The Life of St Guthlac was written by Felix, an East Anglian or Middle Anglian scholar, around the ad 730s. Early Anglo-Saxon monasticism produced many complex and sophisticated Latin texts, but just this one survives from the East Midlands. It is therefore immensely important, for archaeology shows that remarkable things – untouched by any other written sources – were happening there. The people of the region farmed, traded and consumed luxuries; both economically and politically, they were crucial in the eastwards expansion and eventual hegemony of Mercia. The numerous finds of writing styli now show that many of them were literate, and indeed we glimpse one of Guthlac’s guests writing away on leaves of parchment (membranae/cartulae/scedulae). What can we learn about Middle Anglia from its unique literary source?

This massive volume provides material to address that question, in almost encyclopaedic abundance. The twenty-seven contributions cannot all be mentioned here, but some major themes emerge. Felix was highly educated: he had read Vergil (whom he quotes extensively, modelling his hell on the underworld of the Aeneid), the Life of Antony, and his own near-contemporaries Aldhelm and Bede. The important reassessments by Thacker and Orchard emphasise this literate context – a window onto Mercian and East Anglian court culture. The Life is dedicated to King Ælfwald of East Anglia, in words that Aldhelm had used for the great King Aldfrith of Northumbria: ‘beloved by me beyond any other of royal rank’. Yet the future belongs to Guthlac’s young protégé Æthelbald, mentioned several times, who would become one of the greatest Mercian kings and ‘whose happiness as king over his realm has grown in succeeding years from day to day’. This volume offers a range of views on that apparent contradiction. Returning to the Vergilian model, Bacola shows how borrowings that were ‘heroic’ as well as ‘classical’ helped Felix to present the warrior-turned-hermit to an aristocratic lay audience. We are told how Guthlac, before he saw the light, ‘devastated the towns and vills of his foes … and amassed immense booty’ – in sharp contrast to Bede’s suppression of Cuthbert’s secular past. Kilpatrick and Leeser have valuable new things to say about the Middle Anglian region, with its exceptionally prominent kin-group territories that even included – if we believe Felix – the ‘Guthlacingas’. Capper’s important survey of Anglian–British relations suggests that ethnic sentiments hardened during Æthelbald’s reign (as indeed they did between Wessex and Dumnonia at much the same time), so that Felix’s generation was the first to demonise the British: Guthlac’s grotesque and diabolic assailants spoke Welsh.

There is one regrettable absence: recent field archaeology and small-finds analysis, the implications of which are far-reaching. Numismatic and ceramic studies suggest a critical shift in East Anglia. In the seventh century, the centre of things was the royal zone around Rendlesham in south-east Suffolk, with its overseas contacts; in the eighth, north-west Norfolk, the Wash and its tributary rivers became economically dominant. Within a decade of Guthlac’s death in ad 714, bulk consignments of Ipswich Ware were flowing into the Wash and up the Nene, Ouse and Welland (on the last of which Crowland stands, notwithstanding the topos of desert seclusion), presumably in return for enlarged surpluses of foodstuffs moving the other way. If Æthelbald valued Guthlac’s spiritual guidance, he cannot have been blind to the strategic and economic possibilities of the Fenland and whole Middle Anglian zone. Indeed, Guthlac was at the heart of a major geo-political reorientation, as Mercia used growing economic heft to extend its tentacles to the North Sea. Felix is silent on such matters, but they surely had an impact on his own enigmatic and ambiguous loyalties: to Æthelbald or Ælfwald; to Mercia, Middle Anglia or East Anglia?

The cult inspired two outstanding Old English poems: ‘Guthlac A’, apparently independent of Felix, and ‘Guthlac B’, largely based on him (Wragg and Hawtree). A minster founded in Guthlac’s honour at Hereford, perhaps even as early as Æthelbald’s time (Barrow), underlines his cult’s significance for Mercian power. Yet in some ways it remained oddly undeveloped. Guthlac’s sister Pega translated his body into a stone shrine, enriched with ‘wonderful structures of ornaments’ by the grateful Æthelbald. That might look like a good start, but it was probably from the dilapidated remains of this same tomb that the relics were finally elevated in ad 1136. More remarkably, there is no evidence that Crowland was ever monastic before the ad 970s. Instead, the shrine (apparently in a group of Bronze Age barrows) was one among several cult foci in a complex sacred landscape – surveyed here by Chisholm, Prior and Jones – which also included Pega’s church at Peakirk and the tantalising remains at Anchor Hill (surely in urgent need of archaeological rescue). It seems odd that it was never annexed by Crowland’s increasingly mighty neighbour, Medeshamstede (Peterborough), but maybe decentralisation was the local norm. An intriguing parallel is South Kyme, a short way northwards along the fen-edge, which had an exquisite stone shrine with artistic links to Peterborough: did that house another hermit, on whose cult the great minster did in fact lay its hands?

The second half of the volume surveys the cult’s somewhat muted post-Conquest development (Licence), the famously imaginative historical writing that surrounded it in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries (Ispir and Sharpe), and its late medieval expressions in the graphic arts, seals, music and architecture (Roberts, Danbury, Heslop, Parkes and Alexander). It ends – poignantly so, given the author’s recent tragic death – with Richard Sharpe’s new and surely definitive edition of the twelfth-century ‘Translation and Miracles’.

‘Expansive’ is the word for this book: the contributors had a generous frame to work in, and everything is here. Occasionally – as when reading about the political background or the setting of Guthlac’s cult for the third or fourth time – one might wish for tougher editing to reduce duplication, but the varied perspectives on the same problems are often interesting. The volume is a monument to Guthlac as magnificent as King Æthelbald’s must have been, and a credit to Shaun Tyas – far more than publisher – whose personal commitment and engagement are obvious throughout.