Academic Books
Restoring Creation
Abstract
Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac explores the relationship between the natural world (Creation) and humanity through the early English saints Cuthbert and Guthlac in their Anglo-Latin and Old English Lives. It argues that this relationship is best understood through received theological exegesis concerning Creation’s present state in the fallen world. The exegesis has its foundation in St Augustine’s interpretations of the Genesis narrative, though it enters the textual tradition of the Lives via an adapted portion from Augustine in Bede’s verse Life of Saint Cuthbert. Both Augustine and Bede argue, with slight differences, the following: that fallen Creation often functions to urge humanity, the saints included, towards greater holiness; that the Fall produced a relational breach between humanity and Creation (whether actual or ontological); and that the effects of the Fall can be temporarily removed by restoring a portion of Creation into its pre-fallen state by means of sanctity. The end result is a re-centering of the role of the physical world in early medieval literature, which lays the groundwork for a more nuanced engagement with pre-modern notions of the non-human world.
Chapters
Introduction
1. Monastic Obedience and Prelapsarian Cosmography: The Anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti
2. Ruminative Poetry and the Divine Office: Bede's Metrical Vita Sancti Cuthberti
3. Bede's Exegesis and Developmental Sanctity: The Prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti
4. Enargaeic Landscapes and Spiritual Progression: Felix's Vita Sancti Guthlaci
5. Landscape Lexis and Creation Restored: The Old English Prose Life of Guthlac and Guthlac A
Conclusion: Afterlives of Cuthbert and Guthlac
Bibliography
Links
Publisher: Boydell and Brewer
Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England
Interrogations of materiality and geography, narrative framework and boundaries, and the ways these scholarly pursuits ripple out into the wider cultural sphere.
Early medieval England as seen through the lens of comparative and interconnected histories is the subject of this volume. Drawn from a range of disciplines, its chapters examine artistic, archaeological, literary, and historical artifacts, converging around the idea that the period may not only define itself, but is often defined from other perspectives, specifically here by modern scholarship.
The first part considers the transmission of material culture across borders, while querying the possibilities and limits of comparative and transnational approaches, taking in the spread of bread wheat, the collapse of the art-historical "decorative" and "functional", and the unknowns about daily life in an early medieval English hall. The volume then moves on to reimagine the permeable boundaries of early medieval England, with perspectives from the Baltic, Byzantium, and the Islamic world, including an examination of Vercelli Homily VII (from John Chrysostom's Greek Homily XXIX), Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā's Arabic descriptions of Barṭīniyah ("Britain"), and an consideration of the Old English Orosius. The final chapters address the construction of and responses to "Anglo-Saxon" narratives, past and present: they look at early medieval England within a Eurasian perspective, the historical origins of racialized Anglo-Saxonism(s), and views from Oceania, comparing Hiberno-Saxon and Anglican Melanesian missions, as well as contemporary reactions to exhibitions of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Pacific Island cultures.
Contributors: Debby Banham, Britton Elliott Brooks, Caitlin Green, Jane Hawkes, John Hines, Karen Louise Jolly, Kazutomo Karasawa, Carol Neuman de Vegvar, John D. Niles, Michael W. Scott, and Jonathan Wilcox.
Editors: Karen Louise Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks
Links
Publisher: Boydell and Brewer