Warwick Rodwell is Consultant Archeologist to Westminster Abbey, and has dedicated this book to Her Majesty the Queen. U.S. readers will find it a very English artifact. Designed for both
scholarly and popular readers, the entire book is a meticulous description of the chair on which English royalty is crowned. It combines a medieval English wooden throne with the Scottish Stone
of Scone. The author describes the throne and the stone, separately and together, from historical, archeological, and art conservation perspectives. (He would like to make very clear that they
properly belong together.) The occasion of the book was the complete examination and restoration of the chair which recently took place to celebrate the anniversary of the coronation of
Elizabeth II. Rodwell suffers with difficulty the necessity to document contested facts (that the stone is not a fake, etc.), but does so. He is less conscientious about cultural assumptions
(for instance, that features of the stone must not have been historically visible because they are too ugly to be seen in Westminster Abbey). The book will appeal to a very specialized
audience; within it, some readers may note a tension between the author’s difficulty accepting the power of myth, and the fact that the existence of such a book is proof of it. The author
resolves the tension by focusing on the wooden chair as a rare and precious surviving artifact of the medieval period. Oversize: 9 x 12. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co.
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