At the heart of Rebel Angels: Space and Sovereignty in Anglo-Saxon England is a fairly straightforward but undeniably compelling question—how did the story of the angel’s rebellion against God influence systems of power in early England? Jill Fitzgerald offers a comprehensive analysis of both Latin and Old English sources that draw on the angelic rebellion, including poetry, sermons, hagiography, letters, land grants, and charters. She argues that the angelic rebellion is used to justify social and religious hierarchies through appeals to the inheritance of spiritual and physical space. These appeals draw on the replacement doctrine, which held that humans were created to repopulate the space that angels once occupied. Fitzgerald states that the replacement doctrine “assumed a status of a dominant mythos or social theory, a way of crafting meaning for the Anglo-Saxons as a Christian community” (2). According to Fitzgerald, the early English viewed themselves as especially poised to inherit the territory left empty by the rebel angels. They saw their role in the divine hierarchy as one deeply reliant on obedience, in contrast to the faithless angels, and they applied the same rules to justify their sovereignty in physical space as well. By “tethering replacement principles” (3) to spiritual and political systems of power and beliefs, the English organized their world around ideals of compensation, justice, and restoration of what has been lost.Though John Milton’s Paradise Lost perhaps offers the most well-known literary depiction of the angelic rebellion and fall of Lucifer into hell, the story was featured in Old English texts with some frequency. In fact, for years scholars have floated the possibility that texts like the Old English Genesis inspired Milton’s own characterization of Lucifer’s expulsion and the establishment of the kingdom of hell. In addition to the Old English Genesis, the tale appears in poems such as Christ and Satan, Guthlac A, and Andreas, among others. In these poems, the story generally appears as reminder that order will be restored to the divine hierarchy, meaning that those who rebel against God are expelled and punished, while the faithful are rewarded and incorporated into heaven’s divine inheritance. The angelic rebellion also appears in early English exegetical writing, monastic letters, and sermons. Scholarship about the rebel angels in early England approaches the story almost exclusively through the lens of English Christianity and popular spiritual belief. What makes Fitzgerald’s intervention important is her holistic attention to the narrative, both inside and outside of direct spiritual contexts. By engaging with the interplay of historical and religious documents, Fitzgerald demonstrates how literature shaped English social and political practice, as well as how social and political practice shaped English literature. In other words, Fitzgerald examines the stakes of spiritual rebellion in the literary imaginary in order to interpret and discuss the social, legal, and political practices in early medieval England.Rebel Angels is organized by textual genre. The first portion of the book is grounded in historical and legal contexts, while the remainder of the book is dedicated to depictions of the rebel angels in literature. However, Fitzgerald is careful to avoid discussing texts in isolation. Instead, she deploys a combination of source study, material history, and literary analysis to foreground how text and social practice interact. In the introduction, Fitzgerald establishes the correlation between the angelic rebellion and spiritual and earthly territory. She builds largely on Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholson Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) and Jacques Le Goff’s “Discorso di chiusura” (from Popoli e paesi nella cultura alltomedievale, Spoleto: Presso la sede del Centro, 1983), both of which explore the relationships between space, sovereignty, and power. She states that “cultures imagine themselves according to distinct spatial structures and organisations, whether those spaces are in their possession or simply desired and hoped for” (11). Fitzgerald argues that English depictions of the fall of the angels is unique in comparison to Irish or Scandinavian accounts because English authors are careful to point out how “at the moment of angelic creation, there are no pre-existing legal orders in place, only systems of obligation and reciprocity” (13). After the fall, however, it became necessary to establish formal commandments and laws, and to create humankind to repair the divine hierarchy following the loss of God’s subjects. In this way, the fall of the angels acts as a model for systems of power and governance, while also justifying the existence of those structures in the first place.The fall of the angels thus also operates as a sort of origin myth that frames English systems of power within a divinely ordered hierarchy. In chapter 1, “Lands Idle and Unused,” Fitzgerald explores how this origin story is inflected in legal discourses of land ownership, inheritance, and sovereignty. She discusses proems of land charters between the reigns of Edgar and Æthelred that reference the angelic rebellion before establishing the transfer or re-granting of property. Moreover, this chapter provides insight into the legal repercussions of rebellion and treachery alongside Old English poetic accounts of the angelic rebellion. Fitzgerald’s interest in mental and physical spaces left idel ond unnut (idle and unused), as the Genesis A-poet puts it, are especially interesting in this chapter, as is her discussion of English conceptions of homeland (eðel) as they relate to the occupation and control of land. Fitzgerald asserts that “the sin of the rebel angels was frequently understood as a psychological lapse with spatial consequences” (60), illustrating how intertwined mental and physical spaces were within English conceptions of sovereignty and inheritance in this life and the next.The second chapter, “The Anxiety of Inheritance,” extends this conversation to the Old English poem Genesis B, which characterizes Satan’s rebellion as an inability to accept limitations on his own power and territorial ambitions. As Fitzgerald puts it, Satan’s desire to build his own kingdom to rival God’s is a “breach of his social, spatial, and spiritual limitations” (74). Satan’s territorial overreach subverts the narrative of inheritance through obedience, which results in the