Blair, J., 2005. The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (ISBN 0-19-822695-0). Price: £35.00 (hbk). 624pp., 54 figures and illustrations. Online sample.
Reviewed by Alaric Hall (University of Helsinki)
This is a magisterial study, its size commensurate with a scope extending from the fifth century to the twelfth, a scope which--to judge from the author's thirty-four appearances in the bibliography-- reflects a long and productive gestation. Having programmatically adopted the term minster in its Anglo-Saxon sense of 'any kind of religious establishment with a church' (p. 3), Blair says that 'The centrality of minsters to Anglo-Saxon Christianity is the main message of this book' (p.505). One might look equally to his statement, slicing neatly through long and heated debate, that 'The really momentous change [around the 660s] was not the triumph of "Roman"over "Irish", but the formation of an indigenous ecclesiastical establishment which could stand on its own feet' (p.79). But whether one chooses heads or tails-the Church at the centre of society or the society at the centre of the Church-it's good coin.
This is perhaps to be expected, since Blair knows a lot about coins. Notwithstanding some slightly defensive comments on pages 5-6 concerning his occasional-but effective-comparisons with Mexican Christianity (esp. pp.176-80) and Chinese urbanisation (esp. pp.77-78, 263-64), he generally shies from discussing his methodologies; but the integration of archaeological evidence with historical is central to them, and its effectiveness in his hands speaks for itself. Blair's argumentation looks west to Celtic-speaking contexts as much as it looks east to Frankish ones; he rereads Bede's letter to Ecgberht as a call for the reform of small, autonomous but still distinctively monastic establishments (pp.100-8); following the evidence southwards, he grants vikings a justified infamy, but prefers to emphasise changing patterns in royal patronage to explain ecclesiastic change (esp. ch.6); and concludes by working to trace the emergence of the high medieval parish system (esp. ch.8). However, the book's most striking material concerns the economic roles of minsters, which in Blair's account receive a central role in English urbanisation (esp. pp.246-90, 330-41). However this argument eventually fares, Chapter 5 ('Monastic Towns? Minsters and Central Places c.650-850') is an unusually lucid exploration of the beginnings of English urbanism. Most of the book is too dense to serve for undergraduate reading, but this chapter is an important exception.
The density of The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society arises neither from the prose, which is fluent, nor the text, which is extremely clean (I noted only of of p.65; it it p.149; Egislay for Egilsay p.424 fig. 51; offfered p.503; a missing macron on suþ pp.251 and 288 n.194; sokn for sókn p.431 n. 22; and a couple of errant bibliographic entries among the footnotes, pp.163 n. 120 and 174 n. 168). It's simply that the book is packed with material. Since for many it will function as much as a storehouse of references and evidence as an argument, the availablity of a searchable electronic version-for purchase and via print.google.com-would be valuable.
It seems churlish, then, to point to omissions. Hermits (their hermitages considered on pp.216-20) get short shrift considering the prominence of eremites like Guthlac and Cuthbert in our Anglo-Saxon texts and the later insights afforded by the Life of Godric of Finchale into the commerce and Christianity of a man from the lower orders of society. Godric's absence points, however, to a small but more problematic gap. I emerged from The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society wondering about the last word of its title. The book includes the expected scattering of nuns and noblewomen; it includes an incisive chapter entitled 'Church and People, c.650-850'; and in the later chapters 'peasants' enjoy a certain presence, in the argumentation if not in the evidence. But book remains essentially a story of aristocratic men. This, quite reasonably, reflects our evidence; but it is also where the dearth of theoretical and methodological discussion bites. A exposition of how far into Anglo-Saxon societies Blair thinks our evidence really takes us would have been interesting and useful.
But this is a small defect in a great book, which offers both important new syntheses and important new arguments.