Joining a growing body of scholarship interested in the intersection of critical and creative practices, Francesca Brooks’s delightful monograph on the influence of his study of Old English on Anglo-Welsh modernist poet David Jones’sAnathemata (1952) offers her audience the opportunity to read with Jones, tracing his engagement with critical and literary texts as he developed this poem, a history of England in eight parts viewed through the lens of a man-as-artist sitting at Mass, through investigation of the marginalia he left in his books. Brooks’s careful archival research reveals how Jones used his sustained study of early English materials, highly influenced by shifts in how early English studies were being conducted--in particular, by the work of H.M. and Nora K. Chadwick--to locate hybrid Anglo-Welsh histories in the Old English and Anglo-Latin record, permitting him both to contest the very idea of the “Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms,” and to deepen and enrich his multimedia and macaronic work through his own multilingual and multicultural view of medieval Britain. Brooks brings together medieval and modernist studies in this monograph, and while some medievalists might view the book as not holding relevance for them, there are two essential reasons why this book very much ought to be read by any medievalist working in English studies: first, because it showcases the medievalism of a modernist poet who was deeply engaged with Old English literature and language well beyond what we see with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, offering an understudied resource for field reception studies; and second, because in his amateur scholarship and philological work, informed by his own Anglo-Welsh and Catholic identity and largely ignored and understudied prior to Brooks’s contribution with this book, Jones uncannily prefigured the concerns of today’s scholars to understand medieval Britain beyond the traditional focus on Anglo-Saxon and Protestant hegemony.

Where earlier studies of Jones’s work have focused on his Englishness, in contradiction to his own sense of himself as a Cambrophile (Hague, 2008), and scholars have read portions of his library to support thematic understandings of his work (Miles, 1990), other scholars have understood the importance of Old English literature and culture to Jones’s work as an Anglo-Welsh writer (Robichaud, 2007; Johnson, 2010) and of Jones to medievalism (Treharne, 2017 and forthcoming). Brooks engages with the challenge set forth by David Blamires in 1976, that “knowledge of Jones’s reading and a hand-list of The Library of David Jones, National Library of Wales, which was not available when he was writing, would make a full study of Jones’s medievalism possible.” (14) She focuses specifically on what she calls his “Anglo-Saxon library,” [1] a collection of books on Old English language, literature, and culture which Jones collected from the 1930s throughout his life, and in which is preserved extensive marginalia, signaling his deep engagement with these materials. Brooks has identified multiple points at which Jones’s marginalia brings books in his collection into conversation with one another and with critical discussions being had in the world of Medieval Studies, and can be traced directly from the commentary and notes he made in his books to drafts of his Anathemata.

Following an Introduction laying out her subject and methodology, and chapter one, which offers some preliminary illustrations of how Jones’s reading of critical and academic work on Old English inflected his writing of The Anathemata, Brooks offers case studies for four specific ways in which Jones used his collection of early English texts and critical studies to shape his poem. Chapter two focuses on reading the rhetorical tropes in Jones’s “Preface” to The Anathemata against Alfred’s “Preface” to Pastoral Care to show how Jones viewed his work as, like that of Alfred, one of cultural renewal, a decidedly political aim in this regard, pushing against the English nationalism of his time. Chapter three shows how Jones used then-current new work on the settlement period in early England to inform his own poetics of settlement, which emphasized “a continuity of occupation of settlers which chaps would have jeered at a few decades back” (168) and “focused on Celtic survivals in the verbal map of Angle-land” to “make a historiographical argument about the cultural impact of migration through poetic form” (168). Chapter four focuses expressly on Jones’s use of the Vita Sancti Guthlaci Auctore Felice, together with archaeological finds on Caistor-by-Norwich contemporary to the writing of his poem and the verbal map of “Angle-land” he has created, to underscore “the lost narrative of the Britons of the early medieval fenland” (171). And chapter five traces Jones’s engagement with the Dream of the Rood and the Ruthwell monument, arguing that Jones brought these together to shape his vision of “a shared Catholic tradition in the present that is marked by centuries of conflict and suppression as much as it is by a mutual understanding of the central tenets of that faith” (259). Four appendices provide an inventory of Jones’s “Anglo-Saxon Library,” a list of the compound words with Old English roots found throughout The Anathemata, and extracts from some of Jones’s letters that highlight further his debt to Old English, Anglo-Latin, Welsh, and other medieval materials in the development of his poem.

Brooks’s book is lucid, absorbing, thought-provoking, and inspiring. It showcases the continued importance of maintaining and visiting artists’ archives, and the intellectual and cultural value of reading with writers, seeking to look at their work through the materials they consulted in developing it. It rewards slow-looking and deep mental engagement, just as does the poem Brooks has sought to help her readers better understand through its writing. It points out the illusory nature of the “critical/creative divide” and advocates for scholarly attention to the ways writers like Jones engage with the critical in their compositions, particularly where the writers, themselves, have indicated they are conducting poetic inquiry and thus, intend to be read as critical/creatives. Most importantly, it illuminates Jones’s conviction that “the findings of the physical sciences are necessarily mutable” but “the poet, of whatever century, is concerned only with how he can use a current notion to express a permanent mythus,” [2] and how his “reading facilitates the writing of a form of scholarly poetics.” (55)

This bridging of the critical and creative, the blurring of those boundaries in an effort to get at a different kind of truth through a multidisciplinary approach, is on the ascent among those thinkers and writers seeking to go beyond received scholarship and to break the hegemonic and rigidly reinscribed patterns of Medieval Studies broadly and “Anglo-Saxon Studies” specifically. To know that Anglo-Welsh and Catholic poet Jones’s Anathemata was widely viewed as being outstanding by his more famous Anglo-American and Anglo-Catholic contemporaries (Eliot, Auden), even as it (alongside his earlier poem, In Parenthesis [1937], also heavily indebted to medieval sources including Y Gododdin and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur) has been largely ignored until recently by critics and continues to be largely ignored by readers, is to understand that the circumstances of its development and its reception history mirror the historical patterns in medieval English studies of ignoring the significance of non-hegemonic intellectual and cultural traditions to the development of the historical experience scholars seek to understand, and too often leaving those texts which challenge the “Anglo-Saxon” narrative out of the canon that is investigated and taught. Today’s scholars in medieval English (now more often and more accurately called “British”) are more attuned to this disparity than ever before in the field’s history; yet, the majority of the work being done to re-assess and correct it is still being done through non-dominant and adjacent fields--women’s and gender studies, critical race studies, Celtic studies, History of the Book--and through the work of people like Brooks, investigating medievalism and engaging in field historiography. Brooks’s work in this book, her careful excavation of Jones’s critical engagement with mid-twentieth-century Medieval Studies and her contextualization of this within the historiography of the same, offer a brilliant example of why it is time, and past time, for scholars working in medieval English literary studies to re-visit the archives related to their subjects, medieval and modern, alike, with new eyes and a determination to let them tell us not what we expect to hear, but what they truly have to say to us.

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Notes:

1. Brooks acknowledges the problematic nature of this term and explains her reasons for employing it to describe Jones’s library materials covering Roman Britain through the Norman Conquest first, as reflecting “Jones’s own terminology and the terminology of the scholarship he was engaging with” and thus being useful in “historicizing Jones’s own understanding of the literature and culture of the period” and second, as being in support of Jones’s argument, and hers, that “there is no such thing as ‘Anglo-Saxon England,’” but “in order to make this argument I have had to address this mythology directly; the ghost has to be named before it can be exorcised.” (4-5)

2. David Jones, The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing (Padstow: Faber and Faber, 2010 [1952]), 82.