Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England 1843844028, 9781843844020

Table of contents :
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1. Edith of Wilton and the Writing of Women's History 25
2. Audrey Abroad: Spiritual and Genealogical Filiation in the Middle English Lives of Etheldreda 64
3. Henry Bradshaw's "Life of Werburge" and the Limits of Holy Incorruption 102
4. The Limits of Narrative History in the Written and Pictorial Lives of Edward the Confessor 133
5. The Limits of Poetic History in Lydgate's "Edmund and Fremund" and the Harley 2278 Pictorial Cycle 173
Bibliography 211
Index 237

Citation preview

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

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

Cynthia Turner Camp

D. S. BREWER

©  Cynthia Turner Camp 2015 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Cynthia Turner Camp to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2015 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN  978 1 84384 402 0

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper

In memoriam Elva Whitehorn Gessaman, 1926–2014

Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

1 Edith of Wilton and the Writing of Women’s History

25

2 Audrey Abroad: Spiritual and Genealogical Filiation in the Middle English Lives of Etheldreda

64

3 Henry Bradshaw’s Life of Werburge and the Limits of Holy Incorruption

102

4 The Limits of Narrative History in the Written and Pictorial Lives of Edward the Confessor

133

5 The Limits of Poetic History in Lydgate’s Edmund and Fremund and the Harley 2278 Pictorial Cycle

173

Bibliography

211

Index

237

Illustrations Plates 1.

Lydgate’s Life of Edmund and Fremund: Henry VI prays before Edmund’s shrine, facing both tomb and the indulgenced prayer on the opposite page. © The British Library Board (British Library, Harley MS 2278, fol. 4v–5r).

192–193

2. Lydgate’s Life of Edmund and Fremund: Edmund lies incorrupt within his tomb. © The British Library Board (British Library, Harley MS 2278, fol. 117r).

198

Table 1. Contents of Cambridge University Library MS Add. 2604, with incipits and (where they differ substantially) explicits

viii

94

Acknowledgments As I was completing the final edits on this book, I learned that my grandmother was dying. During the weeks I spent with her and my extended family, I was reminded again how profoundly our identities are forged by the stories we tell, and how these tales only become ours by relating them to others. This book, an account of medieval histories designed to shape the communities who shared them, also came into existence through the generous efforts of those who helped it be told. Heading that list are my academic mentors, Andrew Galloway, Paul Hyams, Tom Hill, Mary Arseneau, and Doug Sugano, who have provided constant support in so many ways (even when they didn’t know it), both while I was writing this book and throughout earlier stages of its development. Thanks, too, go to others who provided feedback and assistance throughout its writing and development: Jonathan Good, Andrew Cole, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Elissa Henken, Sujata Iyengar, Tricia Lootens, Cary Howie, Robin Wharton, Joshua King, Lainie Pomerleau, Dorothy Todd, Lisa Bolding, and the anonymous readers for Exemplaria and for Boydell & Brewer. Special thanks are due to many: to Nicole M ­ arafioti and Robyn Malo, for supplying advance copies of their own monographs and for always being ready to talk about dead bodies; to Jonathan Good, for sharing work on Edward the Confessor; to Chris Pizzino, for help with comics theory; to Kevin Grove, for showing me around Cambridge; to Jamie McClung and the UGA (University of Georgia) at Oxford program, for housing in Oxford; to Paul and Margaret Gessaman, for much-needed financial support many years ago; to Chris Martin, for providing technology (and whisky); to Jason Turner, for introducing me to contrast classes and for putting me up during many England research trips; and to Misty Urban, John Sebastian, Libby Maxey, Jamie Friedman, Emily Kelley, and Channette Romero for convivitas and support. This monograph would also never have seen the light of day without the kind aid of Caroline Palmer and the staff at Boydell & Brewer, who have shepherded it through the publication process. As any academic knows, we cannot complete our projects without the help of the research librarians, who know the material sometimes better than we do. So I am deeply grateful to the librarians (especially Virginia Cole) and ILL staff at Cornell University and the University of Georgia, and to the staff at the ­Paleography Room and the Library of the Institute of Historical Research, at the Senate House Library, University of London, for helping me track down unlikely microfilms, moldy documents, and shiny new publications. Extra gratitude goes to the rare books and manuscripts librarians at the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Bodleian Library, Pierpont Morgan Library, Hargrett Rare Book Library at UGA, and the National Library of Scotland. I am especially obliged to the Keeper of the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, Edinburgh, ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

for access to the Abbotsford Legendary and for permission to quote from it in Chapter Two. I am similarly indebted to the vergers at Westminster Abbey, who allowed me access to the shrine of Edward the Confessor, and to the kind guide (whose name I sadly missed) who assisted me so cordially throughout my visit. Research for this work could not have been completed without the support of many grants and fellowships. The archival work underpinning Chapter Three was undertaken with the Cornell University Society for the Humanities’ Graduate Student Travel Research Grant and the Schallek Award of the Medieval Academy of America and the Richard III Society. Much of the work for Chapters One and Four was inaugurated with the aid of the two Junior Faculty Research Fellowships awarded by the Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Georgia. The research for Chapter Five, and the finishing archival touches on the rest of the volume, was completed while I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, at the University of London; I appreciate the opportunities the IES extended to me and to the gracious welcome from the London medievalist community while I was there. That fellowship was only available to me, however, thanks to support from the University of Georgia in the form of the Sarah H. Moss Fellowship from the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Junior Research Fellowship from the Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts. A particular round of thanks goes to the Virginia Mary Macagnoni Prize for Innovative Research and Virginia Macagnoni herself for showing such enthusiasm for my work. I am also grateful to those in my department who helped me through the grant processes, especially Barbara McCaskill, Aidan Wasley, and Chloe Wigston-Smith. Selections of Chapters Two and Three appeared in ‘Inventing the Past in Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge’, Exemplaria 23 (2011): 244–67, while parts of Chapter One rework material published as ‘The Temporal Excesses of Dead Flesh’, postmedieval 4 (2013): 416–26. Above and beyond all these people, this book would never have been finished without the enthusiasm and longsuffering of my children, Theron and Rebekah, and the unfailing support and belief of my husband Nathan, who read every word of this book at least twice and whose fingerprints appear on every page. It is they who have ensured this story has come to light, and who make my own tale worth telling.

x

Abbreviations AASS

Acta Sanctorum. Edited by the Bollandists. 68 vols. Antwerp and Brussels, 1643–1940 BHL Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis. Edited by the Bollandists. Subsidia hagiographica 6. Brussels, 1898–1901; Novum supplementum. Edited by H. Fros. Subsidia Hagiographica 70. Brussels, 1986 BL British Library EETS Early English Text Society (o.s. = original series; e.s.= extra series) GiL Gilte Legende GPA William of Malmesbury. Gesta Pontificum Anglorum: The History of the English Bishops. Edited and translated by M. Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007 GRA William of Malmesbury. Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings. Edited and translated by R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998 Gransden, HW Antonia Gransden. Historical Writing in England. 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974–82 HE Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Edited and translated by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969 Henry, HA Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon. Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People. Edited and translated by Diana Greenway. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996 John of Worcester John of Worcester. The Chronicle of John of Worcester. Vol. 2: The Annals from 450 to 1066. Edited by R. R. Darlington and P. McGurk. Translated by Jennifer Bray and P. McGurk. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995 KNL The Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande. Edited by Manfred Görlach. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1994 Knowles, RO David Knowles. The Religious Orders in England. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955–59 LE Liber Eliensis. Edited by E. O. Blake. London: Royal Historical Society, 1962 LectEorm Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. Lectiones in natale S. Eormenhilde.

xi

ABBREVIATIONS

In The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, edited and translated by Rosalind C. Love, 11–23 LectSex Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. Lectiones in festivitate sancte Sexburge. In The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, edited and translated by Rosalind C. Love, 1–9 MED Middle English Dictionary. In The Middle English Compendium. University of Michigan. 24 April 2013 http:// quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ Memorials Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey. Edited by Thomas Arnold. 3 vols. RS 96. London: HMSO, 1890–96 NLA Nova Legenda Anglie: As collected by John of Tynemouth, John Capgrave, and others, and first printed, with New Lives, by Wynkyn de Worde, a.d. mdxvi. Edited by Carl Horstman. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901 Polychronicon Ranulf Higden. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis; together with the English translations of John Trevisa and of an unknown writer of the fifteenth century. Edited by Churchhill Babington and Joseph Rawson Lumby. 9 vols. RS 41. London: Longman, 1865–86 RS Rolls Series S The Electronic Sawyer. King’s College London. 2014 http:// www.esawyer.org.uk SEL The South English Legendary. Edited by Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill. 3 vols. EETS o.s. 235–236, 244. London: Oxford University Press, 1956–59 STC A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. Edited by Alfred W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave, William A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer. 2nd ed. 3 vols. London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91 VCH Ches. 3 Religious Houses. Edited by B. E. Harris. Vol. 3 of A History of the County of Cheshire, Victoria History of the Counties of England. London: Institute of Historical Research, 1980 VCH Ches. 5.1–2 The City of Chester: General History and Topography. Edited by C. P. Lewis and A. T. Thacker. Vol. 5 in 2 parts of A History of the County of Cheshire, Victoria History of the Counties of England. London: Institute of Historical Research, 2003–05 VCH Som. 2 Religious Houses. Edited by William Page. Volume 2 of A History of the County of Somerset, Victoria History of the Counties of England. London: Institute of Historical Research, 1911 VCH Staff. 3 Religious Houses. Edited by M. W. Greenslade. Vol. 3 of A History of the County of Staffordshire, Victoria History of

xii

ABBREVIATIONS

VCH Wilts. 3

VSex VWer VWiht

the Counties of England. London: Institute of Historical Research, 1970 Religious Houses. Edited by R. B. Pugh and Elizabeth Crittall. Vol. 3 of A History of the County of Wiltshire, Victoria History of the Counties of England. London: Institute of Historical Research, 1956 Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. Vita beate Sexburge regine. In The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, edited and translated by Rosalind C. Love, 133–89 Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. Vita S. Werburge virginis. In The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, edited and translated by Rosalind C. Love, 25–51 Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. Vita S. Wihtburge virginis. In The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, edited and translated by Rosalind C. Love, 53–93

xiii

Introduction The fifteenth-century canons of Stone Priory, Staffordshire had much to be proud of. They boasted a long and productive patronage relationship with the up-andcoming Stafford family, evidenced by a versified history of Stone’s founders and patrons that hung on the choir walls. They also possessed the relics of two AngloSaxon martyrs, Wulfhad and Ruffin, as advertised to the curious visitor by a second tabula containing their Middle English legend.1 According to this tabula’s poem, these two Mercian princes, sons of the saintly Eormenhild and unsaintly King Wulfhere, were converted by the eremetic Saint Chad but then murdered by their apostate father. After the murder, Eormenhild counseled Wulfhere to confess to Chad and reconvert; she then founded Stone Priory as a nunnery on her sons’ burial site. Although this legend, in its original Latin form, is a fantastical confection of the twelfth or thirteenth century,2 many of its details fall within the scope of historical plausibility. According to longstanding tradition, Wulfhere was married to Eormenhild; during his reign, Chad did preach to the Mercians, albeit as a bishop not a recluse; Wulfhere’s father, Penda, did commit violent acts against Christians; and Wulfhad is a reasonable Anglo-Saxon name for the

1

G. H. Gerould, ‘The Legend of St Wulfhad and St Ruffin at Stone Priory’, PMLA 32 (1917): 323–31. The Wulfhad and Ruffin poem is now preserved in BL, Cotton MS Nero C.xii, fols. 183r–188r; these late fifteenth-century folios are unrelated to the other contents of the codex. Due to fire damage, the title and first page are largely illegible, so the copy’s provenance is unknown. It is printed in Carl Horstmann, Altenglische Legenden. Neue Folge (Heilbronn, 1881), 308–14; I cite the Wulfhad and Ruffin tabula by Horstmann’s line numbers. The Stone stemma is extant in two sixteenth-century copies, British Library, MS Add. 38692, fols. 80r–82r, and MS Add. 36542, fols. 138r–140v. It dates to 1444–60, for it titles the priory’s current patron, Humfrey Stafford, as Duke of Buckingham: BL, MS Add. 38692, fol. 82r. William Dugdale prints an imperfect copy of the stemma in Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. John Caley, Henry Ellis, and Bulkeley Bandinel, 6 vols. (London, 1817–30), vol. 6 pt. 1.230–31; for convenience’s sake, I cite this stemma by page number from Dugdale with corrections from the manuscripts noted in footnotes. See further Andrew Abram, ‘Augustinian Canons and the Survival of Cult Centres in Medieval England’, in The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles, ed. Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 87–90. 2 Wulfhad first appears in the late twelfth century; his joint Latin vita with Ruffin (BHL 8735), extant in a fourteenth-century manuscript from Peterborough Abbey (BL, Add. MS 39758), must postdate the twelfth century: Alexander R. Rumble, ‘Ad Lapidem in Bede and a Mercian Martyrdom’, in Names, Places and People: An Onomastic Miscellany in memory of John McNeal Dodgson, ed. Rumble and A. D. Mills (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1997), 315–19; D. W. Rollason, ‘The Cults of Murdered Royal Saints in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983): 11. The Latin vita, edited from the now destroyed BL, Cotton MS Otho A.xvii, is printed in Dugdale, Monasticon, 6 pt. 1.226–30, and AASS Jul. V, 575–82. On the reputed nunnery founded by Eormenhild, see Sarah Foot, Veiled Women, 871–1066, 2 vols. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2000), 2.187–90.

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ANGLO-SAXON SAINTS’ LIVES AS HISTORY WRITING

son of Wulfhere.3 When this Latin legend was translated and posted at Stone, the English poet finessed these ‘historical’ details to fit Stone’s local traditions and to interweave this saintly foundation story into the patronage history of the priory. Referencing one another, the two tabulae present Stone’s glorious, continuous history as originating in conversion-era England and continuing through the benefactions of the Stafford family. The Stone legend of Wulfhad and Ruffin encapsulates the major problematics of this study. Arguing that such early English saints were uniquely useful for constructing nuanced historical narratives, I contend that their lengthy vernacular lives are as much ‘history’ as they are ‘hagiography’, if by ‘history’ we mean ‘the refashioning of the past into a form comprehensible and usable by the present’. For, although these lives serve their expected devotional functions, they also recreate England’s past as a sacred space desirable to late medieval institutions, royal and religious. The Stone legend demonstrates a basic template: first, establish conversion-era England’s spiritual primacy, then craft a narrative of unbroken continuity so the present can inherit this past. The early English framework of Stone’s founding narrative incorporates all the necessary markers of spiritual legitimacy: a pair of royal martyrs, a crowned founder, a saintly mother, and a holy hermit. With the desired scene set, the Stone tabulae collectively build a narrative bridge to the fifteenth-century present by tying together the fortunes of the original nunnery (in the Wulfhad and Ruffin poem) and the still active successor canons (in the Stafford stemma). By emphasizing the continued presence of Wulfhad and Ruffin in Stone’s history – their thaumaturgical involvement in each of the priory’s foundations, the ongoing devotion from the patron Staffords – the tabulae make Wulfhad and Ruffin’s martyrdom more touchstone of the priory’s lived identity than distant origin moment. Similar fascinations with the insular past permeated society in the long fifteenth century (roughly the reign of Richard II through the Act of Supremacy), a period when questions of origins, legitimacy, and ethical probity were deeply intertwined. All manner of writers strove to recover England’s antiquity, both the legendary Britano-Trojan past recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth4 and the Anglo-Saxon past established by historians from Bede to William of Malmesbury. This recovery impulse touched every institution – religious and secular, royal, noble, and civic – manifesting in different ways. Noble families, for example, codified their lineages

3

HE, 4.3 (p. 336); 2.20 (p. 202); 3.21 (p. 278); 3.24 (pp. 288–90); LectEorm, 2 (p. 13); Rollason, ‘Cults of Murdered Royal Saints’, 11. 4 Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press); Francis Ingledew, ‘The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae’, Speculum 69 (1994): 665–704; Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain 1100–1300 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 84–164.

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INTRODUCTION

for political reasons as well as dynastic pride,5 while the crown used historical precedent to legitimize individual rulers or justify royal policy. Nowhere was the desire stronger, however, than in those religious houses whose daily routine was permeated by the written, monumental, and corporeal reminders of pre-Conquest England. Whether textual (charters, chronicles, vitae), monumental (shrines, glass, statuary), or both (tomb inscriptions, tabulae), these commemorations – highlighting what Michel de Certeau deems ‘the presences of diverse absences’ – pointed professional religious always toward the past.6 Saints’ lives penned for monks and nuns participated in this turn to history, solidifying for both internal and external readers the monastery’s antiquity, longevity, and resulting spiritual legitimacy. These saints’ lives, I therefore argue, are institutional and historiographic ­productions, crafted by professed religious writers – and some of the century’s finest poets – expressly to bolster the reputation of the monarchy, the monastery, or both. By demonstrating the deep interpenetration of history and hagiography in these lives, I address Virginia Blanton’s incisive question: ‘What is specific to hagiography written in Middle English?’7 What, that is, distinguishes it from the earlier Latin tradition? One defining feature is its sense of the past, a historical vision that, in goals and formal decisions, resembles yet does not replicate the historical representations found in the chronicles, documentary collections, and Latin vitae that underpin these lives. Despite the important work of Katherine J. Lewis on the historicizing features of Middle English saints’ lives,8 and despite longstanding debates about the historiographic (or not) nature of Latin hagiography,9 few have considered the way Middle English – or, for that matter, 5

Gudrun Tscherpel, ‘The Political Function of History: The Past and Future of Noble Families’, in Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England, ed. Richard Eales and Shaun Tyas (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2003). 6 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 108. 7 Virginia Blanton, review of A Companion to Middle English Hagiography, ed. Sarah Salih, Speculum 83 (2008): 744. 8 Katherine J. Lewis, ‘Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives, History and National Identity in Late Medieval England’, in History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain, ed. Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Lewis, ‘History, Historiography, and Re-writing the Past’, in A Companion to Middle English Hagiography, ed. Sarah Salih (Cambridge: Brewer, 2006). 9 Those who argue for hagiography as a subset of historiography include Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orléans, 800–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 136–37, 185–87, 225, et passim; Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Lewis, ‘History, Hagiography’; Felice Lifshitz, ‘Beyond Positivism and Genre: “Hagiographical” Texts as Historical Narrative’, Viator 25 (1994): 95–113. Those who argue that hagiography operates within different temporal and ethical parameters than history writing include Leah Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 255–57, 277–80; Cynthia Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth Through the Thirteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 30–38;

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ANGLO-SAXON SAINTS’ LIVES AS HISTORY WRITING

Anglo-French – saints’ lives reconstruct the past. Yet understanding this historical vision is crucial: in addition to revealing saints’ historiographic potential, this approach also exposes these lives’ ethical priorities, their exhortations to replicate these saints’ virtuous actions. History and ethical practice were inseparable in the long fifteenth century. If the world was in decay, and if the golden age of England’s religious heritage occurred at the outset of English Christianity, then deeper roots equaled higher holiness and prestige. The authenticity of ancient foundations in turn enabled more robust claims to originary institutional practices at a time when monastic behavior was under increasing scrutiny and royal prerogatives frequently queried. Native saints proved invaluable for addressing these concerns, even as their lives expose the perils of such historical recovery. The poets and visual artists who depict the five Anglo-Saxon saints at the heart of this study – Edith of Wilton, Audrey (or Etheldreda) of Ely,10 Werburgh of Chester, Edward the Confessor, and Edmund of Bury – contrived such temporal and ethical connections by turning their saints’ distinctive features to historiographic ends. They make plausible distant, far-fetched, or unlikely continuities by manipulating hagiographic, visual, and poetic conventions and by capitalizing on the idiosyncratic polytemporalities of their saintly subjects. Native saints’ historiographic potential had earlier been explored in several Anglo-French vies, some of which I use below for comparative purposes.11 The ‘nationalistic’ features of the SEL’s native lives similarly indicate that English saints had long been contextualized within their historical moments, especially by vernacular writers.12 These lengthy fifteenth-century lives differ from David Williams, Saints Alive: Word, Image, and Enactment in the Lives of the Saints (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 10 I prefer the form ‘Audrey’ to ‘Etheldreda’ or the Old English ‘Æthelthryth’; the vernacular version of her name emphasizes the distance between the seventh-century abbess and the late medieval interpretations of her life. 11 On the vies of Anglo-Saxon saints produced in English cloisters, see M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 244–48, 259–66, 268–71; Legge, Anglo-Norman in the Cloisters: The Influence of the Orders upon Anglo-Norman Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1950), 6–9, 21–28, 44–45, 50–51; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture, c. 1150–1300: Virginity and Its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). No one (to the best of my knowledge) has examined the historical vision of these Anglo-French vies. 12 On the way the SEL lives foreground English history, see Julie Nelson Couch, ‘The Magic of Englishness in St Kenelm and Havelok the Dane’, in The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative, ed. Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Jill Frederick, ‘The South English Legendary: Anglo-Saxon Saints and National Identity’, in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Renee Hamelinck, ‘St Kenelm and the Legends of the English Saints in the South English Legendary’, in A Companion to Early Middle English Literature, ed. N. H. G. E. Veldhoen and H. Aertsen (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1988); Klaus P. Jankofsky, ‘National Characteristics in the Portrayal of English Saints in the South English Legendary’, in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 83–84. Complicating this emphasis on nationalism or Englishness are Virginia Blanton, ‘Counting Noses and Assessing the Numbers:

4

INTRODUCTION

their earlier counterparts, however, in the ambition of their historical endeavors. Unlike the relatively straightforward historical framing of most SEL and GiL lives, this historiographic depth leads these longer lives into temporal dilemmas, for the attempted recovery of this perfected past also reveals the impossibility of regaining that ancient political and ethical milieu. Those groups most invested in contriving historical continuity and establishing ethical homogeneity with the past – the crown, the major Benedictine monasteries – found themselves unable to ignore, overwrite, or otherwise excise the historical remnants that would inhibit such continuity. Despite the apparent historiographic utility of saints, their deployment in institutional contexts ultimately reveals the incommensurate distance, temporal and ethical, between past and present. Centered around monk- and friar-poets like John Lydgate, Osbern Bokenham, and Henry Bradshaw, this book considers how these writers’ institutional concerns configure not only their historiographic priorities, but also their formal poetics. As Christopher Cannon has demonstrated, much monastic literary production was functional, preserving and disseminating religious and historical traditions down the centuries.13 Monastic writers were always invested in what John Ganim, speaking of Lydgate’s verse, deems a ‘poetic of exemption’ in which literary works have archival, documentary status and so participate in legal or political conflicts.14 Cannon contrasts this ‘archival’ or instrumental impulse with the ‘literary’ turn of monastic poets like Lydgate, Bradshaw, and Alexander Barclay, who position themselves within an alternate literary genealogy that stretches, via Chaucer, back to classical writers.15 Catherine Sanok and Robert Meyer-Lee both explicate this monastic creation of a literary space ‘as a separate arena of cultural endeavour … defined by its remove from the social world’, in which Lydgate (in particular) uses monastic devotional priorities ‘to lay claim to a distinctive, transcendental power Native Saints in the South English Legendaries’, in Rethinking the South English Legendaries, ed. Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Sara Breckenridge, ‘Mapping Identity in the South English Legendary’, in Blurton and Wogan-Browne, Rethinking; and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Locating Saints’ Lives and Their Communities’, in Blurton and Wogan-Browne, Rethinking. Crucial resources for navigating the SEL’s complexities also include Manfred Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1974). Throughout this study, I cite those SEL lives printed in D’Evelyn and Mill’s edition by line number; those published elsewhere are cited by title and line number. 13 Christopher Cannon, ‘Monastic Productions’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 14 John Ganim, ‘Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption’, in Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 178. On Lydgate’s instrumental poetry, see further Chapter 5, pp. 177–8, 183–4, 200–1, below. Other recent scholarship that considers the institutional affiliations of fifteenth-century poets includes Karen A. Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Shannon Gayk, ‘Images of Piety: The Regulatory Aesthetics of John Lydgate’s Religious Lyrics’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 175–203. 15 Cannon, ‘Monastic Productions’, 340–48; see also Cannon, Middle English Literature: A Cultural History (Maldon and Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 150–52, 186.

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ANGLO-SAXON SAINTS’ LIVES AS HISTORY WRITING

[for his aureate poetry] made manifest by elevated style’.16 That is, critics have divided monastic literature into two types, one embracing spiritual and political pragmatics of written texts, the second (rooted in Lydgate’s aureation) dissociating the monastic literary world from the mundane so that it can participate, via formal poetic innovations, in a transcendent literary tradition. In reading these monastic saints’ lives, I suggest that these two approaches to fifteenth-century monastic productions are complementary. Applying the critical sensibilities pioneered in studies of Lydgate to all the writers I study, I analyze how these writers devised their formal innovations, including but not limited to aureate poetics, to advance the historical and ethical reputations of monastic and royal institutions. It should come as no surprise that England’s great Benedictine monasteries were concerned in the fifteenth century with their spiritual state, and that this concern should take a historical slant. As James Clark, Benjamin Thompson, and others have established, the great English monasteries were not in universal decline; rather, they were renegotiating their social and spiritual roles in the face of myriad changes, within and outside the cloister, including broadly dispersed lay benefactions and the large monastery’s changing administrative makeup.17 Many monasteries were also actively engaging with internal and external criticisms of their spiritual probity. Episcopal, royal, and conciliar calls to return (in Henry V’s words) ‘to the former religion of the monks and … the devotion of his predecessors’ were anticipated by monastic writings concerned with issues of right practice and how best to live the monastic life.18 As a result, questions of reform, 16

Catherine Sanok, ‘Saints’ Lives and the Literary After Arundel’, in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 470; Robert J. Meyer-Lee, ‘The Emergence of the Literary in John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 109 (2010): 322–48, at 342. 17 See, inter alia, James G. Clark, The Benedictines in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011); Clark, ‘Humanism and Reform in Pre-Reformation English Monasteries’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 19 (2009): 57–93; Joan Greatrex, ‘After Knowles: Recent Perspectives in Monastic History’, in The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. James G. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002); Benjamin Thompson, ‘Monasteries and their Patrons at Foundation and Dissolution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 4 (1994): 108–15. 18 ‘de pristina religione monachorum, et ob hoc suorum antecessorum’. Thomas Walsingham, The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, ed. and trans. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003–11), 758–59. See also William A. Pantin, ed., Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General and Provincial Chapters of the English Black Monks, 1215–1540, 3 vols. (London: Camden Society, 1931–37), 2.98–134; Christopher Allmand, Henry V (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 277–79; Knowles, RO, 2.182–84. Compare the Walsingham quotation to Henry VI’s letter of c.1450, which exhorts the abbots to pursue the observances ‘as oure noble progenitours hain do’: Pantin, Documents, 3.111–12, at 111. On Benedictine concerns for internal reform and the order’s reputation, see James G. Clark, ‘Selling the Holy Places: Monastic Efforts to Win Back the People in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Tim Thornton (Stroud: Sutton, 2000); Clark, ‘Humanism and Reform’; Clark, Benedictines, 255–334; Nicholas Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests at St Edmunds Abbey at Bury and the Nature of English Benedictinism, c. 1350–1450: MS Bodley 240 in Context’ (D.Phil. diss., Oxford University, 1994); Heale, ‘Rottenness and Renewal in the

6

INTRODUCTION

renewal, and regeneration were central not only to traditionally austere orders like the Carthusians and Brigittines, but also within many Benedictine cloisters. As Henry’s exhortation to the black monks suggests, the discourse of reform centered around the recovery of earlier modes of perfection, looking to the past to establish desired practice for the future.19 Such discourse was therefore always integrated with the question of origins and the desire to recuperate initial practices. Given the longstanding association of the monasteries with history writing, monastic writers easily co-locate the question of right practice with the question of historical precedent, whether writing in support of the monastic or royal institution. Seeking to confirm ancient prerogatives while also affirming their institutions’ ethical status, these lives engage questions of inception and precedent, monastic identity, and the return (or not) of the claustral enterprise to its supposedly originary state. This issue of originary practice is ultimately a question of ethical replicability. It is this coupling of ethical imitation and history writing, in some ways such a natural decision, that destabilizes these lives’ historiographic projects. Thanks to the foundational work of scholars like Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Karen Winstead, hagiography’s exemplary nature (especially that written for women) has been well studied;20 extending this gendered focus, Sanok’s Her Life Historical considers the temporal implications of imitative exhortations. She focuses on exemplarity as a historical category, considering how calls to mimic female saints encouraged readers ‘to reflect on historical continuity and discontinuity through the category of women’s religious practice’.21 As she and others suggest, any call to imitate long dead figures is necessarily bifocal, arguing for the timelessness of the virtues so lauded while acknowledging the temporal distance between exemplar and reader. Exemplary literature must balance the sweeping applicability of the advice being offered with the specific, local details of the story that, as ‘the Later Medieval Monasteries’, in Monks of England: The Benedictines of England from Augustine to the Present Day, ed. Daniel Rees (London: SPCK, 1997); William A. Pantin, ‘Some Medieval English Treatises on the Origins of Monasticism’, in Medieval Studies Presented to Rose Graham, ed. Veronica Ruffer and A. J. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). 19 For the pre-fourteenth-century discourse of reform as a return to origins, see Gerhart B. Ladner, ‘Reformatio’, in Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages, vol. 2 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia Letteratura, 1983), 520–58; Glenn Olsen, ‘The Idea of the Ecclesia Primitiva in the Writings of the Twelfth-Century Canonists’, Traditio 25 (1969): 61–86; John J. Ryan, The Apostolic Conciliarism of Jean Gerson (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 14–22. See further Michael A. Vargas, Taming a Brood of Vipers: Conflict and Change in Fourteenth-Century Dominican Convents (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 16–19 concerning the utility of the term ‘reform’ and the idea of ‘originary perfections’ more broadly. 20 See, inter alia, Virginia Blanton, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695–1615 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Katherine J. Lewis, The Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), esp. 187–226; Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 112–46; Winstead, ‘Saintly Exemplarity’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives. 21 Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), ix.

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flip side of the example’s authoritative claims’, threaten to qualify the exemplum’s ubiquity and so undermine its transtemporal utility.22 Such accounts of historical figures are therefore always ‘caught between a veneration of the timeless values of ancient models as patterns for action and a sharp awareness of the contingency that divides modern readers from ancient exemplars’.23 This catch-22 is acute in institutional hagiography because the historical stakes are so high. While the need to affirm royal and monastic continuity was integral to historical and hagiographic productions from the time of the Conquest, the fifteenth century’s focus on originary ethics frequently foregrounds, instead of collapses, the distance between their saintly exemplars and contemporary monastic practice. Temporal separation generates spiritual incommensurability that these lives strive (often unsuccessfully) to deny. To best assess the way these hagiographers constructed the ethical–temporal relationships between their saintly subjects and current communities, I want to distinguish between what I will call ‘ethical’ and ‘institutional’ bodies.24 I adapt these terms and the relationship between them from Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic work on multiple metaphysical states of being in The King’s Two Bodies. Although Kantorowicz’s ultimate interest is in the king, he frames his discussion by tracing the gradual development of the ‘king’s two bodies’ legal construction from medieval juridical and ecclesiological theorizing, two facets of which are crucial to my own thinking. First is the development out of sacramental theology of the ‘superindividual body politic and collective’25 – that is, the notion that a corporation, whether Church, bishopric, or city, is a collective body that transcends the individuals who make up the corporation. Second is the understanding that these corporate bodies possess a sempiternal continuity that allows institutional identity to remain stable despite change within its makeup, unifying its membership past, present, and future into a single corpus mysticum.26 This juridical understanding of the collective, stable, transtemporal identity of the ecclesiastical body inaugurated the later secular expansions of Kantorowicz’s theory,27 some of which I pursue in my chapter on Edward the Confessor’s historiographic utility for kings like Henry III and Richard II. 22

Elizabeth Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9; see also Sanok, Her Life Historical, 19–21. 23 Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), x; see also Robert W. Ayers, ‘Medieval History, Moral Purpose, and the Structure of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes’, PMLA 73 (1958): 463–74; Karen Elaine Smyth, Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 59–62. 24 For examples of this duality in ecclesiastical discourse, see Nelson H. Minnich, ‘Concepts of Reform Proposed at the Fifth Lateran Council’, ch. 4 in The Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517): Studies on its Membership, Diplomacy and Proposals for Reform (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), 170, 177. 25 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957; repr., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 194–206, at 206. 26 Ibid., 273–313, esp. 305–12. 27 Ibid., 305–6.

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INTRODUCTION

I also, however, extend Kantorowicz’s understanding of how monastic identity operated at the level of chapter and institutional memory to get at late medieval concerns about ‘institutional’ and ‘ethical’ monastic bodies. The monastic corporate ‘body’ is transtemporal in that it retains a persistent identity, such that all Bury St Edmunds monks living in 1422 (for example) belong to their present community’s active corporation as well as to a permanent institutional body coterminous with all other permutations of the Bury community, past and future. More ephemeral were the fallible, sinful bodies of individual monks, bounded by time and subject to death. These are ‘ethical’ bodies in that they are disciplinable and mutable, needing to be governed by Benedict’s Rule, correction in chapter, and episcopal visitations.28 Just as the king’s royal dignity did not depend on age, health, or mental capacity, so individual monks could be corrupt and still members of a spiritually pure corporation. The true ideal, of course, was to govern the ethical bodies of individual monks to align with the idealized body of corporate monkhood. Such was the general goal of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Benedictine attempts at internal reform, in which many abbots engaged alongside secular bishops,29 and many Benedictine cloisters maintained high standards of education and conduct.30 Such aims also account for the popularity of the austere Carthusians, Cistercians, and Birgettines.31 Most criticism has, accordingly, examined the renovation and discipline of individual bodies, lay and professed.32 Yet, however desirable the primitiva ecclesia may have been, it is ultimately unrecoverable and inimitable in daily practice. Despite several abbeys’ internal emphasis on individual religious renewal, many monks were disinclined to strive for lofty spiritual heights because, Thompson observes, their role in late medieval society no longer required ascetic heroics or 28

Note that my use of ‘ethical body’ differs from Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 210–12, for whom Aristotle’s ‘ethical or moral body’ references the moral entelechy of the secular body politic. 29 Allen duPont Breck, ‘The Leadership of the English Delegation at Constance’, Studies in the Humanities 1 (1941): 289–99, at 291–93; Knowles, RO, 2.183–84, 194–95, 204–6; 3.91–95. On Wolsey’s reforming bishops, see Margaret Bowker, The Henrician Reformation: The Diocese of Lincoln under John Longland 1521–1547 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Andrew Allen Chibi, Henry  VIII’s Bishops: Diplomats, Administrators, Scholars and Shepherds (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2003), 76–86. 30 James G. Clark, ‘The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England’, in The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 18–25; Clark, Benedictines, 312–13; Clark, ‘Humanism and Reform’; Christopher Harper-Bill, The Pre-Reformation Church in England, 1400–1530, rev. ed. (London: Longman, 1996), 40; Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests’; Knowles, RO, 2.212, 217; 3.64, 73. 31 Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests’; Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Ernest Graf, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Nelson, 1957–61), I. 143–44; Knowles, RO, 2.175–81. 32 See, for example, Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Edwin D. Craun, Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. 53–87. Vargas, Taming a Brood examines the interplay of individual and corporate governance in the Dominican order.

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absolute claustration.33 As Michael Vargas argues, ‘Real organizations are unstable, imperfect composites of the thoughts and actions of the individuals inside them, actualized and historicized in stories and rules and ways of getting things done.’34 In rejecting Cardinal Wolsey’s attempted 1520 reforms on the basis that contemporary Benedictines were uninterested in or unable to perform the Rule’s original austerities, the early Tudor abbots essentially concurred.35 The monastic body, as constituted through the efforts of its individual members, will always be flawed and unstable, attempts at individual governance notwithstanding. Consequently, writers and institutions who took seriously the need for renovation in governance and devotion found their ethical problem had a historical shape: the distance, in time, situation, and spiritual aspirations, between ancient exemplars and contemporary practitioners. Monastic writers addressed this discrepancy in myriad ways. As was true of many reforming voices, some effectively denied the gap, calling upon monks and nuns to embrace a static, unchanging code of conduct typified by early English saints. Others, acknowledging the distance, sought to overwrite it by subsuming the ethical body into the institutional body. If the institutional body could be established as once having been spiritually pure, then its supratemporal stability would allow subsequent generations to claim that original purity as integral to the institution’s identity and so bolster (or even supersede) its members’ inevitably limited spiritual successes. Such institutional promotion appeared, as Clark details, as ‘a new form of apologetic literature which emphasized the antiquity and political importance of the monastic order in England’, a literary campaign that included not only the Latin texts Clark discusses, but also vernacular hagiographies that use early English saints to perform similar functions.36 Other writers yet, however, walked a middle road between these two extremes. These moderate reformers held up their ancient saints as ideals to strive for while acknowledging the difficulties that beset monks and nuns aiming at spiritual heights. They present the corporate body, constituted through their early English patron saints, as fostering ethical renewal rather than obviating the need for it. Most importantly, they acknowledge the distance between ancient exemplar and contemporary practice without denying the value of that exemplar, considering how the institutional body could encourage individual renovation in ways sensitive to monastic life’s difficulties. These writers’ historiographic goals are therefore central to their ethical agendas. Those writers who presume the replicability of past exemplars, as well as those who imagine the corporate body to override individual failings, presume 33

Benjamin Thompson, ‘Monasteries, Society and Reform in Late Medieval England’, in The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. James G. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002); Thompson, ‘Monasteries and their Patrons’. 34 Michael Vargas, ‘How a “Brood of Vipers” Survived the Black Death: Recovery and Dysfunction in the Fourteenth-Century Dominican Order’, Speculum 86 (2011): 688–714, at 706–7. 35 Peter Gwyn, The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990), 273–74; Pantin, Documents, 3.123–24. 36 Clark, ‘Selling the Holy Places’, 15.

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INTRODUCTION

a stable relationship between past and present. Depending on temporal continuity, both strive to deny, account for, or otherwise occlude the spatial, temporal, and ethical discrepancies between the early English era and the fifteenth century. Those writers who acknowledge (if sometimes unwillingly) historical incommensurability, on the other hand, tend to be those moderate reformers who admit the difficulties of easily imitating ancient saints. However, even writers invested in crafting continuous lineages for their communities inevitably fail: while English saints can bridge some temporal gaps, they cannot fully guarantee the present’s possession of the past. In examining these texts’ historiographic presumptions and ethical blind spots, I turn to Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History. Throughout this work, de Certeau suggests that all history writing necessarily creates a separation between the inscribing present and the inscribed ‘past’, that is, the present-defined, written past that may be treated as a malleable object of knowledge. As malleable object, the past can be reshaped and made ‘intelligible’ through the process of writing to isolate its useful or ‘thinkable’ features and to ignore or ‘forget’ that which is ‘unthinkable’.37 In de Certeau’s words, any historiography, any construction of a society’s relationship with its past, is characterized by ‘what [the present] consciously lacks (a lost tradition); what it rejects in order to fashion a “legend” from it or to “forget” it; and what it states about itself in reinterpreting its past – in other words, its other (what that society is no longer)’.38 These operations of absence, amnesia, and aspiration characterize late medieval writings about the past as much as they do the seventeenth-century French religious culture de Certeau originally addressed, both in the invention of an intelligible past and in the rupture that necessarily occurs in the process of that invention. One major difference between medieval and modern historiography lies in the reason for so recovering the past. Where, de Certeau posits, modern ‘Historical discourse makes a social identity explicit, not so much in the way that it is “given” or held as stable, as in the ways it is differentiated from a former period’,39 late medieval writers deploy historical discourse to assert a stable social identity despite clear evidence of political, ethical, and religious difference. Seeking to establish rather than deny continuities, medieval writers made the past usable by accommodating well-established ‘facts’ to a formal structure that highlights the persistence of desirable traits. Amy Remensnyder has adapted the term ‘imaginative memory’ for the way such a re-created past enacts a dialectic relationship between temporal moments. As she puts it, imaginative memory is ‘“constitutive”: it creates identity and meaning, whether of the institution, the social group, or even the individual, in the present. Sharing an imagined past can establish and reaffirm the cohesion

37

The term ‘intelligible’ is from Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Revising the Past/Revisiting the Present: How Change Happens in Historiography’, History and Theory 46 (2007): 1–19, at 6, a helpful introduction to de Certeau’s historical vision. 38 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 136, emphasis original. 39 Ibid., 45, emphasis original.

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ANGLO-SAXON SAINTS’ LIVES AS HISTORY WRITING

of a group. It provides a common set of symbols that help create the boundaries delineating and containing the community or society.’40 ‘Imaginative memory’, so defined, is not ‘made-up stuff ’ (although modern historians might deny the factuality of the events it records); it is the past embedded in the imaginaire of those collectively bound together, with each other and with that constructed past. Imaginative memory’s constitutive power, then, strives to deny the differences that de Certeau highlights. And in imaginative memory’s desire to claim continuity despite rupture, saints seem valuable tools: as denizens of heaven, they are not subject to the diachrony that governs history writing, so they can help constitute perpetual communities despite the inevitable fragmentation of linear historiography. These operations are evident in the Stone tabulae, which reveal, first, the limitations of chronological history for bridging these gaps and, second, the potential of saints’ sempiternality and ethical bonds to assert continuities nevertheless. As discussed earlier, the Stone tabulae establish the late medieval priory as the legitimate continuation of Eormenhild’s first female community, thereby perpetuating the originary sanctity of Wulfhad and Ruffin’s martyrdom. The clearest articulation of continuity comes in the second tabula, the Stafford stemma fundatorum, which relies on patrilineal genealogy and the smooth continuity of Stafford patronage to guarantee the priory’s temporal unity. This combination also allows the poet to imagine the priory as possessing a longstanding autonomy, answerable only to Stafford oversight. This was not the case, however, and the poet uses the stemma to overwrite the fact that Stone Priory was long a cell of Kenilworth.41 The stemma does mention that Robert of Stafford founded the priory with the aid of Geoffrey of Clinton, who had just founded Kenilworth Priory, but not that Stone was dependent on Geoffrey’s foundation; that dependence is only recorded the moment it is mooted, when Robert (IV) (d.1261) separates Stone from Kenilworth’s jurisdiction. The textually continuous Stafford lineage also requires some sleight of pen. The stemma ignores moments when patrilineal progress was troubled, particularly the transfer of the Stafford estates from Robert  II to his son Robert III (d.1193/4) and then to Robert III’s sister Millicent (d.1224/5). Millicent was already married to Hervey Bagot (d.1214), so upon Robert III’s death, Hervey occupied the barony inherited by his wife and changed his name to Stafford. The Stone stemma, however, omits Robert  III entirely and claims that Hervey was Robert  II’s son, excising Millicent’s status as daughter and heiress.42 Millicent’s exclusion, whether or not deliberate, witnesses the misrememberings inevitable 40

Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 2–3. 41 VCH Staff. 3.240–41. Kenilworth’s oversight is more overtly acknowledged in the Wulfhad and Ruffin tabula, 341–42. 42 Information on the early Stafford family is taken from George E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, ed. Vicary Gibbs, rev. ed., 13 vols. in 14 parts (London: St Catherine Press, 1910–59), 12 pt. 1.168–73. The Stone stemma contains a similar gap after Hervey (II) (d.1237) and Robert (IV) (d.1261), omitting Hervey II’s son and heir Hervey (III) (d.1241).

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INTRODUCTION

in any reconstruction of the past and the way lineal history is dependent on such elisions. Moreover, these forgettings only allow the Stafford stemma to assert continuity between Stone’s twelfth-century refoundation and the late medieval present, not with Eormenhild’s original foundation. The two religious houses are distinct – one Anglo-Saxon, female, originating in a queen’s sorrow; the other AngloNorman, male, Augustinian, originating in a nobleman’s crime (the lord Enfame/ Enisen kills the last nuns there and establishes the canons to expiate his sins). Much as Millicent’s presence in the stemma would have disrupted the Stafford patrilineage, the nuns’ martyrdom and replacement with canons creates an institutional fissure; this time, however, that gap can be bridged by stable locale and shared possession of Wulfhad and Ruffin’s relics. The Wulfhad and Ruffin tabula emphasizes the priory’s divinely authorized location via the scene (not present in the Latin vita) where the decapitated Wulfhad picks up his head and carries it from the murder site to Stone (205–14). Angels tell Eormenhild that Wulfhad’s cephalaphoric trip indicates ‘that god hade chosen this place’ (268), and she accordingly buries the princes and founds the nunnery there. The Wulfhad and Ruffin poet repeatedly emphasizes that ‘this place’ was chosen by Wulfhad and God (212, 264, 268, 303, 313), the diectic marker co-locating the burial site and original nunnery with the location where the reader, viewing the tabula, stands: Stone Priory. Moreover, the deaths that should separate the Saxon female from Norman male institutions are shaped to link them typologically, as the nuns’ deaths and the resulting (­r­e­)­establishment of a religious corporation replay in miniature Wulfhad and Ruffin’s founding drama. These disparate communities, unified through space and typology, are also unified through veneration. The new canons (the Wulfhad and Ruffin tabula claims) display their piety via Wulfhad’s canonization and the brothers’ new shrines (353–73), while the Stafford family (their stemma insists) remains perpetually devoted to Wulfhad (231). Stafford veneration imitates Eormenhild’s and the repentant Ensien’s devotion to Wulfhad and Ruffin, ensuring continuity between the early English and late medieval institutions. Even this cursory analysis of the Stone tabulae reveals two principles that drive this book’s methodologies. The first is the importance of formal structures for understanding a text’s historiographic project; the second is the way these different formal structures portray temporal relations differently.43 As Hayden White and other linguistic-turn historians have consistently argued, historical texts are nothing but form, ‘that is to say, a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in 43

For three medievalist approaches to form which focus on its expansiveness and heterogeneity, see Christopher Cannon, ‘Form’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Seth Lerer, ‘The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies’, Literature Compass 1 (2003): 1–15; Kathleen Tonry, ‘The “Sotil Fourmes” of the Fifteenth Century’, in Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, ed. Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011).

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the interest of explaining what they were by representing them’.44 Because history only exists through the medium of writing, they argue, any representation of the past is determined by the text’s formal and necessarily interpretive structures. Moreover, fifteenth-century poets had a strongly developed sense of poetic and rhetorical form, as illustrated in Bokenham’s explication of the formal cause in the Aristotelian accessus to his ‘Life of Margaret’. Bokenham’s ‘forme of procedyng’ is the method by which he makes the material cause available to his readers.45 That method includes, as the Middle English use of ‘form’ in aesthetic contexts indicates,46 everything the poet can manipulate to achieve his desired effect: stanza and rhyme scheme, rhetorical colors, organization, abbreviatio and amplificatio of the source material. Attending to these texts’ emplotment and poetics is particularly crucial for interpreting vernacular hagiography because these writers add little, if any, new material to their saints’ lives. They rarely invent traditions out of whole cloth, as occurred at the Marian shrine at Walsingham,47 nor do they craft new miracles out of hagiographic commonplaces, as was common in earlier generations. As Bokenham’s accessus suggests, these hagiographers’ innovations lie not in what they say, but in how they say it, for the ‘how’ can reshape the historiographic import of well-worn saintly narratives. Each formal decision additionally implies a distinctive temporal construction, and these different methods of connecting past to present are inflected by the varied ways medieval people marked time.48 Out of the diverse array of medieval timekeeping possibilities, I am interested in portrayals of two temporal struc44 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 2, emphasis original. See also White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 5–27; White, ‘The Structure of Historical Narrative’ and ‘Storytelling: Historical and Ideological’, both in The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007, ed. Robert Doran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Nancy F. Partner, ‘Making Up Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History’, Speculum 61 (1986): 90–117; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages’, Speculum 65 (1990): 59–86; Spiegel, ‘Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative’, History and Theory 22 (1983): 43–53. 45 Osbert Bokenham, The Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS o.s. 206 (London: EETS, 1938), line 83. 46 MED, s.v. ‘forme’, 1a, 2, 5, 6; see also ‘foorme’ in the glossary provided in Jocelyn WoganBrowne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), and the examples cross-referenced therein. 47 Gary Waller, Walsingham and the English Imagination (Farnam: Ashgate, 2011), esp. 10–18. 48 The literature on medieval conceptions of time and time-keeping is substantial; useful studies include Peter Burke, ‘The Sense of Anachronism from Petrarch to Poussin’, in Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2001); Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer, trans. Andrew Winnard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Jacques LeGoff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Rosamond McKitterick, ‘Constructing the Past in the Early Middle Ages: The Case of the Royal Frankish Annals’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 7 (1997): 101–29, at 103–6; and, in literary contexts, Smyth, Imaginings of Time, esp. 15–58. I was not able

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INTRODUCTION

tures: the mundane tempus of worldly time, the sequential passage of moments recorded as days and years, and the heavenly aevum, the supratemporality of spiritual beings who participate in the simultaneity and stasis of the divine aeternitas while also being subject to movement and duration.49 These concepts, explicated most fully in the heady world of scholastic inquiry, are echoed in different ways of depicting earthly time and saints’ heavenly time. While writings about secular events usually prioritized the smooth transition of one event to the next, slotting them into their proper order in the tempus, writings about spiritual events frequently imagine them to occur in the perpetual now of the aevum, suspending differences between eras in the shared experience of the sublime.50 While these complementary temporal constructs are often joined in medieval history writing, vernacular hagiography enables a more sustained rapprochement between them because saints occupy both tempus and aevum. As perfected beings living eternally in heaven, saints occupy a holy ‘nontime’. Yet saints also lived earthly lives, and their shrines, cults, and communities developed diachronically. Moreover, the saint’s praesentia, the spiritual presence whence he or she exercises virtus, manifests from his or her time-bound shrine;51 saints thereby operate within earthly time while remaining apart from it. Such doubled temporal existence made saints available as aevum-mediated conduits between moments in the tempus. These temporal states lend themselves to different formal structures. When writing about the tempus, medieval writers turned to forms that emphasize ­history’s diachronicity. For example, organizing time sequentially via objective markers (anno domini, royal reigns, papal inductions, six ages of man, etc.) divides the past into discrete but interlocking units that follow one another smoothly.52 Events are given

to take into account Jacques LeGoff ’s In Search of Sacred Time, which was published after this book was complete. 49 Kantorowicz, Kings’ Two Bodies, 279–81; Henryk Anzulewicz, ‘Aeternitas – Aevum – Tempus: The Concept of Time in the System of Albert the Great’, trans. Martin J. Tracey, in The Medieval Concept of Time: Studies on the Scholastic Debate and its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Pasquale Porro (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Frank Herbert Brabant, Time and Eternity in Christian Thought: Being Eight Lectures (London: Longmans, Green, 1937), 74–91; John D. North, Time and the Scholastic Universe (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2003), esp. 9, 14–16; Pasquale Porro, ‘Angelic Measures: Aevum and Discrete Time’, in The Medieval Concept of Time: Studies on the Scholastic Debate and its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Porro (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 50 On the former, see Hanz-Werner Goetz, ‘The Concept of Time in the Historiography of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘Temporalities’, in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 107–15 provides a provocative interpretation of the latter. 51 John Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early Christian West, c.300– 1200 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 16–18. See also Robyn Malo, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 20–21. 52 On medieval modes of periodization, particularly the pervasive ‘six ages of man’, see Michael I. Allen, ‘Universal History 300–1000: Origins and Western Developments’, in Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis (Leiden: Brill, 2003), esp. 26–32. For other

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meaning by being placed within this linear flow, and the unwavering succession of temporal units gives the semblance of completeness and causality to the (selected) events portrayed by means of a post hoc, ergo propter hoc logic.53 Genealogies, as Gabrielle Spiegel has shown and as we saw in Stone Priory’s Stafford genealogy, reinforced linear time while acting as an interpretive filter focused on patterns of filiation and lineage.54 Although strictly linear depictions of the tempus often create seemingly episodic texts,55 diachronically structured writings can ‘constitute more sophisticated analyses of the past conveying a larger meaning than has previously been recognized’.56 Not only does the linear ordering of events itself impose syntax upon a past that only God can see whole, but the presence of a clear chronology, as we saw in the Stafford stemma, implies a coherent progression that gives significance, via position, to the episodes that a linear narrative foliates. This internal logic presents diachrony itself as a form of historical meaning. The structures medieval writers used for depicting the duration of the aevum, on the other hand, are recursive. Rhetorical forms like typology, prolepsis, and analogy function figurally, in Erich Auerbach’s sense of figura; specific individuals or events are affiliated via similitude above, not within, earthly time, associated from the eternal viewpoint of God rather than via historical causality.57 Such figural relationships functioned associatively as ‘an explanatory principle, a way of ordering and making intelligible a relationship between events separated by vast distances of time’.58 Because figurae are grounded in the tempus as disparate, historical events interconnected at the level of spiritual interpretation, they are particularly apt for representing what I term the ‘iconic moment’, the sempiternal duration of the saints in the aevum. Because saints exist outside chronological types of periodization, see Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), 114–27; Sarah Foot, ‘Finding the Meaning of Form: Narrative in Annals and Chronicles’, in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005). 53 Certeau, Writing, 86–102; also 210–37. On genealogical structures, see below, Chapter 2, pp. 69–70. 54 Spiegel, ‘Genealogy’. 55 On parataxis in chronicle, see Gabrielle Spiegel, ‘Social Change and Literary Language: The Textualization of the Past in Thirteenth-Century Old French Historiography’, in The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 185–87; Nancy F. Partner, ‘The New Cornificius: Medieval History and the Artifice of Words’, in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), 15–19. 56 Foot, ‘Finding the Meaning’, 92; see further 96. See also McKitterick, ‘Constructing the Past’, 110–29; and the essays in Elizabeth M. Tyler and Ross Balzaretti, eds., Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). 57 Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 42–43, 53–60, 71–72; see also Richard K. Emmerson, ‘Figura and the Medieval Typological Imagination’, and James W. Earl, ‘Typology and Iconographic Style in Early Medieval Hagiography’, both in Typology and English Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh T. Keenan (New York: AMS Press, 1992). 58 Gabrielle Spiegel, ‘Political Utility in Medieval Historiography: A Sketch’, History and Theory 14 (1975): 314–25, at 321.

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INTRODUCTION

time yet are not completely divorced from it, they maintain (often even in life) holy stasis within temporal flux.59 This stability, based ultimately upon an imitatio Christi, also enfolds a dual exemplarity; the saint is presented as actively imitating Christ (if sometimes at several removes) while the reader is enjoined to imitate the saint’s mode of imitating Christ. Ethical and devotional emulation thereby perpetuates typology’s figural associations. The analogical and proleptic rhetorical figures that operate alongside typology, exemplary patterning, and hagiographic commonplaces depend ultimately on the saint as stasis, a still point outside time’s movement, even as they also presume a singular, tempus-bound originary point for the saint’s holiness. These forms thereby replicate the saint’s temporal duality, originating within earthly time yet superseding its diachronic limitations.60 Saints’ ability to persist in the aevum’s eternal duration while their praesentia remains in their enshrined relics gives these temporal considerations a spatial element. As de Certeau notes, saints’ lives are ‘marked by a predominance of precise indications of place over those of time’, the association of saint and place being central to holy communities’ construction.61 Saints’ lives – historicized or not – therefore invite a chronotopic reading. In its simplest form, a chronotope is the cognitive construction of time–space that orders events and makes available certain actions; Mikhail Bakhtin formatively defined it as ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’, in which ‘spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole’.62 In considering the chronotopes that govern saints’ lives, I adapt two recent redeployments of the concept to show how medieval

59 My construction of the iconic moment is indebted to Hahn, Portrayed, 30–38, Heffernan, Sacred Biography, esp. 97–99, 116–19; Williams, Saints Alive, esp. 1–46. 60 For a parallel methodology, filtered through liturgical rather than hagiographic constructions of time, see Margot Fassler, ‘Representations of Time in Ordo representacionis Ade: Introduction’, Yale French Studies Special Issue (1991): 97–113; Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History Through Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 61 Certeau, Writing, 272–82, at 280. 62 M.  M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84; this essay includes Bakhtin’s most thorough discussion of chronotopes, although he does use the concept elsewhere. Useful discussions include Nele Bemong et al., eds., Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives (Ghent: Academic Press, 2008); Jay Ladin, ‘Fleshing Out the Chronotope’, in Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin, ed. Caryl Emerson (New York: Hall, 1999); Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 366–432; Bernhard F. Scholz, ‘Bakhtin’s Concept of “Chronotope”: The Kantian Connection’, in Mikhail Bakhtin, ed. Michael E. Gardiner, vol. 2 (London: Sage Publications, 2003). For Bakhtinian readings of medieval texts, see Thomas J. Farrell, ed., Bakhtin and Medieval Voices (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995). Bakhtin did not define the term precisely, with the result that he, and subsequent scholars, use it heterogeneously. For definitions and an overview, see Nele Bemong and Pieter Borghart, ‘Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives’, in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, ed. Bemong et al. (Ghent: Academic Press, 2008), 3–8; Ladin, ‘Fleshing Out’.

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re-creations of the distant past are ethically inflected. I start with Nele Bemong and Pieter Borghart’s ‘generic chronotopes’, supratextual time–space constructions that, deployed in different narratives, ‘yield a similar impression with regard to their fictional world’.63 When certain chronotopic presumptions are shared by many works – fictional or otherwise – they function ‘as culturally sanctioned principles of sequentially and appositionally ordering which are capable of generating the plots of historical as well as fictional narrative’.64 I add to this Liisa Steinby’s argument that chronotopes are not only epistemological structures; they also have ethical valence.65 As she argues by reading later Bakhtin through his earlier, ethically concerned writings, chronotopes include the actions of individual characters within precise spatio-temporal settings. Those settings shape characters’ actions – ‘certain forms of potential action are connected with certain kinds of localities’ – without predetermining them.66 A generic chronotope, therefore, is a supratextual spatio-temporal construction that imagines a limited set of actions, ‘thinkable’ rather than ‘unthinkable’ events, available to otherwise free agents. Considered from this angle, the chronotope pairs nicely with de Certeau’s understanding of the historiographic project, for both interpretive frameworks foreground the formal means by which history is rewritten, the chronotope adding spatial and ethical dimensions to the discussion. Focusing on the ethical implications of chronotopes, I delimit three interlocking chronotopic structures common to late medieval chronicles and hagiographies. The most common is the perception of early England – the period between (roughly) the Augustinian conversion and the Norman Conquest – as a single historical time–space. Such historical chronotopes are constructed circularly, Hayden White suggests, ‘of the events that take place within its confines and are recognizable as events “belonging” to the age or period in which they occur by their concomitance with the conditions of possibility dictated by the chronotope itself ’.67 Late medieval writers constructed pre-Conquest England in precisely this

63 64

Bemong and Borghart, ‘Bakhtin’s Theory’, 7. Scholz, ‘Bakhtin’s Concept’, 161–62. See also Bemong and Borghart, ‘Bakhtin’s Theory’, 8, 10. Scholars who discuss the applicability of the chronotope to non-fiction include Pieter Borghart and Michael De Dobbeleer, ‘Eulogizing Realism: Documentary Chronotopes in NineteenthCentury Prose Fiction’, in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, ed. Nele Bemong et al. (Ghent: Academic Press, 2008); Hayden White, ‘The “Nineteenth Century” as Chronotope’, in The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007, ed. Robert Doran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). See also Liisa Steinby, ‘Bakhtin’s Concept of the Chronotope: The Viewpoint of an Acting Subject’, in Bakhtin and His Others: (Inter)subjectivity, Chronotope, Dialogism, ed. Steinby and Tintti Klapuri (London: Anthem Press, 2013), 114–15. 65 Steinby, ‘Bakhtin’s Concept’. See also White, ‘Nineteenth Century’, 240; Ladin, ‘Fleshing Out’, 223–24. 66 Steinby, ‘Bakhtin’s Concept’, 114–16, 120–21, at 116. On Bakhtin and ethics, see also Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri, ‘The Acting Subject of Bakhtin’, in Bakhtin and His Others: (Inter) subjectivity, Chronotope, Dialogism, ed. Steinby and Klapuri (London: Anthem Press, 2013), xiv– xviii. 67 White, ‘Nineteenth Century’, 242.

