The Anglo-Saxon Saints were ideal conduits for late medieval fashioning of the glorious past of England. New book tells the story of how their hagiographies were used to forge a vision of historical righteousness among policymakers, intellectuals and clerics in Late Medieval England.

Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England
by Cynthia Turner Camp
Boydell & Brewer 2015
ISBN-10: 1843844028
ISBN-13: 978-1843844020

ABSTRACT:

Late medieval thinkers and writers weren’t interested in their island’s Anglo-Saxon past; it would be up to early modern antiquarians and reformation polemicists to “rediscover” pre-Conquest history. Or so the received narrative tells us. Turning to visual art, royal ceremony, and monastic tradition, however, we can see a widespread fascination in late fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth-century England with English religious history before the Norman Conquest. Every sector of society might try to root its institutional history in, and thereby shape its contemporary identity through, the perceived spiritual and political perfections of Anglo-Saxon England.

The past was simply very much 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.

Central to this project is the question of ways, not only ends, of imagining the distant past. That is, Saints’ Lives is as concerned with different narrative and non-narrative modes of commemorating pre-Conquest England as it is with the reinvention of the Anglo-Saxon past. Particular attention is paid to these texts’ formal poetics, the structure of manuscripts, the interplay of text and image, and the intersection of writing and corporality. Approaching these texts via both narrativist historiography and the stasis of image and relic, Holy Histories theorizes the ways diachronic and acronic depictions of time establish distinct transtemporal relations between the late medieval present and the distant past. By paying particular attention to the genre’s distinctive features, Saints’ Lives demonstrates how hagiography is able to forge connections unavailable to other historical genres or within other media, making saints the ideal conduits through which the past’s glories can made available to the present.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• 1  Introduction
• 2  Edith of Wilton and the Writing of Women’s History
• 3  Audrey Abroad: Spiritual and Genealogical Filiation in the Middle English Lives of Etheldreda
• 4  Henry Bradshaw’s Life of Werburge and the Limits of Holy Incorruption
• 5  The Limits of Narrative History in the Written and Pictorial Lives of Edward the Confessor
• 6  The Limits of Poetic History in Lydgate’s Edmund and Fremundand the Harley 2278 Pictorial Cycle
• 7  Bibliography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cynthia Turner Camp is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia.