The Anglo-Saxons of James Palmer's sensitive and methodologically exemplary book are of a quite specific kind: missionaries. Or rather, those associated with the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon mission to the continent, for Palmer works with a generous definition, bringing within his remit not only the standard texts about Boniface and Willibrord, but also Hygeburg's idiosyncratic Vita Willibaldi, ostensibly not a missionary text, together with the lives of some of Boniface's more obscure disciples and associates, not all of them Anglo-Saxon. On closer inspection, though, Palmer is chiefly concerned anyway not with these figures themselves, but with the sources for them, particularly the hagiography, and with the groups that produced those sources. Embracing the fact that almost all we know about these missionaries comes from "literary artefacts" of one kind or another, Palmer's Anglo-Saxon missions are essentially a bundle of stories and characters produced, shared and adapted by various textual communities for different ends over nearly a century.
After setting out his methodological stall in a dense but rewarding introduction, Palmer probes those stories and characters in a number of ways to make many revealing observations about the "afterlife" of the missions, in clear and efficient prose. Chapter 1 explores representations of the missionaries' initial motivation, suggesting that early stress in the body of material on the draw of cross-cutting ethnic bonds, mentioned by both Bede and Boniface, was dropped in later representations of the missions in favour of themes of universal mission and peregrinatio. Chapter 2 looks at how writers framed the missionaries' relations with various secular patrons, including but emphatically not confined to the Pippinids, while Chapter 3 assesses the changing images of paganism in the material, re-iterating the dangers of taking these texts at face value. Chapters 4 and 5 together look at the institutions associated with the missionary saints, drawing out regional divergences in how their legacy was articulated (for example, the saints' relative marginalisation in Saxony following the arrival of Roman martyr relics), as well as a growing emphasis on their alleged reverence for the Benedictine Rule, in the wake of Louis the Pious's monastic reforms. Finally, Chapters 6 and 7 broaden the horizons, the former looking at shifting representations of Rome in the missionary-saint corpus, the latter devoted to the role of depictions of the Near East in Willibald's Eichstätt.
As the notes amply indicate, Palmer is comfortably at ease with an impressive array of Anglophone and continental scholarship, particularly German and Dutch, on the missions and the sources concerning them, and on how those sources should be interpreted. Quite how his book should be situated with reference to that work in the round is not altogether obvious, however, since it resists easy categorisation: not focused squarely on the missions themselves, but not quite a purely textual study either. It could perhaps be most helpfully thought of as something like a cross between Thomas Head's study of the saints of medieval Orléans and Ian Wood's work on the genre of missionary hagiography [1], resulting in a study focused on the veneration given to a particular group of connected saints, as evidenced primarily in the texts produced about them, and on what that veneration tells us about the values and priorities of the groups who wrote those texts.
In short, then, this is really a book about hagiography, about how saints are "the product of interpretative acts" (289), and about the roles and functions that saints were called upon posthumously to perform and fulfil in the early middle ages, with the Anglo-Saxon missions serving rather as a case study for these wider themes. If the activities of Boniface and his circle during their lifetime are relatively marginalised in the analysis as a result, Palmer's position is that his perspective is the only one to do full justice to the sources, by looking at them, not past them, to understand the mission as above all a textual phenomenon--though Palmer is at pains to stress this does not mean it should be viewed as wholly abstract, for texts can and do effectively shape the world beyond. His use of the manuscript evidence to add depth to his arguments is particularly fruitful, and clearly illuminates the potential of this approach for future research.
In spite of the alluring charm of its title, then, this is not a book suitable for beginners interested in finding out the basics about the Anglo-Saxon missions, but a sustained and serious intervention in the question of how historians should best make use of the tremendous resources afforded by hagiography, by means of comparison within and across genres. In fact, of course, the fascination exercised by the Anglo-Saxon missions has always rested in part on its sources, texts that are absorbing taken individually but truly compelling when analysed as a corpus, thanks to the possibilities of cross-reference that their complex inter-relations make available. The merit of James Palmer's painstaking and sophisticated analysis of these texts is to bring that richness to the fore, making this a most welcome contribution to scholarship on the Anglo-Saxon missions in particular, but also on the cult of saints more generally.
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1. Thomas Head, Hagiography and the cult of saints: the diocese of Orléans, 800-1200 (Cambridge, 1989) and Ian Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the evangelisation of Europe 400-100 (Harlow, 2001).