New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints' Lives (Middle Ages Series) - Hardcover

Sanok, Catherine

 
9780812249828: New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints' Lives (Middle Ages Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812249828 ISBN 13: 9780812249828
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

In New Legends of England, Catherine Sanok examines a significant, albeit previously unrecognized, phenomenon of fifteenth-century literary culture in England: the sudden fascination with the Lives of British, Anglo-Saxon, and other native saints. Embodying a variety of literary forms—from elevated Latinate verse, to popular traditions such as the carol, to translations of earlier verse legends into the medium of prose—the Middle English Lives of England's saints are rarely discussed in relation to one another or seen as constituting a distinct literary genre. However, Sanok argues, these legends, when grouped together were an important narrative forum for exploring overlapping forms of secular and religious community at local, national, and supranational scales: the monastery, the city, and local cults; the nation and the realm; European Christendom and, at the end of the fifteenth century, a world that was suddenly expanding across the Atlantic.

Reading texts such as the South English Legendary, The Life of St. Etheldrede, the Golden Legend, and poems about Saints Wenefrid and Ursula, Sanok focuses especially on the significance of their varied and often experimental forms. She shows how Middle English Lives of native saints revealed, through their literary forms, modes of affinity and difference that, in turn, reflected a diversity in the extent and structure of medieval communities. Taking up key questions about jurisdiction, temporality, and embodiment, New Legends of England presents some of the ways in which the Lives of England's saints theorized community and explored its constitutive paradox: the irresolvable tension between singular and collective forms of identity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Catherine Sanok is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Introduction

In 1389, English saints began once again to perform miracles, claims the Benedictine chronicler Thomas Walsingham: despite other calamities that year, Walsingham counts it a "happy" one on account of the "renewal of miracles"—miracula renovata—by England's own saints. The British St. Alban, for example, cured a London woman named Agnes, who was so "demented by grief that her madness was known to almost all those who were accustomed to throng the streets of London" (272). The Anglo-Saxon St. Etheldreda—or Audrey, the Anglo-Norman name by which she is also known—renewed her miracle-working too. She appeared in a vision to a young man to warn him of the "gravest dangers which would befall the kingdom, unless a merciful God was placated by the pious prayers of the faithful and thus stayed his hand from punishment" (269). The saint instructed the man to carry her message to the prior and monks and informed him that to prove its truth he would be made lame until the feast of her translation, when he would be miraculously healed. His disabled body provided powerful evidence that his story was not "fake and the invention of human cunning" (270): the crowds that rushed to see him poked at his shins and feet with their knives to confirm for themselves that his flesh was "dead." The man also conveyed Etheldreda's prophecy of the devastating heat wave that summer, when it was so hot that the lead on church roofs melted, weather that would have been "still more intolerable" had not St. Etheldreda advised the English to pray for forgiveness. The saint appeared to an old woman as well, the young man's counterpart, as a medium for dire warnings addressed to both monks and laity to "continue their processions, redouble their intercessions, and to pray without ceasing that God would remove the sword which hung over their heads."

Walsingham's periodizing scheme, structured by the renewed activity of English saints, maps an epistemic shift in vernacular literary culture too. While there had been considerable interest in England's native saints following the Conquest, when a flurry of Anglo-Norman and Latin Lives were written, by the end of the fourteenth century this narrative tradition, like the saints themselves, had long been dormant: with the exception of the South English Legendary (SEL), there is very little interest in them in English-language narrative culture. But within a generation of the revival announced by Walsingham, Middle English narrative and verse traditions were reshaped by attention to native saints. By the 1420s, English saints' Lives include a verse Life of St. Edith and a Life of St. Etheldreda, paired together in a manuscript associated with Wilton Abbey; John Audelay's carol-form Life of St. Wenefred, a Welsh saint whose two shrines, at Holywell in Flintshire and at Shrewsbury, made her a kind of border saint and increasingly an English one; a tail-rhyme Life of John of Bridlington, the last English person to be canonized before the Reformation; and a sprawling four-book Life of St. Cuthbert. In the 1430s, John Lydgate's aureate double Lives—the Life of Sts. Edmund and Fremund and the Life of Sts. Alban and Amphibalus—made native saints' Lives a crucial forum for aesthetic display, while his shorter works on Augustine of Canterbury and Ursula register his broad interest, and that of his patrons, in England's native saints. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Lives of some English saints from the SEL were translated into prose and appended to a Middle English translation of Legenda Aurea. Shortly thereafter Osbern Bokenham compiled his own legendary, which also adds English saints' Lives to the international canon formed by Legenda Aurea. Long literary saints' Lives in a Lydgatean mode were still being produced at the end of the century: they include Henry Bradshaw's Life of St. Werburge, Edmund Hatfield's Lyf of Saynt Ursula, and Lawrence Wade's Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury. Such works retained their appeal into the sixteenth century and crossed into the new medium of print, in editions produced by William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and, especially, Richard Pynson.

Where Walsingham represents British and Anglo-Saxon saints as intercessors for England—that is, as figures for a community at the scale of the nation or realm—these vernacular texts present them as figures for communities at a variety of scales, conceptualized in multiple ways. A central thesis of this book is that Middle English legends of native saints served as an important narrative forum for exploring competing forms of secular and religious community at local, national, and supranational scales: the monastery, the city, and local devotional groups; the nation and the realm; European Christendom and, at the end of the fifteenth century, a world that was suddenly expanding across the Atlantic. These forms of community may be distinguished from one another by temporal as well as geographical scale. Some are experienced or produced through fixed units of time: the day, the week, the year, or the reign; some are defined at a larger historical scale by rupture and periodization, as in Walsingham's representation of English national community; and still others are defined as transhistorical, at the limit of temporal scale. The different kinds of community imagined by native saints' Lives partly reflect the diversity of institutions and audiences responsible for their production, circulation, and reception, which include powerful Benedictine monasteries seeking to advertise their place in English history, nunneries trying to reestablish their authority in the wake of censure, royal and aristocratic patrons promoting their religiosity, and urban textual communities eager for vernacular religious literature, among others.

This book seeks to identify and understand this preoccupation with forms of community in fifteenth-century Lives of English saints as a literary phenomenon. While it necessarily attends to the works' several historical contexts, and while it is motivated in part by a historical question about how religious identity came to be understood as relevant to national identity, the main project of this study is to analyze how, as a group, these literary works explore the nature and experience of different kinds of community. They ask, for example, whether local, national, and supranational devotional communities can be understood through the spatial logic of a graduated scale, or whether they might be better understood as occupying a conceptual scale organized by level of particularity or universality. They explore whether such differences in scale—spatial, temporal, or conceptual—help to structure, or further complicate, the relationships between incommensurable forms of community. And they investigate how the scale of some communities allows them to be defined in terms of contact or intimacy, and how the scale of others demands an acknowledgment of difference. In their broadest terms, that is, they are interested in how communities might be understood in terms of heterogeneity, sameness, or a constitutive paradox of difference and relation that Jean-Luc Nancy has called "being-in-common."

In exploring these questions, English saints' Lives take advantage of a signature capability of literary form, whether on the level of line, stanza, or work: its own capacity to draw attention to and play with scale—to contract or dilate, to emphasize proximity or distance, to specify or generalize. A second key argument of this book is that questions about the scale of community and the relationship between communities at different scales are addressed in this corpus through experimental and heterogeneous literary forms. Middle English Lives of England's saints...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812249828
ISBN 13 
9780812249828
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
349
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
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