New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints’ Lives . Catherine Sanok. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. x+349.
2018; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/700411
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewNew Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints’ Lives. Catherine Sanok. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. x+349.E. Gordon WhatleyE. Gordon WhatleyQueens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY (Emeritus) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreOf the several studies of Middle English (ME) saints’ lives published since Anne Thompson’s ground-breaking critical reading of the South English Legendary (SEL) collection (ca. 1300),1 Catherine Sanok’s New Legends of England, although focusing on saints native to Britain, is the most ambitious in scope, situating the work of the SEL poet, Osbern Bokenham, and John Lydgate in a larger context of vernacular hagiographic production in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Impressively interdisciplinary, and copiously annotated and indexed, Sanok’s stylish monograph combines textual and critical expertise and contemporary theory of poetic form, “scale,” and “community” (the book’s recurring theme) with a thorough grounding in modern historical scholarship, on which Sanok draws judiciously to contextualize and historicize her primary texts. These include male as well as female saints’ legends, several of which have received little or no critical attention previously. Immediately below, to convey the scope and variety of the book (virtually a vade mecum to late ME hagiography), I itemize Sanok’s main primary sources, then comment selectively to illustrate some of her wide-ranging critical findings.The seven numbered chapters after the introduction deal, in roughly chronological order, with (1) selections from the fourteenth-century “A” recension of SEL, especially the legends of Ursula, Alphege, and Thomas Becket; (2) the early fifteenth-century Wilton Abbey verse lives of Edith of Wilton and Etheldreda of Ely; (3) Bokenham’s “ballad-rhyme” life of Wenefred of Holy Well, from a newly discovered manuscript (Edinburgh, Advocates Library, MS Abbotsford), and “Blind” John Audelay’s St. Wenefred carol (early 15th c.); (4) the ME prose Gilte Legende (1438), with its “Supplement,” comprising prose adaptations of SEL’s verse lives of native English saints along with prose lives of Erkenwald of London and Edward the Confessor; (5) two commissioned works by John Lydgate in his characteristic “aureate” stanzas: Alban and Amphibalus (1439) and Edmund and Fremund (ca. 1440); (6) Audelay’s carol on Thomas Becket, and Lawrence Wade’s massive stanzaic Life of St. Thomas (1497), based mainly on Herbert of Bosham’s twelfth-century Latin vita, but including the romance of Becket’s Anglo-Saracen parentage from John of Grandisson’s fourteenth-century Latin vita. In the packed and final seventh chapter, Sanok explores the legend of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins in various illuminating late ME contexts: the Brut chronicle (12th to 15th c.); an anonymous prose life (mid-15th c., in Huntingon Library MS 140 and Southwell Minster MS 7); early sixteenth-century London pageants; Edmund Hatfield’s aureate verse Lyf (ca. 1509); a prose life of Ursula in Edmund Pynson’s Kalendre of the New Legende of England (1516); and Hans Burgkmair the Elder’s magnificent Augsburg triptych “Santa Croce in Gerusalemme” (1504).Especially striking in this last chapter is the information that the young Catherine of Aragon, Spanish fiancée of Henry VII’s heir, Prince Arthur, was hailed as “a second Ursula” in the civic pageant staged to welcome her naval entourage at London Bridge in 1501. Sanok explains this surprising epithet’s significance on various levels. Not only does Ursula in her legend, like Catherine in actuality, sail the seas to meet a royal (“English”) bridegroom, but the mysteries of Tudor genealogy enabled the pageant authors to claim that Ursula and Catherine shared Lancastrian blood, “thus fashioning a union of the religious and secular versions of the Tudor myth” (244). Ursula figured prominently at the civic level also: the “especially close trading relation” (241) of English merchants with Ursula’s cult center—Hanseatic Cologne—prompted some London mercantile confraternities and guilds to adopt her as patron saint. Finally the naming, in 1494, of a newly Hispanic Caribbean archipelago—the Virgin Islands—in honor of Ursula and her flotilla of maidens, coincidentally associated