Britain and Early Christian Europe: Studies in Early Medieval History and Culture by Patrick Sims-Williams (review)

598BOOK REVIEWS Kitchen's second approach is to compare a man's Life of Radegund with a woman's Life of Radegund. Baudonivia was a nun at Radegund's convent. Her supplement to Fortunatus' Life was also a subtle modification of Fortunatus' interpretation. In the introduction to her Life Baudonivia was completely indifferent to Radegund's gender. Because Gregory and Fortunatus had been likewise oblivious only when writing about men, Baudonivia's "standard indifference to gender constitutes a real distinctiveness" (p. 140). Baudonivia was furthermore noticeably more circumspect in mentioning Radegund's ascetic behavior, and the Radegund that she described was hence more deeply spiritual . Yet Baudonivia also included examples of Radegund's responsibility for typically male activities, such as her militant antagonism to paganism and the employment of punitive miracles within her community. Kitchen's book is primarily a literary study of hagiographical texts. Its obvious strengths are its meticulous comparison of various Lives and its insistence upon including texts that are not explicitly about women in a study of female views of holiness. At the end of his analysis Kitchen is admirably direct in his conclusions about ideas of sanctity. "The present search for a distinctiveness that is determined purely on the basis of gender is undoubtedly a misguided approach to the study of Merovingian Vitae" (p. 159)· The next step is to combine text and context more explicitly by incorporating these literary conclusions into a comprehensive discussion of sexuality and gender in Merovingian society. Raymond Van Dam University ofMichigan Britain and Early Christian Europe: Studies in Early Medieval History and Culture. By Patrick Sims-Williams. [Variorum Collected Studies Series.] (Brookfield,Vermont: Variorum,Ashgate Publishing Company. 1995. Pp. x, 337.) This collection brings together fourteen essays, previously published separately , assembled under three headings, the Adventus Saxonum, Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical culture, and early medieval devotion. The majority are on AngloSaxon subjects while the others range from Welsh origins stories and charters to Irish and Spanish symptoms in the early medieval liturgy. All are informed by acute questioning, good sense, and immense learning. Sims-Williams now occupies a chair of Welsh literature, and the benefits of his literary and philological training can be seen in every essay. Professor Sims-Williams' method is usually that of sharp and close textual reading, proceeding with infinite care to strip away the accretions of scholarly misinterpretation and wishful thinking from the text, to uncover the author's original intentions and meanings. The fruits of this approach can be seen in his two essays on Gildas and the Anglo-Saxon settlements, where his investigation BOOK REVIEWS599 of the De Excidio and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reveals the limitation of these sources as historical records of the Saxon incursions. Here Sims-Williams brings from his Celtic researches a stronger sense than many Anglo-Saxon historians have shown of the presence of oral traditions embedded in the written sources, arguing, for example, that Gildas relied almost entirely on oral sources and cannot be regarded as a reliable source for the fifth century. Another group of six essays brings together studies resulting from the author 's work on southwestern England in the seventh and eighth centuries. Here his attention to detail, often philological or palaeographical, enables him to uncover new evidence for the monasteries and bishops of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. Three essays piece together evidence for the continental links of Bath Abbey for other houses in this area, fleshing out the Frankish connections of Anglo-Saxon monasticism suggested by Bede. In a remarkable piece of textual archaeology, Sims-Williams reconstructs a collection of Roman and papal inscriptions put together for the eighth-century bishop of Worcester, Milred. Liturgical and devotional texts form the subject of the final group of three essays which rehabilitate the Spanish origin of a prayer of the faithful, uncover knowledge of Ephraim the Syrian in Anglo-Saxon England, and identify the triad "thought, word, and deed" as characteristically Irish. Because Professor Sims-Williams' learning is both so deep and so broad there is some problem about the coherence of this collection. The Anglo-Saxon material , as I have tried to show, fits fairly neatly into two groups, but the two essays on Welsh subjects...