Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (review)

Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe explores the difficulties in understanding agency from an early medieval perspective, as opposed to the perspectives of modern scholars and interpreters of early medieval texts. Each chapter centres on the close reading of a particular moment or narrative that focuses on an individual and his or her choices and actions, in order to investigate the ways in which literary representations of agency, or agent action, can be teased out from early medieval texts. O’Keeffe establishes the theoretical framework for her inquiry by discussing the nexus between the theological issues of free will and choice, on the one hand, and the monastic obedience required by the Rule of St. Benedict, on the other; within this framework, she examines how acts of obedience can be (and were) construed and understood as acts of free will. The first chapter centres on the presentation of Dunstan’s initial refusal to enter monastic life, drawing out the intricacies of Osbern of Canterbury’s reworking of the story in B.’s Life of Dunstan, and Osbern’s negotiation of the complexities of free will and choice alongside obedience to divine will. O’Keeffe shows that this results ultimately in Osbern staging “for Dunstan a compatibilist freedom of choice,” so that Dunstan simultaneously exercises his own free will and chooses what God wished for him. Alongside this, O’Keeffe considers child oblation, which continues as an important theme in the following chapter, a discussion of Ælfric’s Colloquy and the shaping of monastic identity through teaching and practice in the monastic schoolroom. Here O’Keeffe argues that the Colloquy and other teaching texts helped to instill in monastic oblates a particular form of agent action, which is linked to a monastic identity formed through textual study, and in which a condition of freedom is understood as the alignment of wills so that complete obedience is effected.

In the next chapter, which focuses on Goscelin’s Life of Edith, the choice of entry into monastic life is set alongside the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest and the contemporary issue of Anglo-Saxon women entering convents to avoid marriage to Normans (or worse). This issue is further explored in the following chapter with a discussion of Anselm’s letters to Gunhild after she had been taken from the nunnery at Wilton. In these two chapters, the focus is on the ways in which a monastic identity can be read from clothing, and how contemporaries might understand choices and agent actions to have taken place on the basis of manners, dress, or speaking (or failing to speak). O’Keeffe argues that while Goscelin seems to have wanted to play down Edith’s agency in some contexts, Anselm read agency into events of Gunhild’s life where in fact her choices may not have been her own. Finally, O’Keeffe turns to Goscelin’s address to Eve in the Liber Confortatorius and considers how Eve, who had formed one identity as a Benedictine nun through her participation in religious life in Wilton, used that same identity to undo it and create another, as a recluse, and in so doing freed herself from obedience.

O’Keeffe’s readings are insightful and unlock depths of meaning in the texts, and her examination of questions of agency and identity through these case studies allows for detailed discussion of the complex issues involved. The book draws together new material with revised versions of previously published work (primarily the chapters on Edith and Gunhild, and parts of the chapters on Dunstan and Ælfric), and this allows for the development of a series of strands of argument that are pulled together across the volume. One wonders, though, whether in places slightly more concession might have been made for readers with less specialist knowledge: information on the contexts surrounding the texts examined is often delayed until after considerable preliminary...