1. Clare Stancliffe, "Cuthbert and the Polarity between Pastor and Solitary," St.
Cuthbert: His Cult and Community to AD 1200, ed. Gerald Bonner, David Rollason, and
Clare Stancliffe (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 21-44.
2. Mary Clayton, "Hermits and the Contemplative Life in Anglo-Saxon England,"
Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints' Lives in their Contexts, ed. Paul
E. Szarmach (Albany, 1996), pp. 155-56. Another recent study refers to Cuthbert's
"schizophrenic calling" (Joel T. Rosenthal, "Bede's Life of Cuthbert: Preparatory to the
Ecclesiastical History," Catholic Historical Review 68 [1982], 610).
3. Cuthbert was clearly the favorite native saint of Bede, who celebrated his life in three
separate texts: a short metrical Vita (c. 700), a longer prose Vita (c. 721), and a
substantial block of chapters (IV.27-32) in his Ecclesiastical History (731). Of these, the
prose Vita, the subject of this study, presents the most complete portrait of the saint.
4. Alan Thacker, "Bede's Ideal of Reform," Ideal and Reality in Frankish and
Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. Patrick Wormald (Oxford, 1982), pp. 130-53.
5. Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1896), pp.
405-23.
6. Thacker, "Bede's Ideal," p. 145.
7. One scholar asserts that Bede transforms the Cuthbert found in the anonymous
Life "from an eccentrically holy wonder worker into an model pastor" (Walter Goffart,
The Narrators of Barbarian History [Princeton, 1988], p. 293). Another states that Bede
took "the saint from his traditional setting, i.e., one of splendid isolation, and turn[ed] him into a
church-builder, an organization man'" (Rosenthal, "Bede's Life," p. 602). See also the quotation
from Mary Clayton above, that Bede's Cuthbert "subordinated the solitary life to the demands of
the
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church" ("Hermits and the Contemplative Life," pp. 155-56).
8. Vita sancti Cuthberti Auctore Beda, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed. Bertram
Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 156-59. Subsequent quotations are from this edition, with page
numbers given parenthetically in the main text. Colgrave's edition also includes the anonymous
Vita sancti Cuthberti (c. 720), Bede's primary source.
9. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 122 (Turnhout, 1955), pp. 64-65.
10. Another example of Cuthbert's practice of "lengthy prayer," during his stay at
Lindisfarne, occurs in Bede's Life, pp. 210-11.
11. Bede's Ecclesiastical History, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors
(Oxford, 1969), pp. 262-63.
12. Ecclesiastical History, pp. 442-45.
13. The famous fourth-century Vita Antonii, written in Greek by Athanasius,
Bishop of Alexandria, was known in early Anglo-Saxon England through the Latin translation of
Evagrius.
14. Vita Beati Antonii Abbatis, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1979), col. 162.
15. Vita Antonii, cols. 134-46.
16. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16 (1986), 24.
17. Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social
Ordering (London, 1997), pp. 13 and 49.
18. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York,
1969), p. 95. Turner's arguments are grounded in his observations of tribal rituals involving a
temporary, liminal state between one social status and another. Working from these observations,
he goes on to describe Christian monasticism as the "institutionalization of liminality" (p. 107).
His ideas are later extended to eremiticism by Christopher Holdsworth, who characterizes the
eremitic life as "the most complete working out of permanent liminality in the Christian tradition"
(Christopher Holdsworth, "Hermits and the Powers of the Frontier," Reading Medieval
Studies 16 [1990], p. 68). A similar dynamic can be seen at work in the bonds between
Turner's ritual "neophytes" and those between the two religious solitaries in Bede's text.
19. "A biographer was allowed considerable license with the speeches placed in his
protagonists' mouths" (Stancliffe, "Cuthbert and the Polarity," p. 28, n. 45).
