Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England - Hardcover

Camp, Cynthia Turner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1843844028 ISBN 13: 9781843844020

Publisher: D.S.Brewer, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: D.S.Brewer
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1843844028
• ISBN 13: 9781843844020
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260