Fenland Pilgrimage: A Literary History of St Guthlac of Crowland, Medieval to Modern

'Fenland Pilgrimage' is a literary history of St Guthlac of Crowland, the medieval hermit most often associated with the landscape of the fens – the low, flat region in the East of England whose waterways wind out from the inland marshes to the Wash. Winding its own way from the medieval to the modern, this study traces Guthlac’s textual trajectory as it moves from the eighth-century all the way to the twenty-first, and bridging the divide between ‘medieval studies’ and ‘medievalism studies’. The first chapter analyses the eighth-century Anglo-Latin 'Vita Guthlaci', before examining how this narrative is rewritten in Old English across the ninth and eleventh centuries. The second chapter analyses literary, multi-modal and instrumental texts produced at Crowland Abbey in the High and Late Medieval periods, which rewrite Guthlac’s narrative for monastic agendas. The third chapter charts how in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Guthlac leaves the cloister and is transformed in Middle English texts produced by and for lay readers, operating within fenland networks. After exploring the submergence of Guthlacian narratives in the wake of the Reformation, the fourth chapter charts Guthlac’s resurgence in modern literary texts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and explains why and how writers are drawn to this fenland saint and his marshy horizons. Insights from ecocriticism, reception theory and pilgrimage studies shape the questions this study asks of Guthlacian tradition. Following this literary history, readers will meet of a variety of pilgrims, from the monastic to the mercantile, from the medieval to the modern, from the fenland-based to the fenland-beyond. And however many pilgrims they meet, they will meet as many Guthlacs.