For those of us who have been persistently puzzled by the medieval use of the term “Saracen,” whether in Crusader chronicles, biblical commentaries, or romances, Katharine Scarfe Beckett's Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World is a welcome new piece of scholarship. But Scarfe Beckett's book is not only about the origin and use of the term “Saracen” and the related terms “Arab,” “Hagarene,” and “Ismaelite.” Its theoretical quest is to test the applicability of Edward Said's postcolonial theory about Western Orientalism in an early medieval context. As such, Scarfe Beckett's work will be of great interest not only to Anglo-Saxonists but also to scholars of Islam and of the relations between Europe and the Middle East in the Middle Ages.

Scarfe Beckett's argument is that Said's famous and controversial argument that modern European Orientalist views about Islam developed out of religious prejudices and geo-political presumptions of the Christian medieval West does not represent the realities of medieval attitudes toward Arabs revealed by a close scrutiny of documents from the period. On the contrary, use of the terms “Ismaelite,” “Hagarene,” and “Saracen” by Anglo-Saxon authors relied on assumed knowledge derived from biblical commentaries rather than from an understanding of Islam, and images were not Orientalist but instead were an aspect of the larger picture of Christian triumphalist perception of others as “anti-Christian.” Contextualizing her work in the scholarly dialogue on Western attitudes toward Islam established by R. W. Southern, Norman Daniel, Benjamin Kedar, E. Rotter, and, of course, Said, Scarfe Beckett suggests in the introduction that medieval attitudes were shaped in a context of received ideas.

Following a summary of relevant historical background on the early centuries of Islam, Scarfe Beckett surveys the limited contact Anglo-Saxons had with Islam and the Middle East before the eleventh century. While pilgrimage accounts like those of Adomnán and Hygeburg show that there was contact with Muslims during the Anglo-Saxon period, there is little to suggest a significant awareness of Islam as a distinct religious tradition, and material imitations such as Offa's famous coin, the presence of Middle Eastern goods, and medicinal recipes in northern Europe show only that an extensive trade network existed between the Mediterranean and the North Sea.

Jerome had a particularly important role in shaping the medieval view of Middle Easterners. The biblical depiction of Arabs was of nomadic people inimical to the Israelites, but Scarfe Beckett demonstrates that Arabs were not identified by Jerome with either Saracens or Ismaelites. Jerome did, however, view the terms “Saracen,” “Ismaelite,” and “Hagarene” as different words for the same people. Scarfe Beckett clarifies that while the origin of the term “Saracen” is unknown, Christian etymology claimed that the term derived from a wish of the descendants of Hagar to claim descent from Sara. “Saracen” and “Ismaelite,” which was a spiritual term that could be used to designate those who were not the spiritual Israel (i.e., the Christians), took on unacceptable character traits such as nomadism, idolatry, thievery, and descent from Cain.

The association of Muslim Arabs and Saracens began in the seventh and eighth centuries, the result of a conflation of the spiritual vision of enmity toward “Israel” and news of Arab conquests across the southern Mediterranean. Aldhelm and the Canterbury Commentator, who provides a direct link to the transplanted easterners Hadrian and Theodore of Canterbury, seem to have made the connection. But it was Bede who ensconced this association between Jerome's nomadic Saracens and the Muslim Arabs, when he presented “the Muslim conquerors of the seventh century as a living verse of the Old Testament” (138).

Postconquest England preserved two theories about Saracens: (1) that Saracens had named themselves to obscure their descent from Hagar, and (2) that Saracens were devoted to Venus and/or stone worship. Scarfe Beckett argues that the long duration of ideas about Saracens in England was not the result of “Orientalist” conservatism, as argued by Said, or for the most part a “will-to-power” suggested by Daniel, but was simply a matter of convenience—the idea continued to be employed because it seemed to be consistent with biblical teachings and validated “one's own habits of mind” (220). They “conveyed efficiently the reassuring proposition that Saracens were unlike Christians in making false statements for self-serving purposes and worshipping the wrong ideal” (222).

Scarfe Beckett concludes that the Christian literary matrix in which ideas about Saracens developed in Anglo-Saxon England cannot be identified with Said's “Orientalism” or Daniel's “imperialism” because it is problematic to assume a homogenous Middle Ages. The important distinction that was made in the early Middle Ages was between Christian and everyone else regardless of any abstract concept of “the Orient,” and the terms “Orientalism” and “imperialism” are too vague when applied to the early Middle Ages to allow any sort of precision in discussing the idea.

Katharine Scarfe Beckett's book, which could be more accurately titled “Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Saracens,” is convincing in its argumentation, persuasively presenting an in-depth analysis of the use of terms and sincerely mindful of the importance of avoiding anachronistic constructs in discussing the Middle Ages. Besides her critique of the application of postcolonial theoretical models to Anglo-Saxon views of Saracens in the early medieval period, her discussion of Bede in particular stands out for its apt articulation of the impact of his ideas while remaining sensitive to his pastoral and pedagogical inclinations. Also praiseworthy in this book is the fact that although much of it is devoted to close textual study of terminology and involves theoretical discussion, the author writes with a clarity that makes the book easy to read and a pleasure to contemplate.