Ælfric and the Cult of Saints in Late Anglo-Saxon England (review)

The modern world has become used to attributing to each decade of the twentieth century its own distinct feel and pervading ethos, which distinguishes, say, the Sixties from the Eighties or the Thirties. It is intriguing to think that Anglo-Saxon authors also had a similar sense of the various periods in their recent past which they liked to look back upon. In her new monograph, Mechthild Gretsch examines a number of saints' cults not from the point of view of the modern scholar, but through the eyes of Ælfric, the Anglo-Saxon abbot of Eynsham working in the later tenth and early eleventh centuries. Her aim is to examine how Ælfric reacted to the developing cults of Gregory, Cuthbert, Benedict, Swithun, and Æthelthryth and their literary manifestations. Gretsch starts off with a detailed demonstration that these five saints indeed held unusually prominent positions in Ælfric's sanctorale (pp. 1-20). Idiosyncrasies in Ælfric's choice of feasts relating to these saints are shown not to be coincidental, but intentionally symmetrical: it is part of Gretsch's argument here to demonstrate that some of Ælfric's hagiographical choices parallel the commemoration of saints in London, British Library, Add. 49598, the Benedictional of Æthelwold, a highlight of tenth-century book production from within Ælfric's cultural milieu. What follows are "five monographs en miniature" (p. viii) which deal with the main saints in turn, and which in themselves represent important publications not just on Ælfric but on earlier Anglo-Saxon hagiography.

Little can be added to the many interesting points Gretsch makes: the feast given for Eugenia ("peculiar indeed," p. 7) need not necessarily have come from the Cotton-Corpus Legendary, but is already in the Old English Martyrology, a text known to have been in late Anglo-Saxon Winchester, Glastonbury, and Exeter. In a forthcoming publication I will be discussing John Frankis's suggestion that Ælfric knew and used the Martyrology, and Gretsch is here opening up some interesting questions. Similarly, the focus on the depositions of Gregory, Benedict, and Cuthbert (p. 14) is also paralleled in the Martyrology. The Martyrology also seems to testify to at least some version of Paul the Deacon's interpolated Life of Gregory reaching Anglo-Saxon England (pp. 61-62). Some might object to the suggestion that "in our days saints are rarely culted" (p. 247), and a look at the Vatican's web site would also suggest otherwise. Perhaps some readers would have appreciated a plate showing the Benedictional's "Choir of Confessors." Apart from these minor points, however, nothing much seems to be missing from this fascinating monograph, which is full of openings and ideas for further lines of enquiry (now highlighted in the margins of this reviewer's copy). There can be only few modern Anglo-Saxonists who would have been able to produce this nuanced picture of Ælfric's cultural milieu which tries "to move beyond the written word" (p. 18) and which is to be greeted with enthusiastic applause. Apart from the two tiniest typos on pp. 235 and 250 no further slips could be found in this exceptionally accurate study.