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 extant, recorded carvings of 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 – 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.