the mythic British saint and her Spanish “kinswoman” with the New World, the rich mercantile potential of which was of mounting interest to an England anxious to compensate for the loss of its former possessions in continental Europe.Insights of a different kind are offered in Sanok’s third chapter, regarding Bokenham’s treatment of the legend of St. Wenefred, another native saint promoted variously in the fifteenth century. In a careful close reading of the miraculous aftermath of Wenefred’s decapitation by her scorned suitor, Sanok illustrates Bokenham’s special interest “in forms of community rooted in the claims of human affection” (101) by analyzing how he has significantly altered St. Beuno’s motive for resuscitating Wenefred’s corpse. In the twelfth-century Latin source, this was to enable Wenefred to fulfill her otherworldly desire to live a virgin life, but Bokenham’s Beuno is motivated chiefly by his desire to allay Wenefred’s parents’ inconsolable grief, to which Bokenham devotes unprecedented narrative space. Sanok reminds us here that such “deep sympathy with the claims of human affection” and “secular community” (102–3) is strikingly at odds with the insistent contemptus mundi of the ME Pearl maiden, who sternly rebukes her earthly and earthbound father’s all-too-human sorrow at his loss. In chapter 2, the Pearl poet’s ostensible repudiation of the saeculum, with its ephemeral emotional ties, is similarly invoked by way of contrast with the Wilton Abbey poet’s sympathetic account of “a still-intimate affective relationship” between the dead saint Edith and her living mother, Abbess Wultrude (88).Sanok explains also that Bokenham and the Wilton author are equally resistant to officially sanctioned modes of thought in the political sphere, as evident in their preoccupation with a saint’s “community” as geographically and culturally local (or what postcolonial theory terms, the translocal [107]), rather than national. These hagiographers, and several treated in other chapters, avoid cooperating with the unifying nationalist ideologies that the Lancastrian kings sought to further in attempting to promote regional saints like Wenefred and John of Beverley to a national level. Sanok also argues, persuasively, that such discrepant ideas of community are also reflected in the hagiographers’ varying poetics, a topic too complex, however, to treat even briefly here.By the later fifteenth century, after the disruptions of the so-called Wars of the Roses (between the 1450s and 1480s), a more centralized, unified sense of nationhood did gain momentum, with a concomitant merging and overlapping of the hierarchies of secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions (a process finalized, of course, under Henry VIII and during the Protestant Reformation). In hagiography, the growing acceptance of such unifying trends is discernible in an unlikely context. Traditionally the legend of Thomas Becket (the focus of Sanok’s chap. 6), had been a vehicle for dramatizing the clash, not the cooperation, of clerical and lay jurisdictions, but as reinterpreted in the “epic” Lyfe by Lawrence Wade (a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury), the Becket story is refashioned not only to justify his simultaneous roles as lord chancellor and archbishop but also to attribute the fatal rupture between archbishop and king to the moral failure of individuals (“personal vice” [213–14]), rather than to any intrinsic incompatibility between the Two Swords of Church and State. Even Thomas’s spirituality is relocated (again anticipating the Reformation) from the public sphere of liturgy and sacraments to a private “interior” self. Sanok’s detailed, searching analysis of Wade’s rendering in its contemporary historical context (205–33) is the first critical essay on a forgotten work that is itself a sustained, thoughtful reaccounting of a landmark episode in medieval English history.My only reservation about Sanok’s first-rate monograph is that its pervasive concern with “community” and “scale” is grounded mainly in modern theory, and not in any specifically medieval discourse regarding communitas, ordines, estates, body politic, et cetera, such as emerged in the wake of the thirteenth-century rediscovery and assimilation of Aristotle’s politics and ethics. Nonetheless, the book should be accessible everywhere that ME literature is studied.Notes1. Anne B. Thompson, Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the South English Legendary (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 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