I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to the recent review of my book by Professor Bitel.
I am conscious that to challenge a poor review can seem like either an act of bad grace and an act of folly, especially when the review comes from such a highly regarded scholar. However, regretfully I have to state that I found Professor Bitel's review of my work inaccurate in content and unhelpful in tone. For example, the dismissal of my work as a "sturdy little book suitable for some classrooms" does not do justice to what I would argue was a much more nuanced work than suggested by the review.
Professor Bitel clearly found much to challenge in the book but I would like to counter just some of these criticisms by way of illustration. For example, at no stage did I argue that Book 44 of the Hibernensis was the origin of my suggested canon of planning (many of the discussed religious settlements were in existence long before the early eighth-century compliation of the Hibernensis) nor was it my only piece of textual evidence. I also did not lay claim to the existence of a discrete "master plan" for monastic layout; rather I was arguing that Hibernensis 44 and other texts pointed to the reality of a scriptually based and inspired understanding of how religious space should look on the ground. The texts were not "blueprints" and I did not claim them to be so.
Further I did not argue that the Irish "mixed up" the tabernacle with the temple; rather I argued (surely uncontroversially) that the description of the layout of the temple was predicated upon that of the chronologically earlier tabernacle. I also did not say that we had no evidence for the layout for Merovingian monasticism; rather I drew attention to the paucity of physical evidence and I do actually refer to much of the extant textual evidence including the relevant hagiography such as Sulpicius Severus' Vita Sancti Martini and the description of Marmoutiers, and the anonymous Vita Filiberti Abbatis which describes in some detail the settlement at Jumièges (164).
These are only some examples of what at times feels like a parody of my work. I am sure the book has many faults and I would have been very grateful to receive constructive criticism from someone so eminent in the field, but I was particularly disappointed by the tone of much of what was written including the advice regarding my need for a refresher course in what Professor Bitel refers to as "micro- Christianities."
I should also say that I have word-searched the entire book and the only instance I used the phrase "Dark Age" in the main text was in relation to the Merovingian archaeological evidence and even then I used apostrophes to indicate a descriptor rather than a label: "...Our knowledge of monastic life in Gaul is very limited and archaeologically the Merovingian period represents something of a 'Dark Age'" (164). It was clearly a play on words on my part. The only other example was in a footnote reference to the work of C. A. R. Radford and his excavation work on Tintagel in the 1930's. Nobody working in the field of Insular Studies--including me--would now use the term "Dark Ages" to refer to the early medieval period.
I appreciate that the academy is not a place for the faint-hearted and that reviews can be hostile, sometimes deservedly so. I should also concede that Professor Bitel was kind enough to say some positive things about my scholarship and I need to be open to the possibility that it is not a very good book, but I do feel that I was not given a fair hearing and that the book is much more worthy than the review might suggest.