Welsh Journals

a short note on the tantalizing doings of British clergy in Spain by E. A. Thompson. A final 'summary and prospect' by R. P. C. Hanson rounds off the book. As Professor Hanson remarks here, the book as a whole represents a cross-section of work in progress rather than a complete survey. This, though it would not be quite true of all the papers taken individually, is the key-note of the collection. The whole area is one full of lacunae and much remains to be done: and not only by the spade, though, as Professor Hanson notes, archaeology is likely to provide the materials for most of the major advances to be made. It is, however, a field in which divergent interpretations (several are spotlighted by Professor Hanson) and gaps are bound to remain with us. It is clear, however, that much work can be done, work to which several disciplines can contribute. One merit of Professor Hanson's summing up and prospect is that it has sketched some of the areas and problems on which further study might usefully con- centrate. Another, one of minor importance but not to be passed over in silence, is that he has provided a footnote which is the only occasion in the book on which the views associated with Dr. Myres and Dr. Morris on Pelagianism, views almost in danger of becoming a received orthodoxy, are called in question. R. A. MARKUS Liverpool THE VISION OF HISTORY IN EARLY BRITAIN. By R. W. Hanning. Columbia University Press (New York and London), 1966. Pp. xiii, 271. 56s. This is a study of the views of history revealed by Gildas, Bede, Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth in their accounts of the fall of Britain. Dr. Hanning writes as a historian of literature and of ideas, in search of patterns of thought and imagery. He emphasises the originality of Gildas in treating the history of a single people in exclusively religious terms. Much subtlety and complexity is discovered in the typology and imagery of De Excidio. In his discussion of Bede, Dr. Hanning stresses the in- fluence of Gildas and the importance which Bede attached to the Christian responsibility towards the whole of society. He shows how Nennius's stories represent diverse traditions of historical interpretation and how some are more nationalistic, in a modern sense, or reflect a less theocentric view of political action and morality than anything in Gildas or Bede. The best part of the book is that on Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey's sense of personality and of paradox and his belief in fate and chance are put in sharp contrast with the attitudes and views of his godly, and God-obsessed, predecessors. The similarities between his approach to the past and that of his Anglo-Norman contemporaries who wrote less fictional history