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INTRODUCTION

way.68 They envision it (as Lewis has shown) as ‘a golden age of endeavour and religiosity’, in which ‘early England’ is defined by ethical similitude within a certain geotemporal area (e.g., Anglo-Saxon kings sponsor monasteries, noble women found nunneries) and against adjacent communities (like the Welsh);69 events or persons that do not fit the pattern must be excised or refashioned. While the ‘holy Anglo-Saxon’ chronotope is evident in vernacular chronicles (like Robert of Gloucester’s), saints’ lives (like the SEL native lives), and romances (like Guy of Warwick), its most concise articulation appears in Life of Werburge. There, Henry Bradshaw casts conversion era England as an age when with great perfection Kynges / quienes / dukes entred religion, Professed obedient, chaste, without propurte, Vertue to encrease / true loue and charite: That tyme was iustice ministred with mercy, True loue and amite founde in euery place; Dissimulacion / pride and fals enuye Durst nat appere in halle nor in palace, Extorcion, pollynge opteyned no grace; The commaundementes of god were obserued a-ryght, Charite was feruent / encreasynge day and nyght.70 (2.151–61)

‘That tyme’ – and the physical space governed by its kings and dukes – is characterized ethically, populated by devout and militaristically dominant kings; pastorally minded bishops; and meek, chaste, and pious virgins. Importantly, and despite the precedent established by Bede,71 this was not the only image of the AngloSaxons available in the fifteenth century, for Geoffrey of Monmouth instead envisioned the Anglo-Saxons as perfidious pagan invaders.72 Thus, when vernacular 68

On the difficulty of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, see Susan Reynolds, ‘What Do We Mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxons”?’ Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 395–414; on AngloSaxonisms, see Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, ‘Introduction: Anglo-Saxonism and Medievalism’, in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Frantzen and Niles (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997); Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg, eds., Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Although late medieval writers did not use the phrase, I use it interchangeably with ‘early English’ to refer to England between c.450 and 1066. 69 Lewis, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, 165. Also important for understanding this chronotope (although he does not use the term) is Robert Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005). 70 Henry Bradshaw, The Life of St Werburge, ed. Carl Horstmann, EETS o.s. 88 (London: EETS, 1887). I cite this poem parenthetically by book and line number. 71 Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. Wormald et al. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 120–26; Wormald, ‘The Venerable Bede and the “Church of the English”’, in The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism, ed. Geoffrey Rowell (Wantage: Ikon, 1993), 20–27. 72 John D. Niles, ‘The Wasteland of Loegria: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Reinvention of the

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writers privilege the ‘holy Anglo-Saxon’ chronotope over the ‘marauding AngloSaxon’ one, they construct England’s past not only spatio-temporally, but also ethically: historical actors are expected to adhere to certain behavioral norms, and are devalued when they do not. Closely related is the ‘monastic chronotope’. This historiographic structure is typical in texts that focus on a religious institution’s origins, development, and traditions – including its land holdings, architectural development, legal rights, and ever broadening privileges and liberties. Although different genres (­ chronicles, house histories, miracle collections) may construct this monastic past differently, they all share a single chronotopic vision that conceives of the institutional body’s singularity in time and space. The monastery’s possession of the saint’s holy remains is key to many monastic chronotopes: the saint unifies monastic identity throughout time and often (as in the case of Cuthbert or Werburgh) space.73 Typically, the saint’s praesentia manifests from the shrine, implicitly privileging monastic control over the saint’s power and holiness. The chronotope also unifies saint and institution ethically, for it presumes the saint’s heroic holiness to define the corporate body’s spiritual state. Both Anglo-Saxon and monastic chronotopes take the tempus as the primary sphere of action, imposing a singular ethical vision upon a spatialized territory or group while tracking its development across time. My third, ‘iconic’ chronotope (insofar as the term is appropriate) aligns with the iconic moment’s focus on stasis and sublimity grounded in, but not subject to, earthly time. This iconic chronotope takes its most extreme form in the virgin martyr narrative. There, just as ethical action is prescribed in the saint’s holiness, persecutor’s perfidy, and onlookers’ willingness to convert, geographic space is subsumed into the narrative function of the generalized pagan court room and the prison cell, sites where the saint’s imitatio Christi is realized. The achronic nature of that typology has spatial ramifications, in that the aevum, the site of the saint’s persistence, becomes a more important locus of her holy power than the geographic place she was tortured and martyred. Accordingly, the iconic chronotope privileges the saints’ despatialized virtus and supratemporal exemplary potential over the supposed historical time and place of her passio. Most monastic hagiography is heterochronic to some degree, emphasizing the saint’s familia and time-bound deeds while also using those figures and topoi that highlight her sempiternal perfection. Nevertheless, usually one spatio-temporal Anglo-Saxon Past’, in Reinventing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Constructions of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. William F. Gentrup (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998); Kenneth J. Tiller, Laȝamon’s Brut and the Anglo-Norman Vision of History (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 66–67, 74–76. 73 Saints, of course, are not necessary for cementing monastic chronotopes; institutions might use other centralizing forms, such as place as at Westminster (see Chapter 4 below), patronage as at Clare Priory, Suffolk (see Cynthia Turner Camp, ‘Osbern Bokenham and the House of York Revisited’, Viator 44 (2013): 327–52), or ethical action as at Campsey Ash Priory (see Sara Gorman, ‘Anglo-Norman Hagiography as Institutional Historiography: Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval Campsey Ash Priory’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 37 (2011): 110–28).

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INTRODUCTION

presumption dominates. For instance, the Liber Eliensis’s mixing of house history, charters, and Etheldreda’s miracles privileges the monastic chronotope over the iconic chronotope; her deeds as Ely’s foundress and patron marginalize the book’s few typological references. In Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Vita Wihtburge, on the other hand, the iconic is more heavily weighted; references to Wihtburgh’s kin, her founding of Dereham, and her death and translation are encrusted with typological comparisons and rhetorical devices that render her virtues sublime. Although not truly monologic, in such chronotopically imbalanced texts the ideological priorities associated with the dominant chronotope subsume the presumptions of the secondary one. And while these chronotopes often merge seamlessly, as in these examples, they can just as easily clash when the sempiternal is revealed as incommensurate with, rather than complementary to, the priorities of the tempus.74 Despite the apparent utility of Anglo-Saxon saints for affirming late medieval spiritual purity and institutional longevity, these moments of incommensurability arise frequently and often in unexpected places. In many lives, the problem of ethical replication – the impossibility of ever truly imitating ancient saints – proves to be the spanner in the hagiographer’s historiographic works; in others, the saint’s prior hagiographic tradition throws up undesirable shards that poets try to ignore. Despite the ‘forgettable’ problems that threaten to collapse such historical projects, Middle English writers go to great formal lengths to affirm temporal continuity and spiritual homogeneity. These efforts, whether in the service of monastic or royal institutions, bear witness to the imaginative power of the early English past for defining the present’s political and spiritual identity. The book is structured as a series of case studies examining the chronicle and hagiographic dossiers of these five Anglo-Saxon saints. Each chapter considers the vernacular life or lives of a single saint, analyzing the historiographic problems these hagiographers encountered, the formally inventive solutions they developed in response, and the ethical assumptions that underpin those decisions. Together, these chapters limn out the spectrum of late medieval engagements with England’s spiritual heritage. There was no ‘one size fits all’ approach to the past, nor any continuous development from early to late; rather, these hagiographers employed varied strategies, based on the writer(s)’ and artist(s)’ needs; the audience’s expectations; and the material available in earlier vitae, pictorial traditions, and monumental remains. Amidst these differences, four elements remain constant: the ethical cachet of the Anglo-Saxon chronotope, these writers’ and artists’ desires to appropriate that cachet for their own institutional situations, saintly supratemporality’s perceived ability to enact such appropriations, and the ultimate inability of saintly stasis to guarantee historical continuity or ethical homogeneity. The first three chapters trace the increasingly complex understanding of history and ethics in the lives of three female saints: Edith, Audrey, and Werburgh. Using 74

On heterochronicity, see Rachel Falconer, ‘Heterochronic Representations of the Fall: Bakhtin, Milton, DeLillo’, in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, ed. Nele Bemong et al. (Ghent: Academic Press, 2008), esp. 112–13.

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Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s notion of ‘dotality’, the female saint’s ability to give to and be given among communities,75 these chapters show how the female virginal body enables symbolic, corporeally based lineages for individual monastic communities. Their ability to transfer Anglo-Saxon spiritual legitimacy through their bodies – both their incorrupt corpses as the unchanging, transtemporal embodiments of their ‘primitive’ age, and their biological flesh as participants in blood lineages – allows virgin saints to work within diachronic history. The life of Edith of Wilton in the anonymous Wilton Chronicle, for instance, rewrites a ‘women’s history of Wessex’ for the nuns of Wilton, imagining Edith to affect politics in life and after death. Importantly, the Wilton poet imagines (against hagiographic tradition) that Edith was fully incorrupt, a rhetorical move through which her hagiographer constitutes the integrity of Wilton’s institutional body and proposes Edith’s ethical utility for English governance. Audrey, on the other hand, received multiple vernacular lives across southern England, and in almost every instance she is associated with her saintly sisters and nieces. As I show in Chapter 2, non-Ely religious communities capitalized on Audrey’s holy blood genealogies, grafting themselves into her family tree and crafting spiritual kinships through ethical emulation to appropriate her originary Anglo-Saxon virginity and sanctity. Through such imitatively constituted lineages, Audrey’s hagiographers also interrogate the ‘best practices of professed women’ question, suggesting that contemporary nuns can – or cannot – perfectly replicate early English spirituality. My third chapter, on Henry Bradshaw’s Life of Werburge, ties together strands introduced in these earlier chapters – genealogy, exemplarity, and corporeal transtemporality – by establishing how Bradshaw uses Werburgh’s incorrupt corpse to solidify Chester Abbey’s local position. The abbey’s long-held privileges were under threat, and its members were renowned for violence and dissent, so Bradshaw crafts through Werburgh a transtemporal institutional body that justifies those privileges and overwrites the flaws in the abbey’s ethical bodies. That project, however, is troubled symbolically by the decay of Werburgh’s corpse, a problem Bradshaw turns to his advantage by using her decomposition to figure the difficulties, and benefits, of the properly ordered ethical body. Werburge thereby illustrates the interpenetration of historiography and ethical issues in all these texts, which address reformers’ concerns by historicizing their saints. The final two chapters treat the historiographic problems faced by those writing about England’s most famous royal saints: Edward the Confessor and Edmund of Bury. Celebrated at every level of society, these king-saints were powerful symbols of English sanctity and, one might therefore think, useful figures for constructing England’s holy history. I demonstrate otherwise. Whereas the virgin saint, when deployed for monastic purposes, could enact material, corporeal connections between past and present within time, the holy king cannot. The king-saints’ claims to holiness are predicated on not fulfilling their kingly duties; their sanctity therefore invokes, not supersedes, rifts in the kingdom’s diachronic history. The king-saint can therefore perform historiographically only through completely 75

Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, 57.

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INTRODUCTION

supratemporal connections. Edward’s sanctity, I elucidate in Chapter 4, depends upon unkingly action: he refused to produce an heir. As a result, he could not be productively slotted into history (which largely consisted of the acts of kings and values smooth succession) while retaining a full articulation of his sanctity; his chaste sanctity and his reign proved structurally incompatible. Looking at every major account of his life – chronicle and hagiography, Latin, French, and English, written and pictorial – produced between 1066 and 1450, I show how verbal narratives cannot reconcile his virginity and his reign without hinting that his chastity caused the Norman Conquest. Visual narratives and single image iconography, on the other hand, could elide the causal connection between sanctity and Conquest, thereby becoming, for kings like Henry III and Richard II, useful tools for constructing a profitable past. Lydgate faces an analogous problem, I suggest in the final chapter, albeit with a very different outcome. Writing his Edmund and Fremund for Henry VI, Lydgate casts Edmund as a type of ideal kingship for the young monarch; in so doing, Lydgate dissociates Edmund from linear history. In so elevating Edmund to the iconic chronotope, Lydgate marginalizes his role in Bury St Edmunds’ monastic chronotope, occluding Edmund’s incorrupt corpse and minimizing the interdependency of Bury’s history and Edmund’s cult. What Lydgate excises, however, is returned to the narrative in the extensive series of illustrations designed for the royal presentation manuscript, BL, Harley MS 2278. These images ­re-affiliate Edmund with the corporate body of Bury St Edmunds, resituating the saint within the tempus. While the dialogic play between these two unreconciled chrono­topes is crucial to Lydgate’s self-construction as a saint-inspired poet, the play between the text and the pictorial cycle undermines Lydgate’s attempt to locate Edmund in the aevum. Whereas Edward’s written and pictorial lives demonstrate the power of the image for conveying historical truths, Edmund and Fremund – especially when read alongside the Harley miniatures – illustrates the impossibility of completely removing these early English saints from their historical contexts. To write hagiography in the fifteenth century is also, necessarily, to write history, and to desire Anglo-Saxon saints’ spiritual perfections is also, necessarily, to desire the spiritual reformation of contemporary monasticism.

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1

Edith of Wilton and the Writing of Women’s History

I

 begin with the lives of three female saints: Edith of Wilton, Audrey of Ely (accompanied by her sisters and nieces), and Werburgh of Chester. For the communities who possessed these saints’ relics – and even, as I show in the next chapter, some who didn’t – the virgin abbess was a potent figure of institutional cohesion and longstanding purity, the inviolable female body representing the integrity of the religious community formed around her relics. Importantly, all three women also enjoyed a reputation for incorruption; posthumous bodily preservation continued their sexual purity, and the undecayed corpse became an important material conduit through which early English spiritual cachet could manifest, whole and unchanging, throughout time. This integration of incorrupt stability and virginal institutional origins made female saints useful tools through which to write the past. The stasis of bodily incorruption allowed their virginal charisma to manifest within linear history, conveying early English sanctity throughout the generations. The Middle English life of Edith, the poetic Wilton Chronicle, exemplifies many features common in fifteenth-century hagiography: its imaginative recreation of an Anglo-Saxon past, its grafting of history onto Edith’s established hagiography, and its insistence on the corporeal stability of the past. It is also anomalous among these lives: it was written for a female community. Although many vernacular lives were produced for nuns, and many Anglo-French vies can be placed at particular nunneries,1 the poetic Wilton Chronicle and its companion the Wilton Life of Audrey are the only long Middle English saints’ lives produced for a convent we can name today. Anonymously composed around 1420, the Chronicle reconstructs the pre-Conquest past to locate Edith, and by extension Wilton, at the center of England’s history and politics. Textually constructing Edith’s relics as incorrupt, despite evidence to the contrary, the poet portrays Edith as bodily resolving later 1

On collections of saints’ lives compiled for convents, see Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 189–90, 195–99, 260–62; A.  S.  G. Edwards, ‘Fifteenth-Century English Collections of Female Saints’ Lives’, Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 131–41; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Powers of Record, Powers of Example: Hagiography and Women’s History’, in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, 170–76 et passim.

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conventual conflicts and perpetuates her political role as king’s daughter into the reign of Cnut and beyond. Edith’s claims to incorruption, however tenuous, also allow her relics to represent metonymically a stable, transtemporal institutional body that supersedes the limitations of individual nuns. As a composite history– hagiography composed for and about a nunnery, the Wilton Chronicle writes a different kind of history than do male monastic texts. Focusing primarily on the Chronicle’s historical perspective, this chapter argues that, by melding the conventions of the moinal foundation narrative with chronicle history (via Higden and others), the Chronicle writes a ‘women’s history’ of Wessex, in which the royal daughter might take the throne and the virginal saint directs England’s destiny. Edith’s royal and saintly clout benefits not only her convent but the entire kingdom; the convent’s past can shape the nation’s future, and women (at least royal, holy women) are imagined to form England’s religious heritage. Edith (c.961–84) is less familiar than the other saints I consider. She was the daughter of Edgar of Wessex (r.957–75) and his second consort Wulfthryth, who retired to the royal nunnery at Wilton when Edith was young, and there they both stayed until their deaths. Although Edith’s memory was initially cultivated by her mother and the Wilton nuns, she emerged as a royal saint under the patronage of her half-brother Æthelred, king of Wessex.2 Veneration crested in the late eleventh century, when the itinerant Norman hagiographer Goscelin of Saint-Bertin wrote his Vita et Translatio Edithae at the behest of Abbess Godiva (c.1067–90).3 Scholars of Anglo-Saxon saints and nunneries have profitably explored this period in Wilton’s history: Edith’s vita has been read alongside other Anglo-Saxon royal vitae,4 and she helps clarify relationships between Anglo-Saxon hagiographers and their sources, Edgar and his wives and offspring, and Wilton and the royal house.5 Less attention, however, has 2

Susan Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England: A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 152–54. The essays collected in Stephanie Hollis, ed., Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004) are invaluable for understanding Edith’s cult through the twelfth century. On Wulfthryth’s role in Edith’s cult, see Wiesje Emons-Nijenhuis, ‘The Embedded Saint, The Wilton Chronicle’s Life of St Wulfthryth’, Revue Bénédictine 119 (2009): 86–120. 3 Stephanie Hollis, ‘Goscelin’s Writings and the Wilton Women’, in Hollis, Writing the Wilton Women, 234. The Vita et Translatio Edithae (BHL 2388–89) is extant in two authorial redactions of c.1080, one dedicated to Archbishop Lanfranc (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS C938), and one that Hollis argues was recrafted for the Wilton community (Cardiff, Public Library, MS I.381): Hollis, ‘Goscelin’s Writings’, 238–44. The Rawlinson version is edited, with variants from Cardiff, in A. Wilmart, La légende de Ste Édith en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin, Analecta Bollandiana 56 (1938): 5–101, 265–307, and has been translated in Michael Wright and Kathleen Loncar, ed. and trans., Goscelin’s Legend of Edith, in Hollis, Writing the Wilton Women. I cite Vita (VEd) and Translatio (TransEd) by chapter number, quotations by page number from Wilmart, and translations by page number from Wright and Loncar. 4 Ridyard, Royal Saints, 140–75. 5 On the first, see Susan Millinger, ‘Humility and Power: Anglo-Saxon Nuns in AngloNorman Hagiography’, in Medieval Religious Women, vol. 1: Distant Echoes, ed. John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984); Barbara Yorke, ‘Carriers

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been paid to Wilton’s post-1150 history and Edith’s later medieval cult, so a brief discussion of both follows. Wilton was one of the most well-respected Anglo-Saxon royal nunneries, a prestige it retained until the Reformation. Its later medieval history nevertheless mirrored that of other convents, particularly as English devotional fashion after the twelfth century turned to new foundations.6 Because the sole extant cartulary, copied probably in the fourteenth century, preserves only the earliest charters (in Latin and Old English),7 the historian is dependent on external records, royal and ecclesiastical. These records suggest that Wilton was beset by occasional financial problems and decaying fabric; episcopal visitations reveal that the nuns possessed private property and entertained nonenclosed female visitors; and the house endured royal interference, particularly concerning the election of abbesses. Yet it also enjoyed oversight of a sizable deanery, continued bequests, a steady stream of novices and, in the early fifteenth century, a rise in the profile of its patron saint.8 Wilton was found to be in good order when Archbishop Chichele visited in 1423, only a few years after the Chronicle was composed.9 Although the abbey buildings were razed in the sixteenth century, we are fortunate that five Wilton manuscripts have survived – one cartulary (mentioned above), three liturgical manuscripts, and one Middle English manuscript.10 The liturgical evidence indicates that Edith centered Wilton’s identity throughout the Middle Ages. Wilton’s late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century processional preserves extensive celebrations for Edith; these included two feasts plus octaves,

of the Truth: Writing the Biographies of Anglo-Saxon Female Saints’, in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, ed. David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006); on the second, Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, ‘Edith’s Choice’, in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, ed. O’Brien O’Keefe and Andy Orchard, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Barbara Yorke, ‘The Women in Edgar’s Life’, in Edgar, King of the English 959–975: New Interpretations, ed. Donald Scragg (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 150–52; Yorke, ‘The Legitimacy of St Edith’, Haskins Society Journal 11 (2003): 97–113; on the third, Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (New York: Continuum, 2003), 75–76, 83–84, 152–53, 167–70; Yorke, ‘Women in Edgar’s Life’, 149–50. 6 Yorke, Nunneries, 92; Sally Thompson, Women Religious: The Founding of English Nunneries After the Norman Conquest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 161–81. 7 The Wilton Cartulary, BL, Harley MS 436, is edited as Registrum wiltunense, saxonicum et latinum, in Museo britannico asservatum, ab anno regis Alfredi 892, ad annum regis Eadwardi 1045, ed. Richard Colt Hoare and James Ingram (London, 1827). 8 Mary Dockray-Miller, Introduction to Saints Edith and Æthelthryth: Princesses, Miracle Workers and Their Late Medieval Audience. The Wilton Chronicle and the Wilton Life of St Æthelthryth, ed. Dockray-Miller (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 5–7; VCH Wilts. 3.234–39. 9 The Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1414–1443, ed. E. F. Jacobs, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 515–16. 10 A list of some of Wilton’s lost or unidentified books, written on the last folio of BL, Cotton MS Faustina B.iii and including primarily liturgical texts, has been printed by Richard Sharpe et al., eds., English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues (London: British Library, 1996), 644–46. On the extant Wilton manuscripts, see David N. Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 213–14, 222.

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responses derived from her vita, and the carrying of her relics during processions.11 The litanies in both extant psalters incorporate Edith, and the illuminated psalter’s many finely executed miniatures include a historiated initial depicting Edith’s posthumous appearance to Cnut.12 The fifth manuscript, BL, Cotton MS Faustina B.iii, presents narrative vitae that complemented Edith’s liturgical commemorations. This composite manuscript includes one section of three fifteenth-century items originally owned by Wilton: two lengthy Middle English narrative poems – the Wilton Chronicle (fols. 194–257) and a Life of Audrey of Ely (fols. 260–74) – separated by three folios providing Latin lists of Wilton’s royal patrons and the poet’s sources.13 Composed for the Wilton nuns c.1420, the Chronicle is primarily a paraphrased translation of Goscelin’s Vita et translatio Edithae integrated into a larger narrative of English history, as derived from chroniclers like Higden and the now lost account of monastic foundations by Henry Crompe.14 It is missing one gathering, relating 11

This processional is known solely through a nineteenth-century transcript made by one Dom Jausions, now housed at the Paléographie Musicale library in Solesmes, France: Georges Benoît-Castelli, ‘Un Processionnal anglais du xvième siècle: Le Processional dit “de Rollington”’, Ephemerides Liturgicae 75 (1961): 281–326. 12 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson G.23, a Psalter of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, contains a second litany added particularly for Wilton: Bell, What Nuns Read, 214 (no. 3). I am indebted to Robin Wharton for examining this manuscript for me. London, Royal College of Physicians, MS 409, the Wilton Psalter of c.1250, is richly illuminated with images of Benedictine nuns and Franciscan monks. It also includes prayers for the abbess and a fourteenth-century French commentary on the Pater Noster: Bell, What Nuns Read, 214 (no. 2); Nigel Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts [II], 1250–1285, vol. 4 pt. 2 of A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles (London: Harvey Miller, 1988), 2.55–57 (no. 99); Eric G. Millar, ‘Psautier historié du xiiie siècle exécuté pour l’abbaye de Wilton et conservé à la bibliothèque du Royal College of Physicians, Pall Mall East, à Londres’, Bulletin de la Société Française de reproductions de manuscrits à peintures 4 (1914): 128–49. 13 The Wilton Chronicle, The Wilton Life of Audrey, and the manuscript’s other items have been edited in Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth. I cite the Wilton Chronicle (WC) parenthetically by line number; the additional material is cited by page number. There is one earlier edition: S. Editha, sive Chronicon Vilodunense, im Wiltshire Dialekt, ed. C. Horstmann (Heilbronn: Verlag von Gebr. Henninger, 1883). All these texts, and their marginal glosses, are written in the same hand; a different scribe added a fragmentary miracle for Audrey at the end of her life. For a full manuscript description, see Dockray-Miller, Introduction to Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, 29–31. I discuss the Wilton Life of Audrey in Chapter 2. Jocelyn WoganBrowne, ‘Outdoing the Daughters of Syon? Edith of Wilton and the Representation of Female Community in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain. Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 395–96 suggests a date of before 1422, because Henry V’s death is not mentioned in the Latin list of founders. 14 Henry Crompe was a late fourteenth-century Cistercian who became involved in Oxford’s anti-Wyclif uproar and later began espousing heterodox positions himself. He authored a now lost history of English monastic foundations that the Wilton poet appears to have used heavily; ‘Crompe’ appears frequently in the margins as a source, and his history is described in detail in the appendix, fol. 258v: Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, 408. On this history, see Wiesje F. Nijenhuis, ‘The Wilton Chronicle as a Historical Source’, Revue Bénédictine 115 (2005): 370–99, at 371 and n. 11.

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the courtship of Edith’s parents and her birth. The Wilton Life of Audrey was written around the same time, similarly positioning Audrey within a chroniclederived narrative of conversion-era England. The intervening Latin items act as a historical appendix to the Wilton Chronicle, listing the names of the earliest founders, the kings of England, and the chronicler’s sources. The author of both Middle English texts, and possibly the intervening Latin ones, is commonly held to be a priest or chaplain associated with the nunnery.15 While a nun could have composed the vernacular texts and read the straightforward Latin of sources like the Polychronicon,16 it takes exceptional Latinity to decode Goscelin’s Vita, which is notably elaborate even by his purple standards. Nevertheless, I read the Chronicle as an example of medieval women’s history writing. As Diane Watt emphasizes, the compilatory nature of all medieval literature allows us to broaden our understanding of women’s literary production to include ‘women-oriented texts … that are the product of collaboration’ between women’s concerns and the men who hold the pen.17 Articulating a coherent conventual identity that privileges female action, agency, and often autonomy, the Wilton Chronicle emerges as a sophisticated piece of women-oriented historiography that compares favorably with analogous histories produced in continental convents. As the Chronicle was being written, Edith’s cult was being actively promoted by regional figures. In 1425, John Chandler, Bishop of Salisbury (1417–26), granted an indulgence of forty days for those who pilgrimaged to Wilton on Edith’s feast day, and pilgrim badges for Edith found around Salisbury confirm that such pilgrimages took place.18 While Abbess Christine Doulre (r.1416–41) was probably intent on re-establishing Edith’s cult, Chandler himself may also have been invested in the community’s reputation.19 As dean of Salisbury, Chandler had earlier worked to canonize Osmund, second Bishop of Salisbury (d.1099), in part to ‘foster a sense of unity and purpose among the cathedral canons’ at a particularly trying time.20 15

Dockray-Miller, Introduction to Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, 8; Wogan-Browne, ‘Outdoing’, 395–96 n. 8. Wogan-Browne observes that the Latin appendix is in a contemporaneous, if not identical, hand, and that the author and the scribe were not identical. 16 See Dockray-Miller, Introduction to Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, 8–9. On medieval nuns’ literacies in Latin, see Bell, What Nuns Read, 59–68; Alexandra Barratt, ‘Small Latin? The Post-Conquest Learning of English Religious Women’, in Anglo-Latin and Its Heritage: Essays in Honour of A. G. Rigg on his 64th Birthday, ed. Siân Echard and Gernot R. Wieland (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001). The nuns also had access to Trevisa’s translation of the Polychronicon; see below, p. 42. 17 Diane Watt, Medieval Women’s Writing: Works by and for Women in England, 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 2. 18 VCH Wilts. 3.239; Brian Spencer, Salisbury Museum Medieval Catalogue. Part 2: Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (Salisbury: Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, 1990), 48. In the Salisbury area have also been found several badges for Etheldreda, of interest for the Wilton Audrey: Spencer, Salisbury Museum, 51–52. 19 Wogan-Browne, ‘Outdoing’, 397 n. 11. I have not been able to confirm her claim that Chandler had been a Wilton chaplain, which would make his tie to the nunnery all the stronger. 20 T. C.  B. Timmins, ‘Chandler, John (d.1426)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–).

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Chandler had experience using saints to enhance the institutional body and to supersede tensions among individual ethical bodies, and the Chronicle reveals a similar desire to unify the nuns corporately around their ancient, prestigious saint. Although I cannot confirm Chandler’s involvement in the Chronicle’s production, he was probably aware, and in favor, of its existence. Despite this burst of cult promotion and her inclusion in the Sarum calendar, Edith’s popularity outside Wilton was limited.21 She was not widely venerated,22 and her hagiographic dossier outside Wilton is thin, for she appeared in none of the major vernacular legendaries (other than a cameo in the SEL ‘Edward the Martyr’) until Richard Pynson’s Kalendre translated and abbreviated the NLA.23 This scarcity makes remarkable her appearance in Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 2604 (fols. 69v–75v), a prose legendary compiled for a convent in which Edith is grouped with other early English nuns and cast in an exemplary light.24 Fervently embracing the cloistered life, she ‘bowed to all systers in mynistryng right lowly’ (fol. 70r) and refused to be elevated to abbess, ‘rathir to be bodyn than to bydde’ (fol. 71r). As is true of the collection’s other English nuns, her historicity is subordinated to her imitative value: although the life identifies her as Edgar’s daughter and associates her with Archbishop Dunstan, it primarily depends on miraculous vignettes to illustrate Edith’s claustral virtues like humility, charity, and abstinence. Outside Wilton’s walls, then, Edith was commemorated as an exemplary nun – when she was venerated at all. Within the nunnery, Edith was also remembered for her ideal behavior. The Chronicle, while valorizing Edith’s nobility and consumption of aristocratic goods like clothing and personal relics,25 establishes Edith as a model of proper ethical action. As professed nun, Edith was ‘meke

21

Nigel Morgan argues that Edith was included in the Sarum calendar only because of Wilton’s proximity to Salisbury: Morgan, ‘The Introduction of the Sarum Calendar into the Dioceses of England in the Thirteenth Century’, in Thirteenth Century England VIII, ed. Michael Prestwich, Richard Britnell, and Robin Frame (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001), 188, 191. 22 Only three parish church dedications can be conclusively attributed to her. The two dedications in Baverstock and Limpley Stoke, Wiltshire, are undoubtedly to Edith of Wilton, while Bishop Wilton’s church of St Edith, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, celebrated its parish feast on 15 September, the vigil of Edith of Wilton: Francis Bond, Dedications and Patron Saints of English Churches: Ecclesiastical Symbolism, Saints and Their Emblems (London: Oxford University Press, 1914), 202 n. 1. Frances Arnold-Forster, Studies in Church Dedications: or, England’s Patron Saints, 3 vols. (London: Skeffington, 1899), 2.414–19, 3.13 lists fifteen other dedications to an Edith, many of which are probably to Edith of Polesworth; see the discussion on 2.414–15. Nor is Edith of Wilton typically depicted in lay or parish art; the only extraWilton commemorations I have found are New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.105, the Hours of Sir William Porter, a heavily illuminated c.1420–25 horae that includes suffrages for and images of multiple English saints, including Edith (fol. 78r–v); and the pictorial cycle in the Salisbury Breviary, created for John, Duke of Bedford; I discuss this cycle below. 23 KNL, 81–82. On the NLA and its derivatives, see Chapter 2, p. 92. 24 Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 257–62. I discuss this collection at length in Chapter 2 below. 25 Dockray-Miller, Introduction to Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, 17–19; Wogan-Browne, ‘Outdoing’, 406–8.

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and humble’, ‘full redy’, the poet relates, ‘To helpe ychemon in his nede’ (1096, 1097–98), as busy in all thyng to serve hure sustren wyth all mekenes as was Martha or Mary in herre servyng. (1045–47)

Her mother similarly pays for masses and feeds the poor at Edith’s death (2103– 24). Through such exemplary moments, common in lives of women saints written for female readers, the Wilton poet encourages his readers to holy imitation. Emulating her in governing their fallible, ethical bodies, Edith’s cloistered daughters perpetuate, as I argue of Audrey’s readers in the next chapter, a heritage of enclosed female virtue. The Chronicle is not, however, solely edificatory hagiography; it is equally history writing. Opening with a thousand lines of Anglo-Saxon history centered around Wilton’s early foundations,26 this backstory constructs the idealized Anglo-Saxon chronotope while reminding its conventual readers (or auditors) ‘For whom ȝe ben yholde to preyȝe fore’ (315). This historical narrative is interwoven throughout Edith’s life, situating her actions (before and after death) within a larger narrative of pre-Conquest England. The poem’s status as history writing is intensified by the appended Latin texts, which restate in list form Wilton’s early founders and royal patrons, as well as the authors ‘from whose books and authority, the thin matter of this book is extracted and compiled’.27 The sources, particularly Higden and Crompe, are frequently noted in the margins of the Chronicle,28 and these paratextual elements – source lists and glosses – enhance the poem’s standing as history. Even its poetic form signals its status as history writing. That form – loosely rhyming quatrains in long lines – aligns it, as Wogan-Browne points out, with a tradition of southwestern historical writing like Robert of Gloucester’s Metrical Chronicle.29 In that tradition, as in the Wilton Chronicle, establishing chronology and manipulating emplotment are the primary historiographic ­objectives. The Chronicle is remarkable not merely for melding hagiography and history, but for the kind of history it emplots. The poet has crafted a different picture of Anglo-Danish Wessex than available in the Polychronicon or the Brut: a women’s history of Wessex, a narrative overtly concerned with women’s role in the kingdom’s affairs. This focus does not simply reflect the grafting of a female saint’s life onto English history; Bradshaw also pursues that task, but in his poem women are relegated to the religious sphere. Rather, this women’s history results from the 26

On the Chronicle’s foundation account, see Foot, Veiled Women, 2.229–30; Yorke, Nunneries, 75–76. 27 ‘de quorum libris et autoritatibus, exilis materia istius libelli est extracta et compilata.’ Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, 412–13. 28 On the Chronicle’s sources, see Nijenhuis, ‘Wilton Chronicle’; Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘Historical Sources of the Middle English Verse Life of St Æthelthryth’, American Notes and Queries 20 (2007): 8–11. The Chronicle’s major sources also include Bede and William of Malmesbury. 29 Wogan-Browne, ‘Outdoing’, 398–99 and n. 16.

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Chronicle’s dual aims of relating Wilton’s female-centric past and of integrating that past into England’s historical trajectory. Other convent narratives privilege female agency and piety, yet the Chronicle uniquely emphasizes women’s role in shaping English royal heritage. The Chronicle therefore not only looks inward, educating the Wilton nuns about their prestigious place in England’s past and witnessing their renewed interest in Edith’s cult. It also looks outward, advertising to county and crown Edith’s role in directing the nation’s history. Particularly in the encounter between Cnut and Edith’s corpse, it quietly engages with issues of legitimacy that vexed Lancastrian monarchs, hinting at Edith’s (and hence Wilton’s) utility in resolving them. Wogan-Browne suggests that the chronicler’s historical perspective, particularly the opening emphasis on royal patronage, ‘writes Wilton into a Henrician monasticism, in which the authority of this ancient Wessex nunnery and its virgin patron saint are inflected with Lancastrian concerns’.30 She demonstrates how different features of Edith’s hagiography – her devotion to Saint Denis, her acquisition of relics from Trier – would have located fifteenth-century Wilton within international ecclesiastical and dynastic concerns.31 The Chronicle resonates with other Lancastrian concerns as well: right rule, dynastic legitimacy, the proper honoring of a royal corpse. Although it is neither a sustained engagement with Lancastrian issues nor an apologia for the new regime, the Chronicle offers gentle reminders that Edith has effectively sanctioned kings in the past, and that she could do so in the future. Writing Women’s History in the Wilton Chronicle The historiography of professed women in medieval England has always been one of dispersal and fragmentation. Scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century focused on absence and neglect: too many documents lost; too few records originally kept; too little knowable about nuns’ daily lives, devotional engagement, and communal practices.32 As feminist scholars of the past thirty years have responded to this historiographic discourse, they have emplotted new histories of female religious: narratives of political savviness, economic acumen, spiritual

30 31 32

Ibid., 396. Ibid., 400–401. See Knowles’s justification for not discussing nuns in his three-volume study of medieval English monasticism: Knowles, RO, 2.viii. Power’s early, groundbreaking book on nuns belied such generalizations, but her characterization of nunneries as mismanaged, secularized institutions enforced certain stereotypes about moinalism: Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275–1535, repr. (New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1964), esp. 94–95. For an assessment of Power, see Nancy Bradley Warren, Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), ix; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘“Reading is Good Prayer”: Recent Research on Female Reading Communities’, New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 229–97, at 258–60.

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purity, and social engagement.33 Despite this scholarly growth, the records still offer more gaps than are comfortable for historians, modern and medieval alike.34 For medieval nuns did at times try to write their own institutional stories, through hagiography, obit lists, and narrative history,35 and they too had to overcome losses of memory and written record. The Wilton Chronicle, I suggest, participated in the tradition of conventual origin narratives but, unlike them, strove to fill these gaps by grafting the convent’s past onto royal history. Nunnery-sponsored histories usually took the form of short accounts of the convent’s foundation, frequently affixed to the house’s cartulary, that emphasized women’s roles in those origins. While much has been written about the history of medieval religious women, and while the nature and characteristics of women’s history was a crucial concern for many early feminists,36 little has been done on medieval women’s involvement in the contemporary production of history.37 Studies of late medieval German and Italian convent chronicles have addressed 33

In particular, see Bell, What Nuns Read; Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London: Routledge, 1994); Paul Lee, Nunneries, Learning and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Society: The Dominican Priory of Dartford (York: York Medieval Press, 2001); Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1540 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998); Thompson, Women Religious; Warren, Spiritual Economies. For a recent reassessment, see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Barking and the Historiography of Female Community’, in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community, ed. Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell (York: York Medieval Press, 2012). 34 Thompson, Women Religious, 7–15; Thompson, ‘Why English Nunneries Had No History: A Study of the Problems of the English Nunneries Founded after the Conquest’, in Medieval Religious Women, vol. 1: Distant Echoes, ed. John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shrank (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984). 35 Sara Gorman has recently read the Campsey Ash hagiographic collection (BL, Add. MS 70513) as evidence of hagiography used ‘as an active construction of institutional identity’ in which ‘hagiography becomes institutional historiography’: Gorman, ‘Anglo-Norman Hagiography’, 112, emphasis original. I read the Wilton Chronicle as a more elaborately developed and historiographically sensitive version of the phenomenon Gorman traces. 36 The scholarship is extensive, and this note cannot do it justice. Important scholarship includes Gisela Bock, ‘Challenging Dichotomoies: Perspectives on Women’s History’, in Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives, ed. Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, and Jane Rendall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Bock, ‘Women’s History and Gender History: Aspects of an International Debate’, Gender and History 1 (1989): 7–30; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘“Women’s History” in Transition: The European Case’, Feminist Studies 3 (1975): 83–103; Davis, ‘Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400–1820’, in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980); Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness from the Middle Ages to EighteenSeventy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 37 On the limited ways that medieval women influenced the written historiographic tradition, see Elisabeth Van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 12–14 et passim. Survey articles include Davis, ‘Gender and Genre’; Jerzy Strzelczyk, ‘The Participation of Women in Mediaeval Historiography and Affiliated Domains’, Quaestiones medii aevi novae 12 (2007): 129–54.

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this dearth,38 and these continental examples share many features with English nunnery narratives. All privilege female devotion and action, ‘making women themselves the primary agents in establishing their respective houses – rather than the secular men who granted them lands, or the religious men who exercised the inevitable ecclesiastical oversight’.39 Their scope is narrow, but no less historical, for the early female historian ‘was led most often to write about the world she knew … about which her statements had some authority’.40 We might follow Joan Wallach Scott and characterize moinal histories as ‘herstory’, an emplotment of the past that ‘give[s] value to an experience that had been ignored’ and that ‘insist[s] on female agency in the making of history’.41 It is generally true, as Billie Melman has observed, that the ‘construction [of women] as active agents of change’ was ‘alien to historiography’ before the mid-nineteenth century;42 many women seen as political actors in medieval chronicles were monstrous figures to be overcome in national origin myths or evil women like Edward the Martyr’s murderous stepmother Ælfthryth (discussed below). Nevertheless, histories written within female communities were likely to present women as taking an active role in creating and promoting their institutions, foregrounding female agency and devotion above equally crucial male action. Wogan-Browne, Rebecca June, and Emilie Amt have shown this to be true of Wherwell, Crabhouse, and Godstow’s foundation narratives,43 and examples could be compounded from nunneries like Wroxall, Lacock – and Wilton. At best, however, these house narratives offer only discontinuous vignettes of founders and prominent abbesses, because the data for producing full narratives was simply unavailable. Wogan-Browne proposes that spotty accounts of abbessial achievements ‘suggest a pattern familiar in women’s history: that of success established in one generation, briefly built on, and then recontained’;44 these episodic cycles also leave insurmountable documentary gaps. For example, the compiler of the Wroxall origin document – a foundation narrative that includes the story of

38

On the German sister-books, see Gertrude Jaron Lewis, By Women, for Women, about Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth-Century Germany (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1996); Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); on the Italian chronicles, see K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 39 Rebecca June, ‘The Languages of Memory: The Crabhouse Nunnery Manuscript’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), 352. 40 Davis, ‘Gender and Genre’, 157. 41 Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 18. 42 Billie Melman, ‘Gender, History, and Memory: The Invention of Women’s Past in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, History and Memory 5 (1993): 5–41, at 6. 43 Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, 201–3; June, ‘Languages of Memory’; Emilie Amt, ‘The Foundation Legend of Godstow Abbey: A Holy Woman’s Life in Anglo-Norman Verse’, in Writing Medieval Women’s Lives, ed. Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 44 Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, 202.

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Abbess Alice Crafts’s construction of a chapel then shifts into a list of nuns and founders – evidently wished to produce a full record of her abbey’s past, for she left still unfilled blanks in the manuscript for death dates of early founders.45 We can see her desire for temporal completeness and continuity in her interpretation of older documents: ‘Item, in one place we have prioresse names set togeder, likely to deme, that aftir that forme of writing they succeded eche other.… This I see in the Bishops Register.’46 She even turns to archaeological evidence and rudimentary bioanthropology, recording that Abbess Alice, buried in the Lady Chapel doorway, must have been ‘a woman of grete stature’ as ‘beseming of her bones’.47 Yet this historical consciousness and desire for completeness, even by the dedicated Wroxall compiler, cannot produce a continuous house-history, because the lacunae in knowledge were simply unfillable. The Wilton Chronicle resembles these foundation narratives while striving to supersede the fragmentation that besets other origin stories. Like other nunneries, Wilton faced gaps in its recorded past. Only a handful of the charters in the Wilton Register relate explicitly to the house’s early years, and the poet made limited use of them.48 The single abbess mentioned by name in these charters is Wulfthryth, and the poet can name only one earlier abbess, Radegunde (WC 618);49 if he had access to conventual narratives unavailable to us, those must have been just as fragmented as accounts preserved at other female houses. Unlike those nunneries, however, Wilton produced a largely continuous institutional history from its first foundation until the reign of Henry  I, and it does so by integrating Wilton’s history with Wessex’s. Because Edith is both saint and royal daughter and Wilton a royal foundation, Wilton and Edith have dual identities not available to most nunneries. This historiographically expedient grafting allows the chronicler to use royal politics to bridge the gaps in the conventual past, to emplot for Wilton a complete and continuously narratable history, and to enhance the sense that royal and moinal identities are interdependent. Although it resembles the Stone tabulae formally, in the melding of house and patron histories, the 45

This tripartite document is only preserved by Dugdale in one of his registers; his mise en page suggests that he is making a facsimile transcription of the original document: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Dugdale 12, pp. 389–93. The origin narrative alone was printed in Dugdale, Monasticon, 4.90–92; it is also printed (not without errors) along with the founder list or ‘Leiger Book’ in John William Ryland, Records of Wroxall Abbey and Manor, Warwickshire (London: Spottiswoode, 1903), 214–18. I cite page numbers from Ryland. 46 Ryland, Records of Wroxall, 216. 47 Ibid., 217. 48 The earliest royal grants to the nunnery are those of Athelstan (S424, AD 933; S438, AD 937): Registrum, 39–40, 32–33. The Wilton chronicler does refer to these deeds: WC, 696–97. However, the poet did not recognize that the Old English rubric to S438 reveals that this grant was in honor of Athelstan’s sister Eadflede, who had died at Wilton in her infancy: Registrum, 32. Since the Eadflede episode plays a major role in the poet’s construction of Wilton’s past (see below), and since he went to great pains to acknowledge other endowments made in Eadflede’s memory (WC, 580–89), it seems likely that he would have acknowledged Athelstan’s support had he noticed it. 49 These early abbesses are not attested in pre-Conquest sources: Foot, Veiled Women, 2.230.

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Chronicle devises a more seamlessly intertwined narrative of female spirituality and dynastic progression, positioning Wilton firmly within English, not simply patronal, history. The Chronicle’s opening reveals how the poet’s desire to produce a continual history and to balance different desiderada – royal origins, female origins, ancient origins – results in a sometimes convoluted yet ingeniously integrated story of Wilton’s place in England’s past. Instead of identifying a singular origin moment, as most foundation narratives do, the Chronicle’s poet integrates all Wilton’s early foundations into an extended account of royal support. Using Crompe’s now lost history of English monasteries and presumably local tradition to clarify Wilton’s ninth-century origins, he names Elburwe, King Ecgberht’s sister; Egwine, wife of King Alfred; and Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians and sister to Edward the Elder, as founders and patrons alongside their husbands and brothers. While this emphasis on female and royal founders in multiple generations at times troubles narrative coherence, it demonstrates the desire for ancient origins, points to the equal value possessed by royal and female founders, and establishes a horizon of expectations for female political activity that later allows the poet to foreground Edith’s participation in royal affairs. The first narrated foundation (although not the original foundation on that site, as the reader learns later [WC 318–41]), by King Ecgberht, amply illustrates this narrative fragmentation. The chronicler characterizes Ecgberht as a ‘holy mon’ (126) and a founder of ‘Religyose houses’ (128) before telling that Ecgberht founded Wilton in the year 830 for ‘threttene sustren’ with the ‘consel of Bysshop Elmeston’ of Winchester (134, 132). The foundation impetus is at first clearly royal and episcopal but, just three lines later, the chronicler refocuses it onto female devotion. He claims that ‘For Elburwys love’, Ecgberht’s sister and wife of the Earl of Wilton, ‘he made þat place’ (139), because to make a religiose house of hur owne place [s]he prayede hur brother Egbert þe kynge. (144–45).50

The earlier joined royal and episcopal desires are displaced by Elburwe’s holy aspirations. Some 200 lines later, after relating a prior foundation story (Earl Walston had founded a college on the site [326–38]), the poet reiterates the Ecgberht– Elburwe narrative, this time giving Elburwe primacy of place (340–45) and clarifying that ‘[s]he was furst cause of þat house makynge’ (348). This interplay between royal patronage and female devotion persists through the Chronicle; the poet is careful to note which English kings support the nunnery during their reigns, but frames this royal patronage as resulting from female piety. King Alfred refounds Wilton Abbey for the sake of Elflede, ‘þorow preyer of Egwne þe quene’ (584), and his son Edward also contributes: 50

In the poet’s dialect, ‘he’ is the third person singular feminine and masculine subject pronouns. To prevent confusion in direct quotations, I have added the s in square brackets to feminine pronouns.

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By preyour of Elflede his sustre dere, þat was godmoder and aunte also of Elflede ye chyld. (587–89)

Similarly Eadwig, although he is otherwise a sinful ruler, supported Wilton ‘by casye of Elvine, his moder dere’ (754).51 This pattern suggests that royal patronage is underwritten by female piety, bolstering Wilton’s claim to continuous royal support from its earliest days and reinserting female devotion into an established tradition of royally supported religious institutions. It imagines a standard facet of the Anglo-Saxon chronotope – the piety of its kings – as produced by their wives’, sisters’, and mothers’ devotion. Such ‘remembering’ of women’s influence over affairs of state occurs elsewhere early in the Chronicle, where the abbey’s domestic history and Wessex’s regnal history interpenetrate. Most striking is the death of King Alfred’s granddaughter, Elflede. This episode begins not as a domestic tragedy, but as a national one: the Danes invade Wessex as far as Wilton, where they engage Alfred, Edward the Elder, and their troops in battle (420–29). The poem’s focus quickly shifts, however, from the militaristic violence outside Wilton to the domestic tragedy within. The plight of the women and children takes center stage (434–37), and the child Elflede, the daughter of Edward the Elder who drowned in her bath when her frightened nurse abandoned her (448–53), becomes the Danes’ most important victim. Receiving as much attention (twenty-nine lines) as does the military loss (twenty-seven lines), this single death is grammatically elevated over the military defeat: Bot all þawe þis childe were þis deyed and buryed þere, … mony gret batels after þat ȝet þere were. (466, 468, emphasis added)

Elflede’s death – not Alfred’s military defeat – becomes the defining tragedy of the Danish invasions.52 With Edgar’s ascent, the narrative shifts from broader English history to Wilton’s localized house-history based on Goscelin’s hagiographies. The poet, however, continues to engage English history not only to contextualize Edith’s life but also to insist that Edith, as Edgar’s daughter and through her prophetic abilities, can intervene in royal politics. Prophecy was integral to history writing in later

51 The Wilton Register includes a charter of Eadwig (S582, AD 955): Registrum, 45–47. It is possible that the chronicler included Eadwig as a founder because of the charter, but that he used Eadwig’s mother Ælfgifu (Elvine), who was honored as a saint at Shaftesbury, to purify the famously lecherous king’s gift: John Blair, ‘A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Saints’, in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 503. 52 For a historical assessment of this story, see Yorke, Nunneries, 83.

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medieval England,53 and although prophetic mouthpieces were not always women, as they would be in the seventeenth century, the Chronicle does grant prophetic ability to women, especially Edith.54 She can intervene in political affairs through foreknowledge, allowing her seemingly to direct future events through insight into divine will and to traverse the nunnery walls as a political agent while remaining cloistered. Prophecy and Edith’s royal status converge most clearly when her halfbrother, King Edward, is martyred and the question of succession arises. In this section of the Chronicle, Edith’s cloistering does not impede her participation in watershed national affairs, and the poet integrates vita and chronicle to envision a possible world in which a princess might inherit the throne. In later medieval chronicles, the death of Edward the Martyr led to a nadir in pre-Conquest history: the reign of Æthelred. Robert of Gloucester sums up the later medieval view of the ‘unready’ king’s reign well: ‘Febleliche he liuede al is lif & deyde in feble deþe.’55 By the fifteenth century, the tradition was well established that Edward, who had succeeded his father Edgar, had been murdered at the behest of his stepmother, Ælfthryth, so that her son Æthelred could take the crown.56 The tenth and eleventh centuries had seen several variations of the story develop before the ‘murderous stepmother’ version won out,57 and one detail not incorporated into the mainstream tradition was Edith and Wulfthryth’s involvement in Edward’s reburial. Almost a year elapsed between Edward’s murder and his entombment at Shaftesbury, and the vitae of Edith and Edward portray Edith as a prime mover behind her brother’s reburial.58 The Passio Eadwardi foregrounds 53 Lesley A. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (York: York Medieval Press, 2000); R. W. Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 3. History as Prophecy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5 ser. 22 (1972): 243–63. 54 Edgar’s mother Ælfgifu also prophesies; in a passage adapted from GRA, 2.154–55 (pp. 250–54), she interprets Edgar’s vision of barking whelps, falling apples, and (a new addition to the original) a hanging lamp: WC, 886–957. See also Stephanie Hollis, ‘St Edith and the Wilton Community’, in Hollis, Writing the Wilton Women, 274, on visions in Goscelin’s vita. 55 Robert of Gloucester, The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, ed. William Aldis Wright, 2 vols., RS 86 (London: 1887), line 6125. 56 SEL ‘Edward King and Martyr’ (listed as ‘St Edward the Elder’), lines 4–14, 29–36, et passim; Polychronicon, 6.12 (RS 7.32–36); The Brut, or, The Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, vol. 1, EETS o.s. 131 (London: EETS, 1906), ch. 114 (pp. 116–17); Robert Mannyng, The Chronicle, ed. Idelle Sullens, 2 vols. (Binghamton: MRTS, 1996), 2.825–32; Castleford’s Chronicle, or, the Boke of Brut, ed. Caroline D. Eckhardt, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 305–6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), lines 30280–91, 30236–63. On Edward’s death and burials, see Nicole Marafioti, The King’s Body: Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 261–81. 57 Catherine Cubitt, ‘Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cults of Murdered and Martyred Anglo-Saxon Royal Saints’, Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 53–88, at 72–74; Christine E. Fell, Edward King and Martyr (Leeds: Texts and Monographs, 1971), xvi–xvii; Ridyard, Royal Saints, 158–69; Rollason, ‘Cults of Murdered Royal Saints’, 2, 17–19; Barbara Yorke, ‘Edward, King and Martyr: A Saxon Murder Mystery’, in Studies in the Early History of Shaftesbury Abbey, ed. Laurence Keen (Dorchester: Dorset City Council, 1999). 58 Ridyard, Royal Saints, 155; Passio Sancti Eadwardi Regis et Martyris, in Edward King and Martyr, ed. Christine E. Fell (Leeds: Texts and Monographs, 1971), 8–9; VEd, 18. The SEL ‘Edward King and Martyr’, the Sanctilogium, and the Sanctilogium’s derivatives follow closely

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Edith and Wulfthryth’s participation in the translation and burial episode,59 but Goscelin’s Vita Edithae gives her additional prophetic powers. During Edward’s prosperous reign, Edith dreams that her right eye falls out; she explains to the sisters ‘that this vision foretells some disaster to my brother Edward’.60 After Edward’s death, she has a second realization that Edward ‘was reigning in heaven’,61 which Goscelin states was the cause of Edward’s translation to Shaftesbury. In both vitae, Edith is an active participant in Edward’s translation and a central force behind his recognition as a saint. The Wilton Chronicle, however, intensifies Edith’s involvement. Her passing vision in the vita becomes a frightening ‘merveylle swene’ (1660) in the Chronicle, one that causes her to awake with a shriek. Edith explains her dream to her mother and the nuns: ‘Me þouȝt þat my ryȝt Eyȝe fell ouȝt of my hedde, doun in to þe grounde fast me by. Hit betokenyth þat my brothere shall be dedde Sone after þis tyme now sodenly. For y knowe hit’, [s]he sayde, ‘ryȝt well, þat hit nyll turne non other warde, bot soden deythe woll come full snell To my brother Kyng Edward.’ (1669–76)

The precision of Edith’s prophecy contrasts with the vague hint of ‘some disaster’ in Goscelin, and the poem’s sense of speed (‘Sone after þis tyme’; ‘full snell’; ‘so hit by fell afterward sone’ [1677]) gives Edith’s prophecy historiographic force. After Edward’s murder, the poet omits the year-long misplacement of his corpse and makes Edith, rather than the ealdorman Ælfhere, the sole mover behind Edward’s burial: Edith byde þat his body to Schaftesbury were leyde in to þe governell of Quene Elvyne [Ælfgifu]. (1688–9)

In the Chronicle, the disposition of the murdered king’s corpse is entirely overseen by royal women; it passes from the hands of the murderous Ælfthryth (1683–84) via Edith’s oversight into the hands of her grandmother Ælfgifu (1685–92). As on the Passio to relate that Edith was involved in the translation and present at Edward’s exhumation: SEL ‘Edward King and Martyr’, lines 165–80; NLA, 1.350; KNL, 85. Although several Latin and Middle English chronicles tell of Edward’s translation, none mentions Edith or the Wilton nuns. Compare Henry, HA, 326; GRA, 162.4 (p. 266); Castleford’s Chronicle, lines 30370–415; Polychronicon, 6.12 (RS 7.36); John Hardyng, The Chronicle of John Hardyng … Together with the Continuation by Richard Grafton, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1812), 215–16; Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1811), 201–2. 59 Passio Eadwardi, 8/23–9/16. 60 ‘Eduuardi fratris portendere casum.’ VEd, 18; Wilmart, Légende, 82; Wright and Loncar, Goscelin’s Legend, 50. 61 ‘celo regnare’. VEd, 18, Wilmart, Légende, 83; Wright and Loncar, Goscelin’s Legend, 51.

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a ‘tokene of his martringe’ (1700), Edith’s prophecy bears the advance trace of Edward’s death, and the event begun by female foreknowledge and maternal treachery is completed by their burial of the dead. Edith’s royal involvement is not limited to controlling her brother’s corpse, for the poet also portrays Edith as a viable heir to her brother’s throne. After she assisted with Edward’s reburial, as Goscelin tells it, both ealdormen and populus decide that Edith is a more worthy ruler than her half-brother Æthelred, whose claim to the throne is tainted by Edward’s murder. Edith, of course, rejects the siren song of royal power.62 The Wilton Chronicle includes these events, following immediately upon Edward’s burial; there, the lords agree that Æthelred should not become king ‘For he was causa of his brotheris deythe’ (1706), and they conclude that ‘þis holy mayde shulde have þe reme in governynge’ (1712). Edith refuses and the lords offer the crown to Æthelred. This episode is unique to the Vita Edithae and its hagiographic derivatives, and it has been assumed to be apocryphal.63 Barbara Yorke, however, has shown how Goscelin’s construction of Edith as a legitimate daughter of Edgar allows us to ‘give some credence’ to this account. It is not implausible, though ultimately unprovable, that the ealdormen may have seen Edith, perhaps properly married to a prominent noble, as a viable alternative to Æthelred’s rule.64 Whether or not the Wilton poet inadvertently preserved a record of an actual historical event, his decision to retain Edith’s claim to the throne reinserts her, as political agent, into the received narrative of England’s past. Her ability to wear the crown ‘remembers’ women’s potential but unrealized participation in English political history. Yet ‘remembering’ always entails ‘forgetting’ and, as we will see forcefully in Edward the Confessor’s chastity, the intrusion of political responsibility can threaten the hagiographic plotline. The Wilton poet must therefore ensure that Edith’s political identity is subordinated to her saintly one. In order to establish Edith as both legitimate heir and cloistered virgin – that is, as able to be offered the throne and able to reject it – the chronicler must ignore the result of her decision to remain a nun: Æthelred ‘the Unready’ becomes king and England suffers. When Goscelin and the Wilton poet portray the lords as offering Edith the crown, they open up a new horizon of historical possibilities, one with the adept Edith rather than the inept Æthelred on the throne, one in which England might not be overtaken by Danish rulers. Given this hypothetical scenario, Edith could be considered culpable for the failures of Æthelred’s reign because she allowed 62 63

VEd, 19; Wilmart, Légende, 84; Wright and Loncar, Goscelin’s Legend, 51–52. Ridyard, Royal Saints, 161 et passim; see in response Hollis, ‘Edith and the Wilton Community’, 248–49. 64 Yorke, ‘Legitimacy’, 109–10, at 109; see also Yorke, Nunneries, 170. The succession had been disputed upon Edgar’s death, even before Edward’s murder, making it not implausible that Edward’s death would have exacerbated the debate: Byrhtferth of Ramsey, Vita S Oswaldi, in The Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 4.11, 18 (pp. 122, 136–38); Simon Keynes, ‘Edgar, rex admirabilis’, in Edgar, King of the English 959–975: New Interpretations, ed. Donald Scragg (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 52–53; Marafioti, The King’s Body, 179–80, 184, 189.

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the crown to pass to him instead of taking it herself and protecting the kingdom. Her dilemma here resembles that of male kings like Edward the Confessor and Edmund: to maintain one’s sanctity entails not fulfilling one’s proper political role. For both Goscelin and the Wilton poet, however, Edith’s responsibility for Æthelred’s governance falls in a blind spot. Goscelin quickly elides the results of Edith’s choice, stating only that ‘she forced them [the lords] to seek again the young king whom they had rejected’.65 Because the Wilton poet emplots a dual Wilton–Wessex history, however, he cannot forget Edith’s possible culpability so simply; he must include Æthelred’s reign with all its ‘travell’, ‘sorwe’, and ‘wo’ (3248), inevitably highlighting the real threat to England occasioned by Edith’s refusal of the throne. The Chronicle shows the lords questioning Æthelred’s fitness to reign, not just because he is indirectly culpable for Edward’s death, but also because he was so ȝonge a thyng and couȝthe nowthre mesure ny methe. (1707–8)66

These terms for characterizing Æthelred’s youth – that he knows neither moderation nor self-control – foreshadow Æthelred’s ‘unmeasured’ reign, particularly as Higden relates it.67 Æthelred’s youth as type of unfitness would also have resounded forcefully after 1422, when the infant Henry VI came to the throne. Unable to ignore the problems of Æthelred’s rule, the poet offers an alternative explanation that neatly forgets the throne had been offered to Edith. Following a common chronicle tradition, the poet claims that Æthelred’s failures postdate Archbishop Dunstan’s death, thereby implying that the archbishop’s presence had stabilized the reign (2597–98, 3252–53).68 This deflection of responsibility is particularly important when the poet introduces the encounter between Edith and Cnut, the crux, I argue below, of the poet’s historical narrative. The poet must establish that England’s fortunes plummeted under Æthelred and Cnut so that he can portray Edith – or more precisely, her incorrupt corpse – as the agent that converts Cnut and rallies England’s spiritual fortunes. In the meantime, however,

65

‘regulum autem quem repudiauerant repetere coegit’. VEd, 19; Wilmart, Légende, 85; Wright and Loncar, Goscelin’s Legend, 52. 66 Goscelin claims indirectly that Æthelred was in ‘his infancy’ (‘infantia’) and of ‘childish ignorance’ (‘infantilem inscitiam’): VEd, 19; Wilmart, Légende, 84; Wright and Loncar, Goscelin’s Legend, 51, 52. These terms, however, are used less to characterize Æthelred than to add credence to Edith’s superior claim. 67 Although Robert of Gloucester, Robert Mannyng, and, to a lesser extent, the prose Brut portray Æthelred’s reign as doomed because of his treacherous accession to the throne, Higden describes Æthelred’s personal failings as being at the root of his failure as a ruler. For example, Trevisa (translating Higden) relates that Æthelred ‘hadde suche a condicioun þat he wolde liȝtliche disherite Englisshe men, and feyne trespas for to byneme hem here money, and what þat þey hadde’, and that he so sexually harassed his wife Emma ‘þat sche com seelde in his bed; he walwede in leccherie with strompettes and wiþ hores’: Polychronicon, 6.13 (RS 7.59–61). 68 Compare to Mannyng, Chronicle, 2.865–66; Henry, HA, 326; Robert of Gloucester, Chronicle, 5928–35; Hardyng, Chronicle, 216–17.