denial of his own homeland. Fitzgerald also incorporates into this chapter a discussion of the angelic rebellion in Irish apocryphal traditions. She concludes that, while Irish sources tend to depict Satan as reacting to heavenly limitations, both mental and spatial, English writers “represent heaven as a place of unspecified limits and indeterminate boundaries” (83) before the angelic rebellion.The following chapter, “Rebel Clerics, Monastic Replacements,” does similar work, this time building on Bede’s concerns about monastic lands and secular canons. As stated in his letters, Bede viewed spiritual corruption as an echo of angelic rebellion, a characterization that inspired reformers in the late tenth century to compare their ecclesiastical rivals to rebel angels. Consequently, “the fall of the angels narrative became a prism through which to view and later filter the turbulent events of this era” (117). Fitzgerald draws on the “New Minster Charter,” which served as the official royal and religious response to the conflict of secular canons. The document opens with the story of the rebel angels and paints the secular clerics at Winchester as oppositional to God and to the English religious community. The New Minster Charter interweaves royal and ecclesiastical power, forging new ideas of kingship and spiritual sovereignty. As Fitzgerald writes, “by removing the rebellious canons from the ecclesiastical hierarchy and appropriating the doctrine of replacement,” the early monastic reformers implied that the way to heaven would be jointly secured by King Edgar and a reformed monasticism (147).Chapters 4 and 5 continue this examination of the rebel angels in religious literary culture. “The Angels’ Share” discusses how rehearsals of angelic rebellion acted as a sort of talisman or charm for English Christians—a “protective ritual written across both bodies and landscapes” (160). The fusion of body and landscape in these performances reinforces Fitzgerald’s argument that the rebel angels’ narrative cemented ideas of inheritance and divine order in early English popular belief. In “A Homeland as a Possession,” Fitzgerald returns to the New Minster Charter to compare the revocation of clerical lands and removal of the secular canons to Satan’s own loss of territory after his disobedience. She frames this discussion through the Rogationtide festival, which symbolically reenacted the fall of the angels, and looked forward to the Last Judgment when Christians would occupy their place heaven. In addition to highlighting the correlation between Rogationtide and the angelic rebellion, Fitzgerald provides an intriguing analysis of transitions and movements across space in the Old English poem Christ and Satan. The language of “turning back” and “encircling” featured in this poem reflects the circuitous organization of Rogationtide and invites readers to tread the path toward redemption.In her final chapter, “A New Praedestinati in Wulstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos,” Fitzgerald offers a new way to read Wulfstan’s “Sermon of the Wolf to the English.” She argues that Wulfstan appeals to the replacement doctrine to condemn the English for believing they are predestined to divine inheritance, comparing the English to the rebel angels and stating that they were actively erasing themselves from salvation. Fitzgerald also includes an afterword, in which she restates the stakes of the book and emphasizes the importance of reading across genre. She concludes that the overall impression one gains from examining these diverse works is that “the fall of the angels mythos—and the restructuring of of the heavenly and earthly politics in its aftermath—gave the Anglo-Saxons a way to imagine the construction of their own earthly society, and a means to understand how they could chart clear paths to a heavenly one” (279).Overall, Rebel Angels is a fantastic resource collating stories of angelic rebellion in early medieval England. Fitzgerald’s dedication to providing a thoroughly discussed and comprehensive record of these narratives, and the examination of historical documents alongside literary texts offers nuanced insight into the role that these stories played in both secular and ecclesiastical settings. However, a closer engagement with Lefebvre’s The Production of Space would have been beneficial to the book’s overall argument. Though Fitzgerald cites Lefebvre’s observation that sovereignty implies space, she does not offer further elaboration on why this is the case. In The Production of Space Lefebvre argues that the “space” in which sovereignty operates is “the space of the ruling class's hegemony over its people and over the nationhood that it has arrogated” (281). Moreover, he writes that state sovereignty “was constituted as an imaginary and real, abstract-concrete ‘being’ which recognized no restraints upon itself other than those deriving from relations based on force (its relations with its own internal components, and those with its congeners—invariably rivals and virtual adversaries)” (279). Lefebvre’s attention to issues of state violence and systems of power distribution among the elite can shed additional light on Fitzgerald’s own discussion of Satan’s rebellion against divine authority and his construction of a subversive, alternative kingdom in hell.Fitzgerald’s work opens the door for future studies that more fully explore the interaction of sovereignty and space in early England. Fitzgerald chooses not to critically address how many of the rebel angels narratives are couched within appeals to English origin myths, English exceptionalism, and English as God’s chosen heirs—conversations that continue to be crucial within studies of early English literary and political histories. Bringing her work into conversation with recent scholarship on white heritage politics and early English texts would bring a fruitful and necessary dimension to this conversation about power, territory, inheritance, and dissent. Rebel Angels also presents numerous opportunities to examine Satan’s subversion of God’s territorial sovereignty through the lens of queer theory and queer modes of production and creation. Overall, the book will be valuable to any student or scholar researching early English history and religious culture. The close readings of Old English poetry also present valuable insight into literary culture’s interactions with spiritual and secular systems of power and governance.
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