Longwinded, abstract, and often dUficult to foUow, his work is interesting and clever enough to have deserved the kind hand of a more severe editor. More generaUy open to criticism is Binski's use oflanguage. Nor does the art history always blend easUy with the overarching view ofWestminster as an exercise in political theories.The compUcated study oftheWestminster retable, for instance, looks to one who is not an art historian to be a seU-contained piece of art history.
He sees the Cosmati work, for example, as charged with a royal ethic of respect for antiquity, imperial Rome, and (a very vague notion) the world outlook of popes and emperors and here, as elsewhere, he perhaps unduly elevates ideology over taste in determining aesthetic choices. The effect ofBinski's work is to loosenWestminster from its French moorings and to present it as an altogether odder and more individual artefact, reflecting the outlook ofkings who looked back to the EngUsh past and, in the case of Edward I, sideways to a British Imperium, as weU as overseas. Some of Binski's best pages are given to Edward's cult, for which his study has a value independent of the cult's architectural and artistic context. But Ui its decoration and symboUsm it drew on a much wider range of influences, notably from the Rome of the Cosmati, whose mosaic work was continued under Edward Fs patronage.At the same time it was the shrine of a thoroughly insular saint, though Edward the Confessor's quaUties, transmuted by hagiographical developments of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries from kingly to chivalric virtues, were ones which belonged to European culture.
The models for the church were certainly in large part French and here Binski restores Reims to its traditional place as exemplar, though with Louis LX's Sainte ChapeUe not far behind. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ģ12BOOK REVIEWS centration of roles which had no French counterpart.
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