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he must also ensure that Edith is not held accountable for Æthelred’s disastrous reign. In casting Edith as a critical player in Wessex history, the Chronicle does more than integrate her into England’s royal past. It also reminds us that nuns read history. Most scholarship on English women’s literature has focused on mystical, devotional, and exemplary texts, ones designed to shape women’s spiritual lives. These elements are not absent from the Chronicle, but neither do they define it. Rather, the Chronicle’s historical and chronological concerns suggest it appealed to the nuns in equal measures as history and as devotional reading. Nor were the Wilton nuns the only cloistered women interested in their island’s past; evidence of book ownership suggests that many religious women had access to historical texts. The Dominican nuns at Dartford owned a Brut;69 the fifteenth-century chapter book of Kingston St Michael’s opens with a list of universal and English dates and kings;70 and the fourteenth-century Lansdowne Legendary, owned by the Romsey nuns, also begins with a chronicle of British history.71 More provocatively, the opening 110 lines of the Wilton Audrey are taken, at times verbatim, from Trevisa’s translation of the Polychronicon, offering a tantalizing peek at what else may have lain in Wilton’s book press.72 Even anecdotal evidence indicates that interest in the past, generally regarded a characteristic of male institutions, was not absent from female ones. Moreover, the fact that women’s history writing became more widespread in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – as attested by German, Italian, and even expatriated English conventual examples73 – hints that the Wilton Chronicle and other moinal narratives may have presaged a nascent but ultimately abortive strand of English conventual history writing. Virgo Intacta? Fleshly (In)corruption, Female Agency, and Institutional Integrity Writing in the early 1420s, the Wilton poet would have been aware of the revered corpse’s symbolic potential. Only a few years before, Henry  V had staged his elaborate 1413 translation of Richard  II’s remains, moving them from Langley to Westminster with all the pomp of a royal funeral. This reburial laid to rest uneasy rumors about Richard that had haunted England, rumors encouraged by the deposed king’s misacknowledged corpse.74 Several features of the Chronicle 69 70 71 72

Lee, Nunneries, Learning and Spirituality, 211–14. Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.8.2, fols. 3r–4r; Bell, What Nuns Read, 144–45. BL, MS Lansdowne 436: Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, 197–99; Bell, What Nuns Read, 161. Dockray-Miller, ‘Historical Sources’, 9–10. Although it is a rhetorical commonplace, the Chronicle also points its readers to the ‘story’ of Æthelred’s reign ‘whose wolde hit rede’ (WC 3246), suggesting that the poet envisioned his audience as having access to other historical texts they could consult on their own. 73 Isobel Grundy, ‘Women’s History? Writings by English Nuns’, in Women, Writing, and History 1640–1740, ed. Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992). 74 Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–

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resonate with this event. Edward the Martyr’s burial reflects it: the royal grandmother and sister make right the wrong committed by the royal mother, just as the Lancastrian king legitimizes his rule through the body of his father’s predecessor. Cnut’s later translation of Edith’s remains also echoes it: transferring the saint into a new shrine, as I discuss later, similarly validates Cnut as rightful king. Finally, both Richard’s reburial and Edith’s first relic translation, thirteen years after her death, change their relationships with their communities. Richard’s inhumation incorporates him into a legacy of English kingship; Edith’s translation transforms her from royal daughter to patron saint. Whereas Richard’s reburial dispelled his spectral presence, however, translation intensifies Edith’s, as her preternaturally mobile corpse is imbued with her supratemporal perfection. Or, more properly, only by translating Goscelin’s miracula into Middle English can the Wilton poet imagine Edith’s praesentia to manifest corporeally, for only in the Chronicle is Edith fully incorrupt. The poet’s escalation of Edith’s incorruption and posthumous agency is his most extensive addition to her hagiographic dossier. No other text imagines Edith so thoroughly to influence the living from the grave, for every other life relates that her body had been partially consumed by decay. Though the textual tradition of partial decay resists the Wilton poet’s attempts to overwrite it, he repeatedly insists upon the persistence of her material flesh because it can extend through time those facets of her identity dependent on flesh: her role as Edgar’s daughter and singular figure for Wilton’s corporate identity. More shockingly, her imagined incorruption also enables a uniquely somatized agency. Denying her decay is necessary, for not only can her incorrupt body best represent Wilton’s institutional integrity, but it can also actively intervene to preserve it. Since incorruption is a central somatic trope for all the saints I discuss, a brief overview of the miracle’s significance is in order.75 In the Anglo-Saxon hagiographic tradition, bodily incorruption – entailing an intact, lifelike, and glorified

1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 101–27. 75 See Michel Bouvier, ‘De l’incorruptibilité des corps saints’, in Les Miracles, miroirs des corps, ed. Jacques Gélis and Odile Redon (Paris: Presses et Publications de l’Université de ParisVIII, 1983); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 206–12 and nn. 20–21; Bynum, ‘Bodily Miracles and the Resurrection of the Body in the High Middle Ages’, in Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion, ed. Thomas Kselman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 71, 83; Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 184–85 and 353 n. 1; Grant Loomis, ‘Folklore of the Uncorrupted Body’, Journal of American Folklore 48 (1935): 374–78; Malo, Relics and Writing, 44–49; Herbert Thurston, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (London: Burns Oates, 1952), 233–70; André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 427–28. As Loomis, ‘Folklore’ and Bynum, Resurrection, 206 n. 20 note, an undecayed body could belong to a sinner rather than a saint, and as John Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 16 observes, incorruption alone was not sufficient evidence of sanctity. I restrict my discussion here to the incorruption of already acknowledged saints, not those whose sanctity depends largely on bodily intactness.

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cadaver at least one year after death, usually discovered during translation ceremonies – was a privileged miracle granted to some of England’s most prominent saints. The English interpretation of incorruption differed from later continental constructions.76 Beginning with Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and his Vita Cuthberti, and continuing through Abbo of Fleury’s Vita Edmundi, the incorrupt body signaled both the saint’s virginity and the eternal resurrection body.77 Incorruption thus pointed backward and forward in time, witnessing the saint’s perfections in life and his or her eschatological state. While both interpretations remained in play through the heyday of Anglo-Latin hagiography,78 by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the intact body was seen primarily as resulting from virginity. As John Capgrave’s Katherine of Alexandria puts it, summe with clennes be that there purchace Swech dispensacion that in what maner place They be leyd, thei shall nevyr roote, Flesshe ne senowis, veynes, shete ne coote.79

76

For example, incorruption was common among continental female mystics (like Catherine of Siena, Clare of Montefalco, Margaret of Cortona, and Teresa of Avila) where postmortem wholeness extends their lived corporeal privations and anomalies – inedia, anorexia nervosa, myroblita, stigmatism, subsistence on the Eucharist alone, and cessation of bodily excretions; see Bynum, Resurrection, 221–22; Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 186–94. Bynum discusses these lived bodily privations, but not postmortem incorruption, in detail in Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). Additionally, while incorrupt saints flourished on the Continent after 1200, during this time no English saints other than Edmund Rich and the lesser known John of Coutances, Bishop of Worcester (d.1198) claimed incorruption. On Edmund Rich’s incorruption, see Matthew Paris, Vita Sancti Edmundi auctore Matthaeo Parisiensi, in St Edmund of Abingdon: A Study of Hagiography and History, ed. C.  H. Lawrence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 285; on John of Coutances’s, see Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), 70. 77 In HE, 4.19 (p. 392), Bede explains that Etheldreda’s incorrupt corpse proved her virginity in life; in his Vita Cuthberti, Bishop Eadberht’s hymn on Cuthbert’s incorruption likens his remains to the resurrection body: Bede, Vita Sancti Cuthberti auctore Beda, in Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), ch. 42 (p. 294). Abbo’s Life of Edmund unites the two interpretations: Abbo of Fleury, Life of St Edmund, in Three Lives of English Saints, ed. Michael Winterbottom (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1972), ch. 17 (pp. 86–97). However, fragmented relics were sometimes also likened to the resurrection body by twelfth- and thirteenth-century writers; see Bynum, Resurrection, 211–12; Bynum, Fragmentation, 266–67. 78 See in particular GRA, 2.207 (p. 386, on several saints); LE, 1.27–28 (pp. 44–47, of Etheldreda); VWer, 12 (p. 50, of Werburgh); and Osbert of Clare, ‘La Vie de S. Édouard le Confesseur par Osbert de Clare’, ed. Marc Bloch, Analecta Bollandiana 41 (1923): 5–31, at 30 (122/6–8). Matthew Paris, on the other hand, only refers to Edmund Rich’s virginity: Paris, Vita Sancti Edmundi, 285. 79 John Capgrave, The Life of St Katherine, ed. Karen A. Winstead (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), 5.1201–4.

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Given the incorrupt corpse’s physical wholeness and the late medieval fascination with the unsavory aspects of the Last Things, we might expect incorruption’s ability to prefigure the resurrection body to have been more widely appealing than it was. However, as Bynum suggests, the ‘fetishizing of fragmentation and decay was … an effort to transcend it by giving it moral significance’, and transi tombs, fragmented relics, and the partitioned body of Christ ‘located access to the eternal in change and dissolution itself ’.80 This late medieval privileging of the corporeal fragment as a metonym for, rather than hindrance to, eternal bliss is paralleled by a decreased emphasis on the incorrupt body’s promise of resurrection. Although the glorified eternal body remains a possible signification of incorruption, Middle English hagiography rarely invokes it. The eschatological meaning becomes a vestigial part of the incorruption miracle. Why then do the Wilton chronicler and Henry Bradshaw insist upon the intactness of their saints’ corpses in the face of opposing tradition? What is the textual role of incorruption? Middle English hagiographers primarily frame descriptions of the incorrupt body to point back to the saint’s earthly life. Any saintly remains, in addition to being an earthly anchor for the saint’s eternal praesentia, could link past and present through material continuity. When those relics were also untouched by decay, their potential to manifest fully heavenly and past earthly glories was all the greater, for the unchanging nature of these bodies intensified the seeming persistence of the past.81 The most common descriptors of the incorrupt corpse – ‘looking as if asleep’ or ‘looking as if he/she died that day’82 – elide both the process of decay and the passage of time. Persisting statically in the moment of death, the incorrupt corpse can collapse the distance between past and present, existing simultaneously in both historical moments. Undecayed flesh thus appears to offer the history writer a way to smooth over historical ruptures, a way of avoiding the historiographic paradox of ‘creating the absent, in making signs scattered over the surface of current times become the traces of “historical” realities’ by promising the perpetual presence of those otherwise lost fragments.83 It is this ability to make the past present, to represent synecdochically its moment in the tempus, that most Middle English lives emphasize, for the holy incorrupt cadaver co-locates the historical moment of the saint’s death and her eternal transtemporality.

80

Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 252. See further Bynum, Christian Materiality, 177–94, 208–16, et passim. 81 Here I adapt Bynum’s analysis of corporeal fragmentation to the historio-temporal realm: Bynum, ‘Bodily Miracles’, 83; Bynum, Resurrection, 309–17. See also Vauchez, Sainthood, 433–35, 444–46; Seega Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 39. I consider this facet of incorruption further in Cynthia Turner Camp, ‘The Temporal Excesses of Dead Flesh’, postmedieval 4 (2013): 416–26. 82 Compare, inter alia, HE, 4.19 (p. 394); Bradshaw, Werburge, 1.3383. 83 Certeau, Writing, 46.

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This privileging of incorruption’s historiographic significance over the eschatological one is mirrored in female saints’ lives by the virginal body’s ability to corporeally figure foundation, continuity, and perfection. Wogan-Browne has described how the virgin saint, already a potent representation of originary purity and divine power, becomes in post-Conquest hagiography a powerful founding figure for religious institutions.84 Throughout these rewritten legends, ‘the saint’s personal history is important for the continuity and specific identity it confers on a monastic house, while a properly authoritative royal virgin will also confer dynastic associations’.85 In such symbolic economies, the virgin saint’s value lies as much in her historical life as in her thaumaturgical virtus, and her body’s wholeness (its virginity, with or without incorruption) promises the continuity of that heritage. Possession of the saint’s relics became possession of the lands historically associated with her, the saint’s body figuring institutional integrity and providing the necessary continuity for a community whose past may be characterized by discontinuity and repeated refoundation.86 Like the incorrupt corpse, the virginal foundress provides one means for bridging gaps in the historical record. As a representative of her historical period, she can embody the cultural capital of the past, and her relics make that capital available across time. Idealized pre-Conquest virtues can thus be imported into the present when they are embodied in corporeal remains, whether through the liturgical translation of relics or through literary translation. While incorrupt male saints can perform similar functions – think of Edmund’s role at twelfth-century Bury St Edmunds87 or Cuthbert’s undecayed body, which unified his peripatetic familia88 – they are less likely to do so in fifteenth-century lives. Rather, a historiographic synergy animates the virgin’s body. As incorruption was treated as prima facie evidence of virginity, the undecayed corpse of a female saint – a double promise of continuity – possessed compelling historiographic potential. The vernacular lives of Edith, Audrey, and Werburgh participate in this economy of historicized value, their hagiographers embracing incorruption’s signifying potential. All three saints’ virginal promise of institutional continuity is underwritten by their incorruption, so much so that both the Wilton chronicler and Bradshaw assert their saints’ incorruption against precedent. The deployment of these virginal bodies is best understood through what Wogan-Browne 84 85 86

Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, 57–66. Ibid., 63. Ridyard, Royal Saints, 191–92; Virginia Blanton-Whetsell, ‘Tota integra, tota incorrupta: The Shrine of St Æthelthryth as a Symbol of Monastic Autonomy’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32 (2002): 227–67. 87 See Chapter 5 below, p. 195. 88 Meryl Foster, ‘Custodians of St Cuthbert: The Durham Monks’ Views of Their Predecessors, 1083–c.1200’, in Anglo-Norman Durham 1093–1193, ed. David Rollason, Margaret Harvey, and Michael Prestwich (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1994); A.  J. Piper, ‘The First Generations of Durham Monks and the Cult of St Cuthbert’, in St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to A.D. 1200, ed. Gerald Bonner, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), 437–41; Victoria Tudor, ‘The Cult of St Cuthbert in the Twelfth Century: The Evidence of Reginald of Durham’, in Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe, St Cuthbert, 453–54, 460.

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terms ‘dotality’, the female saint’s ‘capacity to be given and to give’ as a way of understanding her circulation among men and institutions.89 Female saints in post-Conquest hagiography, Wogan-Browne argues, are both objects of exchange that confirm male relationships and active participants in this spiritual economy, gifting themselves to Christ while granting spiritual favors and thaumaturgical virtus to their devotees in a system of reciprocal obligations.90 This concept is particularly useful for understanding the roles female saints play in institutional identities,91 and I want to think about these saints’ dotality in this context. All three exercise their agency by founding religious institutions and protecting their devotees; each also becomes an object of value and exchange as her body becomes a commodified symbol of virtue, lineage, and communal integrity. As both dotal agents and dotal objects, these saints can transmit through their bodies the holiness and authority that accrue to them via lineage and sanctity, and their bodies can be appropriated by (often male) institutions to demonstrate the institution’s ancient integrity. Despite basic similarities, these virginal saints manifest their dotal qualities differently. Werburgh, as we will see in Chapter 3, is primarily a dotal object, a founding figure whose cultural capital is embodied in and transferable through her incorrupt corpse. And while Audrey’s corporeal integrity functioned dotally for the Ely monks who possessed her relics, enabling them to claim rights and land across time, her vernacular lives subsume that dotality into her role as holy progenetrix, as I discuss in Chapter 2. Werburgh and Audrey’s corpses, no longer animated by their souls, are primarily objects to be acted upon by their devotees and persecutors (violated, preserved, translated, enshrined). Edith’s incorruption, on the other hand, perpetuates her dotal agency after her death, her fully enfleshed praesentia materially intervening in the tempus. Her corpse therefore not only represents institutional integrity (also true of Werburgh and Audrey) but also acts to preserve it. Goscelin’s miracula show Edith appearing spectrally, in the manner of most saints, to her devotees. The Wilton poet, however, has transposed those apparitions into bodily appearances, conflating her spiritual and corporeal presence to invest her tempus-bound corpse with an unnatural agency. When coupled with the poem’s heightened chronology and historical awareness, Edith becomes a corporeal metaphor for the way a community’s past might shape its future. Edith’s preternaturally active corpse perpetuates Wilton’s integrity most explicitly in two miracles that occur during the translation ceremonies. Like analogous corpse protection miracles in the Liber Eliensis – whenever impious Danes or irreverent churchmen attempt to penetrate Etheldreda’s tomb to examine her undecayed body, she stymies their attempts92 – these miracles assimilate Edith’s wholeness and Wilton’s autonomy. But whereas Etheldreda exercises her dotal 89 90 91 92

Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, 57. Ibid., 75–77, 80–86. Ibid., 59–66. LE, 1.41, 43, 49; 2.144 (pp. 55–58, 60–61, 228–30). See further Chapter 2, p. 66.

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protection of corpse and community from the aevum, raining vengeance miracles down upon her attackers, Edith does so from within the tempus, her lively corpse protecting itself. Her body is directly menaced, as first a monk of Glastonbury and then one of Wilton’s residents attempt to acquire pieces of Edith’s clothing. During the translation, the poet relates, a Glastonbury monk attempted to cut Edith’s girdle. His knife, however, touched her breastbone and she bled as þawe hit hade come from a lyvyng monn þat hadde be lette blode in a quyke veyne. (2615–16)

Edith’s clothing and the church floor run with blood until the monk repents, the blood miraculously vanishes, and Edith is found clean and whole (2631–38). In this miracle, expanded only slightly from Goscelin’s telling,93 the blood is both accusation against the invasive monk and an enactment of Edith’s lifelike wholeness (the blood runs as though from ‘a lyvyng monn’ and ‘a quyke veyne’), even as her inviolability despite the attack – a point the poet adds to Goscelin’s narrative – is dependent on her blood’s disappearance. This miracle resonates with an earlier miracle in the Wilton Chronicle. During her lifetime, Edith’s tutor Benno helped her and Wulfthryth obtain a fragment of a nail of the Passion. Archbishop Æthelwold, learning of Wilton’s new relic, requested part of it; Edith and her mother were dismayed but unable to refuse. Once a priest had filed the nail asunder, however, it bled fast and ȝerne … … leke as God was on þe cresse. (1415–16)

After all prayed through the night, they returned to the chapel to find the nail perfectly intact and the blood gone (1434–38). Goscelin also relates the miracle of the nail, but the nail does not bleed; the fragments of iron were in the morning reunified.94 In both versions, the miracle proclaims Wilton’s autonomy against the interfering archbishop, who acknowledges that divine will has confirmed these women’s claim to the relic. What role, then, does the Chronicle’s blood play? On one level, elevating the nail miracle to a blood miracle partakes of the late medieval fascination with Christ’s blood as divine presence, symbol of sacrifice, and promise of salvation.95 The nail becomes the Real Presence of Christ at Wilton, promising access to divine presence unmediated by priestly control. The chronicler does not explicitly state that the nail was still at Wilton in his day, but the late medieval community’s exceptional celebration of the feasts of the cross makes it likely.96 Blood’s accusatory aspect also intensifies the nail’s desecration and, by extension, the women’s devotion for it; the priest with the file typologically echoes the crucifying Jews, and Æthelwold’s misplaced desires become downright sacrilegious. 93 94 95 96

TransEd, 2. VEd, 14. Bynum, Wonderful Blood; see esp. 180–85 on blood as accusation. Benoît-Castelli, ‘Un Processionnal’, 314–15.

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The bleeding nail, however, also foreshadows Edith’s bleeding corpse and resonates with her integrity. Just as the nail is divided against the holy women’s desires, so does the Glastonbury monk’s attack on Edith’s corpse threaten the community’s control over its patron saint; just as the bleeding nail proclaims divine presence, so does Edith’s bleeding corpse proclaim her lifelike incorruption; and, just as the reunification of the nail fragments proclaims Wilton as impervious to episcopal interference, so does the corpse’s restored integrity proclaim the nunnery’s resistance to outside interference. Moreover, both miracles insist upon the corporeal nature of accusation and intervention, the bleeding corpse and nail accusing their violators in a shockingly material fashion. However, where the bleeding nail divinely approves the women’s devout desires, Edith’s bodily self-preservation manifests her dotal agency: her continued ability to act and so protect the corporate body. These paired blood miracles clearly emphasize Edith’s somatic protection of Wilton’s institutional body. Configuring the nunnery’s identity through Edith’s corpse, the poet also imagines Edith guiding her nuns’ actions; however, he ultimately subordinates those nuns’ individual bodies to the corporate body. In the second translation miracle, the lady Elbright starts to remove Edith’s headpiece, but before she can, þat blessud virgyn sodenlyche heve up here hedde, Ryȝt as þaw [s]he hadde ben alyve þere þo, and schewede þat lady wyth hurre chere also þat hit nas not þe wyll of God, ny for hurre hele, þat [s]he wolde so prowdelyche þedere so go or ony pece of hurre blessud clothus to stele. (2653–58)97

As in the previous miracle, Elbright’s attempts to cut away her clothing challenge Edith’s corporeal integrity. Edith’s corpse again enacts its own wholeness by intervening to prevent the sartorial mutilation, this time by lifting its head and glaring at the nun. Significantly, here its agency is aimed not at retribution but at productive spiritual change: the theft was not for Elbright’s ‘hele’, and she is so frightened that she repents and becomes ‘a parfyt lever’ (2671). Edith’s correction of Elbright’s misplaced desires is one of the few moments in the Wilton Chronicle when Edith governs her nuns’ ethical bodies. Although she does model good ‘mixed life’ virtues for the nuns within the narrative and Wilton’s readers outside it, she rarely intervenes directly to guide individual conduct. Rather, the poet typically depicts specific nuns’ problems as evidence of corporate rather than personal ills, conflating the governance of ethical bodies with the good of the corporate body. Throughout the miracula, Edith frequently appears visionarily to one nun with a message for another in order to reconfigure Wilton’s

97

Goscelin refers to Edith’s ‘living head’ (‘uitale caput’) but without the dramatic action of the Middle English retelling: TransEd, 2; Wilmart, Légende, 271; Wright and Loncar, Goscelin’s Legend, 72.

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community. In these apparitions, Edith manifests not as a heavenly being, but as her entombed, intact corpse. The Wilton poet adds this detail to her dossier, as becomes clear by comparing the language of the Chronicle’s miracles to Goscelin’s. In the Chronicle, Edith appears, in vision or in body, twenty times after her death; fifteen have counterparts in Goscelin’s vita and translatio narratives, and in almost every instance the poet makes Edith’s praesentia materially immediate. Goscelin’s language places Edith firmly within the iconic chronotope, using heavenly imagery and similes to imagine her static persistence within the divine duration, even when she appears to waking Wilton nuns. The Wilton poet, on the other hand, replaces Goscelin’s heavenly metaphors with mundane ones to imagine Edith as persisting within the monastic chronotope, interacting with the living in a quotidian fashion – even when she appears in dreams. In the miracles where Edith corrects her nuns’ faults, this re-metaphorization and resulting chronotopic shift also conflate the nuns’ individual bodies with a corporation constituted through Edith’s corpse. A few examples will illustrate this change. When Edith appears to both the laywoman Ælfhild and the nun Ælfgifu to elect Ælfgifu as the next abbess, Goscelin states that Ælfhild receives a vision of ‘heavenly Edith descending the stairs from the bridal chamber of her dormition to the tomb of her mother’;98 the Chronicle, on the other hand, imagines Edith to Come doune from hurre shryne a ryȝt gode pase. And ryȝt to hurre moder tombe [s]he hede. (4607–8)

After giving Ælfgifu her own headdress and ring, Edith returns ‘Into hurre shryne’ (4631). Edith’s somatic and tomb-centered election ensures Wilton’s corporate wellbeing (Ælfgifu becomes one of Wilton’s most effective abbesses), while the two women’s shared vision makes the election communal. Similarly, late in the miracula the Wilton nuns, plagued with disease, blame Edith for abandoning them, so Edith visits ‘by vision, certeyn laydes’ to upbraid the convent (4797). In Goscelin’s account, she is a ‘stellar virgin’ who speaks to them ‘in a vision as if physically present’;99 in the Chronicle, however, by vision [s]he was as conversaunte among hem, y wys, Ryȝt a lyve as þaw [s]he hadde among hem ȝet be. (4842–43)

Again, institutional correction is shared, corporate, and corporeally realized. And when Algide, engaged fruitlessly in a legal battle, questions Edith’s goodness, another nun, Tole, receives a dream. Looking into Edith’s shrine, Tole sees that Edith ‘leyche þere all holl’ (4881), and Edith presents her incorrupt corpse as evidence of her power, Algide’s complaints notwithstanding:

98

‘etheream Editham de thalamo dormitionis sue ad sepulcrum genitricis a gradibus descendentem.’ TransEd, 20; Wilmart, Légende, 295; Wright and Loncar, Goscelin’s Legend, 88. 99 ‘per uisum ac si corporaliter siderea uirgo’. TransEd, 21; Wilmart, Légende, 298; Wright and Loncar, Goscelin’s Legend, 90.

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Lowe, see here my hondone and my fete also, how holle and sounde my body ys, and how myȝty and how quyke ycham nowe also, For of body ny of leme no corrupcyon þer nys. … And what ever y bydde of God lowde or styll, Trewelyche of hym anone hit have y may. (4886–89, 4892–93)

In each miracle, Edith appears bodily to intervene for the corporate body; resolving all conventual conundrums via Edith’s corporealized praesentia, the poet privileges the institutional body over the individual bodies of Wilton’s nuns. Even in the earlier translation miracle, Elbright goes to heaven after she attempts to divide Edith’s miraculously whole clothing, but only because she was confronted by Edith’s corpse, the symbol of Wilton’s corporate identity. The Wilton poet figures the institutional body in Edith’s somatic praesentia by co-locating the monastic and iconic chronotopes. Fusing the static persistence of the iconic chronotope with descriptive language fixing Edith within the monastic realm, the Wilton poet imbues Edith’s corpse with the stability and power of her supratemporal virtus; as the poet says at the very beginning of the translation episode, God nolde let hurre body no lengur be hedde, seyth herre soule was in so joyfull a place. (2389–90)

Such chronotopic interdependence is common in monastic hagiography, at work (for example) in Etheldreda’s corpse protection miracles. It is not, however, typically taken to the extremes of Edith’s agentive cadaver, for no other English hagiographer imagines any other saint’s virtus to animate his or her corpse as dramatically as the Wilton poet does. However, this chronotopic fusion is not altogether smooth. Edith is not present bodily in these visions, no matter the corporeality of the poet’s language; the poet’s frequent use of similes reminds the reader that Edith actually resides in heaven, not in her corpse. The poet’s construction of Wilton’s identity through Edith’s embodied governance only occurs through dreams, revealing its contingency. Moreover, Edith’s body is not undecayed, however consistently the poet asserts it. Edith’s reputation as a partial incorrupt, muted and often ignored in the Wilton Chronicle, is not fully excised from the poem’s narrative. Resurfacing at awkward junctures, that prior reputation threatens to destabilize both the poet’s construction of Wilton’s identity and his revisionary historiography. In Edith’s hagiographic tradition, Edith’s corpse is half decayed. Goscelin claims that, thirteen years after her death, Edith had appeared in a vision to Archbishop Dunstan and told him to elevate her remains. Dunstan will know this is a true vision, she says, because except for the organs of the body which I misused in girlish light-mindedness, that is my eyes, my hands, and my feet, you will find the rest of my body both 51

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unharmed and incorrupt. You will also see that the thumb of my right hand, with which I continually used to make the sign of the cross upon myself, is undamaged, so that the kindness of the Lord may be seen in the part which is preserved, and his fatherly chastisement in the part which is consumed.100

Goscelin describes Edith’s body as being decayed in the face and below the elbows and knees, but whole in the torso and thumb. William of Malmesbury follows suit but emphasizes her chastity as a reason for her partial preservation: Edith tells Dunstan that ‘my belly was never pricked by any lust, and so, quite properly, it is not affected at all by decay. For I was free from gluttony and from any carnal connection.’101 In her vitae, Edith’s incorruption is partial and ethically inflected: her youthful indiscretions are marked on her body, while her torso’s preservation witnesses to her virtuous chastity and temperance. Goscelin’s account, in particular, ethically segregates the chronotopes that the Wilton poet tries to conflate: after death, Edith is strictly a ‘stellar virgin’, residing on a different plane from her time-, sin-, and decay-bound body. The Wilton poet strives to forget this tradition of fragmentation, but Edith’s decomposition reveals the ultimate impossibility of the poet’s attempted chronotopic fusion. The Wilton poet cannot simply ignore Goscelin’s account – hagiography is too conservative, and the weight of tradition too heavy. Instead, he attempts to undermine the impact of that tradition by piling up standard descriptors of incorruption to assert her wholeness. The poet claims repeatedly she had lain in her tomb ‘as saffe, as hole, as [s]he upone urthe ȝede’ (2385), and at nine different points he states either that her corpse ‘lyth þere as þowe leydyst hit styll’ (2458) or that it appeared ‘Ryȝt as alyve hit was goynge here’ (2560).102 Nevertheless, he must eventually acknowledge her partial decay. For instance, when Edith appears to Dunstan, urging him to elevate her remains, she promises (as in the Translatio Edithae) her partially incorrupt corpse as proof of her words’ truth: ȝe shull fynd my body þere, y wys, as hole lygyng as ever alive ȝe hit seye, þe organys of þe lemys ouȝt take, þe whyche childlych y usede when y was chylde, as felyng and seyȝt ys from hem take From þe fyngers wyth þe whyche y fedde bestes wylde. Bot all þe remanent of my body, as hole hit ys, 100 ‘quod scilicet preter officia membrorum quibus in puellari leuitate abusa sum, idest oculorum, manuum, pedum, inuenies reliqum corpus meum sicut illibatum, ita incorruptum. Pollicem quoque dextere manus quo mihi assidue sancte crucis impresseram signum uidebis nihilominus illesum, ut appareat benignitas Domini in parte seruata et paterna castigatio in parte absumta.’ TransEd, 1; Wilmart, Légende, 266; Wright and Loncar, Goscelin’s Legend, 69. 101 ‘uentrem nulla corrumpi iuste putredine, qui nulla umquam aculeatus sit libidine; immunem se fuisse crapulae et carnalis copulae.’ GPA, 2.87.6 (pp. 298–99). John of Tynemouth and texts that derive from his Sanctilogium combine these traditions; see NLA, 2.313/37–314/7; KNL, 82/25–30; Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 2604, fol. 73v. 102 Compare WC, 2385, 2466, 2474, 2476, 2480, 2566, 2589.

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Excepte þe organys of þe lemys þe whyche governede my wittes five, and as clene wyth ouȝt ony corrupcione hit is, as hit was whenne yche was on urthe alyve. (2465–74)

She continues, describing her thumb as ‘hole in fel and flesshe and blode’ and as ‘freysshe’ as ‘hit was in my lyff day’ (2476, 2479, 2480). By embedding his description of Edith’s fragmented, childishly used limbs within a larger discourse of bodily wholeness, and by avoiding Goscelin’s graphic claim that her limbs were ‘consumed’,103 the poet glosses over Edith’s decay as being merely the absence (‘ouȝt take’) of wholeness. Ultimately, the Wilton poet’s historiographic project rests upon this attempt to out-shout descriptions of corruption with assertions of wholeness. Insofar as the reader willingly forgets, later in the poem, that Edith is not perfectly incorrupt – that the cadaver confronting Cnut cannot be as intact as the poem depicts, that the institutional body is figured by a fragmented saintly body – this rhetorical denial of her decay is successful. Yet that rotting corpse does not disappear. Edith’s decay becomes the irrepressible shard that troubles the Wilton poet’s project, the reminder of the incommensurate distance between the timeless saint and her timebound, destruction-prone community. It casts doubt on the (ethical, institutional, individual) integrity of the Wilton community – a problem that Bradshaw also encounters in his Werburge, but that he addresses in a different fashion. Edith’s corporeal deterioration reflects the nuns’ grumbling, and Elbright’s attempts to cut away Edith’s clothing suggest that Wilton cannot be unified around Edith’s corpse. Edith’s visionary appearances asserting her entombed wholeness thus reaffirm defects in the poet’s historiographic project as much as they correct flaws in the nuns’ corporate body. This irrepressible decay reminds the reader that the poet’s history writing is only ever an expression of desire. At the same time, his insistence on Edith’s bodily perfection reveals the historiographic power of the incorrupt virginal body, not only to represent Wilton’s corporate integrity, but also to actualize Edith’s dotal agency beyond the grave. By locating Edith’s praesentia and virtus within the monastic chronotope, the poet can imagine Edith to exercise agency within the mundane political world much as she had during life, perpetuating his women’s history through embodied female action. As I argue in Chapter 3, Bradshaw ensures that Werburgh’s royal heritage inheres in her flesh so that her incorrupt corpse can make her father’s Mercian authority available transtemporally. The Wilton poet similarly imagines Edith’s royal status to obtain posthumously so that she can intervene in affairs of state. Her nobility and rhetorically reconstituted, active flesh converge in Edith’s dealings with Cnut, the Chronicle’s most pronounced instance of women’s history: she exercises agency not only over her person and her institution, but over the kingdom’s welfare.

103

‘absumpta’. TransEd, 1; Wilmart, Légende, 266.

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Converting Cnut: Revisionist History from the Convent The poet’s revisionist history is most evident in the Edith–Cnut episode, where he re-emplots the received narrative of Cnut’s reign to make Edith’s dotal agency, exercised through her textually re-enfleshed corpse, central to Cnut’s conversion and thence to the monarchy’s renovation after the depredations of Æthelred and Sweyn. Edith’s incorrupt body is therefore central to her political interventions after her death, keeping Edgar’s line present (if not alive per se) during the time when, according to the chronicle tradition, the rightful line was excluded from the throne. Her ultimate support of Cnut’s reign enacts both heavenly and political approval of the once pagan king: as the last active child of Edgar, Edith and her conversion of Cnut are central to his political legitimacy. Moreover, as in Henry V’s reburial of Richard  II, Cnut’s translation of Edith into a new shrine enables the licit transfer of power from the Wessex line, as embodied in Edith’s remains, to the Danish ruler. Cnut had an ambivalent reputation in later medieval chronicles, an ambivalence useful for the Wilton poet’s revisionism. On the one hand, as an Anglo-Danish ruler with no blood ties to the Wessex line, Cnut was easily cast as a foreign usurper.104 Robert of Gloucester suggests as much when he laments England being ‘out of kunde’ after Edmund Ironside’s death,105 and William of Malmesbury asserted that Cnut disliked England’s saints ‘because of the enmity between the two races’.106 Moreover, Cnut’s acquisition of the throne was suspect. Although his joint rule with Edmund Ironside is often portrayed as a return to peace after the upheavals of Æthelred and Sweyn, Cnut only gains sole rule after the traitor Eadric (according to the most common medieval account) disembowels Edmund from within a privy. The fact that Cnut reigns despite the existence of Edmund’s children, who are supposed to be killed on the Continent but are spared by the Swedish and Hungarian kings, also enables a narrative of usurpation. Such is hinted by William of Malmesbury, who claims that ‘There was no justice in his succession to the throne’,107 and by Robert Mannyng, who states that Cnut was ‘kyng þorgh conquest & desceit’.108 On the other hand, Cnut was fondly remembered as a patron of monasteries, a supporter of saints, and a powerful king who humbled himself before God. This reputation was supported by both authentic

104 For the vernacular chronicles’ portrayal of the Danish invasions, including Cnut’s reign, see Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘Havelok and the History of the Nation’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D.  S. Brewer, 1994), 129–30. On Cnut’s attempts to shape his reputation, see Marafioti, The King’s Body, 191–229; on his reputation more generally, see Chris Dennis, ‘Image-Making for the Conquerors of England: Cnut and William I’, in Aspects of Power and Authority in the Middle Ages, ed. Brenda Bolton and Christine Meek (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). 105 Robert of Gloucester, Chronicle, 6465. 106 ‘pro gentilitiis inimicitiis’. GPA, 2.87.7 (pp. 298–99). 107 ‘iniuste quidem regnum ingressus’. GRA, 181.1 (pp. 320–21). 108 Mannyng, Chronicle, 2.1213.

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and dubious charters109 and by William of Malmesbury’s influential characterization of Cnut as a noble, pious king.110 The vernacular chronicles also laud Cnut’s religious patronage more generally. The Brut praises him as a supporter of monasteries, and Robert of Gloucester claims that he ‘muche louede holi chirche & susteinede al so’.111 Many chroniclers negotiated these tensions by portraying Cnut as a treacherous usurper who, as a result of a vivid conversion moment, transformed into a pious ruler and strong monastic patron. In this narrative, Cnut’s spiritual awakening allowed for England’s infrastructural and religious healing in the wake of Æthelred and Sweyn’s mismanagement. Chroniclers achieved this vision of history by conjoining two popular vignettes to emplot a conversion narrative: Cnut’s attempt to exert royal power over the sea, and his humble crowning of a crucifix. The standard narrative runs thus: Cnut, sitting on the sea shore, proudly commands the rising tide not to wet his royal robes. When the sea disobeys the order, Cnut realizes the limitations of his kingly power when compared to divine authority and promptly places his crown upon a nearby crucifix. This story, presented first by Henry of Huntingdon,112 depicts Cnut’s shift from royal arrogance to humility, and other chroniclers heighten the legend’s conversion potential. In the Brut, for example, Cnut’s humbling by the sea leads not to his crowning of the crucifix but to a repentant pilgrimage to Rome, ‘my Wickednesse forto punisshe, and me to amende’; after returning from Rome, Cnut ‘bicome a gode man and an holy’ and transforms into a generous founder of monasteries.113 Robert of Gloucester doubles the conversion structure. His Cnut originally participates in the treasonous intrigues of Æthelred’s and Edmund Ironside’s reigns but, despite his belief that ‘al þe world ne miȝte aȝen is poer be’, when he becomes sole ruler of England he ‘bigan is herte in bocsomnesse amende’ and becomes a great patron of the church.114 Toward the end of Cnut’s reign, Robert gives the story of the sea and the crowned crucifix, portraying this event as a second conversion experience: Suiþe god mon he bi com & aforcede him ynou & bihet god euereft afterward to bileue wou & god & holi chirche to louie mid al is miȝte & to make gode lawes & to sosteine ech riȝte.115

This sequencing is key for England’s spiritual regeneration, because Cnut’s ­conversion also purifies English rule, as exemplified by his treatment of Ælfheah. 109 M.  K. Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in England in the Early Eleventh Century (London: Longman, 1993), 127–28, 150–56; Antonia Gransden, ‘The Legends and Traditions Concerning the Origins of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, English Historical Review 100.394 (1985): 1–24, at 10–13. 110 GRA, 181–86 (pp. 320–34). 111 Brut, 124/13–17; Robert of Gloucester, Chronicle, 6507. 112 Henry, HA 6.17 (pp. 366–68) and n. 95. See also Lawson, Cnut, 136–37. 113 Brut, 124/5–6, 11–12. 114 Robert of Gloucester, Chronicle, 6503, 6504. 115 Ibid., 6602–5.

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In most chronicles, Archbishop Ælfheah is murdered and his corpse mistreated by Cnut’s pagan father, Sweyn, but when Cnut comes to the throne he piously translates and reveres Ælfheah’s body.116 Cnut’s new-found piety redirects England’s spiritual trajectory back onto the productive path it had left at Dunstan’s death and lost during the depredations of the Danes. Chroniclers use this conversion plot to present a national stabilization of rule and religious renewal, imagining Cnut’s reign as a period of restoration, peace, and spiritual productivity. The Wilton poet writes within and against this historiographic tradition. The Chronicle exploits Cnut’s double reputation and emplots a similar narrative of conversion and national renewal, but with a twist: in the Chronicle he repents when confronted, not with natural and divine inexorability in the form of the rising sea, but with the specter of the defunct yet still legitimate Wessex line as reanimated in Edith’s preternaturally active corpse. Suspending time and embodying her blood heritage, Edith’s intact body presents a superabundance of legitimate royal authority, able to abash the usurper and justify his rule through its eventual recognition of Cnut’s fitness to reign. If the Chronicle indeed depicts Wilton’s ability to authorize English kingship, as Wogan-Browne proposes,117 that project is pointedly pursued in the extended Cnut episode, which envisions the nun as generating England’s royal renovation.118 The Wilton poet introduces Cnut’s reign by establishing England as politically and spiritually destitute under Æthelred and Edmund Ironside. Æthelred, as we saw earlier, had governed ‘in travell, in sorwe, and in gret wo’ (3248); his rule suffered because of his stepmother’s murder of Edward the Martyr; and Dunstan’s death ended any stability in his reign (3243–58). Edmund Ironside’s short tenure was little better, plagued by Cnut’s claims to the throne. Ignoring the chronicle tradition that Edmund and Cnut had come to brotherly terms and co-reigned peacefully,119 the poet asserts that ever bytweyne hem was hate and loth tyl þe tyme þat he [Edmund] was þus deydde. (3265–66)

Significantly, the poet makes no mention of Sweyn’s attacks during Æthelred’s rule, allowing him to portray Cnut alone as the pagan defiler of English Christendom: Bot Knowde was ȝet no trewe cristen mon, Ny levede no thyng on criston lawe. And þe seyntes of Englonde, he hated ychone Ny set by non of hem an hawe. (3275–78) 116 117 118

Ibid., 6516–21; Castleford’s Chronicle, 30474–543, 30926–35; Fabyan, New Chronicles, 217. Wogan-Browne, ‘Outdoing’, 397. See Marafioti, The King’s Body, 213, 218–22 for a complementary reading of this episode in eleventh-century English history. 119 See, inter alia, Brut, 119/17–19; Robert of Gloucester, Chronicle, 6312–25; Castleford’s Chronicle, 30672–78; Hardyng, Chronicle, 220.

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This impious pagan Cnut departs sharply from the chronicle tradition’s more ambivalent depiction of his early reign, for he embodies all the vices of the ‘ravaging Dane’ trope and threatens England’s saints and religious heritage. The poet uses this characterization to segue into William of Malmesbury’s story about how an oafish Cnut, while feasting at Wilton, cast aspersions on Edith’s sanctity.120 Cnut, the poet tells us, was holding his Whitsunday court in Wilton but persistently denigrated Edith, refusing to believe that a daughter of a philanderer like King Edgar could be holy. The doubting king is taken to Edith’s tomb to ‘se how hole hurre body þere ȝet leythe’ (3358), but even the sight of Edith’s intact corpse is insufficient to persuade him. Cnut began to ‘lawe hurre to scorne’ (3378), at which þat mayde rerede up hurre body every whytte, and gederede to gedere hurre lymnys þo ȝeke, and made a sygne, as þaw [s]he wold þe kyng have smytte wyth hurre fust under his cheke. (3379–82)121

Cnut, bodily threatened by this revenant saint, becomes ‘assmayhydde’ and swoons: ‘Was he never so sore agast þat tyme byfore’ (3384, 3386). This fear generates repentance in the king, who tells the archbishop that ychull do herre worshippe ever whyle y leve and trewelyche ychull ever byleve in Gode, … by cause of þis holy virgyn þat here now leythe. (3394–98)

As a result of this experience, Cnut becomes Edith’s greatest patron: he gives gold and gems on the church altar, he comes on pilgrimage repeatedly, and he generally ‘worshepude hurre name in every place’ (3404). This episode integrates the two strands I have been discussing: women’s history and Edith’s textually contrived incorruption. The Chronicle extends its women’s history of Wessex by re-emplotting Cnut’s conversion around Edith. As occurs earlier when the Chronicle portrays Edith as a viable monarch, Edith is imagined as able to affect the trajectory of English history. Her conversion of Cnut also resolves the problems that arose from Æthelred’s reign, problems that, in the Chronicle’s construction of royal history, could be laid at Edith’s doorstep: the converted Cnut undoes the damage caused by the preceding wars (3629–33), and Edith’s intervention returns England to the spiritual rule of the Chronicle’s 120 GPA, 2.87.7–9 (pp. 298–300). The story is also preserved in Polychronicon 6.9 (RS 6.476). Although the poet knew Trevisa’s translation of the Polychronicon (see above, n. 72), this passage shares more affinities with William’s text than with Trevisa’s. 121 William similarly states that ‘Eadgyth was seen to emerge as far as the waist, though her face was veiled, and to launch herself at the contumacious king’ (‘defuncta, oppanso ante fatiem uelo, cingulotenus assurgere, et in contumacem regem impetum facere uisa’). GPA, 2.87.8 (pp. 298–9). This authority may have shaped the poet’s conception of Edith’s active corpse.

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opening pages. Moreover, the poet insists that Edith’s corporealized agency drives this change. Cnut’s disbelief focuses on Edith’s bodily integrity, and belief in her incorruption becomes a point of faith that will define Cnut’s spirituality. Yet her incorruption on its own does not persuade Cnut of her holiness and his depravity, for the king sees ‘how hole [s]he þer leyȝe’ but laughs scornfully anyway (3377). Only Edith’s embodied intervention – her corpse must sit up and threaten to strike Cnut – causes him to convert and so return English rule to a holy path. Because Edith is the last active representative of the Wessex line, the Cnut– Edith confrontation also enacts an encounter between illicit and rightful kingship, for Edith perpetuates Wessex rulership. When Cnut mocks Edith, he does so not because she is a nun, or a woman, or a saint, but because she is Edgar’s daughter: ȝe, Syre Archebysshop, hold þu þy clappe. For y ȝeve no byleve þerto. Kyng Edgares douȝter, yche wene [s]he was, y kete bot upon a wenche. How shulde [s]he ever have suche a grase, whose wolde hym self þis well by thenche? (3349–54)

Cnut’s invocation of her bodily generation from Edgar reminds the reader of her nobility, which the Wilton poet has emphasized throughout the poem. As Barbara Yorke has shown, Goscelin portrays Edith as Edgar’s legitimate daughter, and her rich clothing, continental tutors, and personal menagerie all highlight her royal status;122 the Wilton poet follows Goscelin’s lead. Although the episode describing her birth from Wulfthryth and Edgar is now lost, the passage immediately following that missing quire emphasizes her nobility of bearing and that ‘[s] he was worthy to bene a quene’ (1074). That nobility stems directly from her position as Edgar’s daughter, as demonstrated by the episode in which the ealdormen offer her the crown. Moreover, her royal heritage obtains in her flesh. Although the Wilton poet is not as explicit as Bradshaw when he presents Werburgh’s Mercian heritage as inhering in her body, the Wilton writer nonetheless assumes that Edith also enjoys her nobility corporeally. Cnut’s derogation of Edith suggests as much; his crass claim that Edgar ‘kete’ Edith ‘bot upon a wenche’ (3352) might be idiomatically rendered ‘sired her upon a strumpet’. ‘Ketenen’ is the verb used of animal propagation,123 and the poet’s decision to place that rude term in Cnut’s mouth draws attention to the physicality of Edith’s descent. This assumption is also seen when Edith appears to Dunstan to ordain her translation. Explaining the reasons for her partial decay, Edith states that this corruption was ‘more for my fader gulte’ than for her own faults (2483). Edith’s flesh is a continuation of Edgar’s, such that the sins of the father can be visited upon the daughter’s body. Her corpse thereby both perpetuates and (in the Chronicle) purifies the Wessex line: when 122 123

Yorke, ‘Legitimacy’, 104–7. MED, s.v. ‘ketenen’.

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the signs of Edgar’s sin, her decay, are textually erased from her corpse by the poet’s insistence on her incorruption, his sin is tangibly erased from the material artifact that is Edith’s body. Edith’s rhetorically re-membered corpse thereby acts as a repository for a cleansed and idealized form of Wessex royal authority, embodying it in a glorified, sempiternal, and surprisingly mobile form long beyond the death of Edgar’s last living child. So when Edith’s cadaver confronts Cnut, the Chronicle stages not only a meeting between holy virgin and pagan king, but also a clash between rightful Wessex rule and unjust interloper. When Cnut dismisses Edith’s sanctity, asking ‘How shulde [s]he ever have suche a grase’ as sanctity and incorruption (3353), he assumes an ethical similarity between father and daughter, one he thinks should deny Edith any holy ‘grase’.124 The form of Cnut’s objection – as Edgar’s daughter, Edith perpetuates his reputation – actually underscores the way Edith represents Wessex legitimacy in this scene, while the erroneous substance of Cnut’s objection – refusal to acknowledge Edith’s holy grace – highlights how far the Dane has fallen from the poem’s opening ideals of holy kingship. Thus, when Edith’s corpse rises up to strike Cnut, he is confronted not only by her embodied virtus but also by the specter of the purified Wessex line, a line that Cnut himself, the chronicle tradition makes clear, had extirpated from England. And by converting and receiving Edith’s approval, Cnut is also legitimized by the Wessex line. Rightful rule, the Chronicle implies, need not be a product of blood; it can be ensured through proper spiritual orientation – that is, through respect for Wilton’s saint. Had the Chronicle indeed been written with one eye on the Lancastrian situation, its message must have been welcome to a king already experimenting with corporeal translation and sponsoring female religious communities as ways of legitimizing his claim to the throne.125 Two subsequent passages, both derived from Goscelin’s miracula,126 demonstrate how Edith’s intervention in Cnut’s reign ensures his holy governance. In the first episode, the Wilton poet adapts Cnut’s conversion stories to highlight his dependence on Edith’s patronage. Cnut, coming home from a military campaign in Scandinavia, finds his ship in a tempest and his sailors unable to cope. In response, Cnut comandede þe wat and þe wynde to have rest. Bot of his commanndyng þey ȝeve ryȝt nouȝt, Ny þey abeyȝedone hem no thyng to þe kynges hest. (3448–50)

124 Glastonbury did claim sanctity and even incorruption for Edgar: William of Malmesbury, The Early History of Glastonbury: An Edition, Translation, and Study of William of Malmesbury’s De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie, ed. and trans. John Scott (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1981), 134; Keynes, ‘Edgar, Rex admirabilis’, 57. However, his reputation for womanizing was more widespread: Yorke, ‘Women in Edgar’s Life’, 155–57. 125 Warren, Spiritual Economies, 111–24. 126 TransEd, 12–13.

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This echo of his famous confrontation with the sea is reinforced by Cnut’s conclusion, when the tempest does not cease, that there is no benefit in being king when þis tempest obeyeth hym nomore me to, Shipmon, þen hit dothe to þe. (3453–54)

Instead of acknowledging divine authority over the sea and his realm, however, the Chronicle’s Cnut turns to Edith: ‘Bot where art þow now, þu blessed mayde Seynt Ede?’ (3455). Edith appears to calm the storm (3460–75), her intervention foregrounding her ability to aid the kingless kingdom’s weal. This mutually beneficial relationship is complicated in the final episode: when Cnut builds Edith a new shrine, royal authority is shown to be dependent on saintly approval. Cnut’s decision to honor Edith’s body with ‘a shrene of sylver and golde full feyne’ (3496) is a complex symbolic act. It benefits Edith and Wilton by magnifying her public glory, enacts Cnut’s new-found piety, and allows Cnut to exercise authority over Edith. In the process of re-enshrinement, her corpse becomes a dotal object, an item of value to be gilded, confined, and transferred at the king’s behest. Yet Edith does not remain objectified by the devout king’s authority, for she must ratify her new enclosure. During the translation scene, the shrine is found to be too short, and Edith’s corpse will not fit: Cnut’s royal prerogative, expressed through the shrine, is incommensurate with Edith’s fleshly perfection. Instead of rejecting this sub-par royal gift, Edith graciously bends her legs to squeeze into the space: Bot þis blessud mayde clewȝthe up herre legges herre to, and dressud hurre body wyth inne þat shrene full honestly.

(3530–31)

As in furta sacra stories of saints who cannot be translated against their will, Edith is an active force in her own translation, in this case working with royal authority, not coerced by it. The Chronicle’s depiction of royal and saintly cooperation is driven home in an ancillary event: the shrine is too small because the goldsmiths Cnut commissioned had stolen some materials. Edith and Cnut are equally dishonored by this thievery (3516–18), so when the goldsmiths are miraculously frozen with loot in hand, the poet establishes a clear chain of authority that renders Cnut and Edith equals. The goldsmiths, found by the sexton and fearful of Cnut’s anger, ask the sexton to have the nuns intercede for them with Cnut. They do so, and Cnut demonstrates royal mercy by pardoning them. Yet his forgiveness is insufficient to release the goldsmiths; king and nuns must petition Edith before the goldsmiths are allowed to return home (3566–619). Both secular and spiritual authority must forgive the thieves, establishing king and virgin as co-authorities. Moreover, Edith’s absolution of the goldsmiths, like her corpse’s squeezing into the too-small shrine, endorses Cnut’s governance. Just as she must approve Cnut’s flawed shrine for the translation to be complete, so must she pardon the goldsmith’s trespass for the 60

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king’s mercy to be implemented. Cnut’s pious actions, in short, are only efficacious because of Edith’s aid. Within Wilton’s walls, the story of Edith and Cnut’s confrontation was apparently a central narrative, even though it was not included in Goscelin’s miracula. In the Faustina manuscript, this episode is distinguished by its marginal glossing. Although marginalia are commonly found in the opening historical folios, identifying sources or key figures, they are scant in the miracle section, where the glossator simply identifies the beginning of each miracle with ‘miraculum’. On the top of fol. 235v, however, the glossator has written ‘Rx Conutus’ in the margins when Cnut first appears. On fol. 237r, when Edith sits up in her tomb and frightens Cnut, the glossator has written a source name, ‘Cistrensis’ (i.e., Higden’s Polychronicon), in the upper right corner; ‘miraculum’ appears in the margin; and he has drawn a manicule pointing to the relevant line.127 Evidently, the interaction between Cnut and Edith’s Jack-in-the-box corpse was worth being able to find quickly. The story is also pictured in a historiated initial in the richly illuminated c.1250 Wilton Psalter.128 Although nuns and women figure frequently in the psalter, this is the only illumination of Edith, suggesting the importance of this story to the thirteenth-century convent. The gold and red two-line initial opens Psalm 61 [62], ‘Nonne Deo subiecta erit anima mea’ (fol. 76r): Edith is crowned, wearing secular dress but with the same style of veil worn by nuns elsewhere in the manuscript, this hybrid garb signaling her identities as both nun and royal daughter.129 She stands at the right side of the initial, her left hand gesturing at Cnut and her right hand raised, index finger pointing upward. A crowned, royally robed Cnut on the left awkwardly bends double at the waist, his hands touching the ground and his crown grazing Edith’s hem. Although there is no tomb to fix the event certainly as Edith’s confrontation with Cnut, the body postures make the relationship between the figures undeniable: a clearly royal Edith reprimands Cnut, shaking her finger at him, while he prostrates himself before her. Cnut’s lower body remains outside the upright of the N, emphasizing his separation from her; he can only approach her presence penitently. However, Edith’s gesture also suggests her approbation of Cnut. Her single-fingered chastising closely resembles the two-fingered sign of blessing, and the visual homonym enacts a reverse blessing insofar as the confrontation does generate Cnut’s conversion, as represented by his prostrate form. Read, then, as a visual distillation of this event, the initial crystallizes a similar message as the Wilton Chronicle: Edith as chastiser of kings, performing her royal duties long after death by converting Cnut and, the Wilton poet stresses, thereby returning England to a spiritually productive path.

127 There is another manicule on fol. 238r, pointing to the line where Edith, having been called upon by the sea-imperiled Cnut, ‘wayvede þe wedur away wyth hur sleve’ (3474). 128 See above, n. 12. 129 Compare Edith’s clothing here with the traditional Benedictine black habit and veil with white wimple worn by nuns elsewhere in the Psalter’s inhabited initials (e.g. the M on fol. 70r and the D on fol. 77r).

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Throughout this episode, Edith’s interventions in Wessex’s politics are crucial for the renewal, spiritual and political, of the body politic. Writing Edith into English history, the Wilton poet presents her as ensuring the ethical and institutional uprightness of English kingship much as she does within the convent, legitimizing Cnut as king just as she legitimized Ælfgifu as abbess. For readers or auditors within and outside the convent’s walls, the Chronicle imagines both national and conventual identities to derive from Edith’s preternaturally active body. As her roles as royal daughter and virgin saint converge in her incorrupt remains, that corpse functions as symbol of her personal perfections, as metonym for Wilton’s integrity and authority, and as the agent that engenders renewal in the king’s two bodies. Those associations are, of course, predicated on the forgetting of her decay via rhetorical re-enfleshment. Describing Edith as though her body were fully preserved, the poet writes as though the past had unfolded as he details. Edith’s partially decayed but imaginatively reconstituted corpse thereby also figures the poet’s own historiography, his re-creation of a women’s history out of the fragmentary historical and hagiographic traditions at his disposal. Putting flesh on the bones of Wilton’s past requires the poet to assert continuities, devise connections, and even reassemble corpses – a project not without its pitfalls, but one that enabled him to construct a coherent corporate identity for the Wilton nuns. As I have suggested throughout this chapter, and as Wogan-Browne has suggested before me, the Wilton Chronicle speaks a Lancastrian symbolic tongue familiar to many in the first quarter of the century. But the Chronicle functions not to authorize Henry V’s reign; rather, it demonstrates how earlier succession problems had been resolved through Edith’s intervention and support. These homologies are not typological – Henry is no Æthelred or Cnut – but are rather structural, as Edith twice interposes herself to redress wrongs done when royal power is transferred illicitly. The Chronicle hints not only at the cyclicality of dynastic distress, but also at Edith’s utility for correcting England’s political course. Her interment of Edward may parallel Henry’s reburial of Richard, but it could not prevent the depredations of Æthelred’s reign. Only her confrontation with Cnut could restore England’s political and spiritual stability, righting the wrongs caused by her brother’s murder and (the poet must forget) by her own refusal of the crown. Read as a history lesson for the Lancastrians, the Chronicle points to the centrality of Edith’s intercession for restoring the English commonweal. Such edificatory privileging of a female saint participates in Lancastrian symbolic dynamics. Nancy Bradley Warren has shown how, during the first half of the fifteenth century, ‘holy women became sources of symbolic capital fit for kings, playing crucial roles in the process of constructing royal identities’.130 She particularly interprets Henry V’s 1415 foundation of the Brigittine Syon Abbey as appropriating saintly female authority for his regal image, and Wogan-Browne reads the Wilton Chronicle as responding to that royal patronage.131 Interestingly, Edith was 130 131

Warren, Spiritual Economies, 115. Ibid., 118–24; Wogan-Browne, ‘Outdoing’, 396–97.

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deployed by the House of Lancaster in just this way. The Salisbury Breviary (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS lat. 17294), a de luxe illustrated office book commissioned by John, Duke of Bedford, includes the only extant pictorial cycle of Edith’s life.132 As Mary Dockray-Miller explains, the manuscript is designed to bolster John’s image as governor of France, and Edith’s role as holy princess was useful for this project. Repackaging many elements the Wilton chronicler also found productive – Edith’s royal birth and engagement in political affairs – the cycle ‘illustrat[es] the integral relationship between royal genealogy, duty, obedience, and legitimately acquired secular and religious power’.133 Yet the Wilton Chronicle’s Edith sanctions English rulership differently than do Syon Abbey or the Salisbury Breviary. When Henry founds Syon as a ‘gigantic chantry for the House of Lancaster’, he invests in the ethical capital of the order, known widely for its learning, austerities, and piety, and in the ethical probity of the individual nuns praying for Henry’s family.134 When John’s artists craft Edith’s pictorial life, they capitalize on her genealogical connections and royal status more than her role as Wilton nun and patron saint.135 The Chronicle, conversely, proposes the transtemporal perfections of Wilton’s corporate body, manifested in Edith’s cadaver and its deep history of royal patronage underwritten by female devotion, as incorporating the current king into its heritage of holy rulers. Indeed, the Faustina manuscript had begun this task: the Latin list of royal founders appended to the Chronicle includes all the kings of England until Henry V. And if devotion to Edith can legitimize even the pagan, Danish usurper, surely it could legitimize the Lancastrian dynasty. By constructing a past where a woman might change history, the Wilton Chronicle imagines a future where a woman’s community could be useful to the crown.

132 On the Salisbury Breviary, see Abbé V. Leroquais, Les bréviaires Manuscrits de Bibliothèques Publiques de France, vol. 3 (Paris, 1934), 271–348; Eleanor P. Spencer, ‘The Master of the Duke of Bedford: The Salisbury Breviary’, The Burlington Magazine 108.765 (1966): 606–12. On the Edith cycle, see Leroquais, Les bréviaires Manuscrits, 339 (fols. 581v–583r). I discuss pictorial saints’ lives in Chapter 4 below. 133 Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘The St Edith Cycle in the Salisbury Breviary (c. 1460)’, FifteenthCentury Studies 34 (1999): 48–63, at 56; see also 49, 53–54 on its symbolic function for John. She reproduces the miniatures in figures 1–15. 134 A. Jefferies Collins, ed., The Bridgettine Breviary of Syon Abbey (Worcester: Stanbrook Abbey Press, 1969), ii n. 1. 135 In the fifteen scenes, Edith is shown with family members (or family members appear alone) eight times; she appears with her nuns or performing conventual actions only four times.

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Audrey Abroad: Spiritual and Genealogical Filiation in the Middle English Lives of Etheldreda

T

he fifteenth-century poem ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’ witnesses to a different conception of conventual life than does the Wilton Chronicle. The poem’s speaker, Kateryne, is a pious girl who believes she has a vocation, but first her father and then, in a dream vision, Dame Experience convince her that a nunnery cannot offer the religious life she desires. Nunneries are populated by Dame Veyne Glory and Dame Dysobedyent, Kateryne’s dream visit to a nunnery reveals, rather than Dame Charity and Dame Mekenes. The poem’s satire on the ‘governawnce’ (line 311) of nunneries proposes not the institutional body’s defining role, as in the Wilton Chronicle, but rather that the misgovernance of individual nuns’ bodies taints the entire conventual project.1 Yet this satire is reformist rather than vindictive, for Dame Experience acknowledges that ‘sum [nuns] bene devowte, holy, and towarde’ and that they ‘holden the ryght way to blysse’ (316–17). Similarly, Kateryne refuses to becomes a nun unless ‘suche defawtes that I have see’ would ‘amendyd be’ (331–32). Crucial to the poem’s ethical revisionism are examples of devout women the contemporary nun should emulate. Literally central to this host of examples, at least in the poem’s fragmentary state, is Audrey, seventh-century abbess and founder of Ely Abbey, twice-married royal daughter who nevertheless retained her virginity and was found incorrupt sixteen years after her death. Praised extravagantly by Bede and still lauded widely in the fifteenth century, Audrey was England’s protovirgin and an enduring exemplar of female devotion, as in ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’. That poem ends with two stanzas listing continental nuns like Clare of Assisi and English virgins like Frideswide and Edith; Audrey opens the second stanza’s litany of abbesses and nuns: Eormenhild, Seaxburgh, Mildrith, and Wihtburgh. Ethical imitation, this poem suggests, allows one to enter into an extended community of holy women. ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’ thereby exemplifies the two most common uses of Audrey in vernacular hagiography: Audrey as exemplar of proper female spirituality, and Audrey as head of a holy coterie consisting of her sisters and nieces and of other Anglo-Saxon saints, male and female, stretching 1

‘Why I Can’t Be A Nun’, in Six Ecclesiastical Satires, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 427–46. I cite line numbers parenthetically.

