In Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac, Britton Elliott Brooks makes a compelling case for the importance of close, critical comparison of the hagiographical use of exegesis within and between cult dossiers by comparing three lives of Saint Cuthbert and three of Saint Guthlac, all produced by Anglo-Saxon authors between the eighth and early tenth centuries. These hagiographical works take different forms (prose and verse) and are in different languages (Latin and Old English), but he argues that they share a common concern with understanding, parsing, and locating within both monastic practice and the Anglo-Saxon landscape medieval ideas about the "restoration of Creation," and of the right ordering of human life to enable sanctity to restore the pre-lapsarian balance of the world.
Brooks argues, over the course of five densely textured chapters, for the value of close and careful readings of the ways in which the early medieval authors (some anonymous, some, like Bede, famous) explored, examined, and reframed biblical exegesis of the ways in which heaven and earth are linked, and the ways in which the physical world bears the traces of both Creation and the Fall. In an argument that will resonate with those interested in the environmental humanities, Brooks argues that these authors engaged both familiar landscapes and shared monastic dialogues about Biblical exegesis. Their works depict the saints "interacting with a Creation experientially familiar to many who heard or read these vitae" (18). This, however, was not their end goal, he claims. Rather, they used the familiar landscape and the saints acting therein to engage in similarly familiar (to their monastic audience) exegetical arguments about the role of monastic spirituality and obedience.
These arguments about landscape and obedience are the key frame of the book, and what may draw readers to it initially. But I believe that the greatest strength of this book is the detailed and deliberate ways in which Brooks takes passages, moments, and chapters from these sources that may be overlooked or dismissed as repetitive, redundant, tropic, or mere "borrowings" and holds them up against both one another and the biblical passages and commentaries to which they are tied. I am a co-laborer in the trenches of finding ways to prevent the dismissal of hagiographical tropes and repetition/retelling, and I found Brooks' approach to this to be both exhaustive and rewarding. This book is a complicated read, but it is worth the effort, as I, at least, finished with a renewed appreciation for both the erudition and care required to do modern exegesis and the appreciation and care with which Bede and other medieval authors constructed, copied, edited, and re-framed the conversations that their peers and predecessors had started about saints and sanctity.
Caveat emptor, I am much more versed in environmental history and humanities than in the nuances of scriptural exegesis; I am not in a position to evaluate the nuances of these discussions. What I do see and value in this work is yet another way of recognizing monastic talent, deliberation, and authorial agency. I work primarily with hagiographical materials, and am always glad to find works that take the authors' goals seriously, and look not only at if medieval authors draw on biblical and hagiographical precedent, but also work to determine why they did so. This book gives agency to the acts of literary borrowing, and sees authors working across sources and centuries to construct meaningful interpretations and reinterpretations of why their modern peers would find meaning in the stories of past saints.
After an introduction that spans the whole set of sources, the book is structured with chapters devoted to the detailed explication of the five sources one at a time. The first chapter turns to the first, anonymous, life of St. Cuthbert and argues that in the work the Fall from Eden becomes the model of disobedience that monastic discipline can hope to undo through Cuthbert's example. The second chapter turns to Bede's metrical life, and the third to Bede's prose life of the saint. Brooks shows an affinity for Bede's goals, and the ways he connected the natural world and Cuthbert's obedience to Lindisfarne and to the book of Genesis. The fourth and fifth chapters turn to St. Guthlac.
If one were to want to glimpse the strengths and flavor of the book, I would suggest turning to chapter 4, which is the chapter that stands out as the most complete and self-contained, likely because it draws from a previously published article. In "Enargaeic Landscapes and Spiritual Progression: Felix's Vita Sancti Guthlaci," Brooks argues that in what at first seems to be a redundant work deeply indebted to earlier writing, "Felix nonetheless creates a vita distinctively focused on the enargaeic landscape, on the saint's imaginative journey through a physical space bereft of significant landmarks or named sites" (228). This landscape, unnamed yet vividly described, is Felix's tool aimed at "allowing the reader to experience it as an 'eyewitness'" that they might themselves encounter or imagine (174). This extends the message about monastic obedience and the path towards redeeming lost Creation to a wider place, and a broader audience. The "highly conventional" (179) work is oddly precise in its descriptions of natural features of fenlands, though they are at the same time are so generic as to be unlocatable.
This vita, Brooks argues, is intended to do the big, abstract work of shaping hearts and souls, rather than the more localized goals of "creating and/or expanding a tomb cult" (175). This chapter does an excellent job of showing how what could be seen as a failing of the source (imprecision, detailed but vague descriptions, lack of historicity) can also be interpreted as a deliberate choice of the author, working within frameworks not of cult and temporal power, but of exegesis and models of spiritual progress. In this way, a careful explication of Guthlac's spiritual journey through a model fenland landscape and then a description of him encountering fear and chaos in an "airscape" scene were "meant to conjure terror in both Guthlac and Felix's audience" (191). With the discussions of invocations of hell, Brooks shows how powerful anonymized place could be as an authorial tool. For example, in the section "The Restoration of Creation," he argues that Felix engages in "iteration of the hagiographical commonplace" in bird miracles in order to show Cuthbert as able to see and pursue the pre-lapsarian natural world.
This book pushed me to see new value in exegesis. But I also found it at times too narrowly focused on that topic. More attention by Brooks to works in the environmental humanities and environmental history would have helped him find intriguing parallels and conversations that might help deepen the sense of WHY early medieval authors might be concerned about returning to an imagined state of pre-lapsarian natural purity. Engagement with environmental history works on the problem of "wilderness" in monastic writing might help us interpret Guthlac's fens more fully. Looking to histories of environmental change and land management in Britain could help connect these authors more fully to their landscapes. Additionally, more explicit attention to the growth of eighth- through tenth-century monastic complexes as landlords dealing with agricultural crises and with increasing secular economic management burdens could help us see the return of an abundant, ordered wildness as particularly appealing. Greater attention to the fruits of environmental historians' labor would have made this work even richer and could also have helped connect better to environmental history readers.
In sum, I suspect that this book will prove far more useful to scholars of hagiography, medieval monastic ideologies, and scriptural exegesis than to those looking to it for issues concerning perceptions of the natural world. It engages carefully, critically, and generously with multiple works of hagiography, and works across saints, languages, and formats. Britton Elliott Brooks provides important reminders that hagiographical works can and should be read on multiple levels, and that the authors who wrote them did so with an expectation that careful monastic readers would find and value in them many layers of creative borrowing, re-imagining, and re-interpretation of other works--be they classical, biblical, or hagiographical--and that close and slow reading of these sources is spiritually profitable, and helps modern scholars better understand the depth of monastic spirituality.