ABSTRACT
At conferences at Kalamazoo (2002) and Winchester (2003) I had the privilege of discussing the Ruthwell Cross with Patrick Wormald. He was healthily sceptical about the theories of those modern scholars who, as he put it ‘for thirty years have been trying to pull that monument apart’. Together with another old friend, Michael Wood (also with us at Kalamazoo), we planned a television documentary on Ruthwell to be broadcast on or near 25 March 2005, when the Annunciation would coincide with Good Friday, making the day at once ‘Adnuntiatio Domini et Passio eiusdem’. My last contact with Patrick was an e-mail on 25 March 2004, celebrating Spring and the Annunciation: he and Michael hoped soon to get down to working on the project, and he was particularly looking forward to participating, that September, in the annual Medieval Rome seminar, organized by University College Cork at the British School at Rome: during it we would decide on the Roman visual images to use for the documentary. But his illness recurred, and the week of the Rome seminar tragically coincided with his death. In those years, Patrick regularly recited the Latin Liturgia Horarum. He did so as a spiritual exercise, but also delightedly told friends what insights it daily offered into the early medieval monastic imagination. Patrick, always witty and generous with information and ideas, would have enjoyed the sophisticated ‘gift-exchange’ implied by the Ruthwell Visitation-Archer sequence, where sculpted images were designed to recall liturgical chants, which in turn reveal new meanings in scriptural texts.
