Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England. New Directions

Christiania Whitehead, Hazel Blair, Denis Renevey (eds). Pages: 456 p. Illustrations:15 b/w, 12 tables b/w. Language(s):English. Brepols, Publication Year:2022 - SUMMARY This volume fills an important gap in the study of medieval English sanctity. Focused on the period 1150–1550, it examines later manifestations of pre-conquest northern English cults (John of Beverley, Oswald, Hilda, Ætheldreda etc.), and the establishment and development of many more during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries (Godric of Finchale, Robert of Knaresborough, Oswine of Tynemouth, Æbbe of Coldingham, Bega of Copeland, William of York, etc.). It showcases the diversity of new northern cults that emerged after 1150, and pays particular attention to cultures of episcopal and eremitic devotion and hagiographic production in Yorkshire, Cumbria and Lincolnshire. Divided into five subsections, the volume opens by exploring the relation of sanctity to constructions of northern identity through targeted examinations of northern textual and material cultures. It then turns to a series of case studies of northern saints’ cults, grouped with reference to the eremitic life, female networks and locations, and the contextualisation of northern sanctity within national, transnational and post-medieval currents of veneration. Underlying all these essays is a concern with the conflicted idea of ‘northernness’. This collection argues for a northern sanctity that is imagined in varying ways by different communities (monastic, diocesan, national etc.), allied to a series of conceptual ‘norths’ that differ significantly in accordance with the bodies of evidence under survey. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations, List of Abbreviations, Acknowledgements Introduction — CHRISTIANIA WHITEHEAD PART I: Northern Sanctity and Northern Identity I.1 Textual Culture: Hagiography, Legendary, Suffrage Aelred of Rievaulx and the Saints of Durham, Galloway and Hexham — DENIS RENEVEY The Production of Northern Saints’ Lives at Holm Cultram Abbey in Cumbria — CHRISTIANIA WHITEHEAD Flower of York: Region, Nation and St Robert of Knaresborough in Late Medieval England — HAZEL J. HUNTER BLAIR Praying to Northern Saints in English Books of Hours — CYNTHIA TURNER CAMP I.2 Material Culture: Space, Oil, Image Space, It’s About Time Too: Architecture and Identity in Medieval Durham — EUAN MCCARTNEY ROBSON Holy Geysers? Oily Saints and Ecclesiastical Politics in Late Medieval Yorkshire and Lincolnshire — JOHN JENKINS Art and Northern Sanctity in Late Medieval England — JULIAN LUXFORD PART II: New Case Studies of Northern Saints and Their Cults II.1 The Eremitic Life The Context for and Later Reception of Reginald of Durham’s Vita S Godrici — MARGARET COOMBE Robert of Knaresborough, Religious Novelty, and the Twelfth-Century Poverty Movement — JOSHUA EASTERLING Hermit Saints and Human Temporalities — CATHERINE SANOK II.2 Female Networks and Locations: Coldingham, Ely, Whitby Beyond the Miracula: Practices and Experiences of Lay Devotion at the Cult of St Æbbe, Coldingham — RUTH J. SALTER Ætheldreda in the North: Tracing Northern Networks in the Liber Eliensis and the Vie de seinte Audree — JANE SINNETT-SMITH Conflicting Memories, Confused Identities, and Constructed Pasts: St Hilda and the Refoundation of Whitby Abbey — DANIEL TALBOT Remembering St Hilda in the Later Middle Ages — CHRISTIANE KROEBEL II.3 Beyond the North: Southern, European and Post-Medieval Perspectives The French Life of St Godric of Finchale, or Adventures for Thirteenth-Century Nuns — ANNE MOURON The Reception of St Oswine in Later Medieval England — JAMES G. CLARK Northern Saints’ Names as Monastic Bynames in Late Medieval and Early Tudor England — DAVID E. THORNTON Northern Lights on Southern Shores: Rewriting St Oswald’s Life in Eighteenth-Century Friuli — CLAUDIA DI SCIACCA Index.…