Isidore of Seville in Anglo-Saxon England: The synonyma as a source of Felix's Vita S. Guthlaci

This paper investigates Isidore’s Synonyma as a source for one of the founding and most popular texts of Anglo-Saxon hagiography, the Latin life of the hermit-saint Guthlac, a highly-literary work authored by the learned monk Felix, an elusive figure of whom nothing is known except that he dedicated his Vita S. Guthlaci to Ælfwald, king of the East Angles (c. 713-749). The setting of Guthlac’s life itself is Crowland, a demon-infested islet in the fenland between Mercia and East Anglia, and the Mercian-East Anglian associations of the saint and his uita seem to offer precious evidence as to the circulation of the Synonyma in an age and area of Anglo-Saxon England where knowledge of this Isidorian text is otherwise hardly documented. Moreover, the appreciation of the Synonyma within the milieu that produced the Vita S. Guthlaci, that is a locale which seems to have nurtured an interest in eremitic values and a detailed knowledge of some of the key hagiographies concerning the founders of Eastern monasticism, namely the Vita S. Antonii and Vita S. Pauli eremitae, can offer new and tantalising insights into the literary corpus to which the Isidorian text was probably associated and can help further sketch out the Anglo-Saxon libraries to which the Synonyma belonged.