ABSTRACT
For extraordinary diversity, the most common images in Western medieval art were of the Crucifixion and the Virgin Mary. As central representations of the Faith, around which many other concepts and images clustered in the course of the Middle Ages, both were the objects of regulation and control. The Crucifixion is a peculiarly sensitive barometer of aesthetic and conceptual change, that change which led, in the words of R. W. Southern, to the realisation of 'the extreme limits of human suffering. Acts of practical as opposed to verbal censorship of medieval art are not so common as to deprive the events in London in 1305–1306 of interest. Some effort has been made to delineate on what grounds objects such as the Conyhope Cross were held–on the face of it–to be unacceptable. As with all censorship, an element was the actual success of the image in provoking an out-of-hand, popular response, a succes de scandale.
