<i>Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England</i>. Cynthia Turner Camp. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015. Pp. xiv+246.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewAnglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England. Cynthia Turner Camp. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015. Pp. xiv+246.Robin WaughRobin WaughWilfrid Laurier University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis book partakes in the remarkable bloom of hagiographical scholarship concerning the Middle Ages that has occurred over the last thirty years. Its author uses a historical approach in order to examine mostly poetic depictions of Anglo-Saxon saints from the medieval to the early modern periods. The book contains examinations of the Wilton Chronicle (ca. 1420), various lives of Saint Audrey, Henry Bradshaw’s Life of Werburge (ca. 1513), various depictions of Edward the Confessor, and John Lydgate’s Edmund and Fremund (ca. 1447)—all previously neglected works. In the introduction, Camp poses the question, how do saints’ lives “reconstruct the past?” (4). A review then follows of theoretical approaches to the study of saints, history, and the human body as a complex symbol of tradition, knowledge, community, and shared values, with Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History as its starting point. Though Camp refers to Hayden White and other postmodernist thinkers, she singles out M. M. Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, the fusing of indicators of both space and time into one intellectual construct, as most important to her methodology. Throughout this introduction and the remaining chapters, Camp documents her findings thoroughly.Chapter 1 analyses the treatment of Edith of Wilton’s body in the Middle English version of her life that dominates the Wilton Chronicle. According to Camp, the fifteenth-century retelling of this saint’s life enacts “enclosed female virtue” (31), “a woman’s history of Wessex” (31), and the imbrication of a convent’s history with royal history. Camp’s argument is that female agency and the institutional integrity of Wilton abbey are represented in the body of Edith, the abbey’s most famous possession, while a saint’s corpse can express all of these desirable attributes through its incorruptibility. When Edith’s corpse sits up, gestures, and motivates the conversion of King Cnut to Christianity, spiritual traditions and royal ones come together.Chapter 2 argues that Audrey, another saint of the Anglo-Saxon era, also unites royal lineage with the virtues of sainthood. Camp connects several accounts of Audrey’s life with manuscript history and with recent critical reconceptions of saints’ relics. The author then uses the content of CUL MS Add. 2604 in order to propose that the act of reading this manuscript in itself presents a melding of the communities of Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and fifteenth-century England.In her third chapter, the author turns to a topic she has touched on several times already, namely, what happens when a presumably holy saint’s body is revealed to be, against expectation, decayed or somewhat decayed. Such a revelation occurs in Bradshaw’s Life of Werburge, where the various reactions to the discovery of Werburgh’s partially decayed body initiate a transfer, as Camp would have it, of Mercian history to Chester, through the saint’s status as an “enherytryce” (115). The evolution from uncorrupted body to decaying one signals the translation of the saint’s remains to a new site, where they can influence monastic life by relating to “both monastic discord and monastic renovation” (131).In chapter 4, Camp moves away from literary study in order to examine historical and pictorial representations of King Edward the Confessor. Here, she carefully outlines the tension between the chastity of a saintly figure and the often contradictory responsibilities of a king, for instance, fertility. This tension appears in images of an ambiguous Edward that not only suggest stasis and atemporality but also a legacy that he passes on to later kings, who sometimes co-opt his reputation, and sometimes not. Not surprisingly, Westminster Abbey makes use of the Confessor’s image(s) and reputation(s) in a pragmatic fashion as well.Chapter 5 argues that Edmund, an Anglo-Saxon king and saint who was martyred by Vikings and eulogized by Abbo of Fleury (ca. 985), is enshrined, in a variety of ways, for the purpose of providing a role model for Henry VI (and presumably later rulers) in Lydgate’s poem Edmund and Fremund. This poem acquires a magnificent setting in Harley 2278, where it is decked out in extensive illumination and accompanied by pictorial panels. As readers would by now expect, Camp links Lydgate’s and the illustrator’s work to the reputation of the abbey of Bury. In this chapter, what is unquestionably the best poetry examined in this book receives ample quotation, and the process of constructing a verbal, visual, and physical shrine around the cult of Edmund gets lengthy description. Two illustrations support Camp’s discourse here, an inclusion that renders the omission of images of Edward the Confessor all the more puzzling.The author offers rich material to scholars, but some issues arise. Most important, I am not sure that her main argument, that fifteenth-century religious communities were inclined to graft royal histories and genealogies onto their own understanding of themselves in order to further their aims, is particularly fresh. Meanwhile, a more obvious and earlier thesis statement, together with a distinct conclusion to the volume, would help to spotlight the argument more effectively. Instead, the book ends with Camp’s reading of Harley 2278, twisted off rather abruptly. It is also a bit odd that she never questions the spiritual programs of the religious communities that she examines, when fifteenth-century England was rife with religious conflicts. I also think that the discourse is rather one-sided in terms of the promise of its title; had a more exploratory picture of Anglo-Saxonism come through, the analysis of the later material could, I believe, go even deeper than it does. A few more quibbles: the prose style is often dense, and the prevailing atmosphere of learnedness would seem more applicable if the theoretical review in the introduction had seen more explicit employment in the chapters that followed. Instead, almost all theoretical concepts inventoried in the introduction are later ignored, with the major exception of “chronotope.” Perhaps this is a volume more for historiographers than literary scholars. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 2November 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/693147HistoryPublished online June 16, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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