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William Morris & Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings
By Caroline Arscott; 2008; 260 pp.; Hardcover; $75; Yale University Press

William Morris’s Kelmscott: Landscape and History
Edited by Alan Crossley, Tom Hassall, and Peter Salway; 2007; 210 pp; Paperback; $49.95; Windgather Press/Society of Antiquaries of London

Don’t expect pattern-for-pattern comparisons of Morris and Burne-Jones works in Interlacings; instead, Caroline Arscott, a Courtauld Institute lecturer, analyzes subtle undercurrents that tied together the two reformers’ oeuvres during their lifelong friendship. Her basic point: their fascination with physical fitness and their idealization of medieval chivalry and primitive peoples was manifested in Morris’s taut trellis-like designs and in Burne-Jones’s images of buff bodies, articulated suits of armor, and dense floral backdrops. Although thought-provoking, this book can be recommended only for advanced students of Morris and Burne-Jones, since the text at times bogs down in psychoanalysis of “the higher levels of the drives, the scopic, the invocatory and the genital.” Also for Morris initiates, but more straightforwardly written, is William Morris’s Kelmscott. Commissioned by the Society of Antiquaries, which has run Kelmscott Manor (Morris’s Thames-side country retreat in Oxfordshire) as a museum since the 1960s, these 13 arcane yet fascinating essays explore millennia of change in the area. Authors chronicle the region’s traces of Neolithic settlements; medieval gentry’s additions to the village church; the Morris family’s minimal changes to the 17th-century manor during their tenure (1871-1938); World War II fortifications for riflemen along the Thames; and the Society’s decades of restoration work, undoing misguided 1940s alterations and planting the gardens with poetically-named flora like corncockle, eyebright, and harebell.