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across England. Whereas Edith’s local cult made her a perfect figure for imagining Wilton’s institutional stability, Audrey’s widespread cult and far-reaching kinships enabled institutions outside Ely to borrow her ethical perfections, constructing their communities’ antiquity, ethical probity, and spiritual participation via her extended family tree. Audrey’s exemplary and matriarchal roles allow me to focus this chapter on the interplay of genealogy, ethical bodies, and institutional bodies. Since the early twelfth century, Audrey and her incorrupt corpse had grounded Ely’s monastic identity; by the fifteenth century Audrey’s popularity had extended far beyond the Ely cloister, such that, of her six vernacular lives written between 1150 and 1500, not one emanated from Ely Cathedral.2 Many non-Ely writers focused less on her incorrupt relics than on her holy kinship, reconfiguring her genealogy to write their own communities into it and so claim holy, conversion-era origins. With only two exceptions, Audrey’s vernacular lives appear in manuscripts alongside lives of other early English nuns and abbesses; these included her Ely sisterhood (her holy kin enshrined alongside her at Ely) as well as other saints to whom Audrey was not related. Moreover, other than the short life Bradshaw inserted into his Life of Werburge, these vernacular lives were written for, or read within, nunneries. All focus, as Virginia Blanton discusses, on Audrey as abbess and model for professed female readers.3 This chapter expands upon Blanton’s foundational study of Audrey’s evolving cult by showing how non-Ely vernacular writers used Audrey’s exemplary protovirginity and wide-ranging genealogy to construct both corporate and ethical bodies. I argue that these writers combined the blood and spiritual facets of Audrey’s lineage in creative ways, sometimes to strengthen longitudinal claims within the tempus, sometimes to impose structure on achronic exemplary systems. These genealogical structures not only rooted institutional bodies deep in conversion-era England; they could also enable non-programmatic responses to reformist concerns like those expressed by ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’. Although not all medieval writers knew Audrey’s entire lineage, and although it includes characters now considered legendary, most knew at least part of her extensive family tree. Audrey (d.679) was the daughter of Anna, King of the East Angles, and Hereswith, daughter of Hereric of Northumbria; by the twelfth century, Hereswith was also considered the sister of Hild of Whitby and believed to have borne a daughter, Sæthryth, to a previous husband. Anna and Hereswith had two sons (Adwulf, later an East Anglian king, and Jurminus, venerated as a saint at Ely) and four daughters. Of the four daughters, two became nuns early: Ethelburgh entered a nunnery in Brie, and Wihtburgh founded an anchorage at 2

In addition to these six (all discussed below), John Bale attributes a ‘Vitam Etheldrede’ to Alexander Barclay, probably written after he became a monk at Ely in 1513, but this life is no longer extant: John Bale, Index Britanniae scriptorum …; John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers, ed. Reginald Lane Pool and Mary Bateson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 19. 3 Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 233–63. Blanton also surveys the role of kinship in ‘Presenting the Sister Saints of Ely, or Using a Kinship to Increase a Monastery’s Status as a Cult Center’, Literature Compass 5 (2008): 755–71, at 765–67, but the only vernacular lives she discusses are those derived from the Sanctilogium.

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Dereham, East Anglia. Audrey was twice married, first to Tondberht, lord of the Gyrwe, and after his death to Ecgfrith, a Northumbrian prince. By all accounts, Audrey remained a virgin through both marriages, eventually professing as a nun at Coldingham under Ecgfrith’s aunt Ebba before founding her own nunnery at Ely. The fourth of Anna’s daughters, Seaxburgh, was married to Eorcenberht, king of Kent, by whom she had several children, including Eorcengota, who entered a nunnery at Faremoutier (in some versions, Brie), and Eormenhild, who married Wulfhere, king of the Mercians. In the fullest accounts of their offspring, Eormenhild and Wulfhere had three sons (Wulfhad and Ruffin, the martyrs of the Stone legend, and the king and saint Coenred) and one daughter, Werburgh, who became a nun and whose remains were eventually translated to Chester. Audrey, Seaxburgh, Eormenhild, and Wihtburgh were enshrined at Ely and, along with Werburgh, formed the core sisterhood of Ely saints. Many pieces of this lineage appear in Bede’s HE, but it was only fully codified at Ely, where it was a necessary complement to, in some cases a stand-in for, Audrey’s incorrupt corpse as a figure of Ely’s holy, royal origins.4 The Ely monks deployed this holy sisterhood textually and architecturally – the shrines of Audrey, Seaxburgh, Eormenhild, and Wihtburgh clustered behind the high altar – to prove Ely’s claims to continue Audrey’s original foundation, to assert ancient land claims, and to defend institutional integrity.5 Although, as Blanton has shown, Audrey’s intact, unassailable body was central to Ely’s self-perception,6 it could not manifest institutional wholeness on its own, as did other incorrupts. The tradition of Audrey’s incorruption took inviolability to extremes, a series of miracles in the Liber Eliensis revealing that her cadaver could not be viewed even by her devotees.7 The Ely leadership could not display Audrey’s body; she signifies through an absent presence, her incorruption instead verified metonymically through the undecayed corpse of her sister Wihtburgh. Both the Liber Eliensis and the Vita Wihtburge depict Wihtburgh’s body being intimately prodded and tested for incorruption,8 her cadaver functioning as Audrey’s corporeal doppelgänger. In this way, Wihtburgh cements the complex interplay of holy kinship and postmortem perfection that underwrites Ely’s corporate integrity and defines its institutional body diachronically and synchronically. Seaxburgh and Eormenhild, matrons and mothers both, serve different symbolic functions; both are the holy 4

Her genealogy was developed in the new vitae and liturgical readings written by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and others in the early twelfth century, then woven into Ely’s own history in the mid-twelfth-century LE. See in particular LE, 1.1–2, 7, 17–18 (pp. 10–13, 17–19, 35–36); VWer, 1 (p. 28–32); LectSex, 1 (p. 2); Blanton, ‘Presenting the Sister Saints’, 761–65. 5 Virginia Blanton, ‘King Anna’s Daughters: Genealogical Narrative and Cult Formation in the Liber Eliensis’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 30 (2004): 127–49. 6 Blanton-Whetsell, ‘Tota integra’. 7 LE, 1.41, 43, 49; 2.144 (pp. 55–58, 60–61, 196–97); Monika Otter, ‘The Temptation of St Æthelthryth’, Exemplaria 9 (1997): 139–63; in response, Blanton-Whetsell, ‘Tota integra’, 232–34. 8 LE, 2.147 (pp. 232–33); VWiht, 20 (p. 78); see also GPA, 4.184.4 (p. 492); Blanton, ‘King Anna’s Daughters’, 133–40. Wihtburgh appears to have been invented as another of Anna’s daughters in the tenth century, when she was translated from East Dereham to Ely and discovered incorrupt.

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lineage’s reproductive anchors and saintly guarantors of continuity (Seaxburgh succeeded Audrey as abbess of Ely, and her daughter Eormenhild in turn succeeded Seaxburgh). Collectively, then, Audrey and her female kin perform for twelfthcentury Ely functions similar to those Edith and Werburgh would later perform for the Wilton poet and Bradshaw: intact saintly bodies figure uncompromised corporate bodies, while corporeal stasis lets the late medieval community claim a stable, ongoing perfection. But whereas Edith’s re-enfleshed corpse can perform Wilton’s wholeness on its own, Audrey’s physical perfections must be corroborated by her sister’s body. Audrey is always surrounded and supported by her holy sisterhood. Lives produced beyond Ely’s walls also leaned heavily on Audrey’s family tree, but these non-Ely writers – not possessing her remains nor claiming her as monastic patron – created other kinds of longitudinal communities, some (as at Ely) predicated on blood ties and others focused around spiritual or exemplary bonds. Because her extensive lineage incorporated royal and saintly figures from four of the Heptarchy’s seven kingdoms, she was a linchpin in the widely invoked Anglo-Saxon chronotope; because genealogy was a ubiquitous historiographic tool, she was also readily available for reconstructing that past through her kin network. These biological bonds dominate her vernacular hagiography, which almost always situates Audrey within her holy and royal family. Both Marie’s late twelfth-century Vie seint Audree and the anonymous c.1420 Wilton Life of Audrey include lengthy historical introductions that graft Audrey’s family tree onto a narrative of conversion-era history.9 Writers at younger medieval institutions could interweave their histories with Audrey’s family tree, as do the writer of the Stone tabulae and Henry Bradshaw, writing his Life of Werburge for Chester Abbey. In these texts, Audrey’s blood genealogy extends the temporal, ethical, and sometimes spatial scope of the monastic chronotope, giving the institution greater access to ancient holiness. Only the SEL ‘Audrey’ and Osbern Bokenham’s fifteenth-century poetic ‘Life of Audrey’ omit her matrilineage, imagining her exemplary utility to supersede, rather than perpetuate, mundane bonds. This focus on Audrey’s blood kin creates longitudinal lineages stretching back in time; as ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’ suggests, Audrey’s affiliations were also useful for creating ethical groupings. Having produced no biological descendants, Audrey, like other virgin saints, pushed hagiographers toward alternate genealogical operations: ‘In the particular fecundity of the virgin body, at once the denial and the perfection of human generation, the virgin foundress simultaneously disrupts biological lines of filiation and creates spiritual genealogies. She thus both evades and reinscribes the pressures of family lineage.’10 These ‘spiritual genealogies’ often take the form of imitatively constituted communities. Unlike blood genealogy, saintly imitation of the type analyzed by Sanok and others creates horizontal, detemporalized affinities among the saint’s devotees. Exemplarity is based ultimately upon a one-to-one relationship between saint and 9

As does the Latin legendary, BL, Lansdowne MS 436: Blanton, ‘Presenting the Sister Saints’, 767–68. 10 Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, 210.

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imitator such that, ‘although they sometimes also acknowledge differences based on age, sexual status, and class affiliation, [these lives] generally imagine a collective female response’ that is ultimately egalitarian, placing all these devotees on the same ethical plane.11 This kind of exemplarity operates in all the texts I examine, where Audrey is held up as a model for proper conventual behavior. While most vernacular lives invoke both Audrey’s vertical kinships and horizontal imitative communities, some intertwine them to craft robust yet malleable filial lines in which diachronic genealogy gives shape to synchronic imitation. When exemplary structures are superimposed onto genealogical lines, those horizontal relationships are supplemented by vertical ones. Imitating a saint now entails imitating an extended, closed tradition of female holiness, one that cannot be fully linear but that can have directionality, proceeding from a central exemplar like Audrey through a series of later imitators. While any kind of imitation ‘could also be used to insist on the continuity of communities and the social institutions that define them’, as Sanok suggests,12 the pairing of exemplarity and genealogy highlights ethical continuity within a longitudinal tradition. Although exemplary lineages can never be fully generational, like blood lineages, they can participate in a temporally progressive affinity. Marie’s Vie Audree, I show in the next section, imagines just such an ethical lineage persisting at early Ely after the death of Audrey’s last niece. In one manuscript of saints’ lives, imitative lineages’ alternative kin structures enable a nuanced approach to the questions of proper governance and moinal behavior that underpinned reformist discourse. Unlike texts like the Wilton Chronicle that imagine the nuns’ ethical state to be determined by corporate culture (symbolized as perfected in Edith’s holy body), or texts like ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’ that insist only individual uprightness counts, this collection, Cambridge, University Library MS Add. 2604, foregrounds imitative lineages to encourage but not prescribe certain conventual behaviors. Written almost certainly for nuns and including primarily nuns’ lives, this prose legendary forges ethical and blood relations through the paratextual, codicological, and intertextual relationships among the legendary’s nuns and abbesses. Assimilating non-Ely saints like Edith, Mildrith, and Hild into an extended sisterhood based on and legitimized by Audrey’s example, the CUL manuscript invites its conventual readers also to participate in this lineage of professed women. Ideally, the manuscript’s structure suggests, they will imitate these saints’ cloistered conduct; even if they do not, however, they can still find their place in Audrey’s spiritual genealogy. Audrey, as protovirgin, progenetrix, and ethical example, enables varied temporal and ethical relationships between past and present. Through her central position within the Anglo-Saxon chronotope, later writers construct widely varied historiographic structures: diachronic, blood-centered genealogies to appropriate her ancient virtues; synchronic, typological and exemplary affinities that imagine those ancient virtues to be replicable throughout time; or hybrid lineages that marry these structures to extend imitative affinities through time as though they 11 12

Sanok, Her Life Historical, xii. Ibid., 14–21, at 14.

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were blood genealogies. These different kin structures are in turn used to envision Audrey as underwriting ethical and corporate bodies, revealing the interpenetration of spiritual practice and historical perspective in the fifteenth century. Blood and Exemplary Genealogies in Audrey’s Lives Throughout her hagiographic dossier, Audrey’s extended kin network operates within and against standard models of secular genealogy and spiritual filiation. Blood genealogy offered a powerful and, by the twelfth century, ubiquitous historiographic schema for imagining diachronic continuities; spiritual bonds, especially those constituted through imitation, only participated loosely in genealogy’s linearity. Audrey’s lives contrive an interplay between genealogy’s diachronicity and spiritual kinship’s synchronicity. As the symbolic matriarch of a holy female blood lineage, she can ground spiritual kinships in a historically powerful genealogical model, as illustrated by Marie’s Vie seint Audree, an Old French poetic life derived from Ely sources but read within a female cloister,13 and the c.1420 Middle English Wilton Audrey, companion piece to the Wilton Chronicle.14 The reason for genealogy’s ubiquity was simple: direct descent by primogeniture imagined family as a single diachronic continuum (ideally unbroken) that could be traced back to mythological origins.15 This image, Gabrielle Spiegel posits, offered medieval historians a powerful, because natural, ‘perceptual “grid”’ through which the past could be organized and interpreted: ‘the human process of procreation and filiation [operated] as a metaphor for historical change’, direct descent marking both temporal motion and dynastic continuity such that the latter can persist despite the movement of the former.16 Such temporal opera13

Marie’s Vie, written probably by the poet known as Marie de France sometime either side of the year 1200, is extant only in the Campsey manuscript (BL, Add. MS 70513), a collection of Old French saints’ lives owned in the fourteenth century by the nuns of Campsey Ash Abbey, Suffolk: June Hall McCash, ‘La vie seinte Audree: A Fourth Text by Marie de France?’, Speculum 77 (2002): 744–77; Wogan-Browne, ‘Powers of Record’; Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, passim; Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 195–210. This Vie has been edited twice, the second with translation: Östen Södergård, ed., La Vie Seinte Audree: Poème Anglo-Normand du XIIe siècle (Uppsala: Årsskrift, 1955); June Hall McCash and Judith Clark Barban, ed. and trans., The Life of Saint Audrey: A Text by Marie de France ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2006). I cite McCash and Barban’s edition parenthetically by line number (which differs slightly from Södergård’s numbering) and use their translation throughout. 14 The Wilton Audrey has been edited in Saints Edith and Æthelthryth: Princesses, Miracle Workers and Their Late Medieval Audience. The Wilton Chronicle and the Wilton Life of St Æthelthryth, ed. and trans. Mary Dockray-Miller (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). I cite this edition of the Wilton Audrey (WA) parenthetically by line number. The poem was earlier edited in Horstmann, Altenglische Legenden, 282–307. On the Wilton Audrey’s date and codicological context, see Chapter 3, pp. 28–29. 15 Laura D. Barefield, Gender and History in Medieval English Romance and Chronicle (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 5–13; R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 66–83; Ingledew, ‘The Book of Troy’. 16 Spiegel, ‘Genealogy’, 47–52, at 50.

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tions also underpin the monastic chronotope, where abbatial succession traces time’s movement while saintly stability ensures institutional continuity. Recently, Zrinka Stahuljak has refined Spiegel’s thesis to suggest that blood descent itself functioned as a metaphor for a process of filiation based not on procreation but on the linguistic relationships that constitute social and familial bonds.17 That is, although genealogy appears to operate along lines of biological descent, it actually functions (as revealed in moments of lineal crisis) along lines of linguistic recognition, as the father acknowledges the son or as complex familial ties are stabilized. The Stafford tabula from Stone Priory, especially its elision of Millicent, illustrates this dynamic perfectly, as does the Wilton Chronicle’s emphasis on Edith as Edgar’s daughter and possible heir. This linguistic, metaphoric reading of genealogy helps explain the deployment of spiritual lineages (including the abbatial progression of the monastic chronotope) and matrilineal genealogies apart from, even in defiance of, biological procreation. The virgin becomes mother to other virgins, or the holy woman matriarch of a religious familia, through equivalent acts of linguistic recognition that use the language of blood genealogy to establish spiritual affinities. Like secular genealogy, such holy filiation is always a metaphor; unlike blood kinship, it does not have the backing of biological processes to mask its metaphoric nature. Moreover, because spiritual filiations are established in non-biological ways – through institutional affiliation, typological patterning, or exemplary imitation – these kinships are not generational but recursive, operating synchronically rather than diachronically.18 They cannot mark temporal change, creating flattened transtemporal communities that emphasize sameness at the expense of historical difference. While the recursivity of spiritual kinship could be advantageous for establishing the timeless stability of institutional bodies, historical distance was sometimes needful for asserting ancient origins or demonstrating stability throughout space and time. Institutional writers returned to secular genealogical models for these purposes, whether by borrowing the patrilineage of the patron family, as in the Stone Priory tabulae, or by adapting genealogy’s structure to abbatial lists, as in the De Fundatione, John Flete’s fifteenth-century history of Westminster.19 The power of Ely’s Audrey-based genealogy lies in its ability to do both, at times simultaneously, in different contexts. In the Wilton Audrey, for example, blood genealogy establishes her royal origins and provides a stable structure of lineal descent through which to write Ely’s early history. Genealogy similarly confirms Audrey’s noble status in Marie’s Vie, but here typological and exemplary constructions of kinship reconfigure the linguistic terms that establish familial bonds, sanctifying blood ties. These biological relations in turn provide a temporal struc17

Zrinka Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages: Translatio, Kinship, and Metaphor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 11–13 et passim. Compare Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, 64–91; Bloch, ‘Genealogy as a Medieval Mental Structure and Textual Form’, in La littérature historiographique des origines á 1500, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Ursula Link-Heer, and Peter-Michael Spangenberg (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1986), 1.135–56. 18 Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies, 124–25. 19 See below, Chapter 4, p. 135.

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ture through which Audrey’s spiritual kinship can be extended after her immediate family dies. The interplay among different kinds of genealogical ties therefore constructs diverse relationships with the past, but all depend on the concept of progressive descent to give temporal shape to spiritual affiliations. Genealogy establishes Audrey’s noble origins and locates her precisely within the Anglo-Saxon chronotope in both Marie’s Vie Audree and the Wilton Audrey. Both poems open similarly; Marie, relying on the Liber Eliensis, provides a detailed history of conversion-era England, emphasizing the East Anglian kingdom, while the Wilton poet borrows his opening 100 or so lines from Trevisa’s translation of the Polychronicon to list the kingdoms of the Heptarchy before narrating the reign of Audrey’s father Anna (Marie, Vie 37–228; WA 5–112).20 Both poets also establish the holiness of Audrey’s immediate kin. Marie lays out Audrey’s royal origin (a longstanding element of her cult)21 and details the character of Anna’s ‘very noble’, ‘well-bred’, and ‘kind’ descendants (‘Tres noble’, ‘et digne’, ‘et mult benigne’, 149–50), while the Wilton Audrey characterizes Anna as a ‘blessud mon’ (132) and foregrounds Audrey’s royal heritage, her father’s nobility plus the high-status marriages arranged for Audrey and Seaxburgh (WA 126, 145–47, 172–74). Despite these similarly historicizing openings, each poet develops a conceptually distinct genealogy, privileging different formal elements for constructing mixed blood–spiritual lineages. Later in the Wilton Audrey (after Audrey’s death but before her relic translation), the Wilton poet contrives a curiously, perhaps deliberately, inaccurate matrilineage that emphasizes biological descent from mother to daughter. According to the Wilton poet, Audrey was succeeded as abbess of Ely by Seaxburgh, who was in turn succeeded by her two daughters, Eorcengota and Eormenhild. Eormenhild had two daughters by Wulfhere, ‘Merburwe’ and ‘Milgnyde’, plus an unnamed son; once again, her daughters succeed her as abbesses (551–80). This idiosyncratic genealogy is riddled with errors; according to Bede, Eorcengota went to the monastery of Faremoutier-en-Brie,22 while ‘Merburwe’ and ‘Milgnyde’ are probably Mildburg and Mildgith, sisters of Saint Mildrith of Minster-in-Thanet and nieces, not daughters, of Eormenhild and Wulfhere.23 The poet has also conflated Merburwe and Werburgh, claiming that the former’s relics now lie at Chester (578). Yet these ‘mistakes’ have purpose. They create a coherent line of female descent through which passes sanctity and the office of abbess. This line, modeled on the duo of Audrey and Seaxburgh, 20

On Marie’s sources, see Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 180–81; McCash and Barban, ed., Life of Saint Audrey, 262–66; on the WA, see Dockray-Miller, ‘Historical Sources’. The Wilton poet also evidently relied on a Bedan source, rather than Ely material, for he names Ethelburgh, not Wihtburgh, as Audrey’s third sister. 21 On her nobility, see Ridyard, Royal Saints, 176–80; on the role of her social status in Marie’s Vie, see Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 177–79, 183–89; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Rerouting the Dower: The Anglo-Norman Life of St Audrey by Marie (of Chatteris?)’, in Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 36–41. 22 HE, 3.8 (p. 238). 23 WA, p. 372 n. 48.

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includes a virgin and a mother in every generation; holy chastity, itself apparently unable to guarantee continuous descent, can endure while blood descent proceeds. Whether we see here the poet’s conscious manipulation of his material or the result of corrupted sources, the net effect privileges blood over spiritual constructions of kinship: sanctity and a religious calling may be a family trait, but fruitful daughters are necessary to perpetuate the line. As a result, this lineage is a genealogical dead end; after this passage, the poet lists the saints enshrined at Ely, then claims that ‘wolly stynt of Sexburwe here more to wryte or rede’ (585). The Wilton Audrey’s genealogy demonstrates the strength of blood kinship language for establishing temporal progression but, by concluding Audrey’s lineage in a collection of corpses, it also reveals the weakness of blood alone for imagining long-lived spiritual lineages. Marie, on the other hand, uses typological and exemplary language to reinforce and sanctify family bonds. Like the Wilton Audrey, Marie foregrounds the maternal line in her opening genealogy (137–228); she itemizes Hereswith’s lineage, including her sister Hild and her other daughter Sæthryth (185–89, 193–96), and enumerates all Hereswith and Anna’s children. In the middle of this passage, however, Marie pauses her genealogical list to characterize Audrey and her sisters in typological terms: Like the wise virgins, they brought oil to put in their lamps so that the lamps would never go out – for which [oversight] the foolish ones lamented. Ke ou les cointes virges pristrent L’oille ke en lur lampes mistrent, Ke ja meis ne seient estaintes Dont les nonsages font les pleintes. (165–68)

Such imagery, drawn from the biblical parable of the five wise virgins (Matthew 25.1–13), was commonly used of nuns and saintly women,24 and here it assimilates Audrey and her sisters into a broader continuum of holy women. Situated within this extended genealogy, however, the comparison to the wise virgins also likens the sisters to each other; the typological simile reinforces their kinship as holy, associating them through biblical parable as well as blood. Ethical imitation is an important complement to this typological mirroring, for it reinforces blood kinships and envisions spiritual bonds to extend beyond the end of the biological line. In the Vie, as in the Wilton Audrey, Audrey’s spiritual family is initially identical to her blood family as Marie legitimizes the proposition (unusual in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century hagiography) that holiness and blood kinship are compatible.25 For instance, Marie tells how Werburgh, Audrey’s 24 25

These lines have no counterpart in Marie’s source for this passage, LE, 1.2 (pp. 12–13). In many Old French saints’ lives composed around the time of Marie’s Vie, like the Vie de saint Alexis, sanctity was predicated on the rejection of all kin bonds: Bloch, Etymologies and

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great-niece, came ‘to join Saint Audrey’s holy order’ (‘Pur le seint ordre qu’ele tint’, 1637); two hundred lines later, Marie relates Seaxburgh’s decision to enter Ely: I want to go away to see my friends again, my sister Queen Audrey, and the land where I was born. I want to join her community and receive her religious instruction. Ge m’en voil aler Pur mes amis revisiter, Ma soreur, la roïne Audree, Et le païs u ge fu nee. Ensemble ou li voil estre mise De sa religion aprise. (1843–48)

Seaxburgh’s desire to return to family and homeland is inseparable from her desire to enter the nunnery under Audrey’s care. The repetition of ‘voil’ unites the desires into one, while the apposition of ‘soreur’ and ‘roïne’ ensures that Audrey’s royal lineage is not forgotten after she has entered religious life. Unlike, for example, Gautier de Coinci’s Vie de Sainte Cristine, which constructs spiritual kinships (here, kinship with Christ) in opposition to illicit familial desires,26 the Vie Audree imagines sisterly love and the longing for homeland to enhance spiritual bonds. Seaxburgh enters Ely because she wishes to be reunited with her sister, and that wish leads her to imitate Audrey’s just governance and so fulfill the typological promise embedded in the earlier comparison with the biblical wise virgins. When she becomes abbess after Audrey’s death, Seaxburga was inspired by the merits of Saint Audrey and followed her sister’s example of governing the convent most honorably. fu Sexborc espiree Par les merites seinte Audree. Essample prist de sa sorur, Le covent tint a grant honur. (2161–64)

Once again, the kin relationship is central to Seaxburgh’s imitation; emulation reinforces biological sisterhood, and Ely’s devotional culture, as constituted through abbessial governance, continues Audrey’s merits. On its own, the imitative holy Genealogies, 179–82; Emma Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (Cambridge: D.  S. Brewer, 2008), 71–79; Nancy Vine Durling, ‘Hagiography and Lineage: The Example of the Old French Vie de saint Alexis’, Romance Philology 40 (1987): 451–69, at 453–55. 26 Campbell, Medieval Saints’ Lives, 89–95.

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community cannot mark temporal change because there are no generations to mark time’s passage; were the community strictly based on imitating Audrey’s virtues, that community would exist across but not through time. Grafting this ethical community onto Audrey’s matriarchal line, however, enables its temporal persistence: after Seaxburgh dies, Eormenhild and then Werburgh become abbesses (2389–91; 2397–99). Importantly, and unlike the Wilton Audrey, genealogical continuity establishes an ethical course that enables the metaphorical perpetuation of Audrey’s line through time, such that even after the virginal Werburgh is gone, Marie can imagine this Ely spiritual lineage extending into the future. After these four women died, the congregation of Ely continued and so did the religious life of the ladies who had been placed there. Dura la congregation D’Ely et la religion De[s] dames ki remises furent. (2407–9)

The continuance of ‘la religion | De[s] dames’ highlights exactly how ethical emulation can extend blood lineages. The ambiguity surrounding ‘De[s] dames’ – are these ladies Audrey and her sisters, or subsequent nuns who joined the community? – allows those ‘dames’ to be imagined as both: the spiritual life being continued is identical to that lived by Audrey and extended by her blood successors. Even though genealogical descent and therefore temporal progression is weaker than during the governance of Seaxburgh, Eormenhild, and Werburgh, that lineage’s strong temporal trajectory extends forward through the verb ‘Dura’ and by grafting typological and tropological kinship models onto Audrey’s blood genealogy. As Marie’s and the Wilton poet’s creation of Audrey’s early Ely community illustrates, the diachronicity enabled by the blood lineage metaphor provides a temporal superstructure able to support typologically and ethically constructed kinships that, while important carriers of religious legitimacy, lack the inexorable forward motion of generational genealogy. Intermingling different kinship models allows both poets to construct Audrey’s participation in the spiritual and ethical facets of the Anglo-Saxon chronotope, while Marie’s emphasis on exemplarity extends her heritage beyond Audrey’s last nieces. Yet ethical lineages, metaphorized without the seeming naturalness of blood, are diachronically weak. The Wilton poet doesn’t attempt to imagine such a thing, and in Marie’s Vie it has a short shelf life. The later Ely nuns can only emulate Audrey until Ingwar and Ubba came to the area to conquer its people Deskë Ingar vint en la terre Et Hubbe pur la gent conquere. (2413–14) 74

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Marie never establishes a framework through which her female readers, imitating Audrey, could extend this Ely genealogy into the late medieval present. Blood, albeit just as metaphoric as religious lineages, was valuable to Audrey’s vernacular hagiographers because it was a more temporally robust historiographic structure than spiritual kinships could be. Audrey Alone: The SEL and Osbern Bokenham’s Lives Most Middle English writers followed Marie in extending Audrey’s spiritual kinship by means of her blood genealogy, but before turning to those texts I wish to pause over two that do not: the SEL ‘Life of Audrey’ and Osbern Bokenham’s poetic ‘Life of Seynt Audre’ from the Abbotsford Legendary.27 The SEL poet seems unaware of Audrey’s position within the Ely sisterhood, while Bokenham overtly refuses to relate her lineage. Both poems were written (as best we can tell) at least partially for cloistered readers, and both posit a different ethical structure than the lives that include Audrey’s lineage, focusing on her eternal moinal virtues. By ignoring the kin ties that locate her within the tempus, these poems situate her solely within the iconic chronotope as a singular, static exemplar of virginal holiness, insisting on the timelessness of her example and even, in Bokenham’s life, the supratemporality of the cloister. The SEL ‘Life of Audrey’ is one of the marginal legends in that collection, extant in only three manuscripts and not yet edited.28 It belongs to Manfred Görlach’s E group of legends, seven lives of Anglo-Saxon saints (including the four nuns Audrey, Mildrith, Frideswide of Oxford, and Eadburgh of Winchester) that, he theorizes, may have been derived from liturgical readings.29 The four E group nuns are the only native female saints represented in multiple SEL manuscripts and seem keyed to conventual readers: at least one E manuscript was used by nuns, and the E women’s lives highlight claustral virtues.30 Although Audrey is 27

On Bokenham’s Legenda Aurea, see Simon Horobin, ‘Politics, Patronage, and Piety in the Work of Osbern Bokenham’, Speculum 82 (2007): 932–49; Horobin, ‘A Manuscript Found in the Library of Abbotsford House and the Lost Legendary of Osbern Bokenham’, English Manuscript Studies 14 (2007): 130–62. 28 These are the fourteenth-century manuscripts BL, Egerton MS 1993, fol. 163r–v, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodleian Eng. poet. a.1, fol. 33r–v (the Vernon MS); and the fifteenth-century Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 779, fols. 279v–280r. My readings (cited by line number and folio) are taken from Egerton, with some corrections from Vernon; the Bodley manuscript can be idiosyncratic in its readings. The life is studied in Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 237–49. 29 Görlach, Textual Tradition, 17; Blanton, ‘Counting Noses’. The E saints include Audrey, Botulf, Ailbriȝt (Æthelberht), Birin (Birinus), Eadburgh, Ecgwine, and Mildrith. 30 I omit Brigid and Ursula from my count; as Legenda Aurea saints, their lives and cults were widely disseminated. Frideswide (19 October) is listed in the index to the Vernon manuscript (apparently used by nuns: N.  F. Blake, ‘Vernon Manuscript: Contents and Organisation’, in Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Derek Pearsall [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990], 58) but is currently missing. Egerton 1993 is also missing its October and November saints, so her life may have appeared in that collection. There are two independent SEL lives of Frideswide, the longer

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structurally central in CUL MS Add. 2604, among the E saints she is a minor figure. At fifty lines, her life is a third the length of those of Mildrith or Eadburgh, and only a quarter of the longer ‘Life of Frideswide’; Audrey’s life is not given a historical prologue, like Mildrith’s and Eadburgh’s; and the poet has lavished on Audrey little of his characteristic ‘homely’ language or colorful phrasings.31 Most importantly for my purposes, Audrey is largely removed from her kin group, despite the importance of blood and spiritual genealogies in the other E nuns’ lives. Her father is named and Seaxburgh is identified twice as abbess and ‘hir soster’ (39, 42, fol. 163v), but no other family relations are mentioned. The poet focuses almost exclusively on her two chaste marriages – she is ‘clene’ after her first husband Tondberht dies and remains a ‘clene maide’ while married to Ecgfrith (8, 12, 14, fol. 163r) – and on her postmortem translation. As Blanton has shown, the SEL ‘Audrey’ foregrounds Audrey’s life as nun and abbess,32 an emphasis that also permeates the lives of Eadburgh, Mildrith, and (to a lesser extent) the shorter Frideswide. These lives share many traits: all four women are royal; all are cast as exemplary nuns and abbesses; and the lives of Eadburgh, Mildrith, and Audrey focus on the women’s private devotions and deportment within the community. The Mildrith and Eadburgh lives also highlight blood genealogy. The ‘Life of Mildrith’ details her lineage from Eadbald of Kent to Eormenred to Domne Eafe, who marries Merewalh and bears a ‘god bartnem [group of children]’, including Mildrith (33), while Eadburgh’s life relates her descent from Alfred to her father

and the shorter. It is possible that the longer circulated with these E virgin legends, as Bodleian 779, compiled ad hoc and perhaps preserving the organization of its partial exemplars (on which, see William Robins, ‘Modular Dynamics in the South English Legendary’, in Rethinking the South English Legendaries, ed. Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011], 201), places the long life of Frideswide between those of Audrey and Eadburgh. Blanton, ‘Counting Noses’, 241–42 (following Sherry L. Reames, ed., ‘A Legend of Frideswide of Oxford, an Anglo-Saxon Royal Saint’, in Middle English Legends of Women Saints, ed. Reames [Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003], 24) suggests, on the other hand, that the shorter life of Frideswide would have been more appropriate for Vernon’s cloistered female readers. On the SEL ‘Frideswide’, see Görlach, Textual Tradition, 196–97; Reames, ed., ‘Legend of Frideswide’ (with editions of both lives). The SEL lives of Mildrith and Eadburgh have both been edited: Paul Acker, ‘Saint Mildred in the South English Legendary’, in The South English Legendary: A Critical Assessment, ed. Klaus P. Jankofsky (Tübingen: Francke, 1992), 145–49, and Laurel Braswell, ‘Saint Edburga of Winchester: A Study of Her Cult, A.D. 950–1500, with an Edition of the Fourteenth-Century Middle English and Latin Lives’, Medaeval Studies 33 (1971): 292–333, at 325–29. I cite these editions parenthetically by line number. Blanton, ‘Counting Noses’ discusses the E branch of the SEL and its native virgin legends at length; she includes Wenefrede and Oswin among the E native virgins, but as those lives are only extant (Wenefrede in an apparently corrupt form) in the idiosyncratic Bodley 779, I omit them from my comparison. On the Bodley 779 Wenefrede, see James Gregory, ‘A Welsh Saint in England: Translation, Orality, and National Identity in the Cult of St Gwenfrewy, 1138–1512’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Georgia, 2012), 279–82. 31 Jankofsky, ‘National Characteristics’, 90–91; Anne B. Thompson, Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the South English Legendary (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 7–11, 17–18, et passim. Compare SEL ‘Mildred’, lines 89–90, SEL ‘Edburga’, lines 86–90. 32 Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 246.

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Edward the Elder, listing subsequent kings as well (14, 25–27).33 Given the similarities among these three lives, and Blanton’s otherwise persuasive suggestion that the E lives may have been composed in an East Anglian or Kentish milieu,34 the absence of any genealogy from the SEL ‘Audrey’ is surprising. One would expect an East Anglian poet to have had access to similarly robust historical detail, but the SEL ‘Audrey’ poet seems to be working from a trimmed-down set of lectiones, not unlike those for Audrey’s 17 October translation feast recorded in the Hyde Abbey breviary.35 As Blanton says, further investigation into possible exemplars for these E lives is crucial;36 for now, this disparity may point toward an E composition locale far from Ely’s influence. While Audrey’s epitome in the SEL is only generally exemplary, Bokenham’s idiosyncratic ‘Life of Audrey’ deliberately excludes Audrey’s holy kin to argue prescriptively for nuns’ complete enclosure. Perhaps written, like so many of Audrey’s lives, for a convent, Bokenham’s ‘Audrey’ constructs an ethical landscape in which the convent is entirely other to the secular world; this stance differs substantially from those versions that imagine Audrey’s familial kinship to perpetuate spiritual virtues. Constructing a conventual chronotope that shares features like stasis, stability, and spiritual perfection with the iconic chronotope, Bokenham contrasts the professed religious life with a lay life defined by flux, mutability, and inconstancy. He establishes this binary through different containments – Audrey’s attempted self-containment as a lay virgin, her later claustration as a nun, and her metaphoric enshrinement as a ‘gemme of virginytee’ – that elevate religious enclosure and preclude her involvement in either spiritual or blood kinships. This opposition suggests that only participation in the nunnery’s corporate body can guarantee virtuous individual bodies – exactly opposite to the message forwarded by ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’. Bokenham’s ‘Life of Audrey’ (fols. 117v–120r) is a rhyme royal poem of over 600 lines divided into three sections, each marked in the manuscript with a three-line capital executed in gold leaf.37 The first section discusses her youth and married life; the second her cloistered career, death, and the preparation for her relic translation; and the third the discovery of her incorrupt corpse. Bokenham uses a variety of sources, primarily HE 4.19–20 (17–18) and Book One of the LE.38 33

For Mildrith’s genealogy, see the family tree in D. W. Rollason, The Mildrith Legend: A Study in Early Medieval Hagiography in England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 55; on Eadburgh’s royal roots and early cult, see Ridyard, Royal Saints, 96–129. 34 Blanton, ‘Counting Noses’, 242–46. 35 The Monastic Breviary of Hyde Abbey, ed. John B. L. Tolhurst, 6 vols. (London: Harrison, 1932–42), vol. 4, fols. 360v–362r. This lectio aligns largely with the information included in the SEL ‘Audrey’, except that it does not mention Seaxburgh. 36 Blanton, ‘Counting Noses’, 242–43. 37 I cite Bokenham’s ‘Audrey’ by folio and my own line numbering, silently expanding the few abbreviations and supplying modern capitalization and punctuation. 38 That Bokenham should have known the LE version of Audrey’s vita rather than the independent Norman Latin vitae is evident in his description of the marble sarcophagus into which Audrey’s incorrupt corpse was translated, a description present in no other version of her life; compare LE, 1.28 (pp. 46–47) to ‘Audrey’, 583–603 (fol. 119v).

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Bokenham also had been to Ely itself, as evidenced by a reference to a pictorial tabula hanging there, an unsurprising visit given the proximity of Ely to Clare and Bokenham’s interest in visiting saints’ shrines.39 ‘Audrey’ is one of only two lives of native female saints in the Abbotsford Legendary;40 whatever Bokenham’s priorities in compiling his legendary, close attention to English female saints was not among them. As one of the verse lives in the Abbotsford Legendary, this poem was probably written originally as a standalone life for a particular audience, as were the verse lives collected in Legendys of Hooly Wummen and later repurposed for the legendary. It is also likely that Bokenham composed this life for a nun or nunnery because, as in Audrey’s other vernacular lives read in nunneries, she is presented as nourishing her community of nuns, exemplifying proper cloistered behavior.41 Moreover, his valorization of the professed religious life over even lay devotion makes the most sense if we posit an original cloistered audience. Unfortunately, the poem gives no hint of who might have received this poem. Bokenham opens conventionally with Audrey’s parentage, praising Hereswith as being ‘Bothe of byrth and condicions a ful fair wight’ (10; fol. 117v) and lauding her father Anna as a worthy man both of worde and dede Whos famous name fer aboute did sprede. (4–5, fol. 117v)

He identifies Hereswith’s father Henricus and her sister Hild, acknowledges that Anna and Hereswith ‘Betwix hem of issue had fain plentee’ (18, fol. 117v), and reveals that Seaxburgh, Audrey’s sister and successor as abbess, had earlier been Eorcenberht’s wife. He refuses, however, to narrate Audrey’s genealogy in full, instead referring the reader to the Ely tabula: The pedegrue of whom who so list to see At Ely in the munkys, bothe in picture He it fynde inow shal, and in scripture. Of which noble issue for I may not al Declaren at this tyme the high worthynesse For litle is my kunnyng and my witte small. (19–24, fol. 117v)

The simultaneous invocation of genealogy and refusal to relate it signals Bokenham’s intent to isolate Audrey’s story from her holy kin, an intent made explicit by this stanza’s conclusion: 39

He describes several pilgrimage ventures in his hagiography; his destinations included Margaret of Antioch’s shrine at Mount Flask in Italy (Bokenham, The Legendys of Hooly Wummen, lines 107–21), James at Compostela (lines 5090–96) and, closer to home, the relic of Margaret of Antioch’s foot at Reading (lines 139–43), Wenefrede’s well at Holywell (Abbotsford Legendary, fol. 217r), and possibly David’s shrine in Wales, for he records verbatim the indulgences posted there (fol. 70v). 40 The other is the poetic ‘Life of Wenefrede’, written after Bokenham went on pilgrimage to Holywell. On Bokenham’s ‘Wenefrede’, see Gregory, ‘Welsh Saint’, 282–301. 41 Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 241, 245–46, 256, 262.

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Douly of oon the life for to expresse Chosen I haue aftir my rudenesse. I mean of that gemme of virginytee, Twyes wife and euir maide, blissid Audree. (25–28, fol. 117v)

Having deliberately ‘Chosen’ just ‘oon’ of the Ely saints, Bokenham severs all narrative connection with her kin group to write only of ‘that gemme of virginytee’. This lapidary metaphor echoes throughout the poem, assimilating Audrey (after death) to her shrine and figuring (in life) her cloistered virginity as a form of enshrinement. Using gemological imagery to characterize conventual life, Bokenham constructs the cloister as a place of perfection and immutability; denying the presence of error, weakness, or change, this static claustral chronotope removes Audrey, and all nuns, from temporal flux and its ethical instability. Bokenham does present Audrey as modeling ideal behavior for both laywomen and professed religious. As in many of Bokenham’s virgin saints’ lives, Audrey embraces the mixed life before and within her claustration.42 The youthful Audrey embodies social virtues, especially deportment and charity, appropriate to lay women: In hir demeanyng she was amyable, In coutenaunce and port, sad and demure; In communycacion, benygne and affable, In hir aray honest and in hir vesture, Noyeng ner hurtyng noon erthely creature, But glad she was euir to helpen eche wight As fer as hir kunnyng strecchid and hir myght. (43–49, fol. 117v)

The married Audrey similarly combines contemplative ‘vigilies, preyers’, and private devotions with active ‘almesse by hir large yiuyng’ (151, 152, fol. 118r). Later in the poem, her time at Ely is also characterized by equilibrium between spiritual exercises and active religious work. The novice Audrey is ready to assist within the nunnery only ‘aftir religion’ (279, fol. 118v), and as abbess she did hir cure and hir busynesse Hir sustirs to fostren religiously In al vertues. (326–28, fol. 118v)

However, she also remains in prayer long after matins, unless such cause as must needs be doo For the comoun profite and hir sustris also. (357–58, fol. 119r)

42

Horobin, ‘Politics’, 947.

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This balance is consistently lauded throughout the poem, a thread which links the ideal laywoman to the professed nun’s proper behavior. Despite this mixed-life emphasis, Audrey’s sanctity hinges on her perpetual virginity, a status not assured until she takes her vow as a nun. Bokenham presents her married chastity as always contingent, affected by the mutability of the secular world, and not a de facto guarantor of her holiness. Only the nunnery assures virginal purity because only the nunnery can offer complete spiritual stability. In portraying Audrey’s attempt to remain a lay virgin as difficult, if nevertheless holy, Bokenham departs drastically from the hagiographic tradition that imagined Audrey’s resistance to fleshly temptations to be as inevitable as virgin martyrs’ abilities to withstand their pagan tormentors.43 Bokenham, however, highlights the contingency of Audrey’s decision by making her vow of virginity a secret: hir holy purpos Of contynence and of virginyte Hid in hir breste she kept so cloos That no man privey therto myght be. (64–67, fol. 117v)

This private vow is unusual; both the LE and Marie’s Vie, for example, make her chaste marriage to Tondberht agreed upon and publicly known.44 While Audrey’s laudable goal is humility – as Bokenham states, the fewer people who know, the more praiseworthy her continence – privacy causes problems which do not arise in other versions, for she cannot keep her vow private while resisting her arranged marriages: ‘Allas!’ quoth she, ‘How shuld I my purpoos And myn entent kepyn of virginyte, Which in myn hert hid and cloos From al men I have kept secree? Now must nedis disclosid be My privey counseil and my inward entent Or els to my frendis I must assent. ‘If I sey nay, thei displesid wil be, For my wille to hers I ne wil applye. Yf I say yea, than my virginyte Putten I shal in grete jupartye’. But fynally, in this contrauersye, She committed all thyng to goddis wille, And hir frendis counseil she assentid tille. (106–19, fol. 118r)

It is not Audrey’s ‘entent’ and ‘purpoos’ to maintain her virginity that initiates the conflict voiced in the second stanza, but the ‘privey’ and ‘inward’ format of that 43

Marie’s Vie is an exception, taking seriously marital sexual desire: Virginia Blanton, ‘Chaste Marriage, Sexual Desire, and Christian Martyrdom in La vie seinte Audrée’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 19 (2010): 94–114. 44 LE, 1.4–5 (pp. 14–16); Marie, Life, 325–28, 347–56.

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‘entent’. She cannot fulfill a self-contained and self-directed vow, for the privacy of the decision ultimately disallows her full agency; she cannot both keep her vow a secret and remain unmarried. When Audrey decides that obedience to her parents and desire to keep her ‘privey counseil’ take precedence over her vow, Bokenham reveals the difficulties she must face in pursuing the chaste lay life; she requires help from her confessor Wilfrid to maintain her vow in the face of Ecgfrith’s advances. Wilfrid’s role in Audrey and Ecgfrith’s unconsummated relationship is not new, but Bokenham enhances Audrey’s reliance on Wilfrid, suggesting a disparity between Audrey’s will to maintain her virginity and her ability to do so. Wilfrid is essential to Audrey’s chastity, not only by refusing to press Ecgfrith’s suit, but also by encouraging her to persevere: whan he [Wilfrid] came with hir to han dalyaunce, He hir stired and exortid ful feithfully In hir holy purpoos to han constaunce. For douteles, withoute perseueraunce, Though a man begynne nevir so gode a dede, Frustrat fynally shal ben his mede. (191–96, fol. 118r)

At this point, Bokenham launches into a five-stanza sermon on the value of perseverance before returning to Wilfrid’s exhortations: Thus to perseueraunce this worthy confessour (And othir wise moche bettir than I telle kan) Exortid and stired eche day and hour This noble quene, this blissid womman, Assurance hir making that she shuld han For hir reward whan she hens shuld wende That ioye and blisse that neuir shal ende. By this and many an othir exortacion Goddis chosen doughtir, blissid Audree, Toke perfite and constaunt confirmacion Of perseueraunce in virginyte. (232–42, fol. 118v)

By expounding on Wilfrid’s perpetual (‘eche day and hour’, ‘perfite and constaunt’) hortatory role, the poem hints that Audrey could not have maintained her virginity on her own. The extended sermon on perseverance suggests, by its presence, that endurance in lay chastity is a rare virtue, so rare that even the protovirgin needed regular reminders about its benefits. These stanzas’ syntax also denies Audrey any active role in choosing chastity, despite an earlier emphasis on her ‘entent’ (107, 111, fol. 118r): Wilfrid is the active subject (exhorting, stirring, and making assurances) while Audrey may only ‘take confirmation’ of those claims. At minimum, Bokenham highlights the gap between ‘entent’ and success in marital chastity: desire necessitates active outside assistance. While this slippage enables an exemplary moment, one that takes seriously female readers’ sexual urges while exhorting them to perseverance and continence, 81

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it also suggests that achieving a fully holy life outside the cloister is impossible. Blanton observes a similar tendency in the SEL ‘Audrey’, where the poet’s alteration to Bede’s narrative ‘situates her clean living within the convent as preferable to her clean living within marriage’.45 In the lay world, family obligations, interpersonal pressure, and biological drives inhibit the would-be saint’s full possession of stable holiness. Only in the cloister, which Bokenham describes as beyond temporal change, can Audrey achieve saintly virginity. Audrey’s cloistered virginal integrity is encapsulated in Bokenham’s metaphor ‘gemme of virginytee’, a classic case of relic discourse. ‘Relic discourse’ is a term recently coined by Robyn Malo to describe common rhetorical forms that represent the saint’s remains indirectly through language: the language functions to assimilate the saint’s presence to his or her shrine.46 Such rhetorical replacement occludes the bodily guarantors of the saints’ earthly praesentia, tropologically substituting dazzling, bejeweled, visible shrines for fragmentary, partial, or even absent relics; fixing the saint’s presence within the shrine, relic discourse is also implicated in the monastic chronotope’s spatial and therefore temporal presumptions. This discourse is often dependent on gemological imagery, for the jewels that decorate the shrine, designating it as an object of spiritual and economic power, were also apt metonyms for saints’ corpses. Gems were often used to characterize the resurrection body’s impassibility and glorious immutability, making them appropriate symbols for the saint’s soon-to-be-glorified remains.47 Lapidary instances of relic discourse can therefore point in two directions: toward the bejeweled shrines that house the bodily relics, and toward the saint’s persistence in the aevum. Often the two are indistinguishable, particularly when the corpse is incorrupt and therefore (as discussed in Chapter 1) already representing the resurrection body. Engaging this lapidary tradition to link Audrey’s lived virginity to her eventual incorruption and enshrinement at Ely, Bokenham figures her as immutable and impassable, imagining her virginal perfections as perfect sempiternal stasis. Importantly, Bokenham reserves the phrase ‘gemme of virginytee’ for after Audrey decides to enter the nunnery, affiliating professed virginity with eternal stability. He uses the metaphor nine times in the poem:48 eight refer to Audrey in the cloister and the ninth (254) occurs when she asks Ecgfrith’s permission to become a nun. This equation constructs the conventual life as spatio-temporally equivalent to the saintly iconic chronotope: in both, the holy woman is separated from temporal change, is spatially segregated (by death or the cloister walls) from earthly affairs, and enjoys unchangeable perfection. This chronotopic parallel also encapsulates the poem’s attitude toward virginity within and outside the cloister.

45 46 47

Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 246. Malo, Relics and Writing, 5–10, et passim. Bynum, Resurrection, 24 n. 7, 107–8, 120, 162–63, 209–11, et passim; Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 353 n. 96; Amy Remensnyder, ‘Legendary Treasure at Conques: Reliquaries and Imaginative Memory’, Speculum 71 (1996): 888–90; and, in a different vein, Cynthia Hahn, ‘What Do Reliquaries Do for Relics?’ Numen 57 (2010): 284–316. 48 Lines 27, 254, 281, 286, 303, 315, 424, 429, 459 (fols. 117v, 118v–119v).

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Outside, it requires perseverance to perform; within, it (like the incorrupt corpse) is static and unchangeable. In another remarkable parallel with the iconic chronotope, Audrey’s claustration allows her to achieve widespread accessibility and influence. If she is only a ‘precious gemme’ when ‘shett’ or enshrined ‘Within the cloos of this hooly abbey’ (281, 282; fol. 118v), then her spiritual value is maximized when she is cloistered from secular life’s vagaries. Moreover, Audrey’s enclosure magnifies her sanctity’s influence. The poem’s second section opens with this paradox: Within the preordial circuyte of a yere That this noble gemme closid been had, The bright bemys therof shyne so clere That fer rounde aboute the bemys is sprad. (302–5; fol. 118v)

Like a well-made setting that enhances the light refracted through a gemstone, the cloister here disperses the beams of Audrey’s spiritual glory. Where her lay chastity was secret, her chastity as a professed nun can circulate her holiness ‘fer rounde aboute’. Audrey herself becomes the radiant ‘noble gemme’, illuminated by no external light source. She is self-contained, both gem and its sparkle. The suggestion that Audrey is self-illuminating continues in the next stanza when Bokenham invokes Matthew 5.14–16 in the imagery of the candle which cannot remain under the bushel. In those lines, Audrey is compared to the candle’s flame, and in the final couplet Bokenham insists that Right so Criste wold nat this gemme hide But made it to shyne aboute on eche side. (315–16, fol. 118v)

In the completion of the metaphor (‘Right so’), Christ’s action here is not to shine his own light through Audrey-as-gem, but rather to pull the bushel basket off her luminescence. To cloister may be to segregate from the world, but only from that claustral chronotope can Audrey’s spiritual glory circulate through the tempus. Bokenham returns to this simile after her death to discuss the miracles done at her grave: But yit, for as moch as biforn said ys That light vndir a busshel may nat hyd be, Right so this gemme hir bright bemys Wide spred abrode in many a cuntree, Of myraclis werkyng by grete plentee. (457–61, fol. 119v)

Burial, like cloistering, serves not to localize her virtus but to magnify it, the biblical metaphor locating her praesentia in her tomb (under the bushel) but not constraining it there. Enclosure intensifies, not limits, Audrey’s sanctity, enabling both supratemporal stability and spatio-temporal expansiveness. By portraying Audrey’s virginity as only truly perfectible as a nun, and her glorious holiness as only spiritually effective from the cloister, the poem imagines 83

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the spiritual benefit of the vowed religious life to be unequivocally greater than any holiness a layperson might attain. Unlike ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’, in which Kateryne remains a laywoman because her spiritual desires cannot be fulfilled within the convent, Bokenham privileges the conventual institutional body over the efforts of individual women’s bodies, establishing the cloister as enabling – even ensuring – ethical success. This relationship between individual and corporate bodies privileges the latter over the former in ways reminiscent of the Wilton Chronicle (where Edith’s active corpse, underwriting the conventual body, shapes individual nuns’ actions) and of Bradshaw’s Life of Werburge (where Werburgh’s body, also figuring Chester’s corporate body, guarantees spiritual perfections the individual monks often failed to attain). Bokenham’s claustral chronotope is arguably more idealistic than these texts because it presumes the conventual body to guarantee moinal perfection. There is no need for ethical improvement, for failures overcome, for dissent turned aside; rather, cloistering guarantees ethical stability. Such assumptions were not, however, easily realized in the everyday world, as ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’ suggests, for Bokenham’s vision of the claustral life denies the real problems that faced late medieval nunneries. Despite papal proclamations like Periculoso,49 the convent could never be removed from earthly concerns, and those concerns – as illustrated by the extreme case of St Radegund’s, Cambridge – could impinge upon the community’s spiritual probity. At St Radegund’s, endemic financial destitution and unwise management inhibited religious practice, such that in the late fifteenth century the more devout nuns vacated St Radegund’s for calmer cloisters. In 1486, John Alcock, Bishop of Ely, attempted to reform the nunnery, but to no avail, and he dissolved the convent in 1496 to found Jesus College.50 We do not know whether Alcock’s 1486 aid included economic assistance; given the convent’s continued decline, it seems unlikely. Moreover, Alcock’s own writings on the cloistered life, his sermon for a nun’s profession printed a year after St Radegund’s closed,51 does not suggest he was deeply sensitive to such tempus-bound difficulties. Alcock’s Spousage of a Virgin, like Bokenham’s ‘Audrey’, imagines the cloister as entirely other to the sinful, secular world, elevating the bridal nun to a similar sempiternal stasis by separating her from her kin and assimilating her to the examples of virginal saints like Agnes, John the Baptist, Katherine – and Audrey.52 Such reformist discourse 49

Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–1545 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), esp. 101–21 on fifteenth-century interpretations and applications of Periculoso in England. 50 Arthur Gray and Frederick Brittain, A History of Jesus College, Cambridge (London: Heinemann, 1960), 14–16. 51 John Alcock, Desponsacio virginis xpristo. Spousage of a virgyn to chryste (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1497), reprinted 1499, 1501 (STC 286–87). See V. M. O’Mara, ‘Preaching to Nuns in Late Medieval England’, in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 104–7; Barry Collett, ed., Female Monastic Life in Early Tudor England. With an Edition of Richard Fox’s Translation of the Benedictine Rule for Women, 1517 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), 59–60. 52 Alcock, Desponsacio virginis xpristo, esp. sig. A.iiii.r, A.vi.v–B.i.r, B.ii.v. ‘Saynt Awdry’ is mentioned on sig. B.ii.v.

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of claustral stability and separation, while reinforcing the rituals of profession that emphasized nuns’ separation from the world as brides of Christ,53 belied nuns’ inevitable participation in the tempus as well as the spiritual and mundane challenges they faced daily. Borrowed Blood: The Ely Saints at Stone and Chester One powerful byproduct of Audrey’s extensive genealogy was her ability to legitimize other institutions. Bradshaw and (to a lesser extent) the Stone Priory poet piggyback on Audrey’s genealogy to strengthen their institutions’ claims to continuity and antiquity. Unlike poets who write for nuns, the Stone poet and Bradshaw de-prioritize the governance of ethical bodies to privilege the continuities of corporate bodies, using Audrey’s kin to position their institutions’ origins deep within the holy Anglo-Saxon chronotope. Audrey’s niece Eormenhild is the central player for both poets: as wife of Wulfhere of Mercia, she grafted the powerful Mercian kingdom onto Audrey’s family tree. Although these narratives invoke Audrey’s blood kinship to guarantee a longitudinal continuity not otherwise available to these communities, as a virgin Audrey cannot participate directly in a blood lineage of direct descent unamended by spiritual bonds. Her virginity therefore becomes a problem for Bradshaw. Insisting that Werburgh enjoys her spiritual heritage solely through her biological matrilineage, Bradshaw cannot fully incorporate Audrey even though he needs her to guarantee that heritage’s sanctity. Bradshaw’s Werburge, like the Wilton Audrey, thereby illustrates the limits of strict blood lineage deployed apart from exemplary bonds. Eormenhild is key in the vernacular Wulfhad and Ruffin legend, which is extant in three versions: the Stone tabulae discussed in the Introduction; a version woven into Bradshaw’s Werburge; and a set of long-destroyed stained glass windows, with Middle English verse captions recorded by antiquarians, in the cloisters of Peterborough Abbey.54 Although the brief Peterborough verses make no mention of Eormenhild’s family, Bradshaw integrates it fully in his poem’s account of Werburgh’s heritage, as I discuss below. Yet Eormenhild plays a less robust role in Bradshaw’s version of the Wulfhad and Ruffin legend than at Stone, for the Chester poet highlights not the brothers’ blood possession of an Elyderived sanctity but rather Eormenhild’s role as wise councilor. She and her sons speak against Werburgh’s betrothal to the evil councilor Werebode (Werburge 53 54

Warren, Spiritual Economies, 3–29. On the Stone tabulae, see Introduction, pp. 1–2, 12–13. According to the Latin legend, after Eormenhild founded the nunnery at Stone, Wulfhere founded Peterborough Abbey in expatiation for the murder, although that foundation story was not commonly cited there. For the Peterborough windows’ verse captions, see Symon Gunton, The History of the Church of Peterburgh, ed. Symon Patrick (London: 1686), 104–12. Bradshaw integrates the legend at Werburge, 1.764–1330; he mentions Wulfhere’s foundation of Peterborough (1.1317–21) and Stone’s foundation (1.1324–27), but he seems not to know the tradition that Eormenhild founded it for nuns.

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1.932–1022), and she advises Wulfhere to confess his murder to the hermit-bishop Chad (1.1265–70). Wulfhad and Ruffin’s sanctity is ensured less by their generation from Eormenhild, however, than by their conversion by Chad and their martyrdom. Eormenhild plays a more substantial role in Stone’s Wulfhad and Ruffin tabula. That verse narrative is acephelous, so we do not know whether Eormenhild was positioned within her Ely sisterhood.55 Nevertheless, her devout actions and dotal agency underwrite Stone’s foundation. It is Eormenhild who councils her husband to confess his murder; who ‘wolde then goe bury her sonnes twayne’ (245); and who, when she cannot find Wulfhad’s corpse, received ‘good confortynge’ (255) from God as a band of angels transport her and Ruffin’s body to where Wulfhad lay. Her sanctity is established by her sound advice and visionary experience, which in turn confirm the prestige of Stone, founded by Eormenhild on the martyrs’ burial site: Seynt Ermenylde then for memorall of her sonnes two, The whiche dyde marters and virgyns also, She fowndyde here a monastery of virgyns clere And ordenede theryn nonnes and preestes infere. This begane the fowndacyone of this place sekerly Thore Ermenylde, that fowndyde here a place of nonry. (309–14)

This passage marshals nearly every element of the legend that could possibly improve Stone’s reputation: their saints were both martyrs and virgins and their priory founded by a holy woman as a female institution. Although presented, at least in the poem’s fragmentary state, as disconnected from her Ely sisterhood, Eormenhild is central to this origin legend, her sanctity and foundress role coupling with the martyrs’ Mercian blood to give Stone early, female, and royal roots. Stone’s intertwining of a holy woman into a royal male lineage finds a more complex analogue in Bradshaw’s Life of Werburge, a text dependent on Audrey’s genealogy even as her virginity disrupts its biologically inflected project. Bradshaw, an early sixteenth-century monk of Chester Abbey, crafts the most intricate version of Audrey’s blood genealogy in this, the most ambitious of the long poetic saints’ lives. Its two books of rhyme royal stanzas trace the life and afterlife of Audrey’s great-niece Werburgh alongside Mercian and Cestrian events, intertwining historical and hagiographic elements to narrate a thousand years of marcher spiritual history. As I discuss in the next chapter, Werburge strives to create for Chester Abbey a monastic chronotope centered in conversion-era Mercia, an originary time and space it can claim only through Werburgh’s physical relics. Bradshaw imagines Werburgh to possess the political authority of her royal Mercian father Wulfhere and the spiritual purity of her holy mother Eormenhild 55

The first 69 lines are largely obliterated in the manuscript; from the fragments that remain, it appears that the Stone legend began with the story of Werebode attempting to woo Werburgh.

