The twelve essays in this collection advance the contemporary study of the women saints of Anglo-Saxon England by challenging received wisdom and offering alternative methodologies. The work embraces a number of different scholarly approaches, from codicological study to feminist theory. While some contributions are dedicated to the description and reconstruction of female lives of saints and their cults, others explore the broader ideological and cultural investments of the literature. The volume concentrates on four major areas: the female saint in the Old English Martyrology, genre including hagiography and homelitic writing, motherhood and chastity, and differing perspectives on lives of virgin martyrs. The essays reveal how saints' lives that exist on the apparent margins of orthodoxy actually demonstrate a successful literary challenge extending the idea of a holy life.
Author(s): Paul E. Szarmach (ed.)
Series: Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series, 14
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Year: 2013
Language: English
Pages: 364
Abbreviations and Short Titles
Introduction / Paul E. Szarmach
Old English Martyrology
1. Female Hagiography in the 'Old English Martyrology' / Christine Rauer
2. Bodies of Land: The Place of Gender in the 'Old English Martyrology' / Jacqueline Stodnick
Form and Genre
3. Why Is Margaret’s the Only 'Life' in London, BL, Cotton MS Tiberius A.iii? / Tracey-Anne Cooper
4. Æthelgifu’s Will as Hagiography / Mary Louise Fellows
5. Assuming Virginity: Tradition and the Naked Narrative in Ælfric’s Homily on the Assumption of the Virgin / Rebecca Stephenson
6. Genre Trouble: Reading the Old English 'Vita' of Saint Euphrosyne / Robin Norris
7. More Genre Trouble: The Life of Mary of Egypt / Paul E. Szarmach
Mothers
8. 'Nutrix pia': The Flowering of the Cult of St Æthelthryth in Anglo-Saxon England / John Black
9. The Kentish Queen as 'Omnium Mater': Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Lections and the Emergence of the Cult of Saint Seaxburh / Virginia Blanton
Virgin Martyrs
10. Agnes among the Anglo-Saxons: Patristic Inluences in Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Saxon Versions of the 'Passio' of St Agnes, Virgin and Martyr / Rhonda L. McDaniel
11. Heavenly Bodies: Paradoxes of Female Martyrdom in Ælfric’s 'Lives of Saints' / Renée R. Trilling
12. 'Torture me, rend me, burn me, kill me!': Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and the Depiction of Female Sanctity / Rosalind Love
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
