The Golden Legend
Michael Hodges
Self-published, £35, 320 pages
This encyclopaedic study of the artworks in the churches of East Anglia has good claim to be the photographic counterpart of Eamon Duffy’s monumental work, The Stripping of the Altars. It is the first and best introduction to an important subject, of which only the surface has been scratched in the past.
Written by Michael Hodges, the Herald’s architecture correspondent, it is named after the late-13th-century compilation of saints and prophets drawn up by an Italian Dominican, Giacomo de Varazzi, better known as Blessed Jacobus de Voragine. It consists largely of painted rood screens, plus a few statues, and the small amount of stained glass which was mercifully overlooked by Thomas Cromwell’s appalling band of iconoclasts,
