Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 (review)

Although the title of Catherine Clarke's Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 promises readers a plurality of landscapes, the book actually devotes itself to medieval English imaginings of a single topography: the locus amoenus of classical tradition. Clarke acknowledges Ernst Robert Curtius's influential description of the term in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953), but proposes "a more flexible definition," one that characterizes the locus amoenus as "any literary landscape of delight which is formed self-consciously out of conventional rhetorical elements or motifs" (p. 2). These inherited tropes are "always primarily pastoral and foreground natural beauty, fertility, delight and order" (p. 2). However, as Clarke effectively demonstrates throughout her book, medieval English authors were more than slavish transmitters of Latin tradition; they knowingly transformed the locus amoenus to fit their particular Insular conditions, prioritizing "pastoral enclosure and containment" for the purpose of generating an idealized "English national identity" (p. 2). Acknowledging the constructed nature of these loci amoeni and the deformations they work upon "the historical realities of violence, invasion and conquest" (p. 6), Clarke positions Literary Landscapes within the burgeoning subfield of medieval English nation studies exemplified by such works as Thorlac Turville-Petre's England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (1996), Michelle Warren's History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100–1300 (2000), and Kathy Lavezzo's Imagining a Medieval English Nation (2004).

Chapter 1, "The Edenic Island," begins the book's argument with an impressive analysis of the Insular locus amoenus assembled in the opening lines of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. For Clarke, what most distinguishes Bede's pastoral from that of his classical predecessors is his emphasis on the delight to be found in England's "usefulness" (p. 8). The land's physical productivity anticipates its spiritual "potential" (p. 22); the English locus amoenus is "a powerful image of aspiration and destiny" (p. 10). In taking this tack, Bede dismisses the emphasis on violated topography and lost innocence that he found in Gildas's Ruin of Britain, the History's "ambivalent" predecessor. Clarke locates Bede's change in "the different perceptions of landscape between coloniser and colonised" (p. 15); as the latter, Gildas is always alert to "violence, conflict and contestation" (p. 15) while Bede is more inclined to stress "homogeneity and integrity" (p. 17). Nevertheless, both authors rely heavily on Britain's Insular status as the key to their topographical imaginings, and subsequent writers will follow their lead in emphasizing the centrality of water to English definitions of nationality. Clarke ends the chapter with brief readings of Bede's Life of St. Cuthbert and Felix's Life of St. Guthlac, texts whose saintly protagonists reenact in miniature on the islands of Farne and Crowland the spatial strategies carried out on a larger scale by Bede in the Ecclesiastical History. These hagiographies function as "microcosmic" instances of Bede's central topographical myth: "the aspiration to re-discover and recover an ideal, unfallen state through faith and struggle" (p. 26).

Chapter 2, "Re-making the locus amoenus in Anglo-Saxon England," shifts its focus away from Anglo-Latin texts toward "a literary pastoral tradition in the early English vernacular" (p. 36). One of Clarke's goals in this chapter is to complicate the "accepted view of literary landscapes in Old English as hostile, threatening and grim" (p. 36). Her other primary concern is to "explore the cultural politics of appropriating Latin literary conventions in verncaular poetry, and the powerful statement this makes about English cultural ownership, authority and aspiration" (p. 41). For example, her analysis of the locus amoenus in the Exeter Book Phoenix notes how the Old English poet carefully "expands" and amplifies the thirty lines of his Latin source, Lactantius's Carmen de ave phoenice, to better fit "the conventional English feature of the open, expansive place" or wong (p. 42). In one particularly insightful close reading, Clarke...