4 - Enargaeic Landscapes and Spiritual Progression: Felix's Vita Sancti Guthlaci

Summary

FELIX'S Vita Sancti Guthlaci (VSG) is more indebted to hagiographical convention than most antecedent and contemporary saints’ lives, to the extent that Cubitt argues ‘it is almost entirely a textual confection, created from a modicum of personal recollection and much hagiographical borrowing’. While little is known about Felix himself, the breadth of his education, evidenced in these wide-ranging sources, is clear and strongly suggests he was a monk, or a cleric familiar with monastic life. The VSG is also one of the few Anglo-Saxon hagiographies written not at the request of a specific monastic house or ecclesial figure, but instead for a royal patron, the East Anglian King Ælfwald. This focus suggests that Felix was likely writing in East Anglia. While Felix's intended audience for the VSG beyond Ælfwald is uncertain, the complexity of its depictions and hagiographical references points to a specialised and educated audience, whether monastic or aristocratic. The most recent editor of the text, Bertram Colgrave, persuasively argues for a date between 730 and 740 for the composition of the VSG. While the VSG itself is dense with neologisms, allusions to hagiographical precedent, and lexical echoes of classical authors like Virgil, one of its most striking features is the level of descriptive detail in its depiction of the East Anglian fens and the eremitic site of the island of Crowland. Scholarly engagement with these depictions has been wide ranging, most recently in Estes's Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes. Estes argues that the depictions of fens in Anglo-Saxon texts more broadly, usually described as ‘wildernesses’, are cultural constructions of those areas ‘as seen by people who lived elsewhere’. Felix's VSG presents a divergent case, however, as both he and his patron would likely have had first-hand knowledge of the East Anglian fens. The VSG's descriptive detail, therefore, requires a different kind of analysis.