Description
Book SynopsisA groundbreaking assessment of the use medieval English history-writers made of saints' lives. The past was ever present in later medieval England, as secular and religious institutions worked to recover (or create) originary narratives that could guarantee, they hoped, their political and spiritual legitimacy. Anglo-SaxonEngland, in particular, was imagined as a spiritual "golden age" and a rich source of precedent, for kings and for the monasteries that housed early English saints' remains. This book examines the vernacular hagiography produced in a monastic context, demonstrating how writers, illuminators, and policy-makers used English saints (including St Edmund) to re-envision the bonds between ancient spiritual purity and contemporary conditions. Treating history and ethical practice as inseparable, poets such as Osbern Bokenham, Henry Bradshaw, and John Lydgate reconfigured England's history through its saints, engaging with contemporary concerns about institutional identity, authority, and ethics. Cynthia Turner Camp is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia.
Trade Review[A] very engaging and useful book that will be helpful to scholars in many areas of medieval studies, especially those working in Middle English hagiography or historiography. * JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY *
Highly detailed and carefully argued, Camp's study succeeds in showing how the creators of these lives manipulated not only historical narrative and perceptions of time, but also poetic form and hagiographic discourses to construct institutional identities and address audiences both within and without the monastery walls. * SPECULUM *
[O]ffers interesting new ways of looking at the nature of late medieval English hagiographic literature and innovative paths of inquiry for hagiographic and memory studies. * THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW *
Table of ContentsIntroduction Edith of Wilton and the Writing of Women's History Audrey Abroad: Spiritual and Genealogical Filiation in the Middle English Lives of Etheldreda Henry Bradshaw's Life of Werburge and the Limits of Holy Incorruption The Limits of Narrative History in the Written and Pictorial Lives of Edward the Confessor The Limits of Poetic History in Lydgate's Edmund and Fremund and the Harley 2278 Pictorial Cycle Bibliography
