Æthelwulf’s De abbatibus and the Anglo-Saxon Ecological Imagination

Abstract

Modern scholarship on early medieval views of nature tends to rely too heavily on binary interpretations of positive and negative representations. This article uses an early ninth-century Anglo-Latin poem, Æthelwulf’s De abbatibus (“On the abbots” of an unknown Northumbrian monastic community), as a window into the ways in which early medieval people saw their natural world not as a passive space for human activity, but as an active participant in religious life. This reading comports with ecocritical interpretations of Æthelwulf’s poem alongside contemporary Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture. An understudied text, Æthelwulf’s De abbatibus provides an opportunity to understand how early medieval people could situate nature at a narrative’s center, crediting it with the capacity to shape religious behavior and belief. Æthelwulf’s work should be seen among a rich late antique and early medieval literary and artistic tradition of ecological imagination, in which nature was an interpretive key for articulating religious identity and community.