Episcopal Culture in Late Anglo-Saxon England (review)

This is an ambitious, well-crafted, and deeply informative monograph with a somewhat puzzling title. The majority of the matters it considers does concern bishops, either exclusively or in large part, but that they also concern “ culture” in any sense save the almost meaninglessly extended is much less clear. The first substantive chapter, “Servitium regis,” ranges from episcopal relations with kings and other figures of governmental authority to the Second Coronation Ordo to “ courtly values”(the existence of which is somewhat shakily argued). The chapter on pastoral care deals mainly with bishops in their roles of consecrating churches, preaching, absolving, and presiding over diocesan synods; that on episcopal wealth is mostly about endowments and draws heavily from Domesday Book, while that on bishops in their communities dwells chiefly on legal matters. These topics are taken up interestingly (that on public penance particularly so), but, varied as they are, they do not quite add up to a consecutive treatment of “episcopal culture.” “Episcopal activities” would have been a more accurate, if excessively bland, title.

That is perhaps a medium-level problem. A major difficulty is caused by the decision—whether that of the author, the editor of the series, or the publisher— to dispense with the great majority of manuscript references (“shelfmarks”), instead referring to them only by the numbers assigned in Helmut Gneuss’s Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts . . . (2001). The problem this causes is seen most glaringly in the substantial and extremely interesting chapter on cathedral culture. When, for example, the author points out that two of the three extant manuscripts of the key monastic document of c. 970, the Regularis concordia, “actually form a composite manuscript written at mideleventh-century Christ Church, Canterbury, part of a large collection of material suitable for an archbishop’s pastoral use,” the footnote reference is, in its entirety, “G 332 and 363; G 65f, G 59e and 925e, a version of Wulfstan’s handbook” (p. 73). This means that to grasp fully what the author is saying the reader has to have Gneuss’s splendid work constantly open. Again and again manuscripts of the greatest importance slide by with only a curt “G 73” or whatever. Many of these are well-known and intensively studied manuscripts, and to have them disguised in this way is a disservice to both novice and expert readers—and they cannot be located via the index.

The reason for dwelling on this at some length is not only pour encourager les autres in publishing scholarship that relies heavily on manuscript evidence but also because the practice employed here fails to do justice to the high quality of this book, which is a genuinely important and thought-provoking contribution to our knowledge of later Anglo-Saxon England. Aside from a couple of obvious howlers that need to be corrected lest the unwary be led astray (“Richard” Deshman should be Robert, p. 45, and the statement that “Oswald was crowned by Edgar” is the wrong way round, p. 52), it is a learned book as well. Each of the five major topics it takes on is worthy of a monograph in itself; and Giandrea has done considerable, albeit not exhaustive, justice to each. Although she makes plain in her preface that her doctoral thesis underlies the present volume, its scope far exceeds the parameters of ordinary work at that level, and for a first book, in particular, this is indeed an impressive achievement.