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Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (review)

this book addresses the “discourse of monastic obedience” and its central paradoxes—of obedience and sacrifice as freedom. It is concerned, too, with the understanding of agency in tenthand eleventh-century England and the differences between that understanding and our own. Identity, scripted by sociocultural environment, provides the parallel theme in particular assumptions—theirs, not ours—about the relationship of identity to choice. but our questions are also addressed: how far is agency possible within identities as tightly scripted and as constantly reinforced as monastic identities were? Cultural critique rather than analytical philosophy is the methodological framework, though there is much sharp commentary. throughout, Katherine O’brien O’Keeffe confronts scenarios that prove uncomfortable for modern, and especially post-Enlightenment modern, readers. O’brien O’Keeffe distinguishes between “agent action” [their ideas] and “agency” [ours], though she is fully aware of the problematic nature of our own notions of freedom of action. Her discussion centers on a series of textual presentations of agent action, most of which affront the modern reader. this is a monastic life, which often began with child oblation, or with the “gift” of a daughter, but also one premised on a totality of obedience that involves an annihilation of the individual will. She deals with abduction if not rape, occluded in texts that insist on a woman’s responsibility and freedom of choice, and with a “freedom” expressed in the choice of a living death in total reclusion. In all these cases, she presents us with a sympathetic, sensitive, and perceptive reading. Her constant concern is with elucidation, but also with the question of how, if at all, we can know what the texts work so hard to obscure and to silence. the answer is through identification of the moments of “incoherence, contradiction, or conflict.” these not only demonstrate the anxieties of contemporaries; they also provided the space for improvisation, and thus for an—albeit limited—agency as we would understand it. the book’s title derives from one of its stranger tales. the saintly bishop æthelwold gave an order to one of his monks, ælfwold, who enthusiastically fulfilled it; so enthusiastically that the saint was disturbed. He accused the monk of “stealing obedience,” and demanded that he plunge his hand into boiling water as a proof of his obedience. the tale is shocking; so too that told in the chapter on child oblation. A young “monk-child,” given by his parents into the monastic life, ran away. His action resulted in his death, clearly presented as a punishment; the earth itself rejected his buried body until his guilt was admitted. Such tales policed a monastic obedience that was to be total, prompt, unquestioning—the complete submission of pupil/monk to master/abbot. Yet at the same time, they construct that obedience as an act of free will, as agent action, even in the case of children oblated by their parents. Such paradoxical notions of freedom are to be understood in a context where disobedience was the first sin, where the will was consequently “unruly,” and where Christian and especially monastic disciplines restored the original state. but how can obedience be “stolen”? O’brien O’Keeffe’s reading here owes much to Foucault, unsurprisingly himself interested in these questions: theft is everything done not on order of a director, everything done without permission. ælfwold’s