Whereas we write to communicate what we already know, many Anglo-Saxons wrote to understand their world. Or, more precisely, they wrote to learn about their recent history, their transient homeland, and their distant salvation. According to the late Nicholas Howe's Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography, these three considerations shape an Anglo-Saxon sense of place that was acquired by writing about it. For just as a quick sketch or impromptu diagram helps us see an idea, Anglo-Saxon writers performed this task collectively by comparing, compiling, and, ultimately, writing.

And so it was the writing about a post-lapsarian world, Howe argues convincingly, that allowed the Anglo-Saxons to fall into place. But since this historical and spiritual sense of belonging was inflected by the local and familiar, the book's introduction sets out to expose our comfortable assumptions about the landscape of pre-Conquest England as sanitized and neatly Saxon, as oblivious to the simultaneous coexistence of Celtic, Roman, and Germanic artifacts. Our adjusted starting point for reading the landscape of early medieval England, Howe proposes, must therefore be an Anglo-Saxon architecture that is the product of centuries of accretion. That the Anglo-Saxons inhabited a landscape crowded by structures that had witnessed the transitions from Celtic to Roman and from Roman to Germanic only contributed to their own sense of place as dynamic and itinerant, as certain yet unfixed.

But Howe's argument is too discerning to yield to the lure of dialectics, and his narrative elegantly unravels an intricate understanding of geography, history, and revelation. In the first chapter Howe reads the embedding of English boundary clauses in Latin charters as the insertion of the tangible and local into the eternal, while chapter 2 explores how the sea directs one's attention toward the metaphysical precisely because it denies “a sense of lived or immediate place to call home” (72).

The book's centerpiece is formed by chapters 3, 4, and 5, where Howe champions Rome as the capital of England and reflects on Bede's southward gaze. If, as Denis Cosgrove maintains, landscape is a way of seeing, then the Anglo-Saxon landscape was shaped by looking south until Rome appeared on the horizon. The eternal city figures in this book as the spiritual center of the world, a postcolonial presence, and the home of Anglo-Saxons, for the Borgo Santo Spirito ensures that there is a part of Rome that will be forever England. And just as “Englalond” was in Rome, Rome remained present in Englalond: Anglo-Saxons reused Roman stones and other spolia for their walls, church arches, and windows. In this sense, building around Roman spoils became a dual expression of submission to the spiritual leadership of a Christian Rome and Britannia's postcolonial triumph over the old Empire.

Finally, the remaining two chapters are dedicated to what Howe calls “books of elsewhere.” Whereas the preceding sections ought to be essential reading for historians and archaeologists, the book's last stretch is aimed at literary specialists. Chapter 6 offers alternative readings of two important Old English manuscripts in the British Library, Cotton Tiberius B v and Cotton Vitellius A xv (the Beowulf manuscript). In a discussion that will no doubt become a point of departure for future inquiries, Howe reads the texts gathered in Cotton Tiberius as bringing the here and the elsewhere into conversation. This is accomplished by making the exotic appear hauntingly familiar, whereas the local is made strange. It testifies to Howe's virtuoso performance in this book that he manages to slip into his focused argument a paradigm-shifting reading of Cotton Vitellius A xv as a manuscript whose compiler was more interested in places than in the monstrous. Chapter 7 tackles the overtly religious poems Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan in Oxford University, Bodleian Library, Junius II. Together, argues Howe, these texts treat a people's dislocation and their understanding of exile as a collective yet transient condition. And so, the Anglo-Saxons favored narratives of movement, exile, and exodus to capture their identity or, in the unassuming idiom of Howe's book, to learn out about who they were.

In Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England, the late Nicholas Howe has written a beautiful and complete book. His sophisticated argument chips away at many of the assumptions on which we erect our sense of the past and the Anglo-Saxons’ place within it. Although its subtitle suggests otherwise, Howe's book is not a collection of essays. As his narrative moves from the sobriety of boundary clauses to the elusive nature of elsewhere, the work's episodic structure draws its strength from pinpointed case studies, each unfolding a pertinent aspect of Anglo-Saxon ideas of place. After all, despite the many analogies between text and landscape, a topographical vista cannot always be harnessed into a linear argument.

I have every hope (and little doubt) that Howe's uncluttered book will do for Anglo-Saxon England what Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life did for our daily identity, and that it will do so without spawning a critical industry sustained by self-referential jargon. And although the word “identity” does not figure in the book's index, Howe has a good deal to say about the Anglo-Saxons’ self-perception. Their sense of identity was also their written sense of place, for no pictorial map could easily convey the place of a people who considered themselves refugees from Eden, emigrants from the Continent, residents of Britain, and citizens of Heaven.