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by blood – she is called an ‘enheretryce’ throughout the poem – not by emulation or proximity. Sanctity, true, is not generally viewed as a heritable trait; holiness arises from imitation of Christ and earlier saints.56 Because Bradshaw’s poem so strongly seeks, against custom, to fix Werburgh’s sanctity in her material flesh, the poem must figure holiness as transferable via biological generation. As in Marie’s Vie, Bradshaw reinforces Werburgh’s holy genealogy through figuration, here extended horticultural metaphors that naturalize holiness’s heritability. He is as invested in masking the linguistic acts that establish filiation as the French romances Stahuljak analyzes, attempting to veil blood’s metaphoric nature through yet another layer of figural language. As a result, Bradshaw denies while performing the rhetorical nature of kin relations. Within this layering of metaphor, moreover, Audrey’s necessary presence in Werburgh’s genealogy ultimately exposes the impossibility of transferring holiness through procreative channels, destabilizing Bradshaw’s historiographic presumptions. Chapter 3 below explains how Bradshaw uses this political–spiritual lineage to construct Chester Abbey’s institutional body; here, I demonstrate how Bradshaw lays claim to Werburgh’s inherited holiness through her generation from Audrey’s sisterhood. Bradshaw details Werburgh’s spiritual heritage twice in Book One, once in chapter 3’s genealogy and again later when he incorporates brief lives of Audrey, Seaxburgh, and Eormenhild. The first genealogy is an antiquarian tour de force, compiling data drawn from diverse sources to trace every possible line of filiation. After her Mercian heritage, Werburgh’s most formative descent is from the East Anglian royal house that produced the Ely saints (1.341–50), and Bradshaw also interweaves Northumbrian saints like Hild and Edwin (1.302, 311) as well as the Mildrith Legend saints (1.386–413).57 As a result, the most noble kings Bede and Higden record, and practically every conversion-era royal saint, find their way into her pedigree. Of the seventy named individuals in the genealogy, half are designated as ‘saint’ or ‘holy’; many are related but tangentially, being the children of distant uncles or aunts. Whereas the combination of history and genealogy in Marie’s Vie and the two Wilton poems emphasizes the depth of Edith’s and Audrey’s royal roots, Werburge’s opening highlights the breadth of Werburgh’s connections, centering her within a web of spiritual and familial lines that crisscross England. As Sanok has argued, this fourfold genealogy imagines Werburgh as ‘the culmination of four royal lineages, [who] comes to embody the separate kingdoms they represent and so to establish them as a single national community’.58 Bradshaw, however, uses the following chapters to quickly curtail Werburgh’s potential to figure a composite Saxon political unity, in part by refocusing on the extended history of the Mercian kingdom (as I discuss in the next chapter) and in part 56 On the possibility of inherited virtue, however, see Marie Anne Mayeski, ‘Secundum naturam: The Inheritance of Virtue in Aelred’s Genealogy of the English Kings’, Cistercian Studies Quarterly 37 (2002): 221–28. 57 I discuss Bradshaw’s sources in Chapter 3. 58 Sanok, Her Life Historical, 94.

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by privileging her matrilineal descent from Audrey’s Ely sisterhood. This move not only limits Werburgh’s ability to figure Englishness but also privileges lineal blood descent over lateral kin networks and communities created through ethical emulation. This last claim requires clarification considering Sanok’s work on Werburge. She has helpfully analyzed how Bradshaw, in foregrounding the shifting vicissitudes of history in his narration of England’s past, imagines Werburgh’s virtues (especially as represented in her unchanging, incorrupt body) to be ‘the transhistorical ground of ethical action’ that contemporary noblewomen can and should imitate to ‘form and figure a transhistorical community, one that supplies England with a continuity that its political history cannot’.59 This explanation of Werburge’s function for its early sixteenth-century female readerships clarifies how ethical imitation can forge links with the past. Bradshaw, however, does not deploy imitation to assert spiritual kinship among these four saints, as did Marie in her Vie. They do share ethical similarities: for example, all are ‘obedyent’ to their parents and/or spiritual superiors (1.1436, 1851, 2042, 2160) and all ‘refuse’ worldly attractions (1.1541, 1882, 2060, 2144; compare 1.855–61). These virtues connect these women back to biblical matrons (1.2172–73) and are enjoined upon contemporary noblewoman (1.1779–806), but Werburgh does not deliberately mimic her holy predecessors’ acts, as did Seaxburgh and the Ely nuns in Marie’s Vie. Rather, her imitation is a byproduct of blood descent; she resembles them ethically because she has issued from them, not because she chooses to emulate them. To establish the idea of biologically transferred sanctity, Bradshaw deploys horticultural metaphors and accompanying verbs of growth and generation. Goscelin of Saint-Bertin had peppered his vitae of Ely saints with typologized floral and gemological imagery;60 Bradshaw adapts both, making the vegetative leitmotif structurally central to this portion of his poem. Recycling the same cluster of figurative language for the matrilineal line of Seaxburgh, Eormehild, and Werburgh, Bradshaw emphasizes the importance of this productive lineage to Werburgh’s identity. When Eormenhild is first introduced, she is a ‘floure of vertue’ (1.596), and Bradshaw extends this metaphor of growth and flowering to describe her virtue as a pure perfyte plante, Whiche dayly encreased / by sufferaunce deuyne, Merueylously growynge / in her fresshe and varnaunt. (1.604–6)

Seaxburgh’s holiness, too, is ‘some plant of deuocyon’ (1.2023), while Werburgh’s virtue is a ‘newe plant of goodnes’ (1.716). Personal virtue not only increases vegetatively but also propagates the same way (1.663). Yet Werburgh is not simply a type 59 60

Ibid., 95, 106. For example, Werburgh is a ‘rose of Christ’ (‘rosa Christi’) who ‘blossomed’ (‘florescit’) from her fourfold genealogy, and her grandmother Seaxburgh ‘blossomed forth in her native palace’ (‘Florebat … hec in natiua aula’): VWer, 1 (pp. 32–33); LectSex, 2 (pp. 2–3). Goscelin’s lapidary imagery is more extensive, and is discussed in the next chapter.

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of her ancestresses, for these metaphors take on a maternal, reproductive valence when used of the two matrons. Seaxburgh produces the ‘budde and fruyte’ that is Eormenhild (1.612), and Eormenhild’s engendering of Werburge is described in similar terms (discussed below). Bradshaw’s patterns of metaphor differ, however, for Werburgh: he uses generative language to illuminate the process of begetting that produces her. She herself, rather than her spiritual qualities, is typically metaphorized as a plant or rose,61 an object of aesthetic value that has been propagated, rather than a reproductive plant. That is, whereas horticultural metaphors portray Eormenhild and Seaxburgh as productive, they portray Werburgh as product. The extended metaphors describing her generation from Eormenhild and Wulfhere illustrate this subtle difference: Dothe not a royall rose / from a brere procede, Passynge the stocke / with pleasaunt dylectacyon? The swete ryuer passeth / by due probacyon His heed and fountayne : / ryght so dothe she Transcende her parentes / with great benygnyte. (1.724–28)

The density of this metaphor establishes a horizon of meanings that permeate the poem’s other references to Werburgh as a ‘royall rose’ or ‘rose of Merciens’. The first, and most basic, meaning is Werburgh’s ‘prehemynens’ (1.418), her surpassing of both parents in virtue and blessedness. The metaphors of the rose and the river also highlight both continuity and change in Werburgh’s generation. As the rose growing on the thornbush, she is distinct from the limitations of her parents, yet unites in her person the desirable political and spiritual traits of both. As the river, her identity is contiguous with that of her parents; the form of the rushing river may differ from the quiet bubbling of the spring at its head, yet both share the same matter. This substantive continuity illuminates how these desired traits are imagined to inhere in Werburgh’s physical person. Just as the river metaphor emphasizes stability of identity as continuity of physical substance, despite changes in form, so does the rose metaphor foreground reproductive continuity. Indeed, the poem’s later use of this same pair of metaphors to describe the begetting of Audrey and Seaxburgh from Anna and Hereswith (1.2003–5) further highlights blood continuity down this matrilineage. In all these metaphors, however, Werburgh is consistently cast as the product of generative reproduction. As a virgin, she cannot birth biological offspring, but neither is this metaphor used of Werburgh’s spiritual relationship with her nuns. While she is held up as a ‘myrrour … of vyrgynall clennes’ for women within and outside the nunnery (1.1812), the language of reproduction is not used, as it was of Eormenhild’s spiritually generative abilities earlier. Rather, these paired metaphors imagine Werburgh to possess her spiritual heritage in blood, not through emulation or a verbally constructed spiritual kinship, via a line of descent that ends in Werburgh herself. Bradshaw is invested in Werburgh’s biological possession of these spiritual 61

Bradshaw, Werburge, 1.418, 724, 1490, 1815, 2507, 2522, 2851, 3142, 3286, 3456; 2.312, 317.

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traits, and that investment leads him to privilege Seaxburgh and Eormenhild’s role in Werburgh’s spiritual inheritance over Audrey’s. After narrating Werburgh’s profession as a nun at Ely, Bradshaw devotes three chapters to each of Werburgh’s three female progenitors, derived from the vitae and lectiones composed at twelfthcentury Ely.62 These embedded lives are more than an expansion of the opening genealogies; they rewrite for Werburgh a blood lineage that, counterintuitively, excludes Audrey by focusing on biological, not spiritual, matrilineage. Audrey’s life (chapter 18) does come first, defining the spiritual standard of the Ely sisterhood. Bradshaw, however, reboots Werburgh’s genealogy in the next chapter, the life of Seaxburgh, by opening with a short history of Hereswith’s family (2.1992–95). This family tree establishes a direct line of female blood descent from Hereswith to Seaxburgh to Eormenhild to Werburgh – a lineage in which the virginal Audrey cannot participate. Because she does not fall in Werburgh’s direct matrilineal line, Audrey is never directly figured in horticultural metaphors. This absence confirms Bradshaw’s conscious association of horticultural language with the metaphoric blood relations that supposedly allow Werburgh to enjoy her holy Ely heritage in her flesh. Audrey nevertheless remains crucial to Werburgh’s lineage, not only as one of the thirty-odd saints to whom Werburgh is related, nor only as her spiritual mentor at Ely, but as the guarantor of the entire Ely sisterhood’s holiness. In the late medieval hagiographic tradition, Seaxburgh and Eormenhild are accorded saintly prominence only through their affiliation with Audrey;63 her holiness ensures that her sisters’ and nieces’ sanctity will be recognized. Bradshaw therefore must include Audrey’s life to underwrite the holiness of Werburgh’s lineage, even though Audrey can play no role in Werburgh’s blood possession of that heritage. As a result, Audrey’s presence reveals that holiness cannot be passed through blood. She is the excess in Bradshaw’s scheme, the virginal aunt who must be forgotten; though excluded from the horticultural typology, she cannot be excised from the story because to do so would be to efface the guarantor of Werburgh’s holy heritage. Audrey’s problematic status troubles Bradshaw’s attempt to claim Chester Abbey as the inheritor of Mercian political and spiritual authority and thereby imbue the abbey’s institutional body with a persistent religious integrity and political autonomy. That claim, as I show in the next chapter, is based on the abbey’s possession of Werburgh’s once-incorrupt corpse, the fleshly embodiment of her dual Mercian–Ely heritage and thus the corporeal promise of the institutional body’s self-sufficiency. Werburgh’s direct matrilineal line is crucial to this claim, for to assert that Werburgh is holy because she emulates earlier saints – not that 62 63

On these texts, see Chapter 3 below, p. 110. Before the Conquest, Seaxburgh had enjoyed a separate Kentish narrative as founder of Minster-in-Sheppey, integrated into the Mildrith Legend material; although the early twelfthcentury Ely author of the Vita Sexburge used the Sheppey narrative, by the fourteenth century it had fallen out of circulation. Rollason, Mildrith Legend, 30–31, 37, et passim; VSex, 10–18 (pp. 154–70); Rosalind C. Love, ed. and trans., The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), lxxxii–xxxvi, civ–cvi.

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she emulates earlier saints because she is inherently holy – would undermine the naturalization of her holy descent. It would also locate spiritual perfection in the governance of the ethical body rather than directly in the saint’s physical body and, by analogy, the institution’s corporate body. Chester Abbey could not easily claim to be populated by well-ordered ethical bodies, and Bradshaw equates the saint’s body and the institutional body in part to overwrite his abbey’s sometimes unsavory reputation. As a result, ethical imitation of holy virtues, although it is enjoined upon monks and laywomen alike, cannot be for Bradshaw the primary method of constituting the monastic body or, accordingly, Werburgh’s holiness. Audrey’s necessary but indirect role in this genealogy reveals the tension at the root of Werburgh’s holy heritage, the flaw in Bradshaw’s ideological project, and the centrality of Audrey to so many narratives of English spiritual perfection. She doesn’t fit Bradshaw’s parameters at all, but he cannot accomplish his task without invoking her. Spiritual Kinships in a Conventual Manuscript: CUL MS Add. 2604 The power of Audrey’s blood genealogy lay in its temporal organization of her spiritual lineage, as we have seen, and Marie’s Vie suggests how imitation and shared profession can extend that lineage beyond her immediate kin. If blood filiation is only a metaphor that masks linguistic acts of recognition to form kin groups, as Stahuljak argues, then blood could be supplanted by other linguistic ways of establishing affiliations – affiliations less strictly linear, but no less progressive or directional. Blood kinship is so replaced, I suggest, in one manuscript of saints’ lives, CUL MS Add. 2604. Compiled for a nunnery and centered around Audrey’s holy genealogy, this manuscript incorporates non-Ely virgins into Audrey’s extended affinity not through narrative or rhetorical forms, but through codicological ones: the manuscript’s ordinatio and compilatio.64 I read the CUL manuscript intratextually, showing how its structure, layout, and paratextual elements construct from these saints’ lives a spiritual lineage for professed nuns, one modeled on female genealogy. This lineage combines Audrey’s blood genealogy, a linear or vertical organizational structure, with her ability to form spiritual affinities, a horizontal and non-progressive structure. The non-biological kinship thus created invites cloistered readers to participate in Audrey’s expansible lineage via ethical and professional imitation. In its discursive creation of an imita64

On compilatio and ordinatio, see M. B. Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’, in Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon, 1991), 35–69. For similar intratextual readings of at least partially hagiographic manuscripts, see Kimberly K. Bell, ‘Resituating Romance: The Dialectics of Sanctity in MS Laud Misc. 108’s Havelok the Dane and Royal Vitae’, Parergon 25 (2008): 27–51; and the essays collected in Bell and Julie Nelson Couch, eds., The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative (Leiden: Brill, 2011); and in Derek Pearsall, ed., Studies in the Vernon Manuscript (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990).

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tive space for less-than-perfect nuns, the legendary reveals a sympathetic understanding of ethical bodies’ failures, distinguishing it from the prescriptive ethical landscapes of ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’, Bokenham’s ‘Audrey’, and Alcock’s Spousage. The CUL manuscript focuses largely on saintly nuns and abbesses.65 Almost certainly compiled for a house of nuns, this prose legendary includes lives of universal saints like John the Baptist, Agatha, and Leonard as well as twelve lives of English nuns and abbesses translated from John of Tynemouth’s Sancti­logium.66 Within the Sanctilogium’s calendrical (or, in later permutations, alphabetical) organization, John’s short lives neither engage English history nor lend themselves to genealogical narratives. The Sanctilogium lives of the Ely saints do include basic genealogical detail, but the collection’s structure prevents their grouping as a cohesive kinship. In the CUL legendary’s repurposing of these lives, however, the manuscript’s careful construction, consistent layout, and deliberate ordering reconfigures the Sanctilogium Ely lives into a coherent genealogy. The ordinatio also crafts an affinity of holy nuns and abbesses beyond that lineage, positioning Audrey as the entire line’s progenetrix. These organizational decisions accord with the minor alterations the translator made to his Latin sources, changes that emphasize these nuns’ family relationships and shared profession. The manuscript thus presents a unitary vision for these abbess lives. Dating to the late fifteenth century, the legendary’s medieval core is written in a single hand and is somewhat fragmentary, for it lacks occasional leaves and two full quires. It is uniformly decorated throughout with illuminated initials and marginal penwork, and its layout is very regular. Each life opens with a descriptive incipit, and the opening word of each life is marked by a three-line illuminated initial. Each chapter or subsection is titled and set off with an oversized initial, then the text of each chapter opens with a two-line blue initial. A descriptive explicit concludes each life. The consistent execution of this layout suggests that the manuscript was conceived of and executed as a whole, marking this as a delib-

65

Blanton and Veronica O’Mara are currently editing this manuscript; my information is taken from Blanton, Signs of Devotion, 257–63; Blanton, personal communication; Veronica O’Mara, ‘Reading Saints’ Lives in CUL MS Add. 2604’ (paper, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, 14 May 2011); and my own examination of the manuscript. I submit my codicological and scribal assessments as provisional, pending Blanton and O’Mara’s edition, citing by folio, silently expanding abbreviations, and incorporating modern capitalization and punctuation. 66 John of Tynemouth’s mid-fourteenth-century Sanctilogium Angliae, Waliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae collects over 150 short lives of insular saints. The earliest manuscripts organize the saints by the calendar, while later versions order them alphabetically. The alphabetical collection was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1516 under the title Nova Legenda Anglie (STC 4601); it was abbreviated and translated into English as the Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande, printed by Richard Pynson also in 1516 (STC 4602). I cite Sanctilogium texts by page and line number from NLA. For discussion of the Sanctilogium’s evolution and manuscripts, see NLA, 1, ix–xxi; Peter J. Lucas, From Author to Audience: John Capgrave and Medieval Publication (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1997), 295–97. Lucas, Author to Audience, 294–306 has conclusively disproved the older theory that the collection was John Capgrave’s work.

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erately constructed anthology; the incipits and explicits, unique to the manuscript, are therefore integral to the collection’s unity. That unity extends to the ordering of the lives within it; I give the manuscript’s contents along with the incipits and select explicits in Table 1. As it stands, the manuscript is bookended by the lives of male saints, opening with two biblical figures and concluding with Leonard. Between these, the compiler has grouped the female saints by status: four virgin martyrs, then sixteen saints (in fifteen lives) who were abbesses and nuns. These abbess saints are subdivided into three groups: a cluster of Ely saints, a selection of four (perhaps originally five) other English abbesses,67 and a group of four early Christian saints also commemorated as nuns. The codicologically independent life of Modwenna is attached to the end of this cluster. The incipits draw attention to two shared themes. First is these nuns’ office – most are designated ‘abbess’ or ‘nun’ in the incipits, or else their lives clearly foreground their profession. Second is patterns of female kinship; beyond the complete Ely genealogy, the manuscript mentions but does not complete others. Both Eadburgh and Martha are defined in their incipits by their relationships to other women (Mildrith of Thanet and Mary Magdalene respectively), the life of Edith opens by emphasizing her kinship with her holy mother Wulfthryth and her saintly aunt Edith of Polesworth, and Domitilla’s life consists almost entirely of her family tree. These thematic threads are given significance by the manuscript’s sequencing. This structure is neither historical nor calendrical, nor is it fully genealogical. It is, rather, proximal and directional, even though it does not have the backing of biological processes to create a truly diachronic lineage, nor is it a continuous holy pedigree insofar as these saints do not spiritually engender their successors. This sequencing creates a genealogy-like vector of abbesses and nuns, united by the incipits’ linguistic recognition of their shared office and grafted onto Audrey’s kin group; as in Marie’s Vie, blood genealogy acts as a superstructure that gives the sequence its initial direction, progressing outward from Audrey through these three groups. That vector also decreases in magnitude; the further one moves from Audrey and her Ely kin, the less similar are these nuns to her originary example. Because the CUL translator has not elaborated these lives with exhortations to mimic the saints’ virtues, this vector is not exemplary in the narrow sense of ‘inciting to imitation’; rather, because these saints all share an office, it is exemplary in the sense of ‘modeling paradigmatic behavior’. And, by placing Audrey at the point of origin, then locating female saints who are only nominally nuns at the vector’s distal end, the CUL compiler gives Audrey precedence in defining proper conventual life. At the same time, it leaves discursive space for the collection’s ethically flawed readers to join Audrey’s holy lineage through their shared profession. This reading of the manuscript’s structure is based on these three groups’ unities and distinctive features. These clusters’ deliberate construction is most evident in 67

A quire is missing between Eanswith and Hild; an estimation of the lost text for these two saints, based on John of Tynemouth’s vitae, suggests that there was room for another life between them.

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Table 1.  Contents of CUL MS Add. 2604, with incipits and (where they differ substantially) explicits Saint John the Baptist John the Evangelist

Folios 1r–11v 11v–21r

Columba of Sens*

22r–25v

Agatha

25v–32v [end missing]

Cecilia Barbara

41r–47v [opening missing] 47v–52v

Audrey Seaxburgh

52v–59r 59v–61r

Eormenhild

61r–62v

Werburgh

62v–65r

Eorcengota and Ethelburgh

65r–66v

Wihtburgh

66v–69r

Edith of Wilton

69v–75v

Eadburgh

76r–79r

Incipit / Explicit Here begynnyth the lyfe of seynt John baptist Here begynnyth the life of seynt John evangeliste Here begynnyth the lyf of seynt Columbe þe virgyn Here begynneth the martirdome of seynt Agace the virgyn, howe she was committid to an unclene and a corrupte woman Effridosie by a cruell duke Quyncian Thus endith the life of seynt Cecile the virgyn and martir Here begynnyth the life of seynt Barbara the virgyn and martir The life of seynt Audrey of Hely Here begynnyth the lyfe of seynt Sexburge sister to seynt Awdre which was the next abbes of Hely aftir hir Here begynnyth the lyfe of seynt Ermenylde the first doughter of seynt Sexburgh Here begynnyth the life of seynt Werburgh the doughtir of seynt Ermenyld Here begynnyth a shorte life of seynt Erkengoode the secunde doughter of seynt Sexburgh and the awnte of seynt Wereburgh, and of seynt Alburgh þat was sistir to seynt Awdre of Hely Thus endith shortly the lyves of seynt Erkengoode and of seynt Alburgh not the abbes of Berkyng but the abbes of Brige in Fraunce Here begynnyth the life of seynt Whitburge Thus endith the lyfe of seynt Whithburgh, the syster of seynt Awdre Here begynnyth the lif of seynt Edith of wylton Thus endith the life of seynt Edith the goode mayde of Wilton Here begynnyth the holy life of seynt Edburgh, abbes of Tenett aftir seynt Mildrede

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Eanswith Hild Martha Domitilla (Flavia Domitilla the Younger) Justina of Antioch Benedicta of Origny Modwenna Leonard

79r–80v [end missing] 89r–93r [opening missing] 93r–97v

Here begynnyth the holy life of seynt Aswyde, þe nonne of Folkstone Thus endith the holy lif of seynt Hilde, abbes of Streneshall

Here begynnyth the lif of seynt Martha, abbes of many nonnes and þe syster of Mary Mawdelen 97v–98r Here begynnyth a litill short mencion of the life of seynt Domitille Thus endith the litill mension of seynt Domitille, nonne 98r–105v Of the life of seynt Justine, abbes and martyr, [end missing] howe she began for to growe and encrese in vertue 108r–112v Thus endith the lyfe and martirdome of seynt [opening Benett, virgyn and abbes of nonnes missing] 113r–136v Thus begynnyth þe lyfe of seynt Modewyne 137r–152v Here begynneth the life and the miracles of seynt Leonarde

*

On Columba, Domitilla, and Benedicta, easily confused with other women who share those names, see Agnes B. C. Dunbar, A Dictionary of Saintly Women, 2 vols. (London: George Bell, 1904–05).

the first group of Ely women, where the compiler re-creates a roughly accurate matrilineage, emphasized in the paratextual additions, out of the Sanctilogium’s otherwise disconnected lives. While John of Tynemouth sometimes acknowledges family connections, the translator makes minor additions to solidify their kinships. For example, during Audrey’s corporeal elevation in the ‘Life of Audrey’, the translator names ‘seynt Sexburge which was aftir hir [i.e., Audrey] abbes’ as the impetus behind the ritual, and in the life of Seaxburgh he again names her as ‘sister to seynt Awdre’; John is silent on both counts.68 Similarly, where John identifies Wihtburgh simply as ‘sister of the holy virgin Etheldreda’,69 the CUL compiler claims she ‘was the sister of seynt Awdre of Hely, and of seynt Sexburgh, and of seynt Alburgh of Brige [Brie]’ (fol. 66v). While the compiler has reduced some of John’s wide-reaching genealogical details, particularly in his Werburgh,70 these strategic excisions (removing male or peripheral relatives) focus the reader’s attention on female kinship. 68 69 70

Fol. 55v, compare NLA, 2.426/13–16, 19–20; fol. 59v, compare NLA, 2.355/26. ‘sororque sancte Etheldrede virginis’. NLA, 2.468/15–16. NLA, 2.422/7–25.

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The joint life for Eorcengota and Ethelburgh (called ‘Alburgh’ in the collection), the two Ely women who spent their careers in France, witnesses strongly to the compiler’s desire for a complete Ely matrilineage. These are, to the best of my knowledge, these saints’ only vernacular lives; even in Bradshaw’s expansive genealogies, Eorcengota and Ethelburgh are simply names.71 The main source, the narratio appended to John’s life of Seaxburgh,72 is evidently more laconic than the translator would like, for he opens this life not only with the most genealogically detailed incipit, but also by discussing the paucity of information on Eorcengota: ‘Seynt Sexburgh had to holy doughters. On was callid seynt Ermenylde, whos lyfe is writen afore. The todir is clepid Erkengoode, of whom I wryte a litill nowe for I fynde no more of hir than I write here’ (fol. 65r–v). Speaking, unusually, in the first person, the translator foregrounds his attempt to compile a comprehensive Ely hagiography. He draws additional familial connections later, giving additional data for both women and name-dropping Hereswith’s daughter Sæthryth.73 The lack of information about Eorcengota and Ethelburgh allows the translator to emphasize his genealogical agenda, extending it as far as he can, and to cement details in Audrey’s family tree. The Ely women are united into a single lineage via the incipits’ verbal recognition of their family relations and shared office. Kinship terms like ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ give this grouping a generational and therefore temporally progressive trajectory that is reinforced by the rapid linear progression of short lives in the manuscript, while the shared office of abbess, like Marie’s typological use of the five wise virgins, couples the language of blood relations with conventual status. Each life, with the exception of Eormenhild’s, emphasizes its subject’s place in the sequence of Ely’s abbesses. The lives of Seaxburgh and Werburgh, in particular, foreground the responsibilities of abbesses. Once she ‘had suche gouernaunce of so many holy seruauntis of God’, Werburgh ‘was such a maystres amonges hem that rather she was more like a seruant than a souerayn’ (fol. 63r), while Seaxburgh, once chosen abbess, ‘vndirstode that she was more charged than she was afore, for than she had charge not only of hirselfe, but of all the hole couent and therfore she must be more wakyr than she was afore’ (fol. 60v). This emphasis on good abbessial rule provides a linguistic marker that can be used instead of blood to extend Audrey’s spiritual filiations. Configuring the community of abbesses not simply around office (position in the institutional body) but around ethics (how one ought to discharge that office), the ordinatio and translatio implicitly invite the manuscript’s professed readers to imitate these women while defining the Ely kin group as prototypical of good abbessial governance. That act of linguistic recognition assimilates the second cluster of saints to Audrey’s blood genealogy, for the next four saints are all identified as professed women, their sanctity depending on their holy deeds as community leaders and 71 72 73

Bradshaw, Werburge, 1.342, 397, 1841, 2052–58. NLA, 2.357. Fol. 66r (compare NLA, 2.357/18–21, 32–33); fol. 65v. Although John does name Sæthryth, he does not make these other genealogical details explicit; compare NLA, 2.357/7–9.

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their actions seemingly mimicking the Ely saints’ paradigmatic behavior. As abbess, Eadburgh’s first job is to translate the relics of her predecessor at Thanet, Mildrith, just as Seaxburgh had done for Audrey; Eanswith, although she is never explicitly designated abbess, performs miracles that further the building and protection of her chapel, much as Wihtburgh had done; Hild, like Werburgh and Seaxburgh, is an exemplary ‘holy modir’ and ‘holy abbes’ (fol. 89r). Even though the translator follows the Sanctilogium in refusing Edith the status of abbess – Edith humbly rejects the governance of several nunneries – one chapter heading still claims that ‘the mayden was made abbes of Berkyng and of Wynchestre and ordenyd for to be abbes of Wylton’ (fol. 71r). Standing at two removes from Audrey, these four nuns are verbally incorporated into the manuscript’s alliance of professed women while also perpetuating the exemplary abbesshood of the Ely sisterhood, extending this spiritual lineage beyond blood bonds. The vector’s most distal zone includes the four early church women. These women are not, like Hild and Seaxburgh, renowned primarily for being holy abbesses; rather, they are included in this lineage solely via their position in the manuscript and their paratextual linguistic recognition as nuns. That recognition is based solely on stray remarks in their lives. Only at the end of her life was Martha ‘veyled nonne and made abbes of a gret congregacion of mynches’ (fol. 94v), and while Benedicta starts in ‘religous profession liuing in holy deuocoun and abstinens’, she is accosted by a pagan tyrant and eventually martyred (fol. 108r). The diagnostic saints, however, are Justine and Domitilla. Justine’s life is her standard narrative, characterized by extended demonic temptations. One isolated clause marks her as a nun: ‘Aftir times þat Cipriane was made bisshope, he veyled Justine and made her abbes and modir of many holy nonnes’ (fol. 105v). This sentence earns Justine the title, in the CUL incipit, of ‘abbes and martyr’. Domitilla’s life is even more remarkable, for it takes up only half a folio, in which the translator, after giving her lineage, reports that he knows nothing more of her: ‘I suppose because of grete persecucions that were that tyme in þe begynnyng of the chirch ther was no more mencion made of hir life, but that she lyued an holy nonne and so died’ (fol. 97r). Despite the paucity of information about these holy women’s professed lives, they are recognized by the compiler as nuns and added to Audrey’s spiritual lineage. These four early Christian women fit uncomfortably into this affinity. What role, then, do they play in the collection? I suggest these lives function as a contrast class, defining ideal English conventual life by possessing only one possible trait of good abbesses and nuns – the label. These four saints’ marginality is crucial, because as margin they establish the conceptual edge of the community, structurally delimiting the bare minimum necessary to be incorporated into this pedigree. As such, they cement this lineage’s most significant features: consecration as nun, and to a lesser degree holy female kin. They also highlight by contrast the traits shared by the other nuns: Englishness, ascetic renunciations, the edification of nunneries. The wakings, prayings, humilities, and rejections of worldly honor performed individually by Seaxburgh, Eormenhild, and others become more strongly defined traits of good conventual life because they are shared by the 97

ANGLO-SAXON SAINTS’ LIVES AS HISTORY WRITING

Anglo-Saxon, but not early Christian, women. These four nuns’ position in the manuscript therefore circumscribes this conventual lineage as both ranked, in that it finds its ideal expression in Audrey and her kin, and broad, in that it can still embrace even those who follow Audrey’s example less closely, who simply ‘lyued an holy nonne and so died’ (fol. 97r). Modwenna follows this contrast class of nuns, seemingly belying the pattern I have just laid out. As a composite Irish–Scottish–Anglo-Saxon saint, we would expect her to have fallen in the second grouping of nuns, not lying outside the outermost boundary of this affinity.74 There are several possible reasons for Modwenna’s curious placement. Pragmatically speaking, Modwenna may be a late addition to the collection. Although her life, the longest of the abbess lives, is translated from the Sanctilogium,75 it is codicologically independent of the rest of the manuscript, being the only item in its three quires. It appears to be copied by the same scribe, and perhaps decorated by the same initialer, but it does not open with the usual gold capital, and the scribe has on occasion used a form of textualis for the chapter titles, something he never did in the previous lives. Leonard, who follows Modwenna in the manuscript and ends the collection, is graced with the usual gold capital, and his life’s decoration accords in every way with the other lives in the manuscript; clearly, that text was copied and decorated at the same time as the first twenty-one items. This evidence suggests, although it isn’t robust enough to conclusively demonstrate, that Modwenna was incorporated into the collection late in the compilation process. Perhaps the exemplar for Modwenna was found after the decoration for the rest of the manuscript was complete but while the scribe was still available, and her life was then written out and bound into the manuscript as close to the other abbess saints as possible.76 If so, Modwenna would witness codicologically to the integrity of the nun lives’ ordering within the manuscript as well as the conceptual extensibility of this lineage beyond the specific nuns originally included. It is equally possible that Modwenna was part of the collection as initially conceived, and that there are other, unrecoverable reasons for its decorative anomalies. Whether or not Modwenna’s position in the manuscript is deliberate, she is a fitting capstone for this lineage, for she embodies all the ideal traits of the English nun, as established by the previous lives. She embraces ‘clennes of maydenhode’ (fol. 113r) as does Eanswith, who eloquently rejects her father’s attempts to marry her off; she chastens ‘hir body with grete wakynges and fastinges’ (fol. 113v) as do Seaxburgh and Eormenhild; she founds multiple monasteries, as do Audrey, Wihtburgh, Eanswith, and Hild. She is part of both holy blood and spiritual kinships, living in her first monastery with her sister Athea and her brother

74

On the layers of accretion to Modwenna’s syncretic life, see Geoffrey of Burton, The Life and Miracles of St Modwenna, ed. and trans. Robert Bartlett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), xiv–xix. 75 NLA, 2.198–212. 76 Modwenna falls at the first point in the manuscript where an abbess saint’s life ends at the bottom of a quire.

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Ronan, and acting as spiritual mother to saints like Bridget of Kildare and Edith of Polesworth. Whereas ideal nunhood is defined elsewhere in the manuscript piecemeal, through the collective example of the Ely sisterhood and reinforced by the other nun saints, Modwenna coalesces all this lineage’s significant features into a single life. This proximal structure establishes complex temporal and ethical relationships among its saints and between its saints and its readers. The legendary’s lineage of profession uses vertical (genealogical, temporal) organizational techniques to impose structure on the horizontal (exemplary, timeless) affinity it envisions. It unites past with present not through an unbroken chain of descent but via achronic spiritual filiations that assert continuities across time. Further, the legendary’s proximal structure grounds that supratemporal community in the preConquest past. Beginning with Audrey and proceeding through the contrast class, it privileges the ethical space of Anglo-Saxon England. The manuscript imagines Anglo-Saxon abbesses – not apostolic nuns like Martha, contemporary ones like Bridget of Sweden, or early martyrs like Juliana – as prototypical practitioners of female religious life because they mirror Audrey’s kin group most closely. Audrey therefore defines proper conventual action before her lifetime as well as after. Crucially, this achronic lineage includes the fifteenth-century nuns who read it. Because it erases spatio-temporal distance and envisions, through Domitilla’s example, that any upright, professed nun can belong to Audrey’s affinity, the legendary’s ethical landscape unites the ancient Roman world, Anglo-Saxon England, and contemporary England. In emphasizing conventual best practices, it implicitly enjoins its readers to follow Audrey’s (and these other nuns’) example and so incorporate themselves into the manuscript’s proximal kinship. The CUL collection thereby parallels Bradshaw’s Werburge in its imitative construction of a transhistorical lineage; as Sanok argues, Bradshaw uses ‘exemplary rhetoric’ to create ‘an imagined community linking Anglo-Saxon saints and contemporary readers through the continuity of devotional practice’.77 Unlike Werburge, however, the CUL legendary does not directly exhort its readers to imitative action (rare in the Sanctilogium and accordingly sparse in these lives). Relying on description rather than prescription, the CUL compiler instead imagines a tiered array of paradigmatic claustral behaviors. The legendary thereby creates a supratemporal and despatialized corporate body defined by profession and graded by ethical practice. The professed nun locates herself in proximity to Audrey’s prototypical example via ethical imitation, but explicit emulation is not required for inclusion in this corporate body, as the examples of Juliana and Domitilla suggest. Defined by but not limited to Audrey’s kin group, confined to nuns and abbesses by the incipits’ verbal markers, hierarchical in its structure yet perpetually extensible at its edges, this notion of female spiritual affinities balances horizontal and vertical communities into an ever broadening circle that includes any nun wishing to identify with Audrey and her kinship.

77

Sanok, Her Life Historical, 106.

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The CUL lives, ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’, Bokenham’s ‘Audrey’, and Alcock’s Spousage together suggest that Audrey and her kin were crucial for many attempting to reconstruct the origins and best practices of contemporary conventual life. The legendary’s conception of ethical transformation is, however, less prescriptive than that found in these other texts. Copying early English nuns like Seaxburgh, Edith, or Mildrith would improve the spiritual standing of English nunneries, ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’ claims; it imagines the early English past as fully imitable and replicable, its lost but not unrecoverable spiritual perfections promising to resolve a malaise that, the poem also suggests, plagued fifteenthcentury nunneries. As such, it casts ideal conventual life as static and unchanging, much as Bokenham and Alcock imagine it to be. Just as their nuns persist outside worldly flux, so are the standards of good moinal behavior unchanged from the Anglo-Saxon period, the anonymous poem implies. The CUL compiler concurs, it seems, insofar as that collection presents Audrey as the ultimate exemplar of abbesshood. At the same time, the CUL collection also acknowledges, in ways these other texts do not, that Audrey’s example was always out of reach. Few nuns could model themselves completely on Audrey, Seaxburgh, and Eormenhild; few nunneries enacted the static claustral life Bokenham and Alcock praised; many cloistered women would be doing well to meet the minimum requirements for inclusion in Audrey’s lineage. Several monastic hagiographies – including the Wilton Chronicle, Werburge, and the later Latin lives of Edmund – address the gap between ideal past and present reality via the corporate body, imagining institutional traditions and their patron saints’ holy perfections to obviate flaws in individual monks’ and nuns’ ethical practice. The CUL legendary partially conforms to this presumption, insofar as the contrast class allows spiritually mediocre nuns access to Audrey’s lineage via profession alone. Yet the legendary uses this professional body to encourage spiritual efforts, not to ignore ethical failings. Admonishing its cloistered readers to take Audrey’s example based simply on shared profession, the CUL legendary aligns itself with moderate reformist ideals. The significance of such tempered exhortations becomes clear when comparing moderate reformist texts, like Bishop Richard Fox’s 1517 translation of the Benedictine Rule for nuns, with the totalizing mindset of Bokenham and Alcock. As opposed to Alcock, who defines nuns’ ideal piety ‘as a spiritual experience which is intense and so entirely inward that it rejects what is outward and physical’, Fox constructs conventual behavior ‘in terms of fulfilling a vocation through a job well done’, emphasizing self-regulation within community life’s pressures.78 Focusing on professional identities rather than heroic asceticism or contemplative isolationism, both the CUL compiler and Fox sympathize with the changed nature of religious life; it is no longer identical to that espoused by Benedict or lived by early English nuns, even though those examples are still useful for identifying best practices. The moinal life is challenging, they admit, but these moderate reformers urge their readers to pursue holiness anyway. The CUL collec78

Collett, Female Monastic Life, 60, 59.

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tion thus offers a rigorous model of conventual life without mandating prepackaged perfection, creating a space conducive to ethical striving (unlike Bokenham’s ‘Audrey’) and sympathetic to nuns’ inability to attain Audrey’s example (unlike ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’) without giving up on imitation’s potential to reform the convent. As England’s protovirgin and cornerstone of the Anglo-Saxon chronotope, Audrey’s exemplary utility and family ties are inseparable; the weight of temporal and ethical chronotopic assumptions means that her virtuous action necessarily invokes her historical moment, and vice-versa. Whether or not they emphasize her kin relations, her vernacular hagiographers participate, obliquely or overtly, in larger discussions about religious behavior circulating in the long fifteenth century. What constitutes right monastic practice? How does one regain the spiritual glories of ancient practitioners? Are those heights even recoverable, or should the modern nun look elsewhere for exemplars? The pressures of reformist discourse are felt strongly in Audrey’s vernacular lives, with their implicit and explicit calls to imitation. Even, however, in those lives less obviously invested in the monastic emulation of their titular saints, like Bradshaw’s Werburge, reformist concerns still underlie these texts’ construction of corporate and ethical bodies.

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3

Henry Bradshaw’s Life of Werburge and the Limits of Holy Incorruption

M

ercia has always been a historical fantasy. The most powerful kingdom of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, it is represented differently from age to age, perpetually reconstructed geographically and temporally.1 Its origins are shrouded in Germanic myths, leaving to historians only ‘created remembrances … [that] have been honed and redefined in subsequent centuries as kingdoms themselves grew and reformed themselves’.2 Outside its core domain, the subkingdoms incorporated into the Mercian hegemony throughout the seventh and eighth centuries varied in their political, ethnic, and territorial makeup, such that ‘being Mercian seems to have been a more flexible commodity’ than being part of other Saxon kingdoms.3 That Mercian malleability lent it to re-imagination in every generation, from Felix of Crowland in the eighth century to Geoffrey Hill in the twentieth.4 It is fitting, therefore, that the monks of Chester – a city only falling within Mercia’s most expansive orbit – would turn to this protean kingdom to invent for themselves an ancient, holy, and politically independent origin. Unlike Audrey’s hagiographers, who use her holy kinship to claim roots in a broadly imagined Anglo-Saxon past, the Chester monk-poet Henry Bradshaw seeks, in his Life of St Werburge (by 1513, printed 1521), to delineate a regional manifestation of early English spirituality as a guarantor of Chester Abbey’s spiritual and temporal authority. However imagined ‘Mercia’ may be, for Bradshaw and others, certain features remain constant. The kingly lineage that extended back through Penda, Icel, and 1

Simon Keynes, ‘The Kingdom of the Mercians in the Eighth Century’, 1–26; Richard Martin, ‘The Lives of the Offas: The Posthumous Reputation of Offa, King of Mercians’, 51–53; Sheila Sharp, ‘Æthelberht, King and Martyr: The Development of a Legend’, 59–63, all in Æthelbald and Offa: Two Eighth-Century Kings of Mercia, ed. David Hill and Margaret Worthington (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005). 2 Barbara Yorke, ‘The Origins of Mercia’, in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. Michelle P. Brown and Carol A. Farr (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 21. 3 Ibid., 20. 4 Felix of Crowland wrote the mid-eighth-century Vita Guthlaci, a life of the Mercian soldier-turned-hermit Guthlac; Geoffrey Hill (b.1932), poet and professor emeritus at Boston University, published in 1971 a series of prose-poems entitled Mercian Hymns that use the landscape to collapse temporally ancient and contemporary Mercia.

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Woden was as ideologically productive as the geographic and onomastic identity of ‘Merci’, ‘the borderers’. Mercian identity and politics coincided with the Welsh Marches, and English marcher lords drew connections between their own position on England’s periphery and earlier Mercian liminality.5 Accordingly, many sixteenth-century Cheshire gentry also identified their palatinate’s history with that of Mercia.6 If to be Mercian is to be set apart from the rest of England, then to adopt a Mercian pedigree is to highlight one’s independence from mainstream English heritage and hierarchy – a mainstream increasingly focused, in the early Tudor period, on London and the southern counties. Bradshaw capitalizes on these liminal positions in his Life of Werburge, a lengthy, ambitious account of the life and afterlife of the seventh-century Mercian princess and nun Werburgh. The poem’s 5,500 lines of rhyme royal stanzas, divided into two books, spend as much time on Werburgh’s royal heritage and the history of Chester as they do on traditional hagiographic topics. The first book traces Werburgh’s genealogy, her holy life as a nun and death, and her first relic translation. The second opens with another relic translation from Hambury to Chester to avoid marauding Danes, then recounts Chester’s history before concluding with the miracles Werburgh performs for her monastic community and city. This life is therefore not simply a ‘work of local devotion … with chronicle and legend ransacked for associative and illustrative material’, as Derek Pearsall once suggested.7 Rather, like the Wilton poet and some of Audrey’s hagiographers, Bradshaw intertwines established narratives of Anglo-Saxon England with hagiographic topoi of the virgin saint. Within Werburge, this generic interlace crafts for his monastery a Mercian etiology focalized in Werburgh’s inviolable body. As Catherine Clarke demonstrates, this ‘memorialisation of Mercia … offers an alternative cultural geography which moves Chester from the periphery of England to the centre of an autonomous, powerful, ancient kingdom’.8 Because Bradshaw constructs Werburgh’s physical body as the repository of Mercian greatness, he can imagine that heritage to be transferable, via relic translations, to the sixteenthcentury Chester monks, allowing them to claim vicariously an institutional body that perpetuates the ancient authority embedded in her holy corpse. This invented origin story is, however, neither natural nor obvious. Bradshaw therefore dealt with obstacles in the historical record, and in contemporary 5

David Hill, ‘Mercians: The Dwellers on the Boundary’, in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. Michelle P. Brown and Carol A. Farr (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 178; Kathy Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 73–74; Catherine A. M. Clarke, ‘Remembering Anglo-Saxon Mercia in Late Medieval and Early Modern Chester’, in Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place, and Identity in Chester c. 1200–1600, ed. Clarke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 201–18. 6 Robert W. Barrett, Jr, Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); Tim Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, 1480–1560 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2000), 41–62. 7 Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge, 1970), 281. 8 Clarke, ‘Remembering’, 202.

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monastic life, that threaten any full assimilation of Chester Abbey’s monastic chronotope to Werburgh’s life and afterlife. These obstacles include the ethical distance between Chester’s disruptive monks and Werburgh’s own perfections, a distance Bradshaw overwrites by imagining Chester’s institutional body as continuous with Werburgh’s holy flesh. However, Werburgh’s once-incorrupt body eventually decays. Her corpse is a present absence throughout Book Two that not only challenges Bradshaw’s historiographic project but also hints at the impossibility of constituting a viable corporate body. Yet Bradshaw also recuperates Werburgh’s decay, using her material disappearance to consider, as does the CUL legendary’s compiler, ways the individual monk might strive to meet Werburgh’s example, and the value such striving might have. Bradshaw is a skilled and underrated poet, heavily influenced by Chaucer and Lydgate but not a slavish imitator of the rhyme royal form as were many early sixteenth-century poetasters. As Christopher Cannon establishes, Bradshaw has a nuanced sense of ‘literature’ as a distinct category of writing and of his position in English literary history.9 In one ‘go little book’ stanza late in the poem, Bradshaw traces his own poetic lineage, from Chaucer through the monastic writers Lydgate and Alexander Barclay to John Skelton, emphasizing the moral, frequently monastic nature of this English literary genealogy (2.2020–26). That Bradshaw so carefully places himself within this lineage should attune us to his poetic sensibilities, and a careful formal reading of Werburge pays significant dividends. Poetic elements – metaphors, patterns of floral and gemological imagery, relic discourse, and careful manipulation of key terms – are important historiographic tools for Bradshaw; he uses the diachronic lineages they reinforce, and the achronic associations they enable, to overwrite or repress those obstacles that inhibit Chester Abbey’s claim to Werburgh’s Mercian inheritance. Bradshaw is therefore at least as careful a poetic craftsman as Lydgate or Bokenham, in part because the stakes of his hagiographic project are so high. Unfortunately, no medieval manuscripts of this work exist; its sole witness is the 1521 printing by Richard Pynson, so our only evidence of how or among whom this poem originally circulated in Chester is internal to the text itself. Bradshaw clearly sought a lay audience, for he addresses laywomen directly and explicitly warns city and palatinate not to infringe on the abbey’s jurisdictions. At the same time, the poem also anticipates a cloistered readership, exhorting the black monks to imitate Werburgh’s religious virtues (2.1992–98). Werburge’s imagined audience therefore embraces every facet of Cheshire society, suggesting that Bradshaw (and presumably behind him his abbot, John Birchenshawe) sought to promulgate widely this vision of his abbey’s history. Werburgh, the daughter of the seventh-century king of Mercia Wulfhere and of Audrey’s niece Eormenhild, enjoyed a modest but persistent cult throughout the Middle Ages. She appears in the Anglo-Saxon resting-places lists and in several pre-Conquest calendars, and churches dedicated to her were scattered across

9

Cannon, Middle English Literature, 150–52, 186.

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London and the midlands.10 After the Conquest, she was celebrated primarily at Ely, as part of Audrey’s extended kinship, and at Chester, where she was translated sometime after 907.11 During his time as Ely’s house hagiographer, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin composed her sole vita,12 and at Chester her cult fluctuated greatly. She was feted in the twelfth century, when a now lost book of miracles was probably composed, and her box shrine was crafted c.1340.13 There is, however, little evidence of her Chester cult between then and the turn of the sixteenth century, when both parish wills and Bradshaw’s poem suggest an increased interest.14 This renewed devotion may have been encouraged by Abbot Birchenshawe, who was also pursuing a major rebuilding campaign at this time, the efforts of which can still be seen in Chester Cathedral’s west front.15 Birchenshawe’s construction efforts were part of a larger push to enhance Chester Abbey’s regional clout, and critical reception of Bradshaw’s Werburge has read it in this context. Certainly Werburge is a politically savvy work ‘calibrated to effect change on the level of local politics’, as Robert Barrett argues, and Barrett and Tim Thornton have focused on Werburge Book Two’s intervention in contemporary conflicts.16 There were plenty of those during Birchenshawe’s abbacy (r.1493–1524; 1529–35). A resolute, not to say obdurate, man, Birchenshawe was keenly aware of his position as abbot of the palatinate’s largest monastic house, prepared to maintain that authority at any cost. The early years of Birchenshawe’s governance saw two threats to the abbey’s privileges, discussed at length by Thornton and R. V. H. Burne.17 The first conflict arose between city and abbey when, in 1506, Henry  VII granted a new charter to the city of Chester, confirming to the city all rights of legal jurisdiction except cases that fell within the castle precinct. Notably not excepted were cases falling within the abbey’s traditional jurisdictional boundaries, a substantial diminishing of its civic authority; a series of conflicts and arbitrations did nothing to restore the abbey’s rights.18 The 10 Blair, ‘Handlist’, 557. Bond, Dedications, 17 lists twelve dedications; although his figures are not reliable, parish churches were certainly dedicated to Werburgh from Derby to Bristol to Friday Street in London: Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Husting, London, A.D. 1258–A.D. 1688, ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London: 1889), 1.292, 681; VCH Som. 2.129; Henry A. Harben, A Dictionary of London, being notes topographical and historical relating to the streets and principal buildings in the City of London (London: Jenkins, 1918), 323, 619–20. 11 VCH Ches. 5.1.19; Love, Hagiography, xv–xvii. 12 Edited and translated in Love, Hagiography, 25–93. I cite this text by Love’s abbreviation, VWer, and by chapter and page number. 13 VCH Ches. 5 2.190–91; Love, Hagiography, lviii, cxviii–xix; Clarke, ‘Remembering’, 201–3. 14 VCH Ches. 5 1.85. 15 R. V. H. Burne, The Monks of Chester: The History of St. Werburgh’s Abbey (London: SPCK, 1962), 142–44. 16 Barrett, Against All England, 44–51; Tim Thornton, ‘Cardinal Wolsey and the Abbot of Chester’, History Today 45 (1995): 17; Thornton, ‘Opposition Drama and the Resolution of Disputes in Early Tudor England: Cardinal Wolsey and the Abbot of Chester’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 81 (1999): 43–45. 17 Thornton, ‘Cardinal Wolsey’; Thornton, ‘Opposition Drama’; Burne, Monks, 144–53; see also Barrett, Against All England, 44–51. 18 Burne, Monks, 145–47; VCH Ches. 3.142; Thornton, ‘Opposition Drama’, 29–30.

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second conflict developed over Birchenshawe’s right to the pontifical regalia when no bishop was present. While this right had been exercised occasionally since it was granted in 1345, Birchenshawe defended it rigorously when challenged by the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry sometime before 1512.19 The case went to the papal auditor and, in 1516, to Cardinal Wolsey. Tension between Wolsey and Birchenshawe escalated, probably due to disagreements unrelated to the pontificals, eventually resulting in Birchenshawe’s forced deposition in 1524.20 Although the Birchenshawe–Wolsey clash came to a head long after Bradshaw died, it illustrates the abbot’s desire to preserve Chester Abbey’s rights and, coupled with the earlier civic dispute, illustrates the embattled monastic climate within which Bradshaw wrote. Certainly Book Two’s repeated assertions that Werburgh will protect her community against legal action and violence suggest that Bradshaw spoke partly to these conflicts, as does the refrain that echoes through the thirdto-last chapter: ‘Wherfore to the monasterie be neuer vnkynde.’ Yet Bradshaw’s poem is more than an assertion of his abbey’s rights. The poem centers, as Lewis observes, around an extensive history of Mercia and Chester, interwoven through a narrative of Werburgh’s life reconstructed from her vita and miracula.21 This broader historical project complements the poem’s defensive aspects, for it establishes that Werburgh’s spiritual authority is derived from her Mercian heritage. The entire poem therefore imagines a historically grounded, regional defense of Chester Abbey’s prerogatives by demonstrating that it enjoyed both spiritual and political authority; that authority, importantly, is anciently derived not from the kingdom’s center – from the royal Wessex line and therefore from England’s main stream of history – but from a powerful and autonomous periphery. Considered from this angle, Werburge’s seemingly excessive historical detail is integral to the poem’s interventions in Chester Abbey’s conflicts. This Mercian–Cestrian history was also crucial for defining Chester Abbey’s institutional identity more broadly, for it allowed the Chester monks to embed their monastic chronotope within a Mercian version of the Anglo-Saxon chronotope, thereby claiming roots in the conversion era otherwise unavailable to them. The pre-Conquest history of Chester’s religious communities was obscure, even in Bradshaw’s day. The primary witnesses to the abbey’s origins – the abbey muniments, the Annales Cestrienses, and a tabula in the extramural church of St John the Baptist, Chester – provided him with sparse and sometimes contradictory information. The cartulary evidence is not helpful; only one fourteenth-century cartulary is extant (although the monks undoubtedly owned others, now lost), and its single pre-Conquest charter, a grant by Edgar of Mercia to Werburgh’s familia at Chester, demonstrates only that Werburgh had a community there in the mid-

19

Because this bishop, Geoffrey Blythe, became nonresident in 1512, the conflict probably predates that change in his status: Chibi, Henry VIII’s Bishops, 290–91. 20 Thornton, ‘Cardinal Wolsey’, 14–15; Burne, Monks, 149, 151–53; Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, 324–25; Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 22 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1862–1932), 2 pt. 1–2.848, 4.64, 232, 559. 21 Lewis, ‘History, Historiography’, 132–40.

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tenth century – not who founded it or when.22 The Annales Cestrienses provided the longest picture of Chester’s religious community: in its chronology, King Æthelstan (uncle to Werburgh) founded a collegiate church in 689, Werburgh was translated to Chester in 875, a house of secular canons served Werburgh from Æthelstan’s reign (crowned 924 in the chronology), and Leofric, Earl of Chester, repaired and further endowed both the collegiate church of John the Baptist and the church of St Werburgh in 1057.23 In the Annales, however, Werburgh’s house of canons is not established until some fifty years after her translation to Chester; it is unclear who possessed her relics in the late ninth century. The St John’s tabula, for which Bradshaw is our only evidence, is the latest document: it claimed that the house of canons was founded by Edmund, nephew of Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians (Werburge 2.597–603). Chester traditions are therefore murky about the pre-abbey minster’s foundation and the precise relationship between that foundation and Werburgh’s translation. Once these texts begin recounting the Norman era, they are on firmer ground, for both the Annales and later charters agree that the canons were refounded as a Benedictine abbey by Anselm of Canterbury and the first Norman earl, Hugh of Avranches.24 At the beginning of Book Two, Bradshaw did, like the Wilton poet, attempt to reconcile these founding events into a coherent narrative of Chester’s religious history, but with less success. For example, he lauds Edgar’s granting of ‘fredoms and priuileges speciall’ (2.1198), suggesting a familiarity with the charter discussed above, and he praises Æthelstan, who ‘Confirmed theyr [“holy place”] foundacions with libertes clere’ (2.1127), incorporating the Annales tradition of the minster’s refoundation. He also attributes the minster’s founding jointly to Æthelflæd and her nephew Edmund, apparently combining information from the St John’s tabula with evidence from John of Worcester.25 Bradshaw strives to reconcile this fragmentary historical evidence, but his narrative nevertheless makes clear that no truly continuous history of Chester Abbey can exist without Werburgh’s unifying presence. The intractability of an imagined pre- or non-Werburgian Cestrian history appears most forcefully when Bradshaw locates Chester’s religious origins under King Lucius, for this claim only leads the text into contradictions. Bradshaw states that ‘The perfect begynnyng and fyrst foundacion’ of Chester’s monastic life occurred when ‘baptym began within this countre’ (2.456, 459) and asserts a perpetual continuance of this ‘perfect begynnyng’:

22 S667, AD 958. Cartulary or Register of the Abbey of St Werburgh, Chester, ed. James Tait, 2 vols. (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1920–23), 1.9, xviii. On the authenticity of the charter, see ibid., 1.xviii, 10–12. 23 Annales Cestrienses; or, Chronicle of the Abbey of S. Werburg, at Chester, ed. Richard Copley Christie (London: 1887): 11, 13, 15. Higden followed the Annales closely in his account of Chester’s origins in Polychronicon 5.18, 6.1 (RS 6.126–28, 366), so I do not consider his text separately here. 24 Annales Cestrienses, 17; Cartulary or Register, 1.xxii–xxiv. 25 Werburge, 2.602–3; VCH Ches. 3.132; John of Worcester, 362.

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Certaynly, sith baptym came to Chestre cite, Sooone after Lucius / and afore kynge Arthure, By the grace of god and their humilitie, The faith of holy churche dyd euer there endure Without recidiuacion and infection. (2.449–53)

Even through the ravages of the pagan Angles and Saxons, Chester’s British faith persists so strongly that Bradshaw compares its permanence to St Peter’s at Rome (2.477–483). This hyperbolic assertion of British spiritual persistence, however, avails the narrative naught: the Chester monks cannot locate their origins in the pure antiquity of this primitive British church, for Bradshaw cannot draw a direct line from Lucius to the late medieval abbey. The Chester British Christians’ enduring faith in line 481 must transmogrify only twenty lines later to a disobedient pride, ‘Observyng no charite’ (2.503), when the British bishops refuse to help Augustine preach to the Saxons; these recalcitrant Britons later become the Welsh who frequently threaten Werburgh’s abbey in Book Two. This contradictory portrayal of the British Christians at Chester, as Bradshaw asserts a noble spiritual heritage just to derail that tradition, belies any true religious continuity based on locale alone. Yet Chester’s Anglo-Saxon religious history is not ancient enough, for it does not begin until after the tenth-century advent of Werburgh’s relics. To establish for themselves an ancient and continuous history, the Chester monks took their lead from the familia of that other peripatetic saintly corpse, Cuthbert, and identified their history with that of their patron saint. Bradshaw therefore engages in a hagiographic form of translatio imperii et studii (or, more properly in this context, corporis), in which the translation of the saint’s relics, textually re-enacted in the literary translation of Latin prose into English poetry, transfers the earlier culture’s authority to the later community that desires it. Any act of cultural or linguistic translation, however, necessarily entails a rejection of that which cannot be comprehended in, or by, the new culture or linguistic medium. Such strategic forgetting returns us to de Certeau’s construction of the historiographic process, for both translation and history writing remake a legitimizing past by forgetting its ‘unusable’ aspects, and de Certeau’s formulation urges us to focus on the lacunae in this project. Bradshaw’s translation project is riddled with such lapses: the geotemporal distance between seventh-century Mercia and sixteenth-century Chester, violence and apostasy in Mercia’s early history, ­Chester’s late acquisition of Werburgh’s remains, the eventual decay of Werburgh’s corpse, the Tudor monks’ ethical failings. In striving to overwrite these fissures, Bradshaw deploys many historiographic techniques used by other monastic hagiographers. Werburgh’s Ely genealogy and kinship with Audrey, as I’ve shown, is crucial for establishing her sanctity; no less important for confirming her political authority is her blood descent from the powerful Mercian royal line. Early Mercian kings must be depicted as defenders of the faith, but Bradshaw, like the Wilton poet, must carefully re-emplot that portion of early English history to make it so. Bradshaw also turns to nonlinear approaches for connecting past to present, both corporeal and poetic. Werburgh’s 108

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virginal, incorrupt body is critical to this project. As is true of Edith, Bokenham’s Audrey, and (as we will see) Edmund, Werburgh’s incorrupt body becomes the earthly manifestation of her eternal persistence in the aevum. Like Edith, Werburgh transtemporally corporealizes her holy and royal heritage. Unlike Edith, whose incorruption imbues her with a postmortem dotal agency exercised beyond the grave, Werburgh becomes a dotal object after her death. Her relics, and with them her Mercian prestige, can be transferred between religious houses and then used to define Chester Abbey’s institutional body as also possessing early English spiritual and political clout. Bradshaw turns to his poetic craft to overwrite or elide these lapses – particularly the gap that opens up when Werburgh’s historiographically gravid body decays. Metaphors and extended clusters of imagery, particularly those that invest Werburgh’s body with this inheritance and insist upon that heritage’s persistence despite her decay, bridge these breaks in linear history, making Bradshaw’s poetics integral to his history writing. Werburge is not only plagued by historiographic fissures; it must also contend with the spiritual distance between Werburgh’s holy life and the Chester monks’ disarrayed ethical bodies. Sanok has shown how Werburge is invested in the ethical lives of its lay female readers;26 Bradshaw is – with reason – equally concerned with the proper behavior of his fellow monks. Constructing the abbey as a site of devotional potential fostered by a continuous, devout corporate identity, he also recognizes the need for individual ethical reform. Yet unlike ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’, Bokenham’s ‘Audrey’, and those reformers who viewed ancient austerities as easily replicable, Bradshaw acknowledges the difficulty of attaining Werburgh’s example. Turning to Werburgh’s decay, the flaw in his corporatizing poetics, Bradshaw reminds his monastic readers that true holiness is only attained in heaven; like the CUL legendary’s compiler, he nevertheless exhorts them to strive for that perfection. Although Werburgh’s decomposition reveals the unattainability of both holistic corporate and perfected ethical bodies, Bradshaw reconfigures that decay to cast ideal cloistered behavior as process, not product. Inventing Mercian History Werburge Book One intertwines the history of Mercia and extended lives of Werburgh’s saintly kin with the standard hagiographic account of Werburgh’s life and holy death. This extended chorographic information is central to Bradshaw’s integration of Mercia’s political and religious history, which he models on the Anglo-Saxon chronotope. Mercia must be shown both puissant and religiously pure so that Werburgh, in her role as ‘enheretryce’, can embody these traits and transfer them to her future community. Yet Bradshaw’s sources are not amenable to this project, for early Mercian history is too violent to readily accommodate the chronotope’s ethical facet. Bradshaw’s attempted negotiation of local Mercian violence and imported spiritual fervor reveals the impossibility of this task; only 26

Sanok, Her Life Historical, 83–110.

