series of foundational, regional volumes, with discussions and complete bibliographies.
The publication of the first volume in the series in 1989 by Cramp, was devoted to the sculptures and sculptural fragments recorded across the counties of Durham and Northumberland. Over 50 years, authors, geologists, editors and illustrators have brought the CASSS series near to completion. All volumes continue the format set out by Cramp in 1984, each recording the location, measurements, geology, inscriptions, date and appearance of the surviving sculptures and engaging with the existing scholarship with a full bibliography being provided for each monument. Equally importantly, each entry includes a discussion of the relationships of the carvings – stylistic, iconographic and symbolic – with the art of other contemporary media, as well as the ideas and concepts informing the literary, liturgical and cultural contexts of the sculptures.