Stephen J. Joyce, The Legacy of Gildas: Constructions of Authority in the Early Medieval West. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2022, x, 190 pp.

Abstract

Abstract The British-Latin writer Gildas (493‐570) is an enduring presence in Celtic tradition. So this monograph is welcome. Its author, thanks to his command of Latin, places Gildas firmly within the context of classical, patristic, and early medieval learning, identifying him as one who contributed much to understanding of “political and ecclesiastical authority in the early medieval West” (11). The volume, consisting of six chapters, starts off with the relation of Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae to other sources for the early Middle Ages (St. Patrick’s Confession, Bede, the ninth-century Historia Brittonum), all of them problematic, especially for fifth- and sixth-century dates. (Yet the difficulties are less than imagined.) In chapter two we encounter images of Gildas, who (53) devised “a providential history of Britain” to underpin his own “authority on Church law.” Chapter three has as subject the monastic features of De Excidio, with useful statements on Gildas as a cleric “directed by God to edify a fallen kingship and priesthood” (77). The remaining three chapters provide explorations of Gildas’s influence on St. Columbanus (d. 615), Hiberno-Latin canon law, and Bede (d. 737). There follow a conclusion and some ancillary matter.