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Werburgh can seamlessly unite the Mercian hegemony with Anglo-Saxon sanctity, becoming the zenith of an idealized Saxo-Mercian polity. Bradshaw may be breaking new historiographical ground in his poem, for which no single source exists. Book One is compiled from two types of sources. First are histories and chronicles, chiefly Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon.27 Second are Latin hagiographies, particularly the eleventh-century legends of Seaxburgh, Eormenhild, and Werburgh by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin;28 material on the life and cult of Audrey, as derived from Bede and the Liber Eliensis;29 and the vita of Werburgh’s supposed brothers, Wulfhad and Ruffin.30 Additional material relating to Werburgh’s actions as abbess, not present in the eleventh-century vita, was presumably derived from the now-lost ‘third passionarye’ (1.1692) that Bradshaw cites as his source for the postmortem miracles of Book Two.31 Although whole stanzas on these female saints are directly derived from the Latin vitae, Bradshaw is less verbally dependent on his chronicle sources. Higden’s Polychronicon provides the historical frame through which Bradshaw interweaves topographic description, dates, historical figures, and hagiographic episodes; much as the Wilton poet grafts Edith’s hagiography onto Wessex history, so does Bradshaw scaffold his various sources to create a coherent narrative of the Mercian dynasty’s position within Anglo-Saxon history. Although Mercia’s history of violence and apostasy does not allow Bradshaw to easily depict its kings as sponsoring religious renewal, the presuppositions of the Anglo-Saxon chronotope underpin Bradshaw’s portrayal of Mercia. As he says of Wulfhere’s reign, In lykewyse as this prouynce / of Mercyens Whylom was greatest realme / within Englande, Many yeres contynuynge / in prehemynens, Ryght so the spyrytualte. (1.540–3)

27 28

Bradshaw conveniently names these in 1.127–30. These, Goscelin’s Vita S. Werburge (VWer), Lectiones in festiuitate S. Sexburge (LectSex), and Lectiones in natale S. Eormenhilde (LectEorm), as well as an anonymous Vita S. Wihtburge (VWiht), have been edited and translated by Love in Hagiography. I cite these vitae by these abbreviations, chapter numbers, and Love’s pagination, and I use her translations. The first of a four-volume legendary from Chester Abbey is extant as London, Gray’s Inn Library, MS 3; the full legendary originally included vitae of Werburgh, Seaxburgh, and Eormenhild, probably those of Goscelin: N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–2002), 1.55. The verbal parallels between Goselin’s vitae and lectiones for Seaxburgh, Eormenhild, and Werburgh and their embedded lives in Bradshaw’s poem suggest that these Latin texts were included in this third volume: Love, Hagiography, lviii. 29 Gray’s Inn Library, MS 3 contains a life of Audrey composed of selections from Bede and miracles from the Liber Eliensis: Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 1.54; Love, Hagiography, lviii. 30 The Gray’s Inn legendary appears not to have included Wulfhad and Ruffin’s vita. 31 On the possible contents of this passionary, see Love, Hagiography, cxviii–cxix. The Polychronicon provides an indirect witness to the passionary’s translation narrative, which Higden refers to as a source in 6.1 (RS 6.366).

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Mercia can be portrayed via these chronotopic conventions, however, only with difficulty. If Werburgh is to inherit both ‘prehemynens’ and ‘spyrytualte’, then her natal kingdom must be shown to possess them. Mercia’s geographic and military ‘prehemynens’ is never in question. King Penda, Werburgh’s grandfather, is descended from Woden and subdues ‘Fyue kynges in batayle’ (1.428), while her father Wulfhere ‘Conquered in batayle’ the West Saxons and ‘subdued / vnto his Empyre’ the Isle of Wight (1.531, 533). Yet this martial prowess inhibits Mercian ‘spyrytualte’, catapulting these kings into a cycle of religious backsliding and gratuitous violence, as Wulfhere’s reign illustrates. He begins as a good Christian king, endowing churches (1.560–67) and vowing to destroy idols (1.523–25), but later apostatizes and murders his sons. The contrition and satisfaction Wulfhere makes for these sins completes the pattern of sin and temporary renewal characteristic of the Mercian hegemony. That cyclical violence is predetermined by the narrative history Bradshaw adopts from the Polychronicon, but it threatens Mercia’s full assimilation to the spatio-temporal and ethical elements of the Anglo-Saxon chronotope. To make Mercia fit this set of presuppositions, Bradshaw amplifies, often through re-emplotment, these kings’ piety. For instance, he elaborates on his source’s laconic comments to characterize Wulfhere as Gracyous to the poore / and a sure protectour, A founder of chyrches / and a good benefactour. (1.573–74)32

At times, these assertions distort his source material, as when Bradshaw significantly elevates Penda’s role in the first conversion of Mercia, compared with the Polychronicon narrative. Higden merely claims that Penda did not prohibit anyone from receiving the Christian faith33 – a laissez-faire attitude – while Bradshaw details Penda’s supposed assistance: Kynge Penda consented / as afore is sayd, And permytted doctours / to preche in euery place Thrughout his realme / and neuer it denayed, To baptyse his subgectes / by fayth and ghostly grace; He ayded them with socour / and helpe in that case That wolde be conuerted / for theyr synguler mede. (1.463–68)

Penda here takes an increasingly active role in the conversion effort, moving from a permissive attitude in line 464 to actively aiding would-be converts ‘with socour / and helpe’. The unclear referent of the last half-line – is Penda invested in the converts’ ‘synguler mede’, or are the converts themselves so attuned? – hints at a greater investment in the conversion process than Bradshaw’s source allows. Moreover, the surrounding stanzas make clear, Penda does not instigate the conver32 33

Compare GRA, 76.1 (p. 110); Polychronicon, 5.16 (RS 6.84); HE, 4.3 (p. 336). ‘Nec prohibuit Penda rex quin converterentur ad fidem Christianam quicumque vellent.’ Polychronicon, 5.16 (RS 6.76).

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sion; rather, his son Peada, after marrying the Christian Northumbrian princess Alhflæd, undertakes to have central Mercia baptized (1.449–52) and imports Northumbrian priests (1.158–62). Only after Peada initiates these Northumbrianinspired conversion efforts does Penda become involved. Mercian violence is incompatible with the Anglo-Saxon chronotope without the intervention of other kingdoms, as the Peada–Penda conversion narrative and the role of Eormenhild make clear. In chapter six, dedicated to Eormenhild’s holy life and her marriage to Wulfhere, Mercian spiritual renewal is explicitly attributed to Eormenhild’s influence: Whan this fayre prynces / resplendent in vertue, Came vnto Mercelande / in the order of matrymony, Than grace with good gouernaunce / dyd vyce subdue, Vertue was maystres / chefe ruler and lady; The faythe of holy chyrche / dyd growe and multyply, Relygyon encresed / honour and prosperyte, In euery place pacyence / true loue and charyte. At the solempne spousage / of this lady bryght Kynge Vulfer promysed / on his fydelyte Errours to correcke / by his wysdome and myght, Clerely to expell / all sectes of ydolatrye Frome his realme / and fulfyll by his auctoryte The promyse truely made / at the fonte of baptyme: The chyrche to conserue / and saue it from ruyne. (1.659–72)

While chapter 5 shows Wulfhere destroying idols and founding monasteries, these stanzas leave no doubt that Eormenhild’s influence lay behind Mercian spiritual growth. She is ‘resplendent’ in the virtue that, three lines later, is personified as a female governor of the realm. This gendering of virtue is accompanied by verbs of generation used of religious renewal (‘growe and multyply’, ‘encresed’). As I showed in the previous chapter, Bradshaw associates horticultural language with Werburgh and her female ancestors, particularly to establish generational descent but also to illustrate personal virtue. Such figurative language here also contrasts these saints’ devotional fruitfulness with Mercian violence. Even in this passage, Wulfhere encourages spiritual change via verbs of physical power – ‘correcke’, ‘expell’, and ‘fulfyll by his auctoryte’ – that echo verbs of conquest used of his military victories (1.527–32). Mercian kings can destroy idols, but they cannot foster virtue. Despite Bradshaw’s attempts to portray Mercian ‘prehemynence’ and ‘spyrytualte’, Mercia’s military dominance predisposes it to contribute only recantation and retribution to the Anglo-Saxon chronotope. Any spiritual perfection is imported, by Northumbrian priests and Kentish wives. This tension reveals a double, irreconcilable desire: the power of the chronotope for defining religious worth versus Bradshaw’s commitment to distinguishing his monastery’s origins from centralized English history. This desire to associate Chester and Chester Abbey with a Mercian rather than an English past partakes, as Clarke has shown, of the same 112

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regional historiography driven by desires for palatinate separateness that Barrett discusses, even as Bradshaw’s portrait of Mercia echoes the idealized Anglo-Saxon traits Lewis identifies.34 These conflicting desires create narrative difficulties for Bradshaw, difficulties only partially overcome through his portrayal of Werburgh. ‘Rose of Merciens’: Werburgh as ‘Enheretryce’ Unlike her Mercian ancestors, Werburgh fully manifests Mercian ‘prehemynens’ as idealized secular authority and spiritual power. As the ‘enheretryce’ of the Mercian hegemony, Werburgh embodies Mercian political power alongside Anglo-Saxon religious purity. Bradshaw establishes this embodiment, as I demonstrated in the previous chapter, through extended metaphors that characterize Werburgh’s historiographic function and attend to her corporeality. Figured metaphorically as a royal rose generated from her parental rootstock, Werburgh is cast as the cultivated, organic product of her royal lineage, a lineage that privileges, as was also true of the Wilton Audrey, blood descent over spiritual typology. While Audrey’s presence adjacent to this blood line troubles that spiritual lineage, Werburgh’s political, Mercian inheritance does inhere firmly in her body. Moreover, as a saint whose virginity manifests as corporeal integrity before and after death, she keeps that heritage intact by maintaining virginal purity; as inheritrix, she can then transmit that authority to her later communities. Relying on poetic technique, Bradshaw constructs Werburgh as the pinnacle of this Saxo-Mercian chronotope and his solution to the problem of textually creating his monastery’s continuous identity. Reading Bradshaw’s Werburgh as a dotal virgin highlights how he has knit together different aspects of spiritual and temporal authority into a single somatic economy. Like most virgin saints, Werburgh derives her value from her relationship with the divine, and she exercises dotal agency by, for example, resisting marriage to become a Bride of Christ. Throughout the poem, however, her dotality more often manifests as receiving and preserving her embodied heritage (especially as incorrupt corpse) that can be translated to Chester. Werburgh’s dotality thereby functions across time to endow her community with the prized qualities of her lifetime. Bradshaw casts Werburgh’s dotal value – including her sanctity – primarily as the product of her ancestry. The poem’s broad-ranging genealogies and extended horticultural metaphors unify early English sanctity in Werburgh. As the ‘rose of Merciens’, she is the natural, aestheticized product of a lineage of holy women – and of royal men. Her father Wulfhere’s role is just as important as her mother’s, for she embodies Ely holiness and Mercian might. The extended metaphor that characterizes Werburgh as both rose and river acknowledges that she was produced by

34

Clarke, ‘Remembering’, esp. 204–8; Barrett, Against All England, esp. 1–9, 16–18; Lewis, ‘Anglo-Saxon’.

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‘her parentes’ both (1.728), and that chapter emphasizes that Werburgh, as much as she was the offspring of Eormenhild, Descendynge of noble / and hye parentage, Was doughter to Vulfer. (1.681–82)

The centrality of Werburgh’s political heritage becomes clear in two scenes that emphasize her inheritance’s dual nature. The first comes after her maturity but before her profession, when her father’s steward Werebode asks for Werburgh’s hand in marriage, and she exercises her dotal agency in choosing instead a heavenly mate. Her rejection of Werebode’s proposal (1.988–94), however, reads blandly compared with her mother and brothers’ blood-centered vituperation. Eormenhild decries Werebode’s ‘kynred and pedegre’ (1.946), insisting that Our doughter to the / shall neuer be bonde, Nor suche a caytyfe / shall haue no powere With kynges blode royall / to approche it nere. (1.957–59)

This proposal scene less instantiates Werburgh’s virginity (she speaks only ten lines in its defense, in comparison with her kin’s fifty-five lines) than affirms the inviolability of her royal lineage, her ‘kynges blode royall’, at the moment it is threatened. The possibility of diluting Werburgh’s royal heritage with the blood of ‘vylayne people’ (1.949) is a bigger fear than violating her virginity. Mercian hegemonic integrity is also at stake in chapters 23 and 24: relating Mercia’s regnal history after Wulfhere’s death, they treat the question of lineal descent and inheritance. In Higden, the crown passed not to Wulfhere’s young son Coenred but to Wulfhere’s brother Æthelred,35 and Bradshaw devotes an entire stanza to legitimizing Æthelred as the ‘lawfull enherytour’ of Mercia (1.2277). In the next chapter Coenred ascends the throne As nexte of inherytaunce / by law naturall To be kynge of Mercyens / by dyscent lynyall. (1.2386–87)

The double emphasis on direct lineal inheritance privileges blood descent as the proper mode of transmitting Mercian royal authority. It also casts Werburgh’s political inheritance as more than figurative. Also in chapter 23, Werburgh’s uncle, King Æthelred, recalls her from Ely to become ‘gouernour / ouer the nonnes relygeous’ of Mercia (1.2495), and throughout the following stanzas Bradshaw portrays Werburgh as a noble secular ruler. She is a ‘lady and presydent’ who ‘Ordered her monasteryes’ wisely (1.2508, 2509), and her nuns are her ‘subiectes’ (1.2512): This noble abbesse / remembrynge her duty, What charge it is / to rule a congregacyon, 35

Polychronicon, 5.18 (RS 6.126).

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Humble requyred / the grace of god almyghty And dylygently prepared / to supple her rowme. (1.2514–17)

Bradshaw uses verbs of ordering, ruling, and rendering compliant (‘supple’) that echo – if less violently – the terms of forceful rule and conversion used of Wulfhere earlier (1.523–39). These stanzas color Werburgh in uncharacteristically authoritarian terms for Book One, and they are subsequently tempered by stanzas highlighting her humility and virtue (1.2521–41). Although the language of political governance does not persist, these descriptors’ sudden appearance, at a narrative moment when the transmission of Mercian regnal authority is an issue, highlights Werburgh’s inheritance of her father’s political acumen, not just her mother’s spirituality. Like her brother Coenred (and like the Wilton Chronicle’s Edith), Werburgh possesses this authority ‘by dyscent lynyall’ (1.2387), the emphasis on paternal descent offering a legal counterpart to the earlier rose metaphor. In the chapter following her death, Bradshaw cements this commingling of heritages to construct Werburgh as the Mercian telos of Anglo-Saxon royal and religious glory: This gloryous lady / and gemme of holynesse Of fyue myghty kynges / descended lynyally, A prynces / an enherytryce / replete with mekenes Refused all pleasures / pompe / and vayne glory, Entred relygyon / professed at Ely, A spectacle of vertue / dwellynge in that place And a floure of chastyte / electe by synguler grace. (1.3280–6)

By intertwining now familiar images associated with the Ely matrilineal line – ‘gemme of holynesse’, ‘spectacle of vertue’, ‘floure of chastyte’ – with her noble status as ‘lady’ and ‘prynces’ derived from her Mercian pedigree, Bradshaw unifies spiritual and political heritages in Werburgh’s person. She is, foremost, an ‘enherytryce’, embodying both parents’ holy and royal merits and her fourfold Anglo-Saxon descent from the ‘fyue myghty kynges’. Bradshaw’s Werburgh thereby corporealizes Anglo-Saxon chronotopic values within an explicitly Mercian context. The horticultural metaphors and concerns for pure royal blood emphasize Werburgh’s physical preservation of this heritage, making the virginal body central in this dotal economy. As virginal inheritrix, Werburgh’s chastity also ensures this lineage’s integrity. It will not be diluted in marriage, nor obliterated through conquest, nor even, her incorrupt corpse initially promises, fragmented by decay. Rather, her body contains and maintains both Anglo-Saxon spiritual authority and Mercian political power. Bradshaw’s efforts to establish Werburgh as inheritrix are crucial to the poem’s larger goals of establishing Chester Abbey’s antiquity and authority in the region. Had Bradshaw simply crafted a Mercian politico-spiritual hegemony, or Werburgh as that hegemony’s inheritrix, he could not have conferred ideological Mercian power onto the Chester monks, for Mercian and Cestrian histories were 115

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too disparate. Therefore, Bradshaw must look outside diachronic history to the atemporal qualities of the saint’s holy, static remains. The poem makes Werburgh’s relics, lying in the abbey’s feretory, the polychronic conduit by which this Mercian heritage could become ‘thinkable’ for the Chester monks. Bradshaw’s metaphors of biological generation and insistence on inheritance through blood descent are therefore crucial to establishing Werburgh’s body as the point where this inheritance coalesces and is made available to her spiritual offspring. Translatio corporis, translatio imperii Werburgh’s body is the crux of the poem’s historiographic project, the cornerstone that supports the entire edifice. Residing in their shrine at the abbey church’s east end, her relics are the evidence for Bradshaw’s textual construction of her corporeal integrity; that integrity in turn underwrites Bradshaw’s historicized project, for it promises the transtemporal stability of the Mercian heritage they embody. Yet those relics were always hidden from view, the product of relic discourse, able to be apprehended only metonymically through the shrine’s material structure and writings about them. Under relic discourse’s normal operations, this discursive slippage would have been naturalized and invisible, and the missing bodily material would not be immediately evident. But Werburgh’s relics are not normal, for she is an incorrupt who did suffer decay. Bradshaw therefore faces a double absence: the absence of Werburgh’s intact body, and the shrine’s masking of whatever holy dust might have remained. When Werburgh’s integrity is called into question – when her incorrupt body decays – the coherence of Bradshaw’s narrative is threatened and relic discourse’s sleight of hand is exposed. Bradshaw responds to this challenge by intensifying the figural language that enshrouds the absence of Werburgh’s intact body, deploying an even more sophisticated relic discourse to perpetuate the presence of Werburgh’s heritage despite the disappearance of that heritage’s guarantor.36 As I demonstrated in Chapter 1, it is the nature of relics, especially incorrupt ones (as Werburgh’s were said to be sixteen years after her death), to act as symbols of continuity and agents of transmission. The body that refuses to decay effectively removes itself from temporal flux, manifesting the saint’s sempiternality within the tempus and thereby easily figuring corporate stability, unity, and inviolability. In Werburgh’s case, Bradshaw has caused her dotal capacity as inheritrix to inhere in her incorrupt corpse, combining these two powerful symbols of institutional continuity so that her authoritative Mercian heritage could be unendingly available to Chester Abbey. The way Werburgh’s body establishes her familia’s institutional integrity is illustrated in Book One’s extended death scene. Immediately upon her death, her

36 See also Malo, Relics and Writing, 44–45, 72–75 for a complementary reading of Bradshaw’s relic discourse.

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nuns wail a song of lament, in which the fate of the nunnery is predicated on the integrity of Werburgh’s corpse: The tryed stock of truth / and the grounde of grace Is pyteously decayed / our hope and sufferaynte. O blessed sauyour / vpon vs haue pyte, Sende vs our conforte / by thy great myght agayne As thou hase reysed many / from dethe to lyfe, certayne. O dredefull dethe / cruell enemy to nature, With dolefull heuynes / on the we may complayne, Takynge our heed from vs / to our great dysconfyture, Hath brought vs to thraldome / wofulnes and peyne. (1.3163–71)

Werburgh’s demise, and her nuns’ expectation of her corporeal decay at the hands of ‘dredefull dethe’, results in the ‘piteous decay’ of their sovereignty, while the natural action of postmortem processes has brought their community to ‘thraldome / wofulnes and peyne’. As both ‘stock’ and ‘grounde’, Werburgh is the foundation of her nuns’ community and the trunk from which they can flower profitably. Thus Werburgh’s familia is figured as sharing the same fate as her corpse, participating (in an inverted fashion) in the Ely tradition of identifying monastic unity with the saintly body. The nuns’ prayer that God, who ‘hase reysed many / from dethe to lyfe’, will return Werburgh to them clearly foreshadows her miraculous incorruption, making her unblemished body a promise of communal cohesion. The discovery of her incorruption nine years (and 160 lines) later reverses this complaint, reinstating her familia’s sovereignty, independence, and joy. Her intact body’s promise of institutional integrity is fulfilled in her first relic translation, when the discovery of her undecayed remains unites all those around her – nuns, clerics, and laity alike – into a harmonious community of jubilation and veneration (1.3406–27). This first translation figures the unity of Werburgh’s original nunnery in her incorruption; in the second translation scene, Bradshaw imagines Chester Abbey to gain Werburgh’s institutionally cohesive body and its Mercian inheritance. Although this translatio corporis et imperii from Hambury to Chester resembles a literary translatio studii et imperii in that both appropriate the authority of the past for the ends of the present while re-imagining that authority into a more usable form, the two historiographic processes are not identical. Where translatio studii is dependent on the ever-receding horizon of previous texts that overwrite the absent historical event, the relic of translatio corporis prevents that nearly infinite regression by making that past physically present as a ground zero whence the historical narrative can begin. Bradshaw, of course, does not enact a translatio corporis, but rather a translatio studii of the written record of her tenth-century relic removal. In so doing, he figures the initial translatio corporis anew for his current literary project, refashioning its signifying potential according to the aims of translatio imperii. He can thereby capitalize on the incorrupt corpse’s stasis both to underwrite the truth of his historiographic endeavors and to ensure that 117

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Werburgh’s corporealized Mercian heritage can be thought to be immediately, directly present in Chester Abbey. On a theoretical plane, the translation of Werburgh’s incorrupt corpse should clinch the Chester monks’ claims to this Mercian heritage. Yet on the level of praxis, this schema is derailed: her cadaver decays between her first and second translations. Bradshaw relates at the very end of Book One that, when the Danes threatened Hambury, Werburgh allowed her corpse to rot: Than this vitall glebe by diuine ordinaunce Voluntary permytted naturall resolution, Lest the cruell gentils / and wiked myscreauntes With pollute handes full of corrupcion Shulde touche her body / by indignation; Whiche pagans were enemyes to our lorde Iesu, Rebels to holy churche, vnfeithfull and vntrue. … Great was the respect of diuyne grace In the body of Werburge / without resolucion, Shewed by her myracles / for mannes helth and solace; But greatter was the hope of the eterne renouacion In her body resolued to naturall consumption, Whiche for her merites to this present day Helpeth all her seruantes that to her wyll praye. (1.3470–76, 3505–11)

In this passage, Werburgh’s inconvenient decay is explained away as the better part of virginal valor – it is better to dissolve than to have one’s corpse violated by impious Danes – and paradoxically as a stronger promise of the resurrection. This explanation may redefine and etherealize Werburgh’s integrity,37 yet the body’s disintegration problematizes the transfer of her corporealized inheritance intact. While corruption did not necessarily inhibit patron saints’ authority and prestige,38 the fact that Bradshaw has invested her body with that authority, and that this body had been incorrupt, makes Werburgh’s decay a bigger issue than usual. Bradshaw’s invented chain of inheritance, tenuously linking Mercia to Chester, breaks with Werburgh’s decomposition.

37

Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, 68. Bradshaw translates this passage directly from Goscelin; see below, p. 130 n. 63. 38 It could, however, be a real concern; see, for example, the debate among the Westminster clerics concerning Edward the Confessor’s possible incorruption, particularly those who fear that Edward’s reputation would diminish were he found decayed, and Bury’s loss of privileges when William  II heard rumors of his putrefaction: Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis Edwardi Regis et Confessoris’, Beati Aelredi Rievallis abbatis. Operum pars secunda: Historia, Patrologia Latina 195, cols. 737–90 (Paris: Garnieri Fratres, 1855), col. 782A; Chapter 5 below, p. 195. As Malo observes, in English hagiography ‘the part was rarely portrayed to be as prestigious as the whole’. Malo, Relics and Writing, 39.

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Nevertheless, Bradshaw strives to transmit Werburgh’s Mercian lineage, whole and undivided, via her remains. He narrates the Chester translation almost as though she were intact, and certainly as though her tomb were as capable of transferring that inheritance as her body. Although we have only indirect witnesses for the source of Bradshaw’s second translation narrative,39 we can reasonably infer that one element is Bradshaw’s own twist: the attempt to undo the damage caused by Werburgh’s decay by eliding the lack of corpus throughout his translatio to preserve the imperium. Without an incorrupt corpse, Bradshaw must fall back solely on his poetic relic discourse to sustain his historiographic project. Let me return to de Certeau to illustrate the gravity of Bradshaw’s situation. For de Certeau, the function of any discourse is ‘the representation of a primitive scene that is effaced but is still an organizing force. Discourse is incessantly articulated over the death that it presupposes, but that the very practice of history constantly contradicts.’40 Historical writing provides the illusion of the past’s presence, and when the past had been present but is no more – when the incorrupt corpse decays – the historiographic imperative, in this case Bradshaw’s relic discourse, is intensified. These techniques include Bradshaw’s subtle terminological manipulations and the Chester townspeople’s interpellation of Werburgh as a ‘rose of merciens’ (2.317), culminating in Bradshaw’s lapidary re-metaphorization of Werburgh. In these ways, Bradshaw strives to transfer Werburgh’s corporealized heritage, even without the corpse that had embodied it. Werburgh’s Chester translation occurs in Book Two, chapter 2. The end of the preceding chapter details the Danish incursions before reiterating Werburgh’s original incorruption and subsequent decay: after the danes came with suche rigour To Repton abbay / than she was resolued, And of deuocion full richely shryned. (2.229–31)

Although ‘resolve’ primarily references Werburgh’s decay, the Middle English word has the more precise meaning of changing from one state into another, particularly a melting or splintering into constituent parts.41 Werburgh’s corpse less disappears from the earth than transitions into a new state – not into the corporeal elements of dust and bones, but into the aestheticized shrine that contains them. Werburgh’s shrine textually replaces her incorrupt body by becoming the outward, public proclamation of her spiritual and corporeal integrity. Shifting focus to her shrine also deflects attention from her corporeal decay by transferring her dotality onto a container that can perform the historiographic functions no longer available to her corpse. This fusion of body and reliquary occurs most completely in chapter 2’s translation narrative. Like his manipulation of floral imagery in Book One, Bradshaw 39 40 41

On that narrative, the ‘thrid passionarye’ (Werburge 2.1691), see p. 110 and n. 31 above. Certeau, Writing, 47. MED, s.v. ‘resolven’ 1.

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carefully manages his terms for Werburgh’s continued presence in and protection of Chester, during the translation ceremonies and after – relic discourse at its most self-conscious. Early in the chapter, Bradshaw co-locates the language of relic and shrine, creating a powerful rhetorical association. The Hamburgensians seek ‘To preserue the countrey / the relique / the shryne’ from the Danes (2.251), the asyndetic sequence creating concentric metonymic appositions: the shrine stands in for Werburgh’s relics, and her body stands in for Mercian integrity. This association sets up a terminological interchangeability that allows Bradshaw to progressively substitute ‘shrine’ for ‘relic’ as the translation narrative continues. The Hamburgensians fear repeatedly for the safety of their ‘shrine’, the word and object substituting for Werburgh’s remains early in the chapter (2.248, 251, 258). The fact that the Cestrians submit themselves to her ‘shrine’ in the central welcoming scene (2.298, 303, 335), not her ‘relics’ or ‘body’, suggests just how far the shrine does the work of Werburgh’s absent body. After the translation narrative, Bradshaw prefers the term ‘shrine’ (used twelve times) to ‘relic’ (used twice), privileging the visible representation of Werburgh’s intactness to the implicitly fragmentary relics within. The poem’s attempt to assert Werburgh’s continued Mercian identity despite her corporeal dissolution culminates in the Cestrians’ song of welcome: Welcome, swete lady, replet with grace, The floure of mekenes / and of chastite, The cristall of clennes and virginite; Welcome thou art to vs euerychone, A speciall comfort for vs to trust vpon! Welcome, swete princesse / kynges doughter dere, Welcome, faire creature / and rose of merciens, The diamonde of dignite / and gemme shenyng clere, Virgin and moiniall of mycle excellence; Welcome, holy abbasse of hie preeminence, The rutilant saphire of syncerite, Welcome, swete patronesse, to Chestre cite! (2.311–22)

This song does more than establish a relationship between the citizens and their new ‘patronesse’; it reinstates Werburgh’s dotal role, welcoming her as ‘floure of mekenes’ and ‘kynges doughter’, precisely the terms Bradshaw employed earlier to create her political and spiritual heritage. By placing Book One’s floral and regal imagery into the mouths of the welcoming Cestrians, Bradshaw asserts a continuity of identity between the living Werburgh and Chester Abbey’s shrine. The horticultural language that ensures her natural enjoyment of her heritage also perpetuates that heritage after death: she is still the ‘rose of merciens’. Indeed, the song’s closing line – ‘Welcome to this towne, for euer to endure!’ (2.329) – endows Werburgh once again with the permanent and continuous identity that her incorrupt body had once promised. These stanzas’ gemological imagery completes the mutation of Werburgh’s dotality. While these metaphors too are held over from Goscelin and Werburge 120

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Book One, where they support Bradshaw’s more pervasive floral language,42 here they dominate the passage’s imagery and perversely call attention to the shrine’s replacement of Werburgh’s decayed corpse. Although the gems figure her spiritual virtues, they also simultaneously represent both her virginal, once-intact body and the shrine that replaces it. Paired with his earlier privileging of ‘shrine’ over ‘relic’, Bradshaw’s relic discourse casts Werburgh as perfectly, crystallinely inviolable, irrespective of whether she is incorrupt corpse or enshrined dust. Phrases like ‘cristall of clennes’, ‘diamonde’, ‘gemme shenyng’, and ‘rutilant saphire’ encrust the saint’s image as a glittering treasure regardless of her corporeal state; her value is now carried by the metaphors rather than by her remains. Werburgh’s Mercian heritage seems to offer the abbey’s institutional body everything it lacked: ancient roots, political autonomy, perpetual stability and, I suggest below, spiritual harmony as well. In order for Chester Abbey to fill these needs and bolster its reputation during its ongoing conflicts, it needed to maximize its claim to this heritage. All Bradshaw’s poetic ingenuity, all his elaborate, floral and lapidary metaphorical apparatus is needed to make convincing the unnatural assimilation of Mercia to Chester via Werburgh’s dotal body and to overcome the inconvenient decay of her corpse. However, just as Audrey’s genealogical liminality belies Werburgh’s inherited sanctity, those devices can never replace Werburgh’s lost corpse. They cannot guarantee historical authenticity or corporeally transfer this Mercian lineage; they can only disguise the fragmentation of that guarantor. As a result, Bradshaw’s poem increasingly mimics the dust-filled shrine that enters Chester: the poetic surface alone attempts to transmit her heritage. Werburge becomes ‘a tomb in the double sense of the word in that, in the very same text, it both honors and eliminates’ its titular saint’s absent body.43 Even as it increasingly glorifies and elevates the saint, the poem overwrites her corpse with the figural language necessary to perpetuate its historiographic function while simultaneously obscuring its absence. In trying to recover what it so obviously lacks, the poem becomes fully complicit in the historiographic forgetting necessary to the creation of a useful, thinkable origin narrative. Chester Abbey’s Mercian-defined institutional body seems to have been part of a longstanding Chester tradition. Centuries before Bradshaw wrote Werburge, the designers of her c.1340 shrine constituted Werburgh’s heritage, and by extension Chester Abbey’s corporate identity, through the Mercian kingdom. That shrine, reconfigured into the bishop’s seat during the Reformation but reconstructed in the nineteenth century into (perhaps) its original form, sits today in Chester Cathedral’s Lady Chapel.44 Its medieval elements are easily distinguished from the plain stone used by the restorers. Among the retrieved medieval 42

Goscelin describes Werburgh as the ‘gemstone of God’ (‘Dei gemma’) and ‘Christ’s brilliant jewel’ (‘splendidissimam Christo gemmam’): VWer, 1 (pp. 28–29); LectSex, 3 (pp. 4–5). Bradshaw describes her as a ‘gemme of holynes’ and ‘noble Margaryte’ (1.491, 417). 43 Certeau, Writing, 101. 44 Clarke, ‘Remembering’, 201–3; Nicola Coldstream, ‘English Decorated Shrine Bases’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 129 (1976): 16, 19–20; J. Charles Wall, Shrines of British Saints (London: Methuen, 1905), 61–62; Crook, English Medieval Shrines, 261–63.

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statuary that decorates the shrine are gilded, headless figures that currently grace the top of the upper tier. These figures, thirty of an original thirty-four, hold scrolls upon which were originally written identifying names.45 The antiquarian William Cowper, drawing on the work of Mr Stones, the rector of Coddington, published a description of the shrine’s remnants (then configured as the bishop’s seat) in 1749. Although the writing on the scrolls is largely effaced today, seventeen of the thirty names could be identified by Cowper and Stones, and those names reveal a striking visual analogue to Bradshaw’s construction of Werburgh’s Mercian inheritance. Of the seventeen identified and the five plausibly reconstructed names, all but one are Mercian royalty, the royalty of tributary kingdoms of Mercia, or Werburgh’s immediate Anglo-Saxon ancestors; eight of these twenty-two are saints, Mercian or otherwise. The statues depict not only Mercian kings like Penda and Wulfhere but also subkings like Baldredus (fl. c.823–27), possibly a Kentish king ruling under the thumb of Beornwulf of Mercia.46 This inclusive iconographical approach, coupled with the fact that most of the shrine’s Mercian kings postdate Werburgh, suggests that the Mercian hegemony’s history governed the artistic program more than did English sanctity. This shrine portrays architecturally what I argue Bradshaw’s poem presents textually: it establishes Werburgh as a Mercian princess-saint whose presence in the abbey embodies the extended glory of the entire Mercian realm. As a late medieval built object discontiguous with Mercia but proclaiming a Mercian heritage loudly in its iconography, the shrine is a forceful reminder of this heritage’s centrality for the late medieval monks, and Werburgh’s centrality for transferring that heritage. Yet, as Clarke notes, the shrine also ‘serves to euphemise the loss of Werburgh’s material body, and to replace the saint’s dissolved physical remains with tangible new relics of Chester’s spiritual and cultural heritage – the carved figures of Mercian kings and saints’.47 Its very fabric proclaims the absence of Werburgh’s incorrupt corpse; it is too short (in its reconstructed state) to house a fully articulated cadaver, even as its statues assert her Mercian identity that, in Bradshaw’s historiographic reconstruction, had obtained in that body.48 Together, Bradshaw’s poem and Werburgh’s shrine create a ‘thinkable’ Mercian history, for saint and abbey, that conceals the geopolitical distance between Chester and Mercia and the ‘unthinkable’ yet unforgettable absence of her corpse.

45

[William Cowper], A Summary of the Life of St Werburgh with an Historical Account of the Images upon Her Shrine (now the Episcopal Throne) in the Choir of Chester (Chester, 1749), 10 ff.; George Ormerod, History of the County Palatine and City of Cheshire, ed. Thomas Helsby, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1882), 1.298–99. 46 F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 231. 47 Clarke, ‘Remembering’, 203. 48 Crook, English Medieval Shrines, 261 postulates that the original shrine may have been longer.

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The Promise of Decay So far, I have focused on Bradshaw’s unraveling historiographic project in the face of diverse challenges: Audrey’s necessary presence athwart Werburgh’s blood matrilineage, the incompatibility of Mercian history with the Anglo-Saxon chronotope, and of course Werburgh’s decomposed corpse. These difficulties suggest the impossibility of constituting Chester’s institutional body through Werburgh’s. In revealing that historical writing is only ever a discourse that covers over the absence of the past, Werburgh’s putrefaction unmasks the discursivity of the institutional body, only ever the product of rhetorical constructs premised upon an array of desires (in this case, desires about the past) not necessarily evidenced by contemporary monastic culture. That is not to say the rhetorically constructed institutional body is not a powerful sociopolitical tool. The poem (in its original, pre-1513 composition) does speak to the jurisdictional dispute between abbey and city. Similarly, Werburge’s 1521 London printing, probably instigated by Abbot Birchenshawe and his agents, occurred amidst Birchenshawe’s conflicts with Cardinal Wolsey and just after Wolsey’s 1520 convocation of the Benedictine order, aimed at instituting a narrower interpretation of the Rule.49 The Chester monks clearly believed Werburge could function as part of a kingdom-wide defense of their abbey’s institutional purity and independence from centralized authority. A legacy of internal discord within the monastery, however, indicates that such rhetorically constituted institutional bodies cannot evade their own self-destruction. Yet at just the moment Bradshaw’s project seems to collapse under this weight, he recuperates those elements that threaten institutional promotion in order to champion the ethical betterment of the individual monks’ bodies. The dissolution of the corporate body and the disappearance of Werburgh’s promissory integrity opens up a space in which the individual monk can strive to attain a Werburghlike perfection. This is a perfection inevitably delayed until the afterlife, but it is nevertheless worth striving for, and the monk can aspire to it with Werburgh’s help. As in the CUL legendary, Werburge characterizes ideal monastic behavior as a process, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the difficulties, and rewards, of the professed life. The early Tudor monks of Chester inherited not only Werburgh’s body but also a legacy of deeply rooted conflicts. After the plague of 1349–50, the monastery was riddled with internal disputes and the monks were frequently in conflict –

49

Cynthia Turner Camp, ‘Plotting Chester on the National Map: Richard Pynson’s 1521 Printing of Henry Bradshaw’s Life of Saint Werburge’, in Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester c. 1200–1600, ed. Catherine A.  M. Clarke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011); Thornton, ‘Opposition Drama’, 44–45. Barrett, Against All England, 51–55 also points out that the poem justifies English Catholic orthodoxy, a hot topic in 1521 when Henry VIII was dealing with Luther. On Wolsey’s reform attempts, see Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, 270–74; Knowles, RO, 3.159–60; Pantin, Documents, 3.117–18, 123–24.

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armed conflict, at that – with each other and the townsfolk of Chester.50 In 1349, for example, the newly elected Abbot Richard de Seynesbury and two companions were set upon and beaten by four monks and their associates. Two of the attackers, William Merston and Thomas de Newport, later went on to become abbots of Chester themselves.51 A hundred years later, the mayor’s court rolls still frequently record both monks and townspeople being bound to keep the peace with each other, and the recognizances required, frequently of the abbot himself, were large.52 Such conflicts continued under Birchenshawe’s governance, notwithstanding Burne’s characterization of that abbacy as ‘comparatively placid’.53 Birchenshawe himself evidently deprived a longstanding abbey servant of his position and pension, for reasons unknown, while monks were bound to keep the peace right up to the Dissolution.54 Even conceding that this dismal image may be inflated due to the nature of the available records, the monastery clearly had ongoing difficulties with internal and external discord. And although one might quibble that being held to keep the peace does not make a monk spiritually bereft, it is difficult to see how an abbey could maintain a reputation as an august institution while monks apostatize or are indicted alongside townsfolk for the ‘riotous theft’ of cattle.55 Dissent within the cloister distances the monks, individually and collectively, from Werburgh’s ethical example. This discord echoes the instances of Mercian violence with which Bradshaw opened, that cycle of apostasy and repentance uncomfortably mirroring the later actions of some Chester monks. Such similarities suggest that these monks may have inherited too much of Werburgh’s Mercian background and not enough of her Ely legacy. This lack of corporate harmony also replicates Werburgh’s late decay, her ‘body resolued to naturall consumption’ (1.3509) becoming a sadly apt figure for Chester Abbey’s corporate state. While the abbey’s tradition of conflict helps explain why Bradshaw works so hard to efface Werburgh’s decay – it represents the monastic body as it is, not as it ought to be – the fact that Bradshaw does retain the account of her decay, and does translate (rather than skip over) Goscelin’s explanation for that decay, should give us pause. For even though Bradshaw is clearly invested in using Werburgh to craft as strong and ancient a corporate body as he can, that investment does not lead him to ignore or occlude the difficulties of monastic life. Rather, Bradshaw is as invested in the ethical betterment of his fellow monks as he is in Werburgh’s exemplary potential for laywomen and her ability to figure corporate cohesion. As he develops his sympathetic promotion of good monastic deport-

50

Burne, Monks, 84–94, 106–12, 116–34 provides a detailed, if at times sensationalized, narrative of these conflicts; see also VCH Ches. 3.138–42. 51 Burne, Monks, 84–85. 52 Ibid., 86–98; VCH Ches. 3.139–41. 53 Burne, Monks, 141. 54 Letters and Papers, 7.606–7; Rupert H. Morris, Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns (Chester, [1894]), 136 n. 3. 55 VCH Ches. 3.142; Thornton, ‘Opposition Drama’, 29 n. 20.

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ment, ­Bradshaw uses Werburgh’s decay to envision a hopeful end for the flawed bodies of individual monks. Werburge evinces a clearly developed sense not only of the ethical good of poetry itself (1.12–21) but of the proper behavior of professional religious – and of the difficulties monks face in attaining standard monastic virtues, let alone the refined spiritual heights of the Anglo-Saxon chronotope. As Sanok has shown, one of Werburge’s dominant concerns is ethical address to female readers,56 and Bradshaw speaks to his fellow monks in the same way. In a stanza following an exhortation to laywomen, Bradshaw encourages the abbey’s monks to look to Werburgh as a model of proper monastic lifestyle: If thou be religious / wearyng blacke vesture, Take good example at this holy abbasse; Her lyfe wyll teche the how thou shult endure In holy religion / opteynyng mycle grace With mekenes / meditacion / mesure in eche place, And howe thou shalt kepe thy sensuals thre Consideryng in heuen thy rewarde to be. (2.1992–98)

By interpellating the monks through their Benedictine ‘blacke vesture’, Bradshaw draws attention to their external actions, visible (like their monastic habits) to all who see them. Alliteration associates the virtues ‘mekenes / meditacion / mesure’ – the first and last evident to any spectator. If you wear the habit, these lines suggest, your actions are always under scrutiny. At the same time, Bradshaw insists that such public displays of devotion are difficult (‘holy religion’ must be ‘endure[d]’) and that they result in heavenly, not earthly, rewards. This sense of difficulty and delayed reward is also evident earlier in the poem when Bradshaw devotes an entire chapter of Book One to Werburgh’s virtues as nun and abbess. Good ethical action comes naturally to her, as it did to her holy foremothers, and she is held up not only as an exemplar for her spiritual familia (nuns within the poem and Chester monks reading it) but as actively generating monastic virtue: A myrrour of mekenesse / she was to them all, A floure of chastyte and well of clennes, The fruyte of obedyence / in her was specyall; Refusynge vayne pleasures / honours and ryches Content with lytell / an exsample of lowlynes As dothe belonge / vnto wylfull pouerte; Pryde had no resydence / but all humylyte. She was a mynyster / rather than a maystres, Her great preemynence / caused no presumpcyon; She was a handmayd / rather than a pryores, … 56

Sanok, Her Life Historical, 83–110.

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It was no merueyll / tho all her couent Vnder such a ruler / encreased in vertu, Seynge her exsample / afore them dayly present. (1.2521–30, 2535–37)

Her virtue, chastity, obedience, poverty, and humility are all lauded, as are her leadership skills: acting as ‘a mynyster / rather than a maystres’, she leads her nuns by example rather than precept, and through that example (unsurprisingly, Bradshaw claims) they ‘encreased in vertu’. Yet Werburgh is not as easily imitable as she initially seems. Recycling his horticultural metaphors (‘floure of chastyte’, ‘fruyte of obedyence’), Bradshaw reminds the reader that she is a saint, ‘specyall’ and by definition holy beyond most mortals. Similarly, the nuns’ imitations of her virtues follow from her physical presence, ‘her exsample / afore them dayly present’; the Chester monks, owning only her fragmentary relics, cannot enjoy her lived ‘exsample’. Thus, the nuns’ complaint when Werburgh dies, their lament that ‘The sterre of our conforte / is extyncte clere’ and that ‘The lanturne of our lyght / is taken vs fro’ (1.3140, 3141) is not exaggerated, for without her present example Werburgh’s familia cannot replicate her virtues. Bradshaw, that is, constructs a different ethical relationship between the Anglo-Saxon past and later eras than does ‘Why I Can’t Be a Nun’ or Bradshaw’s ‘Audrey’; where both those poems imagine claustral virtues to be stable and completely replicable across time, Bradshaw hints that the ethical perfections of the Anglo-Saxon era cannot be easily performed in later eras. The fact that Bradshaw does not wholeheartedly exhort his monastic readers to take Werburgh’s example colors my reading of a similar hortatory passage in Book One. Here, Werburgh issues a deathbed speech to her nuns, enjoining them to cling to the three standard monastic virtues and the daily Office: And trust ye well, your true obedyence, your chast lyuynge / and wylfull pouerte, your dayly prayers / vygyls / and abstynence That ye haue obserued / her vnder me, Shalbe recompensed / a thousande-folde, trule. (1.2921–25)

This passage also lauds other ideal behaviors, like meekness and temperance, while Werburgh encourages her community to continue in ‘perfyte charyte’ (1.3020): Iche loue other / and worshyp in theyr degre, So that no murmure / nor dyssymulacyon Be founde amonge / this holy congregacyon. Be euer lowly / humble / and obedyent With due reuerence / worshyp and honoure, Folowe the mynde / of your presydent, Vnto your heed / and ghostly gouernoure. (1.3023–29)

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ters: it functions as a prescriptive address to both ‘the audience in the poem and the audience of the poem’, implicating the seventh-century nuns and the sixteenthcentury monks respectively.57 The fact that Werburgh urges her nuns to avoid ‘murmere’ and ‘dyssymulacyon’ – problems rampant in late medieval Chester, when monks tended not to heed the monastic head – also suggests that Bradshaw aims these lines at his fellow monks. None of this passage’s virtues are remarkable, for these lines echo the language of monastic reform circulating throughout the long fifteenth century. Precisely these qualities had been encouraged for all professional religious at the Council of Constance, and when John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, preached a sermon on the occasion of Wolsey’s visitation of Westminster Abbey (probably part of the archbishop’s initial reforming push), he too encouraged the monks to forsake their dissolute practices and return to poverty, chastity, and obedience.58 However, not all parties thought such ideals were appropriate to the contemporary monk. When Wolsey’s proposed reforms of 1520 advocated similar austerities, some early Tudor abbots objected. Wolsey’s reforms are too strict, the abbots write in a response to his draft statutes (now lost), because none of the black monks nowadays desire to observe the stringencies of the Rule; imposing such rigorous changes will only drive away the current monks and reduce the numbers of new recruits, for those who do wish for such asceticisms join other orders, like the Carthusians.59 The seemingly ‘normal’ virtues that Bradshaw endorses via Werburgh’s voice, then, are actually points of contention in early Tudor England, topics firing debate over behavioral standards for professed religious. The fact that these monastic values were no longer widely enacted, and that Bradshaw elsewhere backs away from assuming the complete replicability of Anglo-Saxon spirituality, complicates our understanding of these lines’ desired ethical impact. Although we could read Bradshaw here as campaigning for reform, setting out (alongside bishops like Longland) to renovate his fellow monks through Werburgh’s example, the earlier passages might suggest the opposite: that (like the objecting abbots) he is setting up Werburgh’s virtues as ultimately too archaic, too elite, too saintly for the everyday monk to attain. We might, alternatively, conjecture that he is creating a normative ethical Chester monastic body, defined through imitating Werburgh, to accompany Chester’s ancient institutional body. As a normative ethical body, it would only ever be a rhetorical construct, an ideal to promulgate but not a standard of practice individual monks would embrace. Yet none of these answers is satisfactory, for Bradshaw expresses a more nuanced understanding of monastic life’s challenges than is encapsulated in a binary of reforming bishops versus dissenting abbots. Monastic life is difficult, Bradshaw avers, and few can attain Werburgh’s early English spiritual heights – but he does not jettison her example as inappropriate or extreme.

57 58 59

Ibid., 107, emphasis original. Bowker, Henrician Reformation, 17–18; Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, 333. Pantin, Documents, 3.123–24; Knowles, RO, 3.159–60.

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Bradshaw negotiates the distance between Werburgh’s example and monastic behavior – the distance between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ – most notably in a pair of miracle stories dealing with Werburgh’s monks. Read together, these stories suggest how participation in the institutional body can encourage proper ethical action. The first miracle concerns the holy monk Simon: This brother Simon, his tyme well vsyng, Nowe in vertuous study / nowe in contemplacioon, Nowe in deuout prayer / nowe busely wryttynge, Somtyme in solace / and honest recreacion, Obserued deuoutly his holy religion, Obedience / pacience / and wylfull pouerte, Mekenes / meditacion / with pure chastite. (2.1367–73)

His slacking fellow monks, however, persecute him with false accusations of ‘wronges and iniury’ (2.1378). Simon intends to escape the monastery as a result, but Werburgh appears to him in a vision, encouraging him to endure his persecutions and proclaiming that he will have ‘blis perpetuall’ in reward for his patience (2.1407). Martyr-like, Simon perseveres in his ‘sufferaunce’ (2.1405), giving until his death good example of perfect lyuynge Vnto his bretherne. (2.1413–14)

The other miracle concerns the ‘humble and pacient’ canon Ulminus (2.1041), who also embraces an upright religious life, with one exception: he is fond of hunting and hawking (2.1044). When he breaks his leg in a hunting accident and the surgeons are unable to set it properly, Werburgh, euer piteous and merciable Vpon her seruantes (2.1087–88)

appears to her ‘chaplayne and seruaunt vertuous’ and heals his leg (2.1077). These two miracles present three kinds of Chester monks: the holy and devout Simon, who lives as perfectly as a monk can; Simon’s dissident companions, who live far from the precepts exemplified by Werburgh; and Ulminus, who falls in between as well-meaning but flawed. Simon’s story questions the prescriptive efficacy of his example (and, by extension, Werburgh’s), for his spiritual probity saves his own soul while aggravating, not converting, his fellow monks. On its own, Simon’s story suggests that imitating Werburgh is nigh impossible for the average monk; that Werburgh’s earlier direct address to her familia is, without her lived presence, fruitless; and that the abbots’ response to Wolsey’s reforms may have been right. Few live like Werburgh, and those who do are persecuted. Ulminus’s story does not counter this dismal image of ethical exemplarity, but it does offer an alternative route to spiritual reformation. The canon’s flaws do not inhibit his participation in Werburgh’s familia; rather, she extends grace in the form of 128

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protection and healing because of his role as her ‘seruant’, not his ethical perfection. In healing him, she returns him to proper monastic work (he was not able to sing the opus Dei with his injury, but when he is healed he rejoins the monks in the choir [2.1078–86, 1101–2]), affirms his worthiness for religious observances, and restores him to full participation in the abbey’s life. Virtuous monastic deportment follows from, rather than constitutes, participation in Werburgh’s familia, just as earlier Werburgh’s nuns are able to imitate her because they are present with her. Belonging to Werburgh’s community does not guarantee good ethical action (as Simon’s fellow monks demonstrate), but it can foster it. In its 1521 printed form, Werburge offers its reader a fourth example of Chester monks’ ethical striving, this time in the liminary ballad that closes the volume. When it was printed, Pynson included four short verses (one opening the volume, three closing it) that package Werburge for its metropolitan readership. The fourth poem, signed in an acrostic by the monk Charles Bulkeley,60 is a monastic cry to Werburgh for assistance in refusing worldly temptations and embracing a more austere life. The poem opens with Bulkeley adopting a posture of repentant ­abjection, Renegate and contumace in all obstinacion, Bewrapt with all synne / detestable and recreaunt. (‘An Other Balade’, 3–4)61

After praising Werburgh’s heritage and doctrine, Bulkeley continues to petition Werburgh Wordly felicite [to] abiect from my courage; Enuy and pride / with lustes voluptuous. (25–26)

Bulkeley’s verse performs Werburgh’s morally productive potential; he expresses his contrition and awareness of human ‘fraylete’ (2) as a threat to his observance of monastic rigors and seeks her help ‘Euer in purite my lyfe to contynue’ (38). Bulkeley portrays himself, like Ulminus, as striving after Werburgh’s example, only able to receive relief from his ‘sores dolorous’ via Werburgh’s aid (28). Voiced by a remorseful monkish speaker, the poem casts traditional monastic virtues not as static values to be legislated, in the vein of Wolsey’s reforms, but as states of being maintained through a process of repentance and regeneration. Sensitively acknowledging the challenges of ancient monasticism without rejecting that lifestyle as impractical or inappropriate, Bulkeley’s ballad reiterates the message of Dom Simon and Ulminus’s miracles: Werburgh can foster her familia’s ethical probity, but they must desire it for themselves. Bradshaw’s (and Bulkeley’s) understanding of a monastic ethical community 60 Curt F. Bühler, ‘A Note on the “Balade to Saynt Werburge”’, Modern Language Notes 68 (1953): 539; Thornton, ‘Opposition Drama’, 44. On these ballads, see further Camp, ‘Plotting Chester’. 61 The liminary verse’s lines are numbered separately from Werburge itself; this ballad appears on pp. 202–3 of Horstmann’s edition.

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therefore resonates with, but does not entirely replicate, other imitative constructions of individual bodies. Unlike Werburge’s ethical community that Sanok identifies as targeted to female readers, who are united into a transhistorical community by ‘reproducing the ethical categories that the saint represents’,62 monks participate in Werburgh’s familia whether or not they live up to her standards. As also occurs in the CUL legendary’s conventual profession, they are united first through profession at Chester Abbey and only then, as a result of belonging to that corporate body, might they replicate Werburgh’s virtues. At the same time, Bradshaw does not present membership in the institutional body as solely sufficient for ‘being a good monk’ or as able to whitewash true spiritual failures. Rather, participation in the monastic body opens a space, structured around Werburgh’s exemplary life, in which Simon’s mode of high devotion is possible, Bulkeley’s form of contrition is productive, and Werburgh’s grace is available to those, like Ulminus, who fall short. Bradshaw’s understanding of the individual–corporate dialectic therefore resembles the ethical–genealogical dialectic constructed in the CUL collection, in that both imagine profession as enabling perfected personal governance without disbarring those who cannot attain such heights from belonging to the holy familia. In such sympathetic treatments of the cloistered life’s challenges, Bradshaw and the CUL compiler present a more hopeful consideration of the saint–community interplay than do many of their contemporaries: reformist polemicists like Longland or Wolsey, who attempt to legislate a return to original austerities; hagiographers like the Wilton poet, who acknowledges conventual dissent but resolves all problems in Edith’s incorruption; or Bokenham or Alcock, who ignore the challenges of professed chastity. Bradshaw does not gloss over monastic difficulties, but neither does he use those difficulties as an excuse not to strive for higher achievements. By privileging the institutional body as the primary organizing category for monastic life while not denying the value of wellgoverned ethical bodies, Bradshaw identifies a middle position between idealized calls for a return to ancient asceticism and complacent shoulder-shrugging over contemporary negligence. That middle position is enabled, ultimately, by Werburgh’s late decay. The destruction of the institutional body’s symbolic guarantor, the figurative revelation that simply belonging to the corporate body is insufficient, opens up a discursive space in which the efforts of individual ethical bodies become meaningful again. For, when Bradshaw narrates Werburgh’s decay by straightforwardly translating Goscelin’s account,63 that recycled Latin resonates across the poem’s stories of monastic striving. Following Goscelin, Bradshaw acknowledges that saints who decay do so for the greatter glorie Of their resurrection for the tyme, truly. (1.3487–88) 62 63

Sanok, Her Life Historical, 109–10. Compare Werburge, 1.3470–511 to VWer, 11–12 (pp. 48–50); these six stanzas are a nearly verbum pro verbo translation of Goscelin.

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In Werburgh’s case, he continues, But greatter was the hope of the eterne renouacion In her body reolued to naturall consumption, Whiche for her merites to this present day Helpeth all her seruantes that to her wyll praye. (1.3508–11)

In their emphasis on the eschatological benefits of decomposition, these lines foreshadow both Bradshaw’s reminder to his fellow monks and Werburgh’s reminder to Simon that monastic virtue and suffering reap heavenly, not earthly rewards (2.1997–98; 1407). These lines therefore reaffirm the saint’s body / monastic body typology: even for the ethically upright, the rewards will not be of this earth. Yet Werburgh’s decay offers more than consolation for life’s hardships; it enables good ethical practice. In lines 3509–11, Werburgh’s ‘naturall consumption’ grammatically ‘Helpeth all her seruantes’ who ask: her bodily fragmentation, not her spiritual wholeness, allows her to assist her petitioners. Werburgh’s decay thereby aids ethical renewal, becoming the promissory of ‘eterne renouacion’ for those who, like Ulminus and Bulkeley, seek it. The passage’s closing emphasis on her ‘seruantes’ privileges Chester’s corporate body, while the caveat that she only helps those who ‘wyll praye’ to her places the ethical impetus on the monks themselves. Werburgh’s aid is available to the Chester monks, but only to those who request it. The decomposed body therefore represents both monastic discord and monastic renovation, the unruly corporate body and its individual members seeking improvement. These opposite ethical states are integral (reformation is only needful when disarray reigns, Bulkeley’s poem reminds us) for, just as Werburgh’s corrupted corpse promises ‘eterne renouacion’, so does acknowledging the disordered institutional body allow its members to admit their failures and seek, with Werburgh’s help, ethical restoration. Bradshaw’s treatment of Werburgh’s putrefaction also reveals the opportunity missed by the Wilton Chronicle’s poet, facing a similar conundrum with Edith’s partially decayed remains. In her Latin hagiographic tradition, Edith’s limited decomposition was linked to her childish misuse of her senses, while her preservation was associated with her virtuous chastity and moderation.64 The fact that Edith became a saint despite those youthful peccadillos, and that her proper conventual conduct was also marked upon her cadaver, could have been used to encourage the Wilton nuns to strive for proper deportment; just as Edith overcame her adolescent faults, so could the Wilton nuns have aspired to devotional betterment. By not acknowledging that his readers can take hope in Edith’s partial decay, by investing in the institutional body without advancing the renovation of the individual nuns’ bodies, the Wilton poet reveals his ethical shortsightedness. Bradshaw faces a similar tradition of decay, and invests just as heavily in the incorrupt body’s ability to figure institutional cohesion, but turns his historiographic liabilities into ethical assets. 64

TransEd, 1; Wilmart, Légende, 266. See Chapter 1 above, pp. 51–52.

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Balancing competing discourses – ancient spiritual origins, corporate stability, ethical emulation, individual renewal – Bradshaw navigates the divergent pressures facing monastic practitioners in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On the one hand, his poem exemplifies the attraction of the rhetorically constituted, ancient corporate body and its ability to assert a coherent, persistent identity through the history and often corporeality of its patron saint. Wilton Abbey, Stone Priory, Bury St Edmunds, and others deploy their saints similarly to achieve analogous results. Yet Chester’s distinctive situation, owning a decomposed incorrupt, forced Bradshaw to acknowledge the historiographic flaws in such assumptions. In negotiating that problem, Bradshaw avoids assuming the perfect replicability of the Anglo-Saxon chronotope’s ethical facets. Rather, in acknowledging the ethical distance between the early Tudor monks and Werburgh’s conversion-era perfections, Bradshaw offers his peers a perceptive way of best enacting their calling in a world so removed from Chester’s (reconstructed) institutional origins. Werburge’s differing and often competing historical priorities illustrate the complexities of these historiographic issues, complexities that become even more pronounced, the next two chapters show, when such historicizing hagiographies represent male royal saints.

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4

The Limits of Narrative History in the Written and Pictorial Lives of Edward the Confessor

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he Wilton Diptych preserves one of the most famous – and most typical – images of Edward the Confessor. On the left panel, a youthful-looking Richard II kneels before the Virgin Mary and her angels, who occupy the right panel. Richard is flanked by his three favorite saints: John the Baptist, Edward the Confessor, and Edmund of Bury. Edward stands robed in cream and ermine, crowned and white-bearded, prominently holding a ring. Similar images of Edward proliferated across late medieval England – in royal apartments, on rood-screens, throughout parish glazing programs, in the great cathedrals’ statuary – making Edward easily recognizable in medieval art. Moreover, as the last representative of Wessex kingship, arguably the last legitimate ruler before the Conquest, and a canonized saint to boot, Edward (1003 × 1006–1066) offered all the features of a national saint along the lines of Louis IX of France or Olaf of Norway. Yet he became neither national saint nor definitive patron of English kingship, despite Plantagenet kings’ promotion of Edward as a holy antecessor.1 The erratic nature of Edward’s cult is seen in the contrast between this widespread iconography and the paucity of his vernacular lives. Unlike the other saints I discuss, Edward inspired no lengthy, original Middle English life. Both Henry II and Henry III did earlier receive monastic-produced lives, a Latin vita from Aelred of Rievaulx (which would become the foundation for all subsequent lives) and a French vie from Matthew Paris, respectively; nevertheless, no Middle English life was produced for Richard II, despite Richard’s active veneration and 1

Edward’s cult has not received a single, overarching study; rather, scholars have broached different aspects of his cult – its origin, royal patronage, written and visual features – separately. Foundational studies include Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), 256–85; Barlow, ed. and trans., Vita Ædwardi Regis qui apud Westmonasterium requiescit. The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster (London: Thomas Nelson, 1962), 112–33; Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 52–89 et passim; Bernhard W. Scholz, ‘The Canonization of Edward the Confessor’, Speculum 36 (1961): 38–60. Emily L. O’Brien, ‘The Cult of St Edward the Confessor, 1066–1399’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 2001) examines the cult’s royal patronage, while the essays collected in Richard Mortimer, ed., Edward the Confessor: The Man and the Legend (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009) consolidate information about his life and early cult.

