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-Saxon England, 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.
Author(s): Cynthia Turner Camp
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
Year: 2015
Language: English
Pages: XIV+246
City: Cambridge
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1. Edith of Wilton and the Writing of Women's History 25
2. Audrey Abroad: Spiritual and Genealogical Filiation in the Middle English Lives of Etheldreda 64
3. Henry Bradshaw's "Life of Werburge" and the Limits of Holy Incorruption 102
4. The Limits of Narrative History in the Written and Pictorial Lives of Edward the Confessor 133
5. The Limits of Poetic History in Lydgate's "Edmund and Fremund" and the Harley 2278 Pictorial Cycle 173
Bibliography 211
Index 237
