Robert Deshman wove together a dense and tightly structured nexus of Early Christian, Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon, and Ottonian manuscript illuminations, ivories, textiles, mosaics, and wall paintings on the one hand, and contemporary exegetical, liturgical, and political writings on the other. In so doing, he ultimately demonstrated the intrinsic connections among visual culture, theology, philosophy, political theory, and ecclesiastic doctrine and practice. Although he used the word only once in his own writings, at the very end of his career, Deshman was truly an interdisciplinary scholar of the first order.

The thirteen articles collected in this volume were published between 1971 and 1997 (four posthumously) in six different journals and four edited books. Reprinting them is meant not only to make the articles more accessible but also to present a cohesive body of work (primarily on Anglo-Saxon art) that as a whole has yet to be surpassed or methodologically replaced in the scholarly literature.