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use of Edward’s conjoined royal and saintly features. Nor did Westminster Abbey commission a life to enhance its prestige along the lines of Lydgate’s Edmund and Fremund or Bradshaw’s Werburge.2 After Paris’s vie, Edward was celebrated in architecture, visual art, and ceremony, but was commemorated verbally only in two short, derivative lives integrated into Middle English legendaries, neither of which appears to have any connections to abbey or king. Edward’s limited written but robust visual and ceremonial cult, I argue, is partly a formal response to the historiographic difficulties his vita presented for Westminster, crown and monks alike. As king and saint, Edward seems an ideal candidate for an integrated hagio-history along the lines of the Wilton Chronicle, Marie’s Vie Audree, or ­Bradshaw’s Werburge, but the hagiographic and chronicle accounts of his life proved narratively irreconcilable. Edward therefore establishes the formal limits of late medieval historicized hagiography, illustrating what narrative saints’ lives cannot accomplish – and what non-narrative methods of connecting past and present can. Edward’s uneven cult has been variously explained. Paul Binski argues that Edward’s role in underwriting English government’s consolidation at Westminster put itself out of a job as that consolidation became fact.3 Jonathan Good suggests that Richard  II’s use of Edward to justify desires for absolutist rule tainted the saint for the Lancastrian kings.4 Additionally, the Westminster monks never attempted to popularize Edward’s cult or to define their own institutional identity through him; his elaborate memorials in Westminster Abbey mostly resulted from royal patronage.5 When the monks sought to defend their monastic identity, they turned instead to Peter, who supposedly appeared mystically to consecrate the first monastery founded on the isle of Thorney (later refurbished by Edward when he built Westminster). This tradition originated in Sulcard’s Prologus de construccione Westmonasterii (c.1076 × c.1085), a history of Westminster from its first foundation until the death of Edward the Confessor,6 and became central to the abbey’s communal life. 2

For a full list of Edward’s vernacular lives, see Matthew Paris, La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei, ed. Kathryn Young Wallace (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1983), xii–xiv. In addition to Paris’s vie, there were two other Anglo-Norman vies, two Anglo-Norman miracle stories, and a Life in Old Norse. 3 Binski, Westminster, 7, 92. 4 Jonathan Good, The Cult of Saint George in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), 79–81, 93; Good, ‘Richard II and the Cults of Saints George and Edward the Confessor’, in Translatio: On the Transmission of Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Modes and Messages, ed. Laura H. Hollengreen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 175–78. 5 On the joint promotion by Westminster and the (particularly Plantagenet) crown, see Binski, Westminster, 52–53; Scholz, ‘Canonization’, 51–56; on the comparatively weak interest of Westminster in promoting Edward’s cult before the reign of Henry  III, despite his 1161 canonization, see Barlow, Edward, 263–85; Emma Mason, Westminster Abbey and Its People, c. 1050–c. 1216 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1996), 264–66; on Osbert’s central role in Edward’s first canonization push, see Barlow, Vita, 127–30, 133; Barlow, Edward, 272–77; Scholz, ‘Canonization’, 39–49. 6 E. H. Pearce, The Monks of Westminster: Being a Register of the Brethren of the Convent from

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The late medieval monks’ attitude to their holy founders is expressed in the De Fundatione ecclesiae Westmonasteriensis (c.1443) of John Flete, prior of Westminster during the second quarter of the fifteenth century.7 The De Fundatione is less a narrative house history than a collection of documents relating to the abbey’s foundation, privileges, and abbatial lineage. Throughout this compilation, Flete emphasizes Westminster’s Petrine consecration, extracting the foundation story from many authorities and interweaving references to Peter’s patronage throughout his material.8 One sermon extract voices Flete’s message succinctly: ‘we, I say, whom he adopted as his special sons’ ought to honor and celebrate Peter.9 Peter thereby upstages Edward. Although he is regularly called ‘Saint Edward the Confessor’, and although Flete asserts that Westminster has been the consecration church and royal mausoleum from time immemorial,10 he does not construct Westminster’s identity around Edward’s remains. His death and burial are recounted briefly under Edwin’s abbacy, subordinating the king’s role as founder to the lineage of Westminster’s abbots,11 and even his affection for Peter, which Aelred emphasizes, makes no appearance. Rather, Flete constructs Edward only as a king and later saint, not as the Westminster monks’ ‘very special friend’. As the De Fundatione suggests, Edward was valuable to the abbey for articulating Westminster’s position vis-á-vis the crown rather than for defining monastic identity.12 The Westminster continuations of both the Flores Historiarum and the Polychronicon,13 for instance, used Edward and the coronation ideology associated the Time of the Confessor to the Dissolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), 40; Bernhard W. Scholz, ‘Sulcard of Westminster: “Prologus de construccione Westmonasterii”’, Traditio 20 (1964): 59–91, at 59–61. On Westminster’s foundation narratives, see Barbara Harvey, Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 20–23; Mason, Westminster, 1–4. 7 John Flete, The History of Westminster Abbey, ed. J. Armitage Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909). On Flete, see Gransden, HW, 2.393–94; Pearce, Monks of Westminster, 137–38; Harvey, Westminster, 12–18; Binski, Westminster, 123. 8 These authorities include known works like Aelred’s Vita Edwardi, Sulcard, and Higden alongside an unidentified ‘quodam libro vetustissimo chronicarum, veteri Anglorum sive Saxonum lingua conscripto’ and a ‘Liber Regius’ also used by Richard of Cirencester: Flete, History, 34, 43. See also Robinson’s introduction: Flete, History, 2–4. 9 ‘nos, inquam, quos speciales adoptavit in filios’. Flete, History, 46. 10 Ibid., 63. 11 Ibid., 82. 12 On Westminster’s scanty historiographic tradition, see Binski, Westminster, 121–22. John Taylor, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 77–89, takes a more rosy view, but still acknowledges (p. 78) that Westminster’s historians were all continuators, not originators. 13 On the Westminster Flores continuation, see Flores Historiarum, ed. Henry Richards Luard, 2 vols., RS 95 (London: HMSO, 1890), xxxiv–xliii; Antonia Grandsen, ‘Continuation of the Flores Historiarum from 1265 to 1327’, Mediaeval Studies 36 (1974): 472–92; Gransden, HW, 1.441, 453–63; Binski, Westminster, 121–23. The Westminster continuation of the Polychronicon was printed as an appendix to the Rolls Series edition of the Polychronicon in vol. 9, and recently edited: Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, ed. and trans. L.  C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). On this continuation, see Gransden, HW, 2.157 n. 2; J. Armitage Robinson, ‘An Unrecognized Westminster Chronicler, 1381–1394’, Proceedings of

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with him to foreground Westminster’s role in regnal affairs; the late fourteenthcentury Speculum Historiale by the Westminster monk Richard of Cirencester similarly includes a lengthy excursus on the coronation regalia and Westminster’s role in the rite.14 In all these examples, Edward functions as holy king, not royal saint, and his association with the coronation ordo affirms Westminster’s pride of place in that ceremony; Edward does not shape the community’s religious identity. The Westminster monks, it seems, had little impetus to commission a vita Edwardi to assert prestigious roots or affirm their ancient holiness. Westminster Abbey’s lack of interest in Edward’s hagiography does not fully explain its absence, and while both Binski and Good provide key factors behind its spottiness, neither claim completely accounts for the crown’s decision not to invest in the potent cultural capital of a crowned incorrupt saint. After studying the major accounts of Edward’s life from the Conquest to 1450, I suggest that the vagaries of Edward’s written hagiography stem from a double irony of historical situation. I contend that Edward was not celebrated in a magisterial Middle English life because he was more historiographically, and ethically, useful to English kingship when dissociated from the events of his reign, a dissociation best accomplished by not historicizing his vita. Instead, Edward’s widely disseminated iconography, an achronic form, encapsulates his useful traits while obfuscating his problematic heirlessness. That double irony can be traced to the two distinct reputations – virginal king and slightly inept ruler – that Edward enjoyed shortly after his death. These reputations proved nearly impossible to reconcile within narratives of his life. As we have seen, monastic hagiographers could intertwine their female patron saints’ royal status and virginal perfections to meld saintly stasis and linear chronology successfully. Female virginity and its association with incorruption prove historiographically fecund for monastic histories already predicated on nonpatrilineal bonds between past and present; in this institutional context, female saints’ dotality and foundress roles are enhanced by the non-biological affinities their virginity enables. Male royal virginity, on the other hand, can become historiographically destructive. Antithetical to the pervasive genealogical structures Spiegel and Stahuljak discuss,15 the royal virgin breaks lineal bonds, inhibiting the longitudinal continuity promised by patrilineal genealogy’s ‘natural’ progression rather than, as in monastic contexts, enabling alternate forms of continuity. In Edward’s case, Westminster Abbey’s limited interest in his cult may explain why his incorruption, such a fruitful figure in other saints’ lives, plays little role in his late medieval reputation. More problematically for the crown, Edward’s sanctity the British Academy 3 (1907): 61–92; Taylor, English Historical Literature, 77–81; Westminster Chronicle, xxii–lxxv. 14 Richard of Cirencester, Speculum Historiale de Gestis Regum Angliae, ed. John E. B. Mayor, 2 vols., RS 30 (London: Longman, 1863–69), 2.26–39. The discussion about the origins of the regalia was originally written by a contemporary Westminster monk, William Sudbury (d.1415); see Robinson, ‘Unrecognized’, 73–75. Richard also uses Aelred’s Vita Edwardi as the fourth and final book of his history. 15 See Chapter 2, pp. 69–70.

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compounds his historiographic troubles because his holy deeds, his pacificism and virginity, prevent him from ruling successfully. A similar potential conflict arose in the Wilton Chronicle when Edith refused to reign: as Edgar’s heir, Edith could have been considered culpable for allowing the inept Æthelred to misrule. The Wilton poet’s monastic focus allows him to pass over that accusation, however, while her corporealized dotal agency later rectified the wrongs inaugurated under Æthelred. Edward’s sanctity, on the other hand, cannot efface the political consequences of his childlessness and his inability to govern the Godwinsons. This tension underlies even those accounts that laud Edward’s holy reign. As Scott Waugh points out, ‘in the hands of historians … [Edward] validated a particular view of history and gave historians an opportunity to use the figure of Edward to highlight moral or historical truths they wished to promote’;16 nevertheless, the process of creating this admirable and imitable Edward was fraught with difficulties. His holiness could never fully replace his other persona as inconsequential ruler – because the one failing that most haunted his political reputation, his inability to produce an heir, resulted directly from his chastity.17 Because virginity and kingship do not mix well, politically or historiographically, Edward’s chaste reputation problematized diachronic accounts of his life.18 As Dyan Elliott has shown, eleventh-century kings’ posthumous reputations for virginity served as ‘a convenient explanation for a disruption in succession’;19 royal virginity was only ever a rhetorical trick to conveniently erase the king’s inability to perpetuate the blood succession. It also makes the chaste ruler a problematic exemplar for later kings. Edward’s heirlessness therefore became the unforgettable shard that resurfaced in many narratives. Because no king could claim to 16

Scott Waugh, ‘The Lives of Edward the Confessor and the Meaning of History in the Middle Ages’, The Medieval Chronicle III, ed. Erik Kooper (New York: Rodopi, 2004), 202–3; see also Tamar S. Drukker, ‘Historicizing Sainthood: The Case of Edward the Confessor in Vernacular Narratives’, The Medieval Chronicle 4 (1996): 53–79. 17 On hagiographers’ struggles to depict Edward as an effectual, not weak, king, see Paul Binski, ‘Reflections on La estoire de Seint Aedward le rei: Hagiography and Kingship in ThirteenthCentury England’, Journal of Medieval History 16 (1990): 333–50, at 347–48; Katherine Yohe, ‘Ælred’s Recrafting of the Life of Edward the Confessor’, Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38 (2003): 177–89, at 186–88. 18 On other ways Edward’s vernacular hagiographers negotiated Edward’s problematic chaste kingship, see Christopher Baswell, ‘King Edward and the Cripple’, in Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor of H.  A. Kelly, ed. Donka Minkova and Theresa Tinkle (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 15–29; Jennifer N. Brown, ‘Body, Gender and Nation in the Lives of Edward the Confessor’, in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community, ed. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), 146–54. 19 Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 123. On the origins of this reputation, see Barlow, Edward, 259; Monika Otter, ‘Closed Doors: An Epithalamium for Queen Edith, Widow and Virgin’, in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 63–92; Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 73, 260–2.

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be Edward’s direct descendant, Edward’s biographers (like Audrey’s vernacular hagiographers) turned to typology to imagine Edward as royal antecessor. A more substantial problem lay in his chaste marriage’s relationship to the dynastic conflicts preceding the Norman Conquest. In both chronicle and hagiography, the possibility that Edward’s heirlessness precipitated William’s invasion must be rendered ‘unthinkable’ so that his ability to legitimize English kingship, through sanctity and right rule, can remain ‘thinkable’. The earliest chronicles never blamed Edward’s chastity for the succession problem, but after he became renowned for purity, writers faced this interpretive dilemma. Most chronicles and hagiographers opted to suppress the connection between chaste marriage and the Conquest, with varying degrees of success, but the connection could not be occluded in narratives that historicize his sanctity. Finally, this historiographic problem also manifested as an ethical conundrum. Although kings like Henry III and Richard II modeled aspects of their reign on Edward’s reputation, they (especially the childless Richard) could not be seen to imitate his heroic chastity too closely – even though his virginal status underwrote Edward’s sanctity and ultimately his foundational role in the royal lineage. As was true of Bradshaw’s Audrey in Life of Werburge, Edward’s virginity must be elided for him to be a useful antecessor and exemplar. Accordingly, narratives of Edward’s reign were only sometimes, and then carefully, deployed in royal circles. In the political climate of Richard’s reign especially, a written life of an heirless, ineffectual king could have been a liability; Richard could have been seen as mimicking Edward’s political limitations too closely. Instead, like Henry III before him, Richard used visual art to imagine supratemporal affinities with his sainted predecessor, transposing Edward’s pacificsm and virginity to the spiritual plane so that emulation of Edward’s holy features would not also be emulation of his political failings. When deployed as a static, dehistoricized image – depicted in an iconic moment rather than as a temporally bound political agent – Edward could do legitimizing work. Visual arts most fully realized the iconic moment, both in the image of Edward and ring, as in the Wilton Diptych, and the pictorial narratives that circulated independent of his vitae. Because these portraits invoke rather than narrate his reign (his crowned, whitebearded maturity in the Wilton Diptych implies his status as the last Wessex king) and capture select facets of his virtus (the ring symbolizes his holy largesse, his approval by God and John the Evangelist, and his saintly chastity), they can depict all Edward’s sacralizing features – his holiness, his royalty – as typological, heritable, and safely imitable. That is, Edward can legitimize late medieval kingship only when these elements are divorced from his reign’s narrative and so quarantined from their problematic political results. This chapter tracks the development of Edward’s written and pictorial afterlives with an eye to how each narrative type negotiates Edward’s different personae via chronological and iconic depictions of the past. Although most accounts interweave the diachronic and the achronic, such temporal intermingling often serves not to strengthen bonds between past and present, as in the virgin saints’ lives, but to undercut Edward’s ability to figure holy, effective English rule. I first focus on Edward’s written commemorations in chronicles and hagiography, demonstrating 138

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the interplay of (and clash between) diachronic time and the iconic moment. I then examine Edward’s pictorial hagiography, heavily patronized by Henry  III and Richard II, to consider Edward’s historiographic utility when rendered iconic rather than temporally situated. Edward thereby establishes the outer limits of this study: a saint whose holy reputation resists contextualization and who is most historiographically and ethically useful when elevated above the tempus. Seeing Double: Edward’s Early History and Cult Edward’s earliest written commemorations – those produced between his death and his translation in 1163 – establish two different traditions for his life and reign. The first, initiated in the early Anglo-Norman chronicles, positioned Edward’s rule within English history. For writers like John of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon, and William of Malmesbury, Edward was just another king; as legitimate heir of Æthelred and peaceable ruler, Edward is better than many but not noteworthy. The second, constructed by the hagiographers Osbert of Clare and Aelred of Rievaulx, divorced Edward from the historical particularities of later Anglo-Saxon England in the process of imagining Edward’s imitatio Christi. This double vision produced the two distinct personae inherited by later vernacular chroniclers and hagiographers, a split personality that proved nearly impossible to reconcile successfully. Both traditions grew from Edward’s earliest biography, the Life of Edward who Rests at Westminster, written 1065–67 by an anonymous cleric undoubtedly at the behest of Edward’s wife Edith.20 As panegyric for Edith and her kin rather than linear biography of Edward,21 its first book, written during Edward’s life or immediately after his death, relates events and interpersonal relationships that later writers would integrate into the chronology of Edward’s reign. The second book, penned shortly after the deaths of the first book’s male protagonists and William of Normandy’s invasion, consolidates Edith’s now precarious political position by presenting a quasi-hagiographical, thematically organized account of her husband’s life.22 The aforementioned ‘double vision’ is thus already present in the anonymous vita’s diptych structure, and later writers mostly followed the vision that best suited their needs. To oversimplify somewhat, early chronicle writers used Book One to flesh out the events recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and elsewhere, while Osbert of Clare, Edward’s first hagiographer, drew on Book Two’s miracles and visions. Only William of Malmesbury attempts to integrate both traditions. Accounts of Edward’s reign produced before his canonization are uninterested in the anonymous biographer’s hesitant sanctification; they tend to be slightly 20 21 22

Barlow, Vita, xxiii–xxx. Ibid., xv–xvii, xxiii–xxiv. Ibid., xx–xxii; Otter, ‘Closed Doors’, 63–67; Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 28–31.

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disdainful of his rule. The annals for 1043–66 in John (a.k.a. ‘Florence’) of Worcester’s early twelfth-century chronicle trace primarily the res gestae of Godwin and his sons, not Edward’s acts, and John does not mention Edward favorably. When Harold Godwinson takes the throne, John states that he ‘destroyed iniquitous laws, and set about establishing just ones’,23 hinting that Edward’s reign had not been thoroughly just. Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum (1129–54) is no more sympathetic. Henry portrays Edward as a ‘simple’ man; Godwin made Edward, rather than Alfred, king after Harthcnut because Edward was the ‘younger and more simple brother’.24 Narrating the relationship between Edward and Godwin, Henry also introduces stories that found their way into the hagiographic tradition. Most notably, he tells how Godwin, protesting his loyalty to Edward, vows that he would choke on his next bite should he be lying; he then promptly makes good on his vow, dropping dead.25 Henry treats the episode as evidence that Edward must rely on divine power, not his own might, for justice – evidence, in other words, of Edward’s ineffective kingship. (Not until Aelred’s vita is the miracle used to demonstrate divine approbation for Edward.) William of Malmesbury, writing his Gesta Regum Anglorum shortly before Osbert of Clare produced Edward’s first vita, is the first to accommodate Edward’s sanctity to his reign. William’s emphasis on Edward’s holiness does not, however, lead to an increased valuation of Edward’s rule; rather, William’s Edward is a simple, easily led monarch whose reign was overshadowed by the House of Godwin and whose governance was blemished by injustice.26 William does address Edward’s sanctity, but he does not integrate Edward’s political and holy acts. He instead borrows the anonymous biographer’s organization as well as his miracles, segregating the chapters on Edward’s reign from those on his sanctity and revealing structurally William’s ambivalence about Edward’s two personae. Edward’s rule falls in chapters 196–200, where William focuses on the Edward–Godwin relationship. This section is followed by chapters (201–6) on supernatural phenomena that segue into William’s account of various Anglo-Saxon saints (chapters 207–9). Only then does he narrate Edward’s holy lifestyle, miracles, and visions (chapters 220–27) before relating Edward’s attempts to secure the succession and his death (chapter 228). The section on England’s royal saints serves, William claims, ‘to establish that King Edward … fell by no means short of the virtues of his ancestors’27 and to situate Edward’s holiness within a trajectory of English sanctity. They also insulate Edward’s holiness from the unflattering narrative of his reign. This structural decision reveals the impossibility of basing Edward’s sanctity on his rule for, like Aelred after him, William relies on typology (Edward’s likeness to other English saints) rather than royal acts to proclaim Edward’s nascent holiness.

23 24 25 26 27

‘leges iniquas destruere, equas cepit condere’. John of Worcester, 600–601. ‘fratri iuniori et simpliciori’. Henry, HA, 372–73. Ibid., 378. GRA, 2.196–97 (pp. 348–54). ‘sciatur quod a uirtutibus maiorum rex Eduardus … minime degenerauerit’. GRA, 2.220 (pp. 404–5).

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Presenting two Edwards, the weak king and the visionary saint, William encodes this double vision into his influential history. William’s ambivalence about Edward is typical of the early twelfth century, as seen in the development of his cult. Despite a tomb opening in 1102, Edward was little venerated between his death and the first third of the twelfth century,28 when Osbert of Clare, prior of Westminster Abbey, unsuccessfully sought canonization for Edward. Osbert’s new vita, written originally in 1138 and based on Book Two of the anonymous vita, is a fully detemporalized hagiography, stripped of historical detail and all references to the House of Godwin.29 This vita was resubmitted to the pope twenty years later as part of a more complete canonization dossier; this time, the bid was successful, and Edward was canonized in 1161.30 Abbot Lawrence then commissioned Aelred of Rievaulx to rewrite Osbert’s vita in time for Edward’s translation in 1163. Aelred’s vita became Edward’s standard hagiography, the basis for all other vernacular and Latin versions as well as the iconographic programs promoted by various kings.31 In revising Edward’s vita for presentation to Lawrence and Henry II, Aelred was the first to contrive a limited rapprochement between Edward’s saintly and political personae. The structural problems he faced would be encountered by later hagiographers, and the solutions he devised would be adopted in Edward’s later pictorial, but not written, lives. Although Aelred is now known best as a Cistercian theologian, devotional writer, and occasional hagiographer, he was more a writer of history than of saints’ lives, and his Vita Edwardi reflects his historical sensibilities.32 As Marsha Dutton shows, Aelred saw himself as an adviser to kings, writing his Genealogy of the Kings of the English as a historical and exemplary treatise for the young Henry  II; his Vita Edwardi, addressed as much to Henry  II as to the Westminster monks, similarly models holy royal conduct and emphasizes genealogical and typological bonds between Edward and Henry.33 As part of this exemplary historical focus, Aelred reintegrated some 28 Mason, Westminster, 264–66; Barlow, Edward, 263–64; Barlow, Vita, 112–15, 119–20. Despite the 1161 canonization, Edward’s cult did not flourish until Henry III’s reign: D. A. Carpenter, ‘King Henry III and Saint Edward the Confessor: The Origins of the Cult’, English Historical Review 122.498 (2007): 865–91, at 866–67. 29 BHL 2422; Osbert of Clare, ‘La Vie’; Barlow, Vita, xxxii–xxxiv. 30 On the development of Edward’s cult and hagiographic witnesses under Osbert, see Barlow, Vita, xxx–xxxviii, 124–28. On his canonization, see Barlow, Vita, 128–32; Mason, Westminster, 39–40; Scholz, ‘Canonization’; and Edina Bozoky, ‘The Sanctity and Canonisation of Edward the Confessor’, in Edward the Confessor: The Man and the Legend, ed. Richard Mortimer (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), 173–86. 31 BHL 2423; Barlow, Vita, xxxvii–xxxviii; Binski, Westminster, 56–57. 32 Marsha L. Dutton, ed., Aelred of Rievaulx: The Historical Works, trans. Jane Patricia Freeland (Kalamazoo: Cisterican Publications, 2005), 7–10; Dutton, ‘Æelred, Historian: Two Portraits in Plantagenet Myth’, Cistercian Studies Quarterly 28 (1993): 112–44; Elizabeth Freeman, Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150–1220 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 31–87. 33 Dutton, Aelred, 11, 21–22; Dutton, ‘Ælred, Historian’, 116–19; Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis Edwardi Regis et Confessoris’, in Beati Aelredi Rievallis abbatis. Operum pars secunda: Historia, Patrologia Latina 195, cols. 738B–739A. I cite Aelred by column from this edition and

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chronicle material into Osbert’s typological framework, emphasizing the political situation behind Edward’s ascension and increasing the visibility of Godwin and his sons. He also sought to refute the uncomplimentary claim, recorded by William of Malmesbury, that Edward had not consummated his marriage because he disliked Edith’s father.34 Most notable is his expansion of Edward’s dying Vision of the Green Tree, originally recorded in the anonymous vita. On his deathbed, Edward was given a vision foretelling the pending political and spiritual depredations; when Edward asked for a consolation, he was told that a resolution would come when a green tree, whose trunk had been cut from its root, was rejoined with no human intervention and flowered again.35 While this revelation was taken by Edward’s earlier hagiographers as ‘a vision of something impossible’,36 Aelred used it to prophesy Henry’s descent from both Saxon and Norman stock.37 Despite these historicizing features, Aelred did not write a history. Once Edward is on the throne, the vita is dominated by a string of miracles (like the curing of Ghillie Michael and others) and visions (the host vision and the vision of the Seven Sleepers) rather than by chronological time and political concerns.38 Interspersed vignettes describe moments in Edward’s life without linking them to dates or political events, consolidating Edward’s holy stasis. That stasis is echoed in Aelred’s descriptions of Edward. In life, he was infused with ‘A spirit of inner holiness [that] shone in his very body’ while on his deathbed his ‘face was suffused with a heavenly rose color’ that functioned as ‘a sign of future blessedness’.39 Edward’s sempiternal sanctity, emanating from his body, trumps the chronological details of his reign. In forming Edward into a static model of divinely authorized rule, Aelred makes it possible to imagine Edward as a typological antecessor for Henry, deploying iconic typology to establish Henry as Edward’s descendant and legitimate heir.40 The tenuousness of this claim is obvious, as the lineal connection was gossamer thin: Edward’s great-niece, Margaret of Scotland, was Henry’s grandmother. Henry cannot be the childless Edward’s progeny through any model of translations by page number from Jane Patricia Freeland, trans., The Life of Saint Edward, King and Confessor, in Dutton, Aelred, 123–243. 34 GRA, 2.197 (pp. 352–54); Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, cols. 748B–C. 35 Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, cols. 772A–773B. 36 ‘reuelatio impossibilitatis’. Barlow, Vita, 78. Compare GRA, 2.226–27 (pp. 414–16); Osbert of Clare, ‘La Vie’, 108–9. 37 Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, cols. 773D–774B. See also Ashe, Fiction and History, 30–33. 38 Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, ch. 13, cols. 754A–755D; chs. 19–23, cols. 761C–765D; ch. 18, cols. 760B–761C; ch. 26, cols. 767B–769A. 39 ‘Lucebat in ipso etiam corpore interioris spiritus sanctitatis’; ‘futurae beatitudinis … insigne, … vultus coelesti rubore perfusus’. Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, cols. 745D, 776A; Freeland, Life, 143, 211. 40 Dutton, ‘Ælred, Historian’, 117–19. See also Nicole Leapley, ‘Rewriting Paternity: The Meaning of Renovating Westminster in La Estoire de seint Aedward le rei’, Medievalia et Humanistica 37 (2011): 37–64.

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patrilineal descent, so typology provides the linguistic marker that establishes kin bonds. Coupling typology with blood descent on Henry’s behalf was nothing new for Aelred. In the Genealogy of the Kings of the English,41 he traced the noble (and sometimes ignoble) deeds of the Wessex kings and Henry’s immediate female ancestors; although Aelred explicitly states that Henry inherits his ancestors’ virtue naturally, through biological lineage,42 he also presents these holy predecessors as ‘a great incentive to acquiring habits’ – that is, as exemplars for Henry to follow.43 Their devotion and rule are also linked typologically to classical and biblical figures: Alfred is likened to Constantine44 and Edith-Matilda is cast as ‘another Esther in our own time’.45 Edward’s typological role is key, his king–saint duality positioning him as ‘the personal linchpin between English history and sacred history’,46 an iconic model of a virtuous ruler. In order to construct Henry as Edward’s heir, Aelred makes a canny move in the vita’s first chapter: he writes for Edward his own typological genealogy of holy kingship, setting up a parallel between Edward’s and Henry’s inheritances. Emphasizing holiness over lineal descent, Aelred can identify Alfred and Edgar as Edward’s most important ancestors and even re-imagine Edward’s father Æthelred as a ‘vigorous’ ruler who, along with his Norman wife Emma, could transmit to Edward ‘the dual holiness of the two peoples’.47 Later, Edward himself identifies Edwin and Oswald of Northumbria as his forebears in similar typological terms.48 These bonds work outside lineal descent and linear time, as there are no blood ties involved. This is not to say Aelred eschews genealogy. Indeed, he asserts that Henry’s legitimacy depends on his claim to Wessex royal blood (as made clear in his interpretation of Edward’s Vision of the Green Tree),49 and the vita’s preface insists that Henry has ‘assumed the kingdom of your great ancestor by a twofold right, having merited the kingdom and your aristocratic blood from both your father and your mother’.50 Aelred points to Henry’s blood 41

Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Genealogia regum Anglorum’, in Beati Aelredi Rievallis abbatis. Operum pars secunda: Historia. Patrologia Latina 195: cols. 711–37. I cite by column number from this edition and translations by page number from Jane Patricia Freeland, trans., The Genealogy of the Kings of the English, in Dutton, Aelred, 39–122. 42 On the theology of ‘inherited virtue’ in Aelred’s Genealogy, see Mayeski, ‘Secundum naturam’. 43 ‘ad optimos mores obtinendos maximum incentivum’. Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Genealogia regum Anglorum’, col. 716C; Freeland, Genealogy, 71. 44 Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Genealogia regum Anglorum’, cols. 719B–C. 45 ‘alteram … Esther nostris temporibus’. Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Genealogia regum Anglorum’, col. 736B; Freeland, Genealogy, 119. 46 John P. Bequette, ‘Ælred of Rievaulx’s Life of Saint Edward, King and Confessor: A Saintly King and the Salvation of the English People’, Cistercian Studies Quarterly 43 (2008): 17–40, at 20. 47 ‘strenuissimus’; ‘duplicata utriusque generis sanctitate’. Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, col. 741B; Freeland, Life, 131. 48 Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, col. 744C. 49 Ibid., cols. 773D–774B. 50 ‘tanti patris regnum duplici jure sumpsisti, de cujus patre simul ac matre regnum ac generosum sanguinem meruisti’. Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, col. 739A; Freeland, Life, 127.

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relation to Edward as the key connection that rights the wrongs of 1066. But the blood is thin. Rather, the typological, linguistic bond allows Edward to function as a holy antecessor for Henry despite the indirect descent. When Aelred then touts the exemplarity of Edward for Henry, suggesting that the latter ‘emulate the outstanding justice of so outstanding a king’,51 his rhetorical program is complete – the iconic image of king-saint Edward serves as both legitimating foundation and aspirational model for the young Henry. Aelred’s vita thus exemplifies the iconic moment’s historiographic utility: it enhances historical typologies. We have seen analogous uses of typology and sempiternality in the vernacular lives of Audrey, particularly in the CUL legendary’s construction of proximal lineages, and, via similar formal structures used to different ends, in the Wilton poet’s and Bradshaw’s deployment of their saints’ corporeal relics to imagine corporate continuities. Despite typological patterning’s historiographic potential, however, none of Edward’s later biographers directly borrowed Aelred’s figural tricks; instead, Edward’s visual artists would develop such typology into polyvalent iconic images that also use stasis rather than diachrony for historiographic ends. Middle English Edwards and the Problem of Edward’s Chastity Instead of turning to achronic methods of realizing Edward’s historico-political potential, vernacular writers, both chroniclers and hagiographers, struggled to reconcile Edward’s two personae within a linear narrative. Chroniclers like Robert of Gloucester and the Brut writers, as well as the SEL and GiL continuators, strove (with uneven results) to write Edward back into late Anglo-Saxon history. Although this is, in part, a problem of emplotment – many of Edward’s miracles are difficult to locate in time – it is also one of ethos. Writers who tried to cast Edward as both good king and virtuous saint inevitably faced the problem of his virginity. His chaste marriage to Edith underlay his claim to sanctity, but because that marriage produced no heir, Edward’s inability to secure the succession undermined his status as exemplary historical king. Edward’s vita consequently resists the harmonization of hagiography and history characteristic of other late medieval saints’ lives. The difficulty of crafting a chronologically coherent life of Edward is epitomized in Matthew Paris’s Estoire de Seint Aedward le rei, the account that best succeeds in harmonizing Edward’s two personae by crafting a historical narrative around his otherwise iconic vignettes.52 Writing for Henry III’s queen, Eleanor of 51

‘Imitanda enim est tanti regis tanta justitia’. Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, col. 738C; Freeland, Life, 126. 52 I cite Paris, Estoire parenthetically by line numbers; the translation, cited parenthetically by page number, is taken from Thelma S. Fenster and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, eds. and trans., The History of Saint Edward the King by Matthew Paris (Tempe: ACMRS, 2008). Studies of Paris’s Estoire are numerous; those discussing its relationship to Henry’s court, particularly in terms of the Estoire’s illuminations, include Binski, Westminster, 57–63; Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s

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Provence, probably between 1236 and 1245,53 Paris produced a deliberately titled Estoire, not a Vie. Unlike the Latin hagiographies or the other French translations of Aelred,54 Paris brackets Edward’s life between a historical opening relating English history from the reign of Æthelred and an epilogue on the disasters of Harold Godwinson’s rule. Although he largely retains Aelred’s episodic structure, Paris integrates these miraculous moments smoothly into the framing chronology, developing causal linkages between scenes and establishing narrative arcs to provide continuity within an otherwise undifferentiated string of miracles. For example, Paris uses Edward’s vision of the drowned Danish ruler (1279–1362) to explain why the continental kings sought his friendship (1367–76). By then describing how Edward’s wisdom led to England’s renovation under his rule (1377–90), Paris can portray the next episode taken from Aelred – Edward’s desire to pilgrimage to Rome, and the populace’s panic at the thought of losing their ruler – as a real threat to this new-found prosperity. Paris develops this narrative coherence in part by borrowing conventions from romance, using entrelacement to create narrative flow out of discrete episodes,55 particularly in this passage and in the closing account of Harold’s reign. Though Paris achieves much better narrative continuity than any other writer, his successes reveal the political cost of Edward’s chastity. The conflict between Edward’s duty to produce an heir and his virginal desires is more easily avoided by writers who (I show below) simply omit Edward’s marriage or succession problems. In Paris’s poem, however, that tension surfaces early: Edward’s lords, observing that the ‘Danes have diminished the royal lineage and laid it low’ (67; ‘Daneis | Est li lignage rëal | Mut escurcé e mis auval’, 1065–67), ask him to take a wife in order to strengthen the kingdom, the crown and its power, so that if it please God in heaven, we shall have from you a rightful heir. (67) Tapestries and Matthew Paris’s Life of St Edward the Confessor’, Archaeologia 109 (1991): 85–100, at 89–95; Binski, ‘Reflections’; Hahn, Portrayed, 216–54, Leapley, ‘Rewriting Paternity’. Hahn, ‘Proper Behavior for Knights and Kings: The Hagiography of Matthew Paris’, Haskins Society Journal 2 (1990): 237–48, at 244–47, and Waugh, ‘Lives’ consider the Estoire’s exemplary historiographic goals. I discuss the Estoire’s manuscript below. 53 For a summation of the evidence for authorship and date, see Fenster and Wogan-Browne, History, 25–27. 54 Wallace lists all Edward’s extant lives in Paris, Estoire, xii–xiv, although she conflates the two different Middle English prose versions: ibid., xiii, no. 7. Among the other French epitomes, most notable is that produced by a twelfth-century nun of Barking; see Brown, ‘Body, Gender and Nation’; Fenster and Wogan-Browne, History, 8–9; Fenster, ‘“Ce qu’ens li trovat, eut en sei”: On the Equal Chastity of Queen Edith and King Edward in the Nun of Barking’s La Vie d’Edouard le confesseur’, in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community, ed. Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell (York: York Medieval Press, 2012); Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, 246–47; Delbert Russell, ‘“Sun num n’i vult dire a ore”: Identity Matters at Barking Abbey’, in Brown and Bussell, Barking Abbey; Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives, 249–53. 55 Victoria B. Jordan, ‘The Multiple Narratives of Matthew Paris’ Estoire de seint Aedward le rei: Cambridge: University Library MS Ee.iii.59’, Parergon 13 (1996): 77–92, at 81.

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Femme prendre pur efforcer Le regne, curune e poër, Ke si il plest au rei du cel, Eium de vus eir naturel. (1070–73)

To their minds, the good of the kingdom and the strength of the Wessex lineage are inseparable; when the Danes earlier ravished England, they also ravaged the royal line, making a prospective heir not only an enhancement of royal authority but also a reinforcement of the bonds between baronage and crown (1074–77) and protection of the border against enemies (1078–81). The ‘eir naturel’ is the key to empowering the kingdom, and one produces an ‘eir naturel’ by taking a wife (‘Femme prendre’). In his own prayers for wisdom in negotiating his vow of chastity and his barons’ demands, however, Edward elides this causal relationship between marriage, heir, and stability. He admits that he must take a wife to protect his kingdom (1103–4), but here and in his response to his barons, he omits any reference to an heir, as though an unconsummated marriage could ensure England’s prosperity. In his deference to his barons’ ‘bidding and … pleasure’ (68; ‘vuler e pleisir’, 1127), Edward becomes a model for future king–magnate relations;56 in his heroic resistance of fleshly pleasures (1253–60), his sanctity is guaranteed. But in privileging both virtues, Paris must forget that Edward does not fulfill the lords’ primary request for an heir to anchor continued political stability. Thus linked with threats to the realm’s security, Edward’s heirlessness persists, if mutedly, in Paris’s account. The magnates mention it as a reason for Edward to forgo his Rome pilgrimage (1505), and Harold invokes it when swearing to allow William of Normandy’s succession. Harold’s perjury exculpates Edward for the Conquest, but his statement that Edward ‘[had] no issue’ (104; ‘n’avez … issu’, 3901) reminds the reader that Edward’s refusal to consummate his marriage led to a tricky political situation in which England’s security depended on the honor of a Godwinson. Kingly chastity has consequences that Paris cannot ignore. Though Paris is the outstanding example, nearly all late medieval chroniclers and Edward’s hagiographers strive for some narrative integration. Few chroniclers completely ignored Edward’s reputation for sanctity, and no hagiographer tried, like Osbert had, to remove Edward’s life from its historical context. All, however, fall back on the earlier histories’ double vision. That double vision is illustrated in the prose ‘Life of Edward’ added to the early fifteenth-century Gilte Legende.57 The GiL ‘Edward’ opens with the kind 56 57

Carpenter, ‘King Henry III’, 887–89. The GiL ‘Edward the Confessor’, like all the GiL native lives, is a late addition to the collection. It appears (alongside lives of Wenefrede and Erkenwald, with which it seems to have circulated) in one manuscript, British Library, Add. MS 35298, although there is indirect evidence for at least two other copies of these lives: Richard Hamer and Vida Russell, eds., Supplementary Lives in Some Manuscripts of the Gilte Legende, EETS o.s. 315 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xvi–xviii, xxii. I cite the GiL ‘Edward’ from this edition parenthetically, by page and line number.

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of detailed historical background common among fifteenth-century lives of early English saints. It leads with the depredations of the Danes before and after Æthelred’s reign (3/1–21) before focusing specifically on Æthelred’s sons and England’s despoliation under Sweyn and Cnut (3/21–4/65, 5/98–6/120). While the Middle English writer is more expansive than his Latin source, this historicizing impulse does not persist throughout the life, as is true in GiL native lives like ‘Dunstan’ or ‘Alphege’. The rest of the text follows Aelred’s episodic, paratactic structure, paying lip-service to a causal narrative without developing it. While elaborating on Edward’s virtues, for example, the GiL hagiographer lists the kingdoms who desire Edward’s friendship, ‘excepte only Denmarke, the which yet conspyred ayenst þis londe of Ynglonde’, then claims that ‘whate felle þerof hit shal be declarid hereafter more opynly’ (7/175–77).58 This promise, however, remains unfulfilled. In the later story of Edward’s vision of the drowned Danish leader, the logical conclusion of this political issue,59 the GiL writer does not complete the narrative arc, settling for oblique platitude: ‘This is the holynes of Seinte Edwarde that causid alle nacyons to love Ynglond and to drede it’ (11/310–11). The end of the life, in particular, is structurally indebted to Aelred; although the GiL writer includes Harold’s usurpation, he only narrates the Battle of Stamford Bridge (28/1011–29/1047), not William’s successes, substituting Aelredian miracles for the tribulations, earlier referenced (25/894–901), that follow Edward’s death. This historical foreclosure enables the GiL hagiographer to elide easily the political ramifications of Edward’s sanctifying virginity. Unlike Paris, the GiL writer need not associate Edward’s chaste marriage with his inability to secure the succession. When ‘the councelle of the londe drewe them togeder tretyng of a mariage for the kyng’, the end of this marriage – a son – is never mentioned (9/249–50). Neither does the hagiographer tell of Edward’s attempt to elect his nephew Edward Ætheling as heir. The succession problem is only acknowledged once, after Edward’s marriage to Edith: ‘dyuers of this londe grucchid ayenste hym because he had no frute to reigne after hym … [;] [for] that he wolde bryng forthe no mo tyraundis he wolde not knowe his wyfe by generacion’ (10/287–90). This complaint, however, is embedded in an extended meditation on the holiness of Edward’s abstinence, and the hagiographer explains that ‘right fewe or none knewe the very trouthe’ of his sanctity during his lifetime (10/291), thereby privileging the spiritual ‘trouthe’ of his sanctity over his mundane lack of ‘frute’. Royal chastity has no political ramifications in the GiL ‘Edward’; it is evidence of his holiness and no more. While the GiL’s double vision entails attaching a historicized prologue to an otherwise iconic life, vernacular chroniclers tend to reverse this structure. As Tamar Drukker concludes in her study of the Brut’s depiction of Edward, ‘The compilers waver between the historical and the hagiographic material available, adopting the hagiographic model for its different generic mode of narrative rather

58 59

Compare Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, cols. 745B–C. Compare ibid., cols. 748C–749D.

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than its religious content, and tell us little of Edward’s function as a ruler’;60 these observations hold true for the other vernacular accounts. Chroniclers writing about Edward’s reign generally maintain the basic chronology inherited from William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and, later, Ranulf Higden while patching in those hagiographic vignettes most easily emplotted into his life: Edward’s visions relating to contemporary events (the thwarted invasion of a Danish navy, the Vision of the Seven Sleepers) and his deathbed scene. Robert Mannyng, for example, deviates from his source, Pierre Langtoft (who did not know Aelred’s vita),61 by incorporating Godwin’s death and Edward’s deathbed vision.62 Mannyng does not, however, include the Green Tree part of the vision or Aelred’s interpretation of it. Similarly, John Hardyng mentions Godwin’s choking as well as the popular story of John the Evangelist and the ring,63 but no other vignettes from Aelred’s vita. Chastity remains the sticking point. Because Edward’s sanctity was founded on his virginity, any full account of his holiness – beyond simply using the title ‘saint’ and integrating the occasional miracle – must include it. Yet most chronicles conveniently forget his unconsummated marriage because it might hint at his responsibility for the Norman invasion. In the pre-vita chronicles, Edward’s childless marriage is never mentioned; both John of Worcester and Henry of Huntingdon acknowledge the succession problem without attributing it to Edward’s lack of an heir. Some later chroniclers either ignore Edward’s chastity or do not link Edward’s childlessness to the succession;64 most simply blame Harold Godwinson for perjury and usurpation.65 Those chroniclers who do narrate Edward’s chaste marriage must, like Paris, find other ways of overwriting his responsibility. Edward’s childlessness is problematic for William of Malmesbury, who claimed that no one knew whether he kept Edith at arm’s length out of a hatred for her family or a love for chastity.66 When he relates the succession problem, William emphasizes that Edward’s lack of sons drove him to appoint first Edward Ætheling then William of Normandy as his successor.67 Although William never directly blames Edward for the Conquest

60 61

Drukker, ‘Historicizing Sainthood’, 69. On the relationship between Langtoft’s and Mannyng’s works, see Thea Summerfield, The Matter of Kings’ Lives: The Design of Past and Present in the Early Fourteenth-Century Verse Chronicles by Pierre de Langtoft and Robert Mannyng (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998). 62 Mannyng, Chronicle, 1321–40, 1597–1621. 63 Hardyng, Chronicle, 229, 232. 64 Polychronicon, 6.32 (RS 7.160), and Fabyan, New Chronicles, 224 follow William of Malmesbury and do not associate his refusal to sleep with Edith with his sanctity. Pierre Langtoft, The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, ed. and trans. Thomas Wright, 2 vols., RS 47 (Longdon: Longman, 1866–68) and Mannyng, Chronicle leave out his chastity altogether. 65 Pierre de Langtoft and, following him, Robert Mannyng idiosyncratically do blame Edward for the Conquest, not for his celibacy but because of his tendency to promise the crown to multiple people: Langtoft, Chronicle, 399; Mannyng, Chronicle, 1499–1503, 1593–97. 66 GRA, 2.197 (pp. 352–54). 67 Ibid., 2.228 (pp. 416–18).

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(Harold’s seizure of the crown allows William to accuse him),68 he emphasizes the failure of the long-lived Wessex line at Edward’s death and so hints at Edward’s culpability: ‘The West Saxon line, which had reigned in Britain for 571 years since Cerdic and 261 since Ecgberht, came with him, as concerns the throne, entirely to an end.’69 The Flores Historiarum voices a similar lament with comparable implications.70 Those vernacular chroniclers that do include Edward’s childless marriage find other ways to render him blameless. While the Castleford chronicler praises Edward and Edith’s chastity,71 he, like so many other chroniclers, blames Harold’s perjury for disrupting the succession. The Brut, as Drukker notes, is surprisingly silent on his childlessness, even though it backhandedly critiques the political inefficacy of his other saintly virtues.72 These chroniclers’ investment in Edward as a ruler more than as a saint necessitates their forgetting of the political fallout from his performance of holiness. The different exigencies of chronicle and hagiographic narratives are nowhere more clear than in comparing the SEL ‘Edward’ and Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle. The close relationship between Robert’s Chronicle and the SEL has been long acknowledged, although the layers of accretion to the Chronicle have yet to be explicated73 and those to the SEL may never be fully understood. Whether or not, as Oliver Pickering has argued, Robert of Gloucester and the so-called ‘outspoken poet’, who composed the SEL ‘Edward’, are identical,74 these two poems must be read together because of their close stylistic and verbal relationships. The interpenetration of iconic hagiography and linear history in both poems reveals the degree to which any fully historicizing and saint-making life of Edward must stumble over the threat his chastity posed to the English commonweal. The Edward epitome was not part of any standard SEL. It is extant only in three manuscripts, and in all it is appended to the end, out of date order; Görlach

68 69

Ibid., 2.228 (pp. 418–20). ‘Progines Westsaxonum, quae in Britannia a Cerditio quingentis et septuaginta uno annis, ab Egbirhto ducentis et sexaginta uno regnauerat, in illo ad regnandum omnino defecit’. GRA, 2.228 (pp. 418–19). 70 Flores, 1.586–87. 71 Castleford’s Chronicle, or, The Boke of Brut, ed. Caroline D. Eckhardt, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 305 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), lines 31182–93, 31589–602. 72 Drukker, ‘Historicizing Sainthood’, 68. 73 Philip A. Shaw, ‘Robert of Gloucester and the Medieval Chronicle’, Literature Compass 8/10 (2011): 700–709, at 700–702. I cite Robert of Gloucester, Chronicle parenthetically by line number. 74 O. S. Pickering, ‘South English Legendary Style in Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle’, Medium Ævum 70 (2001): 1–18, at 4–6 for a comparison of the two treatments of Edward. Pickering has summarized his position on the two poems in ‘Outspoken Style in the South English Legendary and Robert of Gloucester’, in Rethinking the South English Legendaries, ed. Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). The SEL ‘Edward’ is edited in Grace Edna Moore, ed., The Middle English Verse Life of Edward the Confessor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942), which I cite parenthetically by line number.

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suggests that it may have circulated separately as a booklet.75 While the openings of many SEL native lives establish a historical trajectory for the following narrative, the SEL ‘Edward’ boasts the longest and most historically ambitious introduction (including Kenelm’s). The opening 182 lines develop a robust chronological framework for Edward’s life, deftly woven together from the opening chapters of Aelred’s vita and from an account not unlike Robert’s Chronicle.76 In this introduction and throughout the life, the SEL ‘Edward’ poet, unlike the GiL hagiographer, increases the poem’s diachronic progression in several ways.77 Structurally, it follows Edward’s death directly with Harold’s usurpation (rather than with miracles, as in Aelred) and gives a brief reference to William’s eventual coronation (which both Aelred and the GiL hagiographer omit), providing a natural political conclusion to the opening narrative arc. The poet also removes most of Aelred’s typological comparisons, instead establishing historical causality via prophetic fulfillment. Dunstan had foretold the disasters of Æthelred’s reign (127–30), so disastrous it is; Edward foresaw Harold’s role in the later strife (848– 51, 1031–57), and so it befalls. Within this prophetic interpretation of history, the poet develops narrative continuity, integrating Edward’s prenatal acclamation (33–56) and Bishop Brihtwold’s vision (91–126) into his expanded account of the kingdom’s troubles under the Danish incursions. His use of prophecy and his decision to complete the reign’s political arc suggest that the SEL poet, like Paris, was invested in historicizing Edward’s life as far as possible. When Robert relates Edward’s reign in his Chronicle, he provides (perhaps unsurprisingly) a more detailed account. The Chronicle expands upon the peace that comes to England after Edward’s ascension (6836–41), details Edward’s importing of Norman bishops (6844–49), and relates Emma’s trial by ordeal for her supposed lechery (6850–7001). Like other vernacular chroniclers, Robert 75

Görlach, Textual Tradition, 36–37, 134–35. See also Moore, Middle English Verse Life, iii– vi; she prints a fifteenth-century prosification of the SEL life at 107–30. No other pre-print vernacular legendaries contain a ‘Life of Edward’; there is a missing folio in Bokenham’s Legenda Aurea where Edward’s life would fall, and Horobin, ‘Manuscript Found’, 140 posits that one was originally included. 76 Moore, Middle English Verse Life, lvii–lxii compares the SEL and Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle’s treatment of historical details. Although the SEL ‘Edward’ and Robert’s Chronicle never share lines in this opening as they will later in the narrative (with the exception of ‘Edward’, 71–73 and Robert of Gloucester, Chronicle, 6084–85), the correspondences between them are conceptually and narratively close; compare ‘Edward’ to Robert, Chronicle at 8–12: 5682–87; 14–16: 5825–27; 17–23: 5895, 5902–15; 24–2: 5936–39; 27–32: 5965, 5968–6; 65–75: 6078–85; 157–68: 6400–6411, 6474–87; 169–73: 6682–87. The intervening passages – on the prophecies at Edward’s birth, the lamentations and vision of Brihtwold of Worcester – are derived from Aelred’s vita, the end of ch. 1 through ch. 4: Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, cols. 741A–743D. 77 The opening 120 lines of the GiL life closely parallel the opening 182 lines of the SEL life in their borrowings from and additions to Aelred’s vita; as others of the GiL additional lives (but not Edward) were adapted directly from the SEL, it is possible that the GiL poet used the SEL ‘Edward’ for this opening, although they are otherwise independent compositions; see Hamer and Russell, Supplementary Lives, 1. Hamer and Russell do not note the parallels with the SEL ‘Edward’.

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includes only those miracles that bear directly on England’s fate, but he makes Edward more saintly than do other vernacular historical accounts, using hagiographic language similar to that in the SEL ‘Edward’. Edith’s virtue, too, is couched by both Chronicle and SEL ‘Edward’ in an Aelredian simile comparing her generation from the perfidious Godwin to the growth of a rose from the brier.78 As this borrowing from the Latin vita suggests, Robert was one of Edward’s more ‘hagiographic’ chroniclers, and that attempt to integrate Edward’s sanctity with a regnal account leads Robert into problems. As in other narratives, these problems revolve around chastity. The Chronicle’s deep concern for royal legitimacy,79 coupled with the hagiographic depiction of Edward’s life, forces Robert to acknowledge the relationship between Edward’s chastity and its political fallout – a relationship left undeveloped in the SEL ‘Edward’. The Chronicle elaborates upon the succession problems that beset Edward during his lifetime, detailing Edward’s attempt to make Edward Ætheling his heir (7036–53) and, after the Ætheling’s death, his decision to name William of Normandy as his successor (7054–113). Although Edward’s own childlessness is never mentioned in these passages, it had been broached before, in a description of his chaste marriage. This passage appears almost identically in the SEL ‘Edward’, and the minor differences between the two are telling. The SEL ‘Edward’ describes Edward’s desire for chastity thus: Þis king ladde so god lif so chast & so clene Þet þe heiemen of þe lond wolde hom al dai mene & grede on him for þer nas non eir after wille to nyme a wif laste he lete þet lond folliche aspille for ȝif he hadde an kende eir biȝute be his wif Þe sikeror hi wolde be to liue wit-oute strif. (SEL ‘Edward’ 289–94)

The hagiographer emphasizes the barons’ pleadings and their fear that England will ‘folliche aspille’ without an heir, but after this passage the cost of Edward’s chastity largely fades from the SEL, mentioned only in passing at line 1079 (in the poet’s interpretation of Edward’s Vision of the Green Tree) and obliquely in Edward’s deathbed praise of Edith’s chastity (1119–21). The equivalent passage in the Chronicle, however, tackles directly the results of Edward’s chastity. The above quotation appears largely verbatim (Chronicle 6784–89), but SEL ‘Edward’ lines 291–92 are replaced with a couplet recasting the problems of heirlessness:

78

Robert of Gloucester, Chronicle, 6791–95; SEL ‘Edward’, 298–302; Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, cols. 747C–D. 79 Sarah Mitchell, ‘Kings, Constitution and Crisis: “Robert of Gloucester” and the Anglo-Saxon Remedy’, in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 91–94.

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Vor þer miȝte come to al þe lond gret wo uor such cas Vor ȝif he adde an kunde eir biȝite bi is wif. (Chronicle 6787–88)

The change is slight, and it may seem that ‘wo’ is a less fearful possibility than that the ‘lond folliche aspille’ (SEL ‘Edward’ 292). But in Robert’s Chronicle, ‘wo’ is a verbal leitmotif that stands in for a whole range of treasons, depredations, and disasters, including the Danes’ dreadful actions. The term retains its ominous connotations throughout Edward’s reign. While in Normandy, Edward laments to God that it had been sixty-five years ‘Þat to engelond uor þulke deþ [of Edward the Martyr] uerst com such wo’ (Chronicle 6745, emphasis added); when Edward Ætheling dies, Edward realizes that there would be ‘muche wo’ in the land (Chronicle 7053; see also 7276); when Harold seizes the throne ‘bigan þe wowe verst’ that Edward had foretold (Chronicle 7284, emphasis added).80 Every use of ‘wo’ during Edward’s lifetime refers to the problem of succession, making the events of 1066 as catastrophic as the earlier Danish incursions. Robert links this theme of ‘wo’ twice more to Edward’s childlessness; the first time, he remarks that Þat lond was in god loue & pes wiþoute ech striuing Ac ȝut eir nadde he non ywis uor al is liue Vor he nadde neuere bote in clannesse to doiinge wiþ is wiue. (Chronicle 6841–43)

Here, the ‘ac’ subtly contrasts the land’s peace with Edward’s unpeaceable childlessness. Then, when Edward is on his deathbed, the people lament ‘Vor hii wuste þat to engelond muche wo to come was’ (Chronicle 7179, emphasis added); this ‘woe’, the passage implies by analogy with previous examples, stems from a lack of heir. Robert’s treatment of Edward’s life makes evident what must be elided by those chroniclers and hagiographers who also laud Edward’s virginity: Edward’s sanctity inhibited his performance of good kingship, and his chastity led to the upheavals of the Norman Conquest. As long as Edward persists outside temporal movement and the political concerns of linear history, as in Aelred’s vita and the GiL ‘Edward’, his chastity can be a virtue, its dynastic cost easily excised. In a narrative that privileges chronology, genealogy, and smooth successions, however, Edward’s childlessness becomes an issue. It can be ignored – chroniclers use Harold’s perjury to forget the price of heirlessness, hagiographers omit the Conquest – but it cannot be eradicated as long as Edward is king and saint, ruler and virgin. Yet the symbolic potency of this combination is precisely what makes Edward such an attractive figure, particularly to later kings. The problem of Edward’s chastity, even for skilled writers committed to merging Edward’s sanctity into his historical narrative, reveals that his two personae cannot be reconciled within linear narrative. 80

See also Robert of Gloucester, Chronicle, 5385–86 (of the Danish ravages during Alfred’s reign), 5689 (for Edgar raising England out of ‘wo’), and 6011 (for the ‘wo’ that Sweyn brings to England during Æthelred’s reign). Robert’s further use of the term is pervasive, consistent, and too extensive to enumerate here.

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Edward as Icon: Atemporality and Narrative Stasis in Pictorial Hagiography Although Edward was not a good candidate for historicized hagiography, his life’s unrelenting parataxis and uneasy coordination with the chronicle tradition did lend itself to pictorial hagiography. Visual accounts of Edward’s life proliferated in late medieval England, especially in Westminster and royal contexts: everything from single images of Edward to extended pictorial narratives, executed in manuscript illustrations, glass, tapestry, and stone. More common than his written lives, these visual commemorations were, I suggest, a better medium for simultaneously conveying Edward’s sanctity and his legitimizing kingship because the formal atemporality of image allows invisible excision. Whereas hagiographers found themselves unable to forget the political cost of Edward’s holy chastity, visual artists could efface its fallout without seeming to omit anything. Images represent time differently from written narrative. Static, detail rich, giving ‘the impression of simultaneity’ and self-sufficient completeness, they seemingly allow unmediated apprehension of the verities depicted.81 Like Erwin Panofksy’s Andachtsbild and Auerbach’s figura, they can represent spiritual or theological truths by alluding visually to concrete, historical elements drawn from the narrative backstory (e.g., Christ’s crown of thorns or a saint’s attribute), enfolding references to the saint’s life in the tempus into the totalizing stasis of the aevum.82 Such images arguably offer the most unadulterated expression of the iconic chronotope because they are fully non-narrative. Yet even pictorial narratives, those series of images that together (with or without accompanying text) tell a story, are more iconic than linear.83 As Otto Pächt pithily remarks, the history of such sequences represents ‘a series of repeated attempts to smuggle the time factor into a medium which by definition lacks the dimension of time’.84 Such smuggling was successful to a certain extent. Medieval painters and illuminators refined an array of compositional techniques for representing temporal progression in single

81 82

Hahn, Portrayed, 47. On Andachtsbild, see Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting, rev. ed. (Doornspijk: Davaco Publications, 1984), 52–58; Earl, ‘Typology and Iconographic Style’, esp. 102–3. On figura see above, Introduction, p. 16. 83 On pictorial hagiography generally, see Barbara Abou-el-Haj, The Medieval Cult of Saints: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Magdalena Carrasco, ‘Sanctity and Experience in Pictorial Hagiography: Two Illustrated Lives of Saints from Romanesque France’, in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate BlumenfeldKosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Hahn, Portrayed; Kumiko Maekawa, Narrative and Experience: Innovations in Thirteenth-Century Picture Books (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000); Otto Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Francis Wormald, ‘Some Illustrated Manuscripts of the Lives of the Saints’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 35 (1952): 248–66. Also relevant is Elizabeth Morrison, ‘From Sacred to Secular: The Origins of History Illumination in France’, in Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500, ed. Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010). 84 Pächt, Rise, 1.

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images and image cycles: the sequencing of images, reuse of figures across images, or the repeated portrayal of the same figure within a single image (continuous narration). Many of these techniques have their counterparts in contemporary graphic novels, and the terminologies developed for the study of comics offer a vocabulary for analyzing on a granular level medieval pictorial cycles’ narrativity.85 In both medieval cycles and graphic novels, however, those techniques ultimately cannot represent continuous temporal flow or precise placement within historical time. They can only provide an ‘insistently artificial and representational’ depiction of temporal movement that depends on the viewer’s ability and willingness to supply the missing continuity in his or her own imagination.86 While some transitional forms, like continuous narration or action-to-action transitions, require less imaginative work by the reader to supply the ‘missing’ time, medieval hagiographic cycles are dominated by subject-to-subject (tracking change within a single scene or event) and scene-to-scene (tracking change from one scene/ event to the next) transitions. Scene-to-scene transitions, in particular, imply temporal–spatial distance between the two representations, effectively isolating one panel narratively from the next. The predominance of scene-to-scene transitions in classic examples of pictorial hagiography like the late twelfth-century lives of Cuthbert (BL, Yates Thompson MS 26, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, University College MS 165) and Edmund (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.736) suggests a strong temporal likeness between pictorial cycles and many written saints’ vitae:87 both emphasize the static and often atemporal performance of holiness while depending on the reader or viewer’s ability to fill in regular gaps in chronological continuity. And, just as written vitae vary considerably in their use of temporal modes and degree of narrativity, so do pictorial hagiographies, as evidenced by the narrative scope and technical sophistication in the image cycle accompanying Matthew Paris’s Estoire de Seint Aedward le rei. The thirteenth-century manuscript Cambridge, University Library MS Ee.3.59,

85

I borrow terminology from Scott McCloud’s formative work on comics interpretation, particularly his discussion of different types of panel-to-panel transitions, when it enables a nuanced analysis of these medieval cycles: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 60–93. 86 Hahn, Portrayed, 46–48, at 46; compare McCloud’s discussion of ‘closure’ in Understanding Comics, 62–67. 87 By my count, the Yates Thompson Cuthbert employs almost solely scene-to-scene transitions, while the Pierpont Morgan Edmund uses twice as many scene-to-scene transitions as subjectto-subject and action-to-action scenes combined. See also the analysis of Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.736’s narrative motion in Maekawa, Narrative and Experience, 140–45 and the more general discussions in Hahn, Portrayed, 216–52; Abou-el-Haj, Medieval Cult, 33–60. The early twelfth-century pictorial life of Cuthbert in Oxford, Bodleian Library, University College MS 165 is more narratively complex than the Yates Thompson life, but I have not examined the entire cycle; for a comparison of the two, see Dominic Marner, St Cuthbert: His Life and Cult in Medieval Durham (London: British Library, 2000), 40–53, Pächt, Rise, 14–21. As a point of contrast, in their emphasis on linear narrative modern Western comics deploy action-to-action transitions vastly more often than subject-to-subject and scene-to-scene transitions: McCloud, Understanding Comics, 74–77.

