Monastic Ecopoetics in the Thirteenth-Century Fens: Henry de Avranches' "Vita Guthlaci"

Authors

Emma Nuding, University of YorkFollow

Abstract

This article argues that Henry of Avranches’ thirteenth-century Anglo-Latin Life of St Guthlac is shaped by two (curiously intertwined) factors: the first is the monastic desires of Crowland Abbey, the religious community which placed Guthlac at its institutional center; the second is the actualities and particularities of the fenland landscape -- that fertile and shifting environment in which Guthlac, as well as the Crowland monks, lived out their spiritual lives. Henry’s text is ecopoetic in the sense that it is attuned to the material reality of Crowland’s environs: the fens’ mutability and miraculous resources are a key part of its literary arsenal. However, Henry’s ecopoetics is simultaneously hedged-in by its monastic contouring: the desire to present Crowland as a special community whose rights to the land trumped those of secular actors. Responding to the needs of his Crowland patrons, Henry therefore transforms Guthlac’s watery legacy by employing a specifically monastic ecopoetics.

Recommended Citation

Nuding, Emma (2024) "Monastic Ecopoetics in the Thirteenth-Century Fens: Henry de Avranches' "Vita Guthlaci"," Medieval Ecocriticisms: Vol. 3, Article 2.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/med_ecocriticisms/vol3/iss1/2