Marginalia

Studies which bridge (the often specious) divides between areas of study, such as Old English and Middle English, or between the medieval and early modern periods, are less common than one might like. Catherine A. M. Clarke's book - which opens with Shakespeare's iconic vision of England as a 'precious stone set in a silver sea' before taking Bede's description of the opima frugibus atque arborinbus ('island rich in crops and trees') in his Ecclesiastical History as a starting point for the main body of her argument - is therefore to be welcomed for exploring the evolution of the locus amoenus motif and its role in fashioning an English identity across the medieval period and beyond. Although its main focus is on Anglo-Latin and Old English texts of the early middle ages, Clarke's study explores the use and implications of the Eden-like landscapes in English writing in the following centuries.

Her first chapter, 'The Edenic Island', surveys idealised descriptions of the English landscape in Bede, Gildas' Ruin of Britain and other Anglo-Latin texts, discussing the implications of these groomed and cultivated second Edens for the creation of an image of Britain that was both beautiful and useful: 'The cultivation of hostile, wilderness landscape into a locus amoenus functions as a metaphor for spiritual conversion amd cultivation, and for the establishment of peace and order' (p.34). In Chapter 2, 'Remaking the locus amoenus in Anglo-Saxon England', Clarke suggests that the notion of a literary pastoral tradition in the vernacular 'has often been explicitly denied' (p.36). Rejecting 'the accepted view' of literary landscapes in Old English as being unremittingly hostile, she argues that images of idealised verdant spaces in poems such as Genesis A and The Phoenix, with its 'æþele lond/blostmun geblowen', point to 'the familiarity, confidence and creativity of the vernacular with literary pastoral conventions' (p.59).

One great strength of this book is Clarke’s ability to synthesise English, Latin and Celtic traditions of the motif, allowing for a more complete appreciation of the way in which vernacular English writers adapted existing traditions in order to create a particularly English sense of landscape.

Chapter 3, 'Local Landscapes as Mirrors for England', turns to a discussion of the way in which particular local landscapes – such as descriptions of monastic communities at Glastonbury and Ely – are used as symbols both of the locus amoenus and for England as a whole. Referencing Thorlac Turville-Petre's important 1996 study England the Nation, she suggests that 'the monastic island locus amoenus can function as metonym or emblem for the island nation' (p.89). Clarke then turns to a selection of later Anglo-Latin texts for her discussion of the motif used within a city context: 'a symbolic landscape which parallels the pastoral' (p.128). Chapter 4, 'The Delightful City', compares two twelfth century works – William Fitz Stephen’s description of London and the Anglo-Latin Luciani de Laude Cestrie (in praise of Chester) – with texts from the fourteenth century, Gower's Vox Clamantis and Richard Maidstone’s Concordia facta inter regem et cives Londonie. This movement towards the late middle ages allows her to explore 'the increasing ambivalences and anxieties in representations of the city across the later medieval period… In the fourteenth century, the tropes and conventions of English literary and pastoral and panegyric traditions are verging on cliché and bankrupcy' (pp.128-9).

Clarke’s book concludes with a section on 'Disruptions and Continuities'. Discussing the Middle English chronicles of Robert of Gloucester and La3amon, it widens its scope to return to Shakespeare's Richard II and Elizabethan pastoral, 'in a conscious effort to connect with work on representations of England or Britain and formulations of national identity in the Early Modern period' (p.137).

Although wide-ranging, Literary Landscapes' firm grounding in the Old English and Anglo-Latin period – supported by a number of thorough and judicious close readings of texts – provide an excellent platform on which to position her slightly more impressionistic discussion of later medieval texts. Ably fulfilling its premise of exploring 'symbolic pastoral landscapes and their role in the fashioning of English national and cultural identity', Clarke's book is a useful and unifying addition to studies in this area.

Elizabeth Dearnley, U. of Cambridge

©2004 The authors and the Medieval Reading Group at the University of Cambridge
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