The Green Man

`The rarest, most recondite and fascinating art book, which is a folklore and magic book as well- THE TIMES
`Kathleen Basford has made a beautiful collection of corbels, capitals, bosses and misericords depictingthe foliated head known as the Green Man -the immediacy with which the reality of the supernatural is conveyed is sometimes disturbing, sometimes presented with an almost twentieth-century surrealism and always compels a respect for the vitality of the medieval imagination. [The author] includes a personal preface and an essay on the iconographical development of the image - her argument, authorities and evidence are well presented.' LORE AND LANGUAGEThe Green Man, the image of the foliate head or the head of a man sprouting leaves, is probably the most common of all motifs in medieval sculpture. Nevertheless, the significance of the image lay largely unregarded until Kathleen Basford published this book -the first monograph of theGreen Man in any language -and thereby earned the lasting gratitude of scholars in many fields, from art history and folklore to current environmental studies. This book has opened up new avenues of research, not only into medieval man's understanding of nature, and into conceptions of death, rebirth and resurrection in the middle ages, but also into our concern today with ecology and our relationship with the green world. It is therefore a work of living scholarship and its reissue will be greatly and justly welcomed.