Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac by Britton Elliott Brooks (review)

In Restoring Creation, Britton Elliott Brooks brings the environmental humanities into dialogue with early English hagiography. Specifically, Brooks seeks to present 'the sophisticated and considered engagement with the non-human world' (p. 3) that may be revealed through a close reading of early English hagiography. This he intends to serve as a corrective to the oversimplifications he perceives in much previous environmental humanities scholarship, which has tended to posit nature as having a negative alterity in the medieval worldview. Central to Brooks's thesis is the idea that it is possible to reconstruct how the English themselves understood the natural world. Representations of nature in early English hagiography, he argues, were defined by 'contemporary theological and philosophical views' (p. 3) and tied to the physical landscape through the regionalism of their narratives. Of those contemporary theological and philosophical views, Brooks focuses on the concept of the restoration of Creation: a breaching of the postlapsarian division between humanity and nature, effected by the achievement of holiness and sanctity.

Given the wealth of hagiography from pre-Conquest England, Brooks necessarily limits his focus subjects, choosing to structure his study around the vitae of the eremitic saints Cuthbert and Guthlac. The nature of their eremitism provides the two English saints what Brooks terms a 'direct and transformative interaction with Creation' (p. 15). This is well demonstrated in his case studies; each of Brook's five chapters examines a single hagiography, ordered by chronology of authorship. This structure allows Brooks to demonstrate how the vitae built upon one another, adopting and adapting Augustinian and Bedan exegesis of Creation.

Chapter 1 focuses on the anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti (698 × 705), examining those passages of the text in which Cuthbert's sanctity restores Creation, albeit temporarily. It is a sanctity that stems from obedience; Cuthbert's obedience restores Creation just as Adam and Eve's disobedience brought about its Fall. Brooks argues that this obedience is specifically framed in monastic terms and suggests that the hagiographer perceived the 'divine order of the universe' (as it relates to the natural world) to parallel monastic order (p. 28). Chapters 2 and 3 turn to Bede, first his metrical Vita Sancti Cuthberti (705 × 716) and then his prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti (c. 721). Brooks's examination of the metrical vita is Restoring Creation's most compelling chapter. It is a work that he at once perceives as personal—'a ruminative and poetic exercise for Bede himself' (p. 67)—and as foundational not only to the Cuthbertine tradition, but to the entry of Augustinian exegeses of Creation into English hagiography. The restoration of Creation here is again tied to monastic obedience, Cuthbert portrayed as what Brooks terms 'an idealized Gregorian monk-pastor' (p. 16). It is a characterization of Cuthbert that comes into full focus in Bede's prose vita. In this text, Brooks identifies an authorial interest in Cuthbert's evolving spiritual maturity—miracles of restoration provide both impetus for and evidence of Cuthbert's achievement of 'spiritual majority' (p. 171). Bede draws on Augustinian interpretations of the Fall and Creation to portray Cuthbert as an exemplar of saintliness and obedience, Creation's own obedience to the saint being predicated on his perfect sanctity.

Brooks turns to Guthlac in Chapters 4 and 5, first discussing the Vita Sancti Guthlaci (730 × 740) of Felix before going on to examine the terminological nuances of the Old English Prose Life of Guthlac and Guthlac A (both texts that have proved difficult to date). What is possibly most interesting in these chapters is the explicit tying of Guthlac's vitae to the landscape of the East Anglian fens. In the Vita Sancti Guthlaci, Brooks sees Guthlac's story, like Cuthbert's, as being one of spiritual progression toward saintliness, but here to some degree...