2 - Images of Gildas

Summary

Bede's construction of a ‘dark age’ in Book I of his Historia ecclesiastica placed significant weight on Gildas as the chief witness for the period ca 450–600. Gildas's providential history of Britannia and his immediate criticisms of its leaders remains a unique window on the transition from Roman province to the beginning of medieval kingdoms. The problem, even in Bede's time, was Gildas's reluctance to synchronise his history with other sources: datable events were set aside for a providential overview where historical outcomes were related to the moral choices of a people. The result, from a modern perspective, is that the De excidio responds to a crisis at any point between 479 and 550, effectively making its immediate context indeterminable: Gildas's vision of Britain inhabits the entirety of Bede's dark age like a spectre. Scholarly attempts to rationalise a useful outcome, in a historical sense, have ultimately agreed to place the De excidio around the middle point of Bede's dark age, ca 530. Uneasily situated, the date of Gildas's intervention presents an ongoing conundrum.

This chapter seeks to explore Gildas's context through his many images. Gildas's self-image will be analysed via the De excidio and the fragments of his letter to Finnian. Subsequently, I will investigate the way in which the themes of these texts were remembered by authors up to the twelfth century. This will highlight a variety of images of Gildas that have led to uncertainty over his context. I will argue that two of these images – Gildas Historicus and Gildas Sapiens – are modelled on the two discrete modes of authority found in the De excidio and the fragmenta: that of providential historian, as formulated primarily in England through an emphasis on the De excidio; and that of a canonist, as remembered in Ireland through an emphasis on the letter to Finnian. Other representations possibly relate to memories of two discrete religious figures with the same name active in the fifth and sixth centuries. Subsequently returning to the interrelationship between Gildas's De excidio, Patrick's Confessio and Epistola, and Constantius's Vita Germani, I will offer a context for Gildas's intervention as a response to a crisis of authority in the late fifth century.