Gildas's De Excidio Britonum and the Early British Church (review)

Gildas' De Excidio Britonum is a work that has both excited and disappointed generations of scholars in equal measure. Historians have been vexed by the question of its date and have been frustrated by the little factual information it appears to give regarding the transition from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England. Literary critics have puzzled over the repetition and obscurity of its Latin, whilst theologians have been mystified by the confusing and apparently conflicting signals it gives about Gildas' theological stance. George's research employs a multi-disciplinary methodology to investigate the historical, literary and theological context of the work, concluding that it is best seen as a carefully constructed text for an ecclesiastical audience that addresses specific doctrinal debates within the British and Continental Churches.

An important theme of George's book is Gildas' use of 'Biblical style,' drawing primarily on the Book of Lamentations as a literary model. George presents the evidence for patterns of symmetrical repetition and parallelism within the work in painstaking detail—a full annotated Latin text (that edited by Michael Winterbottom) appears as an appendix—and admits that 'there may well be many more such structures within the work as yet undiscovered' (132). Whether all of George's proposed patterns withstand the scrutiny of future scholarship remains to be seen. Another theme apparent within the book is the question of Gildas's sources. In Chapter 6 George finds evidence that Gildas had read certain Pelagian letters, in particular De malis doctoribus, whilst Chapter 7 concentrates on his probable access to the 'E' text of an anonymous Passion of St Alban.

George's interest in Gildas's literary style and sources has a clear purpose: to inform our understanding of his doctrinal position and, in turn, the wider theological standing of the British Church in relation to that on the Continent. Citing archaeological evidence in chapter one as evidence for regular economic (and by extension intellectual) contact between Britain and her Continental neighbors in the fifth and sixth centuries, George concludes that it is highly unlikely that Gildas and his fellow British clerics were unaware of contemporary doctrinal debates. Nevertheless, some members of the British Church, she argues, were naturally conservative and hostile to innovations from across the sea. Rather than adopting the views of Pelagius or Augustine, they (including Gildas) appear instead to have held onto pre-Pelagian doctrine, seeing themselves as defenders of the old orthodoxy; 'anti-predestinarian,' rather than 'semi-Pelagian' or even 'anti-Pelagian' (129). This interpretation appears to account for the puzzling lack of any reference to the visits of St Germanus to Britain in the text of De Excidio Britonum (see Chapter 7).

In conclusion, this book provides the student of Gildas not only with a detailed and stimulating analysis of the text of De Excidio Britonum, but also with a carefully argued and novel interpretation of Gildas' personal beliefs and the ecclesiastical context in which he was writing. It will appeal to the theologian, historian and classicist and, whilst not affordable to everyone, nevertheless provides essential reading for those studying De Excidio Britonum or the early British Church.