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the sole witness to Paris’s Estoire, is graced with a unique cycle of images by a London or Westminster artist, the most narratively complex Edwardian cycle produced in medieval England.88 The illustrations’ multi-layered, technically sophisticated narrative complements Paris’s historiographic project and depicts events not portrayed in other visual cycles. The manuscript is carefully laid out to highlight the interplay between text, rubrics, and illustration. The poem, in three columns, takes up the lower two-thirds of each page, with the upper third comprising miniatures depicting the story’s action (often with accompanying labels that identify figures and actions); shorter rubrics, typically heading the middle text column, mediate between the two narrative levels. As Fenster and Wogan-Browne observe of the manuscript, the interaction of the text, illuminations, and rubrics enable a multilayered and polyvocal reading of Edward’s life.89 Victoria Jordan has detailed the way the manuscript presents three distinct yet complementary narratives, analyzing the rhetorical and compositional techniques each layer uses to enable narrative progression within its structure of episodic parataxis. As she describes, the artist ‘create[s] continuous flow of the narrative out of the independent pictorial topoi’ by, for example, repeating figures to portray continued action, using gestures and figure orientation to indicate forward narrative motion, and varying the number of discrete visual units used to depict a scene.90 While some scenes, such as the host vision (fol. 21r), reduce an entire miracle to a single vignette, other episodes, including the story of John and the ring,91 are elaborated, comprising multiple panels spanning several pages. By my count, the illustrator uses scene-to-scene transitions approximately sixty times, deploying subject-to-subject and action-to-action transitions approximately fortyfive times; this comparatively high ratio of tight transitions, alongside careful use of continuous narration, increases the narrative’s overall forward motion. A particularly interesting example of the cycle’s visual narrativity is the episode in which Edward acquires a papal charter for his newly rebuilt Westminster. In the Estoire, this episode entails 36 lines of narrative plus another 123 lines versifying Edward’s letter to the pope and the charter itself; in the pictorial cycle, it comprises five scenes across three pages (fols. 19v–20v). The illuminator performs this visual amplificatio of an episode never visually depicted elsewhere because this travel story is crucial to one of the Estoire’s unspoken goals – to encourage the royal circle to increase support for Westminster.92 The first four panels cover a two-page spread (fols. 19v–20r) encapsulating the travel part of the narrative. On the far left of fol. 19v, a white-robed and mitered bishop sits atop a dappled gray horse as he and his company process toward the right; in the second panel 88

CUL MS Ee.3.59 has been fully digitized online at http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-EE00003–00059/1. On the artists, see Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, 89, 91–93; Paris, Estoire, xvii–xxi. The fact that this manuscript was illustrated in the metropolis positions its artistic program, if not its text, within the other London/Westminster Edward cycles I discuss below. 89 Fenster and Wogan-Browne, History, 28. 90 Jordan, ‘Multiple Narratives’, 82. 91 Ibid., 83–86. 92 Binski, Westminster, 59–60; Carpenter, ‘King Henry III’, 886–87.

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on that page, the bishop, still facing right, and his company greet the pope, seated and facing left. On fol. 20r, the pope now faces right and hands the charter to a kneeling monk and bowing bishop. The far right panel on that page completes the travel narrative as the bishop, once again mounted on his gray, processes to the right in company, heading (as it were) off the page. The final panel, a singleton on fol. 20v, is a balanced composition: the bishop and king face each other in the center of the illustration as the king receives the papal charter from his bishop, each figure flanked by his entourage. The chiastic structure of the travel narrative on fols. 19v–20r, centered on the repeated figure of the pope and the action-toaction transition that joins those two panels, creates a balanced visual composition (echoed in fol. 20v) that nevertheless has a strong narrative progression to the right, enabled by the dominant and always right-facing horse figures. That rightward movement ceases in the left-facing figure of Edward on fol. 20v, as the episode stops when the charter reaches its destination; the repeated figure of the bishop gives coherence to the narrative sequence. The illustrations draw attention to one aspect of Westminster’s function that is muted in the Estoire’s text: the authority that underpins the charter. The sequence highlights the centrality of the papacy, the crucial intermediary function of the episcopate, and the final priority of the crown while ensuring that the episode moves resolutely forward to its conclusion. Although the artist’s narrative technique can be used for such amplificatio, it can just as easily be used for abbreviatio, and here we can see how images, even in highly narrative sequences, are more conducive to forgetting the costs of Edward’s chastity than is written narrative. Although Edward’s vow of chastity is a problem for Paris, as we saw earlier, the other two narrative levels of CUL MS Ee.3.59 use the five miniatures treating Edward’s marriage to deftly sidestep the problem. Three illuminations on fols. 10v–11r accompany Paris’s story of Edward’s angst when his councilors ask him to marry and he agrees to wed Edith, followed by two on fol. 11v showing the betrothal and Edith’s coronation.93 In the left-hand panel on fol. 10v, a seated, frontally oriented Edward is confronted on both sides by gesticulating laymen; in the right-hand panel, Edward kneels alone before an altar, praying. The singleton on the facing page, fol. 11r, portrays a seated Edward in profile, again discussing with lay and monastic figures. In this syntactically choppy image sequence, there is no way to know what the councilors are asking or why Edward prays; the only caption, identifying Edward as king on fol. 11r, does not clarify the action. The rubric to fol. 10v does specify that the men ask Edward to ‘take a wife, so that we may have a sure heir and leader’ (‘prenniez mollier, | Ke eium eir certein e chef ’),94 but it does not indicate that Edward resists because of his chaste desires. Similarly, the pair of illuminations on fol. 11v portrays, first, Edward receiving a kneeling Edith surrounded by approving courtiers and, second, Edith’s coronation. Crucially, the marriage is not illuminated, and Edward is not depicted in the coronation miniature. The rubric simply 93 94

Fols. 10v–11r contain lines 1046–97; Edward’s internal conflict falls at lines 1093–124. Estoire, lines 4774–75 (rubric 15); Fenster and Wogan-Browne, History, 67 n. xv.

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states that Edward and Edith were ‘both good’ (‘bone e bon’),95 at best an oblique reference to their chaste marriage. Taken together without reference to Paris’s poem, these three pages of illumination and rubrics suggest that Edward does marry Edith to produce an heir, as his men advised. The rubricator’s misdirection replaces the story of Edward’s willed and therefore holy chastity with one of royal acquiescence to the populace’s demand for secure governance. These images do not contradict Paris’s poem so much as quietly excise Edward’s desire for chastity and therefore his culpability for his heirlessness. Yet the Estoire’s illuminations come closer to addressing Edward’s chaste marriage than any of his other insular pictorial lives. All others omit any representation of his marriage to Edith. This is not because Edward’s marriage is unrepresentable; the Edwardian cycle in the early fourteenth-century stained glass of the Norman Église de la Trinité, Fécamp, depicts a crowned Edward and Edith joining hands on a book while a dove representing the Holy Spirit hovers above their heads, signifying divine approval of their joint purity.96 Rather, by omitting Edith, the English cycles omit Edward’s married and therefore heirless chastity; he can remain a chaste king (as I discuss below) without being a childless king because his chastity persists solely within the iconic chronotope. These omissions reveal how the succession problem can be imagined to lie in Edith’s chastity, not Edward’s – a possibility latent since Edward’s first Norman biography97 – and therefore how easily the problem can be ‘fixed’ by removing Edith from the narrative. That the Estoire illuminations include Edith is a sign of Paris’s, if less so the illuminators’, drive to synthesize Edward’s history and sanctity. With few exceptions, other pictorial cycles of Edward (including manuscript illuminations) are dissociated from written vitae. These standalone cycles, all with royal or Westminster connections, preserve largely the same series of images, structured as a paratactic, scene-to-scene progression of single, often compositionally static scenes. The earliest cycles are the tapestries, now lost, donated to the monks’ choir by Abbot Berkyng (r.1222–46) and the fragmentary cycle of illuminations preserved in a condensed Domesday book, PRO MS E36/284 (c.1250–60).98 These were followed in the fifteenth century (c.1441) by the stone images carved on the feretory screen; Binski postulates that these may have been modeled on a now lost cycle of images around the shrine.99 Three late medieval manuscripts 95 96

Estoire, line 4788 (rubric 17). Martine Callais Bey et al., Les Vitraux de Haute-Normandie, Corpus Vitrearum, France 6 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2001), 303–8 at 305 and fig. 212; Madeline Harrison, ‘A Life of St Edward the Confessor in Early Fourteenth-Century Stained Glass at Fecamp, in Normandy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1963): 22–37, at 29–30. 97 Otter, ‘Closed Doors’. 98 Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’. The tapestries have not been preserved, but Binski reprints an antiquarian record of their contents and Latin inscriptions: ibid., 95–96. The PRO manuscript comes from the Westminster exchequer: Binski, Westminster, 62; Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, 88; Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, 91–92, ills. 87–89. 99 Binski, Westminster, 56; Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, 88–89. I am grateful to the Westminster Abbey vergers, and to the kind volunteer guide who assisted me on my visit, for allowing me access to the shrine area to examine the screen carvings.

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also preserve such cycles. Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.10.2 (TCC B), a late fourteenth-century manuscript, contains an illuminated Apocalypse and a pictorial Life of Edward, the latter largely copied from the Berkyng tapestries and not attached to any written text.100 Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.9.1 (TCC O) includes a later fifteenth-century Brut with a seven-compartment full page panel illustrating Edward’s coronation, two of his visions, and the story of John and the ring,101 and the Salisbury Breviary (Bibliothèque Nationale MS lat. 17294, produced c.1424 in a French workshop for but never delivered to John, Duke of Bedford) also contains a cycle.102 These non-Estoire cycles have not received extensive discussion by art historians, and for good reason: they are largely derivative, narratively simple, lexically homogeneous, and detached from Aelred’s vita. Although there is not a one-to-one correlation among the three full cycles, the similarities are close enough for Binski to suggest that there was ‘a traditional picture-cycle about St Edward formed in the milieu of Westminster around 1240’.103 The abbreviated cycles in TCC O and the PRO manuscript include similar scenes: the English nobles acclaiming Edward during Emma’s pregnancy, Edward’s birth, his visions, the healing of the blind, and the transfer of the ring from Edward to Saint John and back again. In addition to this stable iconographic lexis, Edward’s artists usually deployed simple visual syntax. Generally, each episode or miracle is condensed into a single image such that, as Pächt observes of the Yates Thompson Cuthbert cycle, ‘more often than not the thread of the [overarching] story got lost in the process of creating a selfcontained unit’.104 They almost solely employ scene-to-scene transitions,105 rarely

100 Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390–1490, vol. 6 parts 1–2 of A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 1.139–40 (no. 41), ill. 175; Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski, eds., Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), 217 (no. 40); Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, 87–88, plates 16–21. The illuminations are executed in a Westminster style: Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, 87. 101 Drukker, ‘Historicizing Sainthood’, 55–56 and fig. 1. Other fragmentary or completely lost cycles were also crafted: Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, 89; Lawrence E. Tanner, ‘Some Representations of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey and Elsewhere’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 3rd ser. 15 (1952): 1–12, at 8. 102 Leroquais, Les bréviaires Manuscrits, 342 (fols. 604v–606r); Spencer, ‘The Master of the Duke of Bedford’. On the Salisbury Breviary, see Chapter 1 n. 132 above. From Leroquais’s descriptions, the Salisbury Breviary’s cycle appears to differ little (placing more emphasis on Edward’s death) from the standard cycle I discuss below. 103 Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, 88. 104 Pächt, Rise, 21. 105 A critical exception is the narrative of Peter’s consecrating of Westminster (included in Aelred’s vita and added to the end of both tapestry and TCC B cycles); in TCC B, the artist uses both action-to-action and scene-to-scene transitions to show the interactions between Peter and the fisherman who ferries him across the river: Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, plates XXb–XXI. The contrast between narrative styles used by a single artist underlines my argument that Edward’s iconicity is a function of his hagiographic and artistic tradition, not illustrator skill.

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use continuous narration,106 and typically craft static, balanced compositions rather than deploy dynamic gestures or fluid lines. A particularly good example of this non-narrative approach is the TCC B’s single-panel version of Ghillie Michael’s cure. Edward stands in the center, with Ghillie Michael on his back; to the left, a crowd raises its hands in surprise, while on the right, a tonsured monk before an altar receives Edward and his burden.107 Aelred’s multi-staged miracle is reduced to a single, static composition; although all the figures’ gestures represent shock and movement, the image itself is symmetrically arranged, the crowd on the left balanced by monk and altar on the right, with all lines of gaze (except Ghillie Michael’s) focused on Edward. The miracle’s vigor resolves on Edward, the episode collapsing into a single snapshot of action stilled in Edward’s saintly stasis. Although there are some exceptions to the static composition and single panel rules, most notably in the story of Edward and Saint John,108 these exceptions highlight the overall stillness of the Westminster pictorial cycles. Increasing the iconic singularity of Edward’s already dehistoricized life, these artists illustrate not a continuous story but a series of independent episodes that portray Edward in ‘stasis and totality’, as perfectly self-contained, rather than as process or change.109 So while each image in a sequence functions as an evocative snapshot that gestures toward a well-known hagiographic vignette, they – individually and collectively – evoke temporally embedded moments without locating them in the tempus. They present Edward as always already sanctified, persisting (like Bokenham’s Audrey) within the iconic chronotope; events such as his acclamation in Emma’s womb or the death of Godwin no longer possess historical significance, for they have been transformed into singular expressions of Edward’s divine authorization as king. This retreat from narrative continuity, even within the confines of the pictorial sequence genre, enhances the cycle’s ability to do ‘useful’ historical work. Iconic images can drop Edith and therefore exclude the problem of Edward’s chaste marriage more readily than can written texts, masking that excision through the visual semblance of completeness. And for kings like Henry III and Richard II, who deployed Edward the Confessor to stabilize their royal authority, the ability to omit the detrimental aspects of Edward’s life – his struggles with his barons, his inability to produce an heir – could render him a powerful historiographic tool. Iconic antecessor: Edward and the Plantagenet Kings In these pictorial cycles, Edward’s iconicity is balanced by some sense of narrative progression, however weak. In royal use of Edward’s image, on the other 106 The TCC B artist uses continuous narration once, on fol. 42v: Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, plate XIXb. 107 TCC B fol. 41r, in Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, plate XVIIIa; Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘Vita et miraculis’, cols. 754A–755D. 108 TCC O, in Drukker, ‘Historicizing Sainthood’, 71 fig. 1; TCC B, fol. 42r–v, in Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, plate XIX. Deaths, especially of Danes, are also frequently action-packed. 109 Hahn, Portrayed, 47.

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hand, Edward becomes entirely static. He becomes fully iconic – fully ‘haloed’, in Kantorowicz’s sense110 – abstracted from time to figure the temporally continuous royal ‘mystical body’. This representation was exploited most fully by two Plantagenet kings invested in the trappings of royal dignitas, Henry III and Richard II. As many have shown, both Henry III and Richard II were devoted to Edward and used his cult to enhance their royal charisma. Their devotion was, of course, textually influenced, and Binski in particular has argued that Aelred’s and Matthew Paris’s vitae were early forms of written statecraft, functioning as a normative statement of good kingship while also offering Edward as inimitable intercessor and venerable antecessor.111 Nevertheless, Henry and Richard themselves disseminated Edward’s legitimizing potential through ritual, liturgy, architecture, and visual art rather than text. The two images most frequently deployed in royal contexts – the coronation image and Edward with the ring – came to symbolize not single events but a host of royal traits. Representing certain facets of kingship, some grounded in his vita’s events but deployed without reference to his life, Edward’s iconic image could be appropriated by and transferred among later kings as a symbol of the king’s institutional body and as sanitized royal exemplar. Henry  III was the first king to embrace Edward’s cult wholeheartedly, and both Binski and D. A. Carpenter have traced the origins of Henry’s devotion for Edward, his use of Edward to establish Westminster at the kingdom’s symbolic center, and the widespread if conceptually loose way that Henry deployed images of Edward.112 Henry’s artistic project was centered on Westminster, both abbey and palace, and the sheer magnificence of the abbey church project has encouraged scholarly scrutiny. The frequency and consistency of ring and coronation images in these contexts warrant careful attention. Edward and the ring (usually without John) were depicted in various media under Henry’s patronage: in the abbey, the chapels of all royal residences, and, most significantly, the Painted Chamber (the king’s private room within the rambling complex of apartments at Westminster).113 The images of Edward and his ring, as Binksi explains, served as a model of conduct that governed the ethical bodies of the king and court through implicit exemplarity while also constructing Henry as wise, benevolent, and virtuous.114 The coronation images played a different role. Edward was already a part of the English coronation ritual in two ways. First, after his death, coronations were traditionally held in Westminster in close proximity to Edward’s tomb, a right the Westminster monks fought hard to maintain.115 Second, the ceremony’s royal 110 111 112

Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 78–86. Binski, Westminster, 86–89. Binski, Westminster, 52–89; Binski, The Painted Chamber at Westminster (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1986), 38–45; Carpenter, ‘King Henry III’; Carpenter, ‘The Burial of King Henry III, the Regalia and Royal Ideology’, in The Reign of Henry III (London: Hambledon Press, 1996). 113 Binski, Painted Chamber, 33–69; Tanner, ‘Some Representations’, 3. 114 Binski, Painted Chamber, 34–45. 115 Mason, Westminster, 297–305.

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accoutrements were gradually associated, again through the Westminster monks’ insistence, with Edward’s own regalia.116 Carpenter has shown how this West­ minster tradition underpinned the belief, held by Henry  III and others, that Henry’s second, 1220 Westminster coronation used Edward’s crown; consequently, Henry intended to pass down this coronation crown to his successors as a ‘gift of numinous significance’.117 In this conflation, Henry instituted a longstanding association of the regalia, Edward, and Westminster. By the time John Flete wrote his De Fundatione, he could uncontroversially claim that Westminster had been ‘from its earliest foundation … the place of royal consecration, the burial place of kings, and the repository of the royal insignia’.118 From Henry III on, to be vested with the regalia was to be clothed in Edward’s own weeds, enhancing the coronation’s natural ritual continuity by grounding it firmly in a single, legitimizing ancient figure. As Edward was believed to have been divinely elected, such an association would have supported the unction as the central moment of election. This idea had a powerful impact on Richard II’s conception of his reign, as I will demonstrate, but it was Henry III who laid the foundation. At the heart of the Henrician iconographic project stands the coronation portrait that graced the Painted Chamber. Commissioned by Henry in 1263–67 to be painted on the wall at the head of the royal bed, framed by the bed’s canopy or tester, the portrait centers on a frontal, seated Edward surrounded by bishops who place the crown upon his head.119 By positioning the coronation image within the royal bed – the location symbolically and literally most associated with the king’s mortal body – the painting participates in the chamber’s rich decorative scheme that shapes royal ethics and encourages courtiers to similar virtues of largesse and debonairity. Yet the image also figures Henry’s own crowning, with the crown believed to be Edward’s, and conceivably of every English king after him, an image therefore of the mystical, transtemporal royal body. This composition’s typological potential is demonstrated by related images of royal coronations dating from same period. The illuminated Westminster continuations of the Flores Historiarum, roughly contemporaneous with Henry’s various projects,120 included similarly composed introductory miniatures for each king, ‘stress[ing] 116

Binski, Westminster, 134; Carpenter, ‘Burial of King Henry III’, 448–51; Mason, Westminster, 298; H. G. Richardson, ‘The Coronation in Medieval England: The Evolution of the Office and the Oath’, Traditio 16 (1960): 111–202, at 192–93. 117 Carpenter, ‘Burial of King Henry III’, 448, 452–53, at 453. On the checkered thirteenthand fourteenth-century tradition that the royal regalia had belonged to Edward, see also Richardson, ‘Coronation’, 192–94; Richard of Cirencester, Speculum, 2.31–33. 118 ‘ex primitiva fundatione locus … regiae consecrationis, regum sepultura, repositoriumque regalium insignium’. Flete, History, 63. 119 Binski, Painted Chamber has thoroughly discussed this room’s iconography and its role in royal ideology. On this image specifically, see ibid., 38–40, plates 1–3, color plate 1. On the king’s bed as the bed of state and its position within the room, see ibid., 13–15, 35–36. 120 On the relationship among the various thirteenth-century coronation images, see Binski, Painted Chamber, 39; Binski, Westminster 126–28; Judith Collard, ‘Flores Historiarum Manuscripts: The Illumination of a Late Thirteenth-Century Chronicle Series’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 71 (2008): 441–66.

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quite basic notions of liturgical and dynastic continuity’ through visual repetition.121 The same visual topos would be deployed in the Liber Regalis created during Richard  II’s reign, and in BL, Harley MS 2278, the illuminated copy of Lydgate’s Edmund and Fremund presented to the young Henry VI.122 Moreover, this coronation iconography was firmly associated with Edward throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The illumination of Edward’s coronation in the Flores prototype, the Chetham manuscript, is the most elaborate in the Flores tradition,123 while the public, accessible image in the Painted Chamber would have been the most widely known example. Thus, when Henry represents this stylized coronation scene in the Painted Chamber, he invokes the institutional, mystical body of the kingship; by positioning it within the royal bed, he links that institutional body firmly with the private, mortal body of the king. This image therefore invokes less the historical singularity of Edward’s own coronation than Edward as a royal antecessor and origin for coronation ideology. Although English kings after Henry  III paid their respects to Edward the Confessor, only Richard  II’s devotion would rival Henry’s in depth, and only Richard capitalized on Edward’s potential to shape the royal image. Richard venerated Edward throughout his reign, but his use of Edward’s iconography intensified in the 1390s, following hard on the heels of his successful move against the Lords Apellant, at just the same time that (as Nigel Saul and others have argued) his projections of his regal persona, in ceremony, art, and address, increasingly emphasized the exalted, even sacral nature of his rule.124 As intercessor, antecessor, and mystical spouse, Edward offered Richard an image of holy English kingship that could provide legitimization and continuity for his royal prerogative while helping to assuage growing concerns about imperiousness and childlessness. Like Henry, Richard associated his and Edward’s rule primarily through visual art and heraldic symbolism. While this privileging of the visual over the verbal is typical of his court,125 it was also necessary for Richard to capitalize on Edward’s charisma safely. The growing similarities between his reign and Edward’s – an apparently pacifistic king unable or unwilling to sustain a strong military presence, in recurring conflicts with a body of nobles more powerful than he, dangerously childless in a way that could precipitate a crisis of succession – made narrative representations of Edward’s reign more liability than asset. By evoking Edward 121 122

Binski, Westminster, 126. Paul Binski, ‘The Liber Regalis: Its Date and European Context’, in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnas, and Caroline M. Barron (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), 237. The coronation image in Harley 2278 falls at fol. 31r; on this manuscript, see Chapter 5 below. 123 Manchester, Chetham Library MS 6712 (A.6.89): Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, 50–52. Collard, ‘Flores Historiarum Manuscripts’, 443–52 examines this manuscript and decoration in detail. 124 Richard H. Jones, The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968); Nigel Saul, ‘Richard II and the Vocabulary of Kingship’, The English Historical Review 110.438 (1995): 854–77; Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 111–14. 125 Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 365.

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iconically, Richard could capitalize on Edward’s accumulated associations with the coronation, a continuous royal line, largesse, and even chastity, without hinting that he emulated the uncomfortable historical details of Edward’s life. As a guarantor of continuous election, Edward’s coronation iconography renders Richard God’s minister on earth; through the heraldic novelty of impaling his arms with Edward’s, Richard imagines Edward’s sacrality to extend beyond his mystical royal body to his mortal one. Richard’s regal majesty was deeply intertwined with his devotion to Edward, his ancestral interests, and his fascination with the coronation ritual. Edward was one of Richard’s favored intercessors,126 so his visits to Edward’s tomb were frequent, his gifts to the shrine numerous, and his interventions in the abbey’s building projects extensive.127 This affection was intertwined with Richard’s conception of kingship, which scholarship has linked to Richard’s pacifistic international policy,128 his childless state,129 and his sense of royal lineage.130 Richard’s focus on all his crowned predecessors partook of his larger interest in English history and royal precedent, an interest noted by contemporary chroniclers and voiced by Richard himself.131 This concern manifested in Richard’s desire to recuperate his great126 For instance, Richard supplicated at Edward’s shrine in 1381 before facing Wat Tyler at Smithfield and again in 1387 before proceeding through his northern territories: Westminster Chronicle, 8–10, 178. 127 See Binski, Westminster, 199, 205; Richard G. Davies, ‘Richard II and the Church’, in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. Anthony Goodman and James GiLlespie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 90–91; Dillian Gordon, Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych (London: National Gallery, 1993), 54–55, 61; Shelagh Mitchell, ‘Richard II: Kingship and the Cult of Saints’, in Gordon, Monnas, and Elam, Regal Image, 115–18; Saul, Richard II, 311–16; Saul, ‘Richard II and Westminster Abbey’, in The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 128 Saul, Richard II, 312; Saul, ‘Richard II’s Ideas of Kingship’, in Gordon, Monnas, and Elam, Regal Image, 27–28. On Richard’s pacifism, see Saul, Richard II, 197, 204–8, 233–34, 387–88 et passim. Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10–14 et passim has questioned historians’ claims that Richard was against war and removed himself from chivalric pastimes. 129 Katherine J. Lewis, ‘Becoming a Virgin King: Richard II and Edward the Confessor’, in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha Riches (New York: Routledge, 2002). 130 Saul, Richard II, 311–12, 429; Saul, ‘The Kingship of Richard II’, in Goodman and GiLlespie, Richard II: The Art of Kingship, 41–43; Simon Walker, ‘Richard II’s Views on Kingship’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (London: Hambledon, 1995), 53–54; Christopher Wilson, ‘Rulers, Artificers and Shoppers: Richard II’s Remodeling of Westminster Hall, 1393–99’, in Gordon, Monnas, and Elam, Regal Image, 54. 131 Walsingham, St Albans Chronicle, 2.238–40; Westminster Chronicle, 154–57; Chronicles of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 52; A Collection of all the Wills, Now Known to be Extant, of the Kings and Queens of England (London: J. Nichols, 1780), 192; Michael J. Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), 25–27, 40–43, 51, 59–60, 73–75, 139–41; Patricia J. Eberle, ‘Richard II and the Literary Arts’, in Goodman and GiLlespie, Richard II: The Art of Kingship, 238–41; W. M. Ormrod, ‘Richard II’s Sense of English History’, in The Reign of Richard II, ed. Gwilym Dodd (Stroud: Tempus, 2000); Saul, Richard II, 448.

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grandfather Edward II,132 as well as in his fascination with coronation rites and the regalia, for Richard imagined his royal authority to derive from his crowning and his crowned antecessores. His Westminster portrait, for instance, invokes the Henrician visual typology of coronation deployed in the Painted Chamber and the Flores continuations;133 he planned to install statues of English kings, from Edward the Confessor to himself, within the remodeled Westminster Hall;134 and he displayed the coronation regalia to visiting dignitaries.135 Edward was central to Richard’s interest in the coronation rites. The St Albans Chronicle claimed that Richard was vested with Edward’s tunic, dalmatic, and stole,136 and Richard took a continued interest in the insignia and their connection with Edward. In 1390 he gave Westminster a pair of red velvet slippers to replace the regalia slipper he had, as a boy of ten, lost during his coronation;137 he donated a ruby ring to Edward’s shrine to be used in future coronations;138 and he received from William Sudbury, a monk of Westminster, a treatise on the regalia highlighting Edward’s role in its history.139 Surrounded by the coronation and Edwardian iconography implemented by Henry  III, Richard pressed beyond it, extending it at times to create a diachronically continuous royal lineage. Richard’s devotion to the Confessor developed in a new direction in the 1390s, when he began using Edward’s traditional arms, a golden cross and five golden martlets on an azure ground. Richard first paired the royal Plantagenet quartered arms of England and France with Edward’s in the early 1390s, then after Queen Anne’s death in 1394 he impaled the royal arms with Edward’s.140 Arms so impaled ‘symbolized a personal relationship, more usually a marriage or the mystic union of a bishop and his diocese’ – that is, between the holder of an office and the office itself.141 Through this unprecedented impalement, Richard signaled his intimate union with Edward as holy antecessor and a more mystical fusion 132 Ann W. Astell, ‘The Monk’s Tragical “Seint Edward”’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 399–405, at 401–2; Mitchell, ‘Richard II: Kingship and the Cult of Saints’, 119; Saul, Richard II, 323; W.  M. Ormrod, ‘Monarchy, Martyrdom and Masculinity: England in the Later Middle Ages’, in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. Patricia H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), 180–3; Ormrod, ‘Richard II’s Sense’, 102–3; John M. Theilmann, ‘Political Canonization and Political Symbolism in Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies 29 (1990): 241–66, at 253–58. 133 Binski, Westminster, 203–4. 134 Philip Lindley, ‘Absolutism and Regal Image in Ricardian Sculpture’, in Gordon, Monnas, and Elam, Regal Image, 74–83; Ormrod, ‘Richard II’s Sense’, 107–9; Wilson, ‘Rulers, Artificers’, 41, 52–54. 135 Westminster Chronicle, 90, 154–56. 136 Walsingham, St Albans Chronicle, 1.144–46. 137 Westminster Chornicle, 414–16; Robinson, ‘Unrecognized Westminster Chronicler’, 71–2. 138 J. Wickham Legg, ‘On an Inventory of the Vestry in Westminster Abbey, taken in 1388’, Archaeologia 52 (1890): 195–286, at 199–200, 282–83; Westminster Chronicle, 372. 139 Richard of Cirencester, Speculum, 2.26–39; Eberle, ‘Richard II and Literary Arts’, 239–40. 140 M. V. Clarke, ‘The Wilton Diptych’, The Burlington Magazine 58.339 (1931): 283–94, at 284; Good, ‘Richard II and the Cults’, 173–75; John H. Harvey, ‘The Wilton Diptych: A Re-examination’, Archaeologia 2nd ser. 98 (1961): 1–28, at 5–10; Walsingham, St Albans Chronicle, 2.102. 141 Mitchell, ‘Richard II: Kingship and the Cult of Saints’, 117; see also Binski, Westminster, 82.

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with the office of English kingship. Moreover, Richard authorized members of his inner circle also to impale the Confessor’s arms, coalescing his intimates around Edward.142 This novel heraldic decision not only removes Edward from the lineage of English kings to symbolize the institutional body of English kinship; it also claims him for Richard’s personal, special use. This deployment abstracts Edward from his historical and hagiographic narratives, for the cross and martlets point to no episode in his vita – an impossibility, as they seem to have been invented by one of Henry III’s heralds.143 The arms instead invoke the idea of Edward’s holy regality as a self-perpetuating fiction, the product of a historiographic contract written by royal and abbey iconography that Edward should represent an idealized, transtemporal English kingship. This heraldic discussion returns us to the provocative and multivalent iconographic scheme of the Wilton Diptych, where Richard’s Edward-impaled arms appear on the cover, alongside the white hart, as a symbol of royal ownership.144 Edwardian imagery plays a central role in the Diptych’s encapsulation of ­Richard’s self-perception as king, uniting symbols of coronation, lineage, and personal intimacy. Contrary to what has often been suggested, the coronation symbolism is the weakest of the three. Although several scholars have asserted that Edward’s ring represents the coronation ring as well as the ring he exchanged with John the Evangelist in his vita, supposedly removed from his tomb during the 1102 translation,145 the evidence of regalia lists, Westminster Abbey inventories, and coronation records indicates that Edward’s ring and the coronation ring were not conflated.146 At best, the Diptych functions as a 142 Maurice Keen, ‘The Wilton Diptych: The Case for a Crusading Context’, in Gordon, Monnas, and Elam, Regal Image, 194. 143 The use of the cross and martlets may have been suggested by the reverse of a coin minted during Edward’s reign, which depicts a similar design; I am grateful to Jonathan Good for the suggestion. 144 The Wilton Diptych is viewable in high-resolution format on the National Gallery, London’s website: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/english-or-french-the-wilton-diptych. Studies stemming from the conservation and exhibition of the Diptych in 1993 have consolidated what is known about the Diptych, if not how it should be interpreted: Gordon, Making and Meaning; the essays collected in Gordon, Monnas, and Elam, Regal Image. Important earlier studies include Clarke, ‘Wilton Diptych’; Harvey, ‘Wilton Diptych’; subsequent ones include Ruth Wilkins Sullivan, ‘The Wilton Diptych: Mysteries, Majesty, and a Complex Exchange of Faith and Power’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 139 (1997): 1–18; Eleanor Scheifele, ‘Richard II and the Visual Arts’, in Goodman and GiLlespie, Richard II: The Art of Kingship, 265–70; and the reassessment of the Diptych’s action in Fletcher, Richard II, 258–62. 145 These include Carpenter, ‘Burial of King Henry III’, 455; Sumner Ferris, ‘The Wilton Diptych and the Absolutism of Richard II’, Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 8 (1987): 33–66, at 48; Nigel Morgan, ‘The Signification of the Banner in the Wilton Diptych’, in Gordon, Monnas, and Elam, Regal Image, 186–87; Sullivan, ‘Wilton Diptych’, 8–9. On the removal of the ring during the translation, see Richard of Cirencester, Speculum, 2.325; Barlow, Edward, 282. 146 Only one fourteenth-century French directory identifies the coronation ring as Edward’s (‘lanel de Saint Edward’): J. Wickham Legg, ed., Three Coronation Orders (London: 1900), 123. In no regalia list nor any Westminster inventory are these two rings conflated – even when every other item is attributed to Edward: Flete, History, 71; Leopold G. Wickham Legg,

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coronation memoria:147 Richard’s anachronistically youthful face invokes without directly representing his crowning at the age of ten, while the visual language of Marian and divine approval underscores the rite’s elective function. More pronounced is lineage imagery: the white hart, although fully Richard’s by the 1390s, was adopted from his mother, Joan of Kent; the broom-cod collar could allude to his Plantagenet heritage as well as his new father-in-law, Charles VI of France.148 The crowns worn by Edmund, Edward, and Richard create a visual typology – reinforced by the possibility that the three saints resemble Richard’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather149 – that links these monarchs, as in the Westminster statuary, into a royal lineage. Edward’s most prominent role in the Diptych, however, is his intimate association with Richard. Begun by the impaled arms on the reverse, this affiliation is continued in Edward’s presentation of his ring, for Edward’s gesture with the ring is central to understanding his function in the Diptych. Edward does not hold his emblem statically against his body, as do Edmund and John the Baptist, but rather presents it prominently, holding it between his thumb and forefinger with the other three fingers splayed. This gesture of presentation and display resembles the one he makes in TCC B, when he hands the ring to the disguised John the Evangelist; if anything, the Diptych’s gesture, with its splayed fingers, is even more attention-grabbing.150 In the Diptych, the ring is crowned with a blue stone, invoking the sapphire and ruby ring that is recorded in the Westminster inventory of 1388, ‘said to have been’ that of the Confessor.151 Edward holds not any ring, but his own ring, the one exchanged with John the Evangelist and retrieved from Edward’s tomb in 1102. As every other gesture in the Diptych points back to Richard, it is reasonable to read this gesture too as Edward presenting Richard with the ring. Indeed, earlier in his career Richard had attempted a literal exchange of rings with the Confessor. Sometime in the mid-1380s, Richard requested that Abbot Nicholas Lytlyngton give Edward’s miraculous ring to him, a request with which

ed., English Coronation Records (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1901), 191; W. H. St John Hope, ‘The King’s Coronation Ornaments, 1’, The Ancestor 1 (1902): 127–59. Rather, the ring was an indulged relic, housed at Westminster separately from the regalia: Legg, ‘On an Inventory’, 199, 223; Brut, 134.9–13; John Mirk, John Mirk’s Festial: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II., ed. Susan Powell, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 334–35 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–11), 1.138/77–78; SEL ‘John the Baptist’, lines 519–20. Throughout the fifteenth century the ring represented a different aspect of Edward’s royal and holy charisma than did the coronation instruments, as noted by Binski, Westminster, 134; Anne F. Sutton and P. W. Hammond, eds., The Coronation of Richard III: The Extant Documents (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983), 238–39. 147 Theilmann, ‘Political Canonization’, 260; Ferris, ‘Wilton Diptych’, 46–49. 148 Gordon, Making and Meaning, 49, 51–53; Harvey, ‘Wilton Diptych’, 8–9; Clarke, ‘Wilton Diptych’, 287–89. 149 Ferris, ‘Wilton Diptych’, 45. 150 TCC B, fol. 42, in Binski, ‘Abbot Berkyng’s Tapestries’, plate XIXa. 151 ‘dicitur fuisse’. Legg, ‘On an Inventory’, 223.

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Lytlyngton could not comply.152 Then in 1388 Richard offered a different ruby ring to Edward, ‘antecessoris nostri’; Richard pledged to keep this ring during his lifetime and to return it to Edward’s shrine after his death. The ring was then to be used in future coronations.153 Richard had given a ring to Edward, but had not received one in return. Edward’s gesture with the ring in the Diptych effectively completes this earlier exchange on the spiritual level, complementing the nuptial symbolism of the impaled arms by imagining Edward as a willing participant in this intimate union of kings. Moreover, by requesting that his gifted ring be used in future coronations (a request that was never met), Richard attempts to write his own perceived relationship with Edward into the crowning ritual. Just as Edward had added to the coronation regalia in his day (as Sudbury told Richard in his treatise on the regalia),154 so does Richard, through Edward, leave his mark on future coronations. Richard thus partakes of Edward’s regality, holiness, and spiritual virtues less through a royal typology than through a uniquely privileged bond that unites him with his espoused antecessor. More than an image of election and regnal stability, Edward underwrites Richard’s imperious aspirations by marking him as ‘special’ among English kings, sacralizing his rule through this intimate pairing. The marital connotations of the ring exchange also invoke Edward’s own chastity, a virtue Richard may have embraced in the 1390s to justify, paradoxically, his own lack of an heir. Anne had not borne a child before her death in 1394, and Richard’s 1396 marriage to the six-year-old Isabelle of Valois ensured that he would continue heirless for the immediate future. Katherine J. Lewis suggests that Richard deployed Edward, in his guise as chaste king, ‘to deal with anxieties surrounding his status as both king and man’ stemming from his childlessness.155 By associating himself with royal chastity, Lewis argues, Richard can recuperate his childless state without prejudicing his ability to produce heirs later, counteracting any possible slurs on his manhood and fitness to rule. Impaling his arms with Edward’s and depicting himself in the Diptych alongside three virginal men becomes an explicit statement of such emulation.156 Lewis’s compelling argument is, however, predicated on a fully iconic understanding of Edward’s reputation, one that attenuates the possible causal relationship between Edward’s virginity and his heirlessness. Richard must be seen as copying only Edward’s heroic chastity, not his lack of issue; therefore, Richard must be affiliated only with the dehistoricized Edward, not with his eleventhcentury reign. Richard’s use of Edward thereby reveals the divergent historiographic and exemplary utility of royal and monastic saints. As is true of Audrey in the CUL legendary, Edward enables a typologized professional (here kingly) lineage. Whereas imitating Audrey strengthens those lineal bonds, emulating 152 153 154 155 156

Mitchell, ‘Richard II: Kingship and Cult of Saints’, 115. Legg, ‘On an Inventory’, 282–83; see also Saul, ‘Richard II and Westminster’, 200. Richard of Cirencester, Speculum, 2.31. Lewis, ‘Becoming’, 89. See also Ormrod, ‘Monarchy, Martyrdom’, 180–83. Lewis, ‘Becoming’, 87, 92–93.

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Edward too closely would unsettle royal lines. This happens because monastic, female saints’ virginity enables connections within the tempus as well as outside it, but Edward’s tempus-bound virginity – that is, his heroic chastity contextualized as an heirless reign – signifies dynastic disruptions. I have already shown that Edward’s chastity could be dissociated from his problematic childlessness only with difficulty in the narrative sources. Therefore, Richard can deploy Edward’s chastity in the way Lewis presents only via Edward’s iconic persona. Any affiliation with Edward’s historical childlessness could have been dangerous for Richard’s royal security. Under Henry  III’s and Richard  II’s patronage, Edward’s cult underwent an increasing iconization that untethered Edward from the grounding events of his life. While particular images might evoke scenes from his vita, those images gradually accumulated extended significance dissociated from his life. Rather, Edward operates as an abstracted symbol of sainted kingship derived from but not limited to his historical existence. Importantly, this iconic reduction selectively forgets – more effectively than his paratactic vitae and more completely than his pictorial hagiography – those unuseful, detrimental facets of Edward’s reign. His increased affiliations with coronation rites, royal largesse, English common law,157 and departicularized chastity overwrite his earlier associations with overpowerful magnates, misplaced peaceability, and dynastic discontinuity. While such effacing of Edward’s political limitations was begun in his vitae, this project of forgetting his faults to remember him as the ultimate guarantor of regnal continuity is most completely realized in Edward’s fully iconic image. The fact that Richard could invoke royal celibacy through Edward – through the ring’s association with John’s virginity, through his pairing with the other virginal men in the Diptych, through his mystical union with his chaste antecessor – speaks to the evocative power of Edward’s static image within the environs of Westminster Abbey and Palace. Epilogue: Leaving Edward Untold This Plantagenet forgetting of Edward’s narrativized life to preserve the dynasty’s regnal mystique was pervasive, but not totalizing, in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Within court circles, Edward seems to have dropped out of fashion; as Good suggests, Richard’s use of Edward may have tainted him for the early Lancastrians.158 While that may be true, it is also true that Henry VI was gifted with a Latin poetic vita, newly composed from Aelred’s life and adorned with classicizing touches.159 Despite its narrative format, this vita is just as iconizing as

157 Barlow, Edward, 265–66; Richard Mortimer, ‘Edward the Confessor: The Man and the Legend’, in Edward the Confessor: The Man and the Legend, ed. Richard Mortimer (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), 38–39. 158 Good, Cult of Saint George, 79–81, 93; Good, ‘Richard II and the Cults’, 175–78. 159 BHL 2426: ‘Vita beati Edwardi regis et confessoris’, in The Lives of Edward the Confessor, ed. Henry Richards Luard, RS 3 (London: Longman, 1858), xxviii–xxx, 361–77. This vita is

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the Westminster pictorial cycles, emphasizing Edward’s virtues, chaste marriage, and holy similarities to biblical rulers while constricting Aelred’s historical passages and foreclosing Harold’s succession and the Conquest. This manuscript, especially when considered alongside Bury St Edmund’s gift of Lydgate’s newly composed English life of Edmund (which I discuss in the next chapter), suggests that the devout Henry too was interested in the lives of his saintly antecessores – but not for the same reasons as Henry III and Richard II. The poetic vita’s treatment of Edward, and Lydgate’s similar handling of Edmund, indicates that Henry was encouraged to see these kings as role models and justifications for his own pious rule rather than as legitimating symbols of a divinely approved kingship. Edward may have had decreased utility for the crown after 1399, but he could still figure holy rule for the fervent prince. The iconized Edward remained popular outside royal circles as well. The static image of Edward and his ring proliferated in parish rood screens and in stained glass, while the story of his ring exchange with John the Evangelist was widely known – not through Edward’s own vitae, but through those of John, for the miracle was commonly attached to the end of John’s life.160 Still, Edward’s written life was not entirely unknown, appearing in more-or-less paratactic narratives. In addition to his life’s occasional appearance in the SEL and GiL, the SEL ‘Edward’ was updated as a prose life in the fifteenth century,161 and Wynkyn de Worde printed yet another Life of Edward in 1533.162 At the same time, the English prose Brut narratives were circulating, similarly emphasizing Edward’s sanctity and the story of the ring at the expense of a coherent narrative of his reign. As the woodcut introducing de Worde’s 1533 printing witnesses, Edward’s reputation was reduced to a narrow cluster of images: a bearded, white-haired king, here holding the scepter of his majesty and grasping the ring he exchanged with the Evangelist. Yet such forgetting can never be complete, for that which ‘this new understanding of the past holds to be irrelevant … comes back, despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies’.163 Edward’s forgotten reputation creeps back late in Richard’s reign – probably in the middle of his grandest push to assimilate Edward to himself – in a most unlikely place: in the mouths

preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden 55, a quarto pamphlet containing solely this work, and in Bodleian Library, MS Digby 186, a later and imperfect copy. The poem’s editor notes that the poet claims that he writes at Henry’s bidding and tentatively dates the vita and manuscript to the 1440s: ‘Vita beati Edwardi’, xxviii. 160 Lan Lipscomb, ‘A Distinct Legend of the Ring in the Life of Edward the Confessor’, Medieval Perspectives 6 (1992): 45–57, at 46 and nn. 1–15. The miracle was also widely recounted in vernacular chronicles. 161 The prose adaptation is Oxford, Trinity College MS IX, an unprovenanced manuscript of c.1400: Moore, Middle English Verse Life, 73, lxiii–lxxi; Görlach, Textual Tradition, 135, 264 n. 22. 162 This imprint (STC 7500) is identical to the ‘Life of Edward’ printed by Caxton in his Golden Legend of 1483 (STC 24873), itself a linguistic updating and slight abbreviation of the GiL ‘Edward’: Moore, Middle English Verse Life, 134–42. 163 Certeau, Writing, 4.

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of Chaucer’s Host and Monk, in the prologue to ‘The Monk’s Tale’.164 Chaucer is notoriously oblique in his references to current events and English history,165 but his brief reference to Edward the Confessor invokes the tension between Edward’s narrativized life and Richard’s iconic use of him. In response to the Host’s comments on his virility and his request that the Monk tell the next tale, the Monk proposes two opposed tale possibilities: I wol yow seyn the lyf of Seint Edward; Or ellis, first, tragedies wol I telle. (7.1970–71)

The ‘Tale of Saint Edward’ is one of many untold Canterbury tales, and Ann Astell has suggested that this line refers to Richard’s attempts to canonize Edward II.166 I, however, would like to consider what happens if we take the Monk’s ‘lyf of Seint Edward’ to be that of Edward the Confessor and then consider the relationship between the disparate genres of ‘saint’s life’ and ‘tragedy’. In the Host’s comments about the Monk’s sexuality and in the Monk’s definition of tragedy lie a subtle critique of Edward’s iconic image, pointing back to the ‘forgotten’ or overwritten elements of Edward’s life. Edward’s inability to get an heir and the subsequent tragic demise of the Wessex line manifests as suppressed and deflected discourse in the Monk’s Prologue, encircling the one-line reference to the Monk’s other tale and hinting at reasons why Edward’s ‘lyf ’ must remain untold. In this endlink, the Host identifies the Monk as no ‘penant’ or ‘povre cloysterer’ but rather as a ‘wel faryng persone’ whose physique suggests that, had he not been constrained by his vow of chastity, he would have ‘bigeten ful many a creature’ (7.1934, 1939, 1942, 1948). These comments, in part continuing the General Prologue’s characterization of the Monk as a ‘manly man’ (1.167), are another instance of the Host’s socially tone-deaf jollying along of his pilgrim charges. Within the frame narrative, the Monk responds to the Host’s misplaced lamenting of the Monk’s chastity by offering Edward as a counterexample of a ‘myghty man’ who refused ‘Venus paiementz’ for a better path (7.1951, 1961).167 Read against the untold ‘Tale of Edward’, however, the Host’s complaint that the Monk’s chastity is

164 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). I cite parenthetically from the Canterbury Tales by fragment and line number. 165 Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 94–116; John Frankis, ‘King Ælle and the Conversion of the English: The Development of a Legend from Bede to Chaucer’, in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92; Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 207–31, esp. 227; Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 24. 166 Astell, ‘Monk’s Tragical’; in response, see Helen Cooper, ‘Responding to the Monk’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 425–33, at 428. See also Astell, Political Allegory, 102–8. 167 Marcia Smith Marzek, ‘“I wol yow seyn the lyf of Seint Edward”: Evidence for Consistency in the Character of Chaucer’s Monk’, In Geardagum 15 (1994): 85–96 suggests a parallel reading.

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misplaced – ‘al the world is lorn’ because the manly Monk cannot procreate, and the ‘fieble trees’ of the laity produce only ‘wrecched ympes’ (7.1953, 1956) – anticipates the central if unspoken problem of Edward’s life: England is ‘lorn’ because Religioun hath take up al the corn Of tredyng. (7.1954–55)

Edward’s celibate imperative removed him from the threshing floor of fruitful procreation. Moreover, the similarity between the remaining ‘fieble trees’ and Edward’s Vision of the Green Tree, foretelling his truncation of the Wessex line, hints that this celibate imperative was also detrimental to the commonweal. The problems that the Host jocularly and somewhat facetiously imagines the land to face when a ‘manly man’ like the Monk takes religious orders are precisely those faced by England when Edward refuses to engender a son. Likewise, the opposition between any ‘lyf of Seint Edward’ and the ‘tragedies’ the Monk tells instead also suggests how Edward’s life, if it is read through the lens of medieval tragedy, necessarily refocuses on those elements ignored in his vitae. A saint’s life, by definition, is comic, insofar as it climaxes in the union of Christ and the saint; even the pains of martyrdom are ultimately rewarded, as the martyr, living eternally in heaven, triumphs over the damned pagan persecutor. Edward’s life is no less comedic, in that his eternal life is the culmination of his sanctity on earth. To render Edward tragic, therefore, is to remove his sanctity from the narrative – to demote Edward to the mere earthly plane of historical event and linear time. Retold as history rather than hagiography, Edward’s life is indeed tragic in the Monk’s definition: a certeyn storie, As olde bookes maken us memorie, Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly. (7.1973–77)

Were the Monk to tell a tragic Tale of Edward, he must relate not the Life of Saint Edward, but the rise and fall of Æthelred’s son, raised a political outcast in Normandy and elevated to political greatness as King of England but who died heirless in his dotage, surrounded by an archbishop who disdained him, a wife who never loved him, and a brother-in-law plotting for the throne, with political upheaval waiting in the wings. Using juxtaposition to assimilate Edward to this tragic mode, Chaucer highlights that the Monk necessarily cannot relate this tale, because a tragic Edward would contradict the holy royal image built up at Westminster through generations of royal and ecclesiastical collaboration. A historicized Edward, Edward as yet another victim of Fortune, is simply untellable. Nevertheless, the fact that an ideologically complacent Benedictine can be made to invoke a tragic tale of Edward, and that Chaucer can gesture toward questions about Edward’s chastity and his patrilineal responsibility in the surrounding lines, suggests that Edward’s early chronicle reputation had not been entirely suppressed 171

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by his static image. He remained suspended between competing discourses and divergent temporal constructs, neither fully reconcilable nor fully forgettable – a figure who reveals the limits of, as well as the late medieval investment in, diachronic historiography.

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The Limits of Poetic History in Lydgate’s Edmund and Fremund and the Harley 2278 Pictorial Cycle

In the winter and spring of 1434, Bury St Edmunds Abbey hosted the young King Henry  VI, just twelve years of age, and his retinue for Christmas, Lent, and Easter. This visit was a coup for the abbey, for it ensured that its abbot, the redoubtable William Curteys, would have the king’s ear for several months.1 Curteys capitalized on the opportunity, greeting Henry with pomp, providing him with hunting opportunities, guiding his veneration at St Edmund’s shrine, and commissioning the abbey’s resident poet, John Lydgate, to compose for him a poem about Edmund. Some years later, Henry was presented with that poem as a memorial of his visit: now BL, Harley MS 2278, a regal codex containing Edmund and Fremund enhanced by an elaborate series of illustrations.2 Abbey and crown enjoyed a cordial relationship for many years after this visit: Henry and his retinue were admitted into the abbey’s confraternity shortly before departing, in 1447 Henry issued a charter confirming Bury St Edmunds’ long held rights, and Curteys become one of the king’s valued advisers.3 1

The account of the visit, recorded in Abbot Curteys’s register (BL, Add. MS 14848, fol. 128r–v), is printed in Craven Ord, ‘Account of the Entertainment of King Henry the Sixth at the Abbey of Bury St Edmund’s’, Archaeologia 15 (1806): 65–71, and summarized in Memorials, 3.xxxi–xxxii; John Williams Elston, ‘William Curteys, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds 1429–1446’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1979), 56–63. 2 Edwards postulates that it would have taken several years for Lydgate to compose the poem, then for the manuscript to be prepared: A. S. G. Edwards, ed., The Life of St Edmund, King and Martyr: John Lydgate’s Illustrated Verse Life Presented to Henry VI. A Facsimile of British Library Harley MS 2278 (London: British Library, 2004), 14; Anthony Bale and Edwards, ‘Introduction’, in John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund, and the Extra Miracles of St Edmund, ed. Bale and Edwards (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009), 12. Evidence that Harley 2278 is the presentation manuscript comes not only from the two miniatures of Henry VI (fols. 4v and 6r) but also from the royal arms and Henry’s badge of the spotted antelope, gorged and chained, on fol. 6r: Scott, Later Gothic, 2.226, 288. 3 John Lydgate, John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund and the Extra Miracles of St Edmund, ed. Anthony Bale and A.  S.  G. Edwards (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009), lines 71–78; Memorials, 3.242–47, 357–58. I hereafter cite Edmund and Fremund (EF) parenthetically by line number from this edition. EF was printed once before, in Horstmann, Altenglische Legenden, 376–440. The line numbering there differs from the 2009 edition.

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Edmund was, alongside Edward the Confessor, one of England’s most wellknown native saints, famous for his ninth-century martyrdom at the hands of the pagan Danes, his bodily incorruption, and his thaumaturgical powers. Lydgate’s Edmund and Fremund, particularly when read alongside the Harley 2278 images, is the high point of Edmund’s continuous and vibrant cult. Hagiographers from Bury St Edmunds and beyond had rewritten narratives of Edmund’s career and death in every vernacular spoken in England and in nearly every century since Abbo of Fleury penned the first Vita Edmundi in the 980s.4 He appears in each of the major Middle English legendaries and, unlike many saints whose late medieval monasteries were content with their twelfth- or thirteenth-century hagiographies, he received five new vitae at Bury after 1375.5 Appearing in religious art (as on the Wilton Diptych) crowned and holding a sheaf of arrows, Edmund was a familiar figure in parish churches as well as royal iconography. Lydgate’s magisterial poem, over 3,500 lines of rhyme royal and ballade stanzas, relates the life of Edmund at its fullest, including his infancy narrative as well as selections from his extensive miracula and translation accounts. This structurally complex poem consists of three books preceded by two prologues and followed by a closing prayer, an envoy, and a stanza addressed to the king.6 The first book relates Edmund’s birth from King Alkmund of Saxony, the decision of King Offa of East Anglia to make Edmund his heir, and Edmund’s coronation; the second tells of the pagan Dane Lothbrok’s death in East Anglia and the vengeful attack of his sons, Hinguar and Ubba, upon Edmund, resulting in Edmund’s martyrdom. The third, hodgepodge book begins with the life and afterlife of the minor saint Fremund, whom Lydgate identifies as Edmund’s cousin, before transitioning into Edmund’s miracles.7 Edmund and Fremund, a highly influential example of the 4

On his early cult and its Anglo-Norman expansion, see Emma Cownie, ‘The Cult of St Edmund in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Language and Communication of a Medieval Saint’s Cult’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99 (1998): 177–97; Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’; David W. Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 155–58; Ridyard, Royal Saints, 211–33; Dorothy Whitelock, ‘Fact and Fiction in the Legend of St Edmund’, Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 31 pt. 3 (1970): 217–33. Anthony Bale, ‘Introduction: St Edmund’s Medieval Lives’, in St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint, ed. Bale (York: York Medieval Press, 2009) summarizes these developments, and the essays he edits in that collection treat individual facets of Edmund’s cult. On Edmund’s French vies, see Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, 81–85, 244–46. 5 He appears in thirteen manuscripts of the SEL, all the copies of the GiL that include the additional lives, and in Caxton’s Golden Legend: Görlach, Textual Tradition, 204–5; SEL 2.511–15; Hamer and Russell, Supplementary Lives, xv, 147–61. Bokenham’s Legenda Aurea no longer includes any November entries (Edmund’s feast day is 20 November), but he would probably have incorporated so famous an East Anglian saint. I discuss the five late medieval Bury St Edmunds vitae below. 6 The first prologue, which Bale and Edwards edit under separate numeration (P1–P80), was added late to the poem. The second prologue (1–154) seems to have been Lydgate’s first attempt at introducing this text. I do not discuss the Extra Miracles because they were not included in Harley 2278. 7 The incorporation of Fremund, who had been deemed Edmund’s relative since at least the early fourteenth century, is unique to Lydgate: James I. Miller, ‘Literature to History: Exploring

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Middle English long life, would thereby seem to possess all the hallmarks of fifteenth-century historicized hagiography. Edmund and Fremund is, however, somewhat anomalous in the vernacular tradition I trace because of its limited engagement with historiographic concerns. In using Edmund and Fremund to advance his laureate status, Lydgate instead privileges the detemporalized saint–petitioner relationship, not the time-bound, saint–monastery relationship. In its address to the king, its balancing of institutional and poetic priorities, and its interface with the Harley pictorial cycle, Edmund and Fremund negotiates a wider array of pressures than do most other vernacular lives. Ultimately, Lydgate manipulates the hagiographic form to configure his poetry as saint-inspired and spiritually needful for the young Henry. Casting himself as a metaphorical shrinekeeper, Lydgate affiliates his timeless, aureate poetics with Edmund’s supratemporal stasis while minimizing Edmund’s participation in temporal affairs. When read alongside the Harley miniatures, however, the presentation manuscript puts that poetics in the service of Bury St Edmunds’ reputation, characterizing Bury as populated by ethically upright individuals. In balancing the relationships among saint, king, abbey, and poet, Lydgate makes a number of surprising formal decisions. Instead of intertwining Edmund’s sempiternal stasis and enshrined, incorrupt praesentia to affirm Bury St Edmunds’ glorious antiquity and continuous corporate integrity (as do the Wilton poet, Bradshaw, and Audrey’s Ely hagiographers), Lydgate tempers the historicizing impulse, de-emphasizing corporate body and incorrupt corpse. From the poem’s first lines, Lydgate distinguishes his project from history writing: I dar not calle to Clio for socour, Nor to tho muses that been in noumbre nyne. But to this martir, his grace to enclyne, To forthre my penne of that I wolde write, His glorious lif to translate and endite. (10–14)

Robert Meyer-Lee has shown how elsewhere Clio figures Lydgate’s status as monastic historian who occupies an ideological space unsupervised by royal power from which he can, autonomously, address the crown.8 Here, however, Lydgate takes up the role of pure hagiographer, one whose ‘penne’ is ‘forthre[d]’ by Edmund’s aid. This rejection of Clio in favor of Edmund opposes the rhetorical expectations of history and hagiography; the ‘flour’ of ‘rethorik’ (8) he lacks will be supplied by martyr, not muse. Throughout Edmund and Fremund, Lydgate accordingly privileges Edmund’s persistence in the aevum, his spiritual elevation above mundane affairs. When Edmund determines to submit to the Danes, for example, he does so because the proper approach to ‘thyngis temporal’ is opposed a Medieval Saint’s Legend and Its Context’, in Literature and History, ed. I.  E. Cadenhead, Jr. (Tulsa, OK: University of Tulsa Press, 1970), 66–67. 8 Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 55–56, 66, 69.

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to ‘the thynges that been celestial’ (1612, 1614); choosing the latter, in this poem, necessarily entails renouncing the former. This dichotomization rather than integration of tempus and aevum typifies Lydgate’s religious poetry, through which he constitutes the supratemporal potential of the ‘vernacular literary’. Aureate language offered Lydgate ‘an idiom free from the possibility of temporal decay and patronly caprice’ that could also incorporate him into a synchronic, laureate literary tradition.9 Religious poetry, concerned with eternal verities and claiming a timeless devotional utility, was particularly available for constructing an aevum-based poetic. As Meyer-Lee demonstrates, in Life of Our Lady Lydgate uses a rhetorically complex Mariology to imbue his technically elaborated poetry with a transcendent authority, and Sanok extends Meyer-Lee’s observations to argue that, particularly in his saints’ lives, Lydgate’s ‘idea of the literary [is] defined by its remove from the exigencies of history’.10 Saints are particularly valuable for this project, she continues, because their extra-political lives usefully figure poetry’s remove from mundane, socio-political concerns.11 As others have also noted, Lydgate’s ‘saints’ lives constitute a parallel history governed by miraculous concepts of time and affinity’,12 and several aspects of Edmund and Fremund – particularly its preference for Edmund over Clio – participate in this transcendent poetics. This achronic bent has several historiographic ramifications. Edmund and Fremund is less invested in meshing with chronicle history than its late medieval counterparts, both other vernacular saints’ lives and Edmund’s newly composed Latin vitae. Lydgate integrates less historical detail than these texts, significantly less than the source he claims ‘to translate and endite’ (14), the lengthy vita et miracula in the late fourteenth-century Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 240.13 Unlike other vitae, Lydgate relates no event not immediately relevant to Edmund’s sanctity and is more vague than they about using objective temporal markers. In the first two books, Lydgate only gives dates anno domini for epochal events in Edmund’s life (birth, coronation, martyrdom, burial), not for framing historical events (like the Danish invasions), even when those dates are in his source.14 9

Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 24; see also Sanok, ‘Saints’ Lives’, 480. 10 Meyer-Lee, ‘Emergence of the Literary’, 324–30; Sanok, ‘Saints’ Lives’, 484. 11 Sanok, ‘Saints’ Lives’, 471. 12 Ruth Nisse, ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”: Lydgate and the Styles of Martyrdom’, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2006), 286; see also Ganim, ‘Lydgate, Location’, 178–79; Fiona Somerset, ‘“Hard is with seyntis for to make affray”: Lydgate the “Poet-Propagandist” as Hagiographer’, in Scanlon and Somerset, John Lydgate, 262–66. 13 A. S. G. Edwards, ‘John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund: Politics, Hagiography and Literature’, in St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint, ed. Anthony Bale (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), 136–37; Bale and Edwards, ‘Introduction’, 20–24. I discuss the Bodley vita in detail below. 14 Edmund’s martyrdom is dated to month and day, via the moon (2016–18), and his burial is dated from his own martyrdom (3476–79) as well as by incarnational years (3484–85). These dates are taken from the Bodley vita, which also gives the dates for the Danish invasion;

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Lydgate’s attitude toward the corporate monastic body is equally conflicted; he seems disinclined to narrate Bury St Edmunds’ history alongside Edmund’s life and miracles, only occasionally imagining a close patronal relationship between Bury and Edmund. Lydgate accordingly decenters Edmund’s incorruption and enshrined praesentia in favor of his eternal, heavenly persistence. That is not to say, however, that Lydgate completely removes Edmund from the tempus and related institutional concerns. He does not entirely eschew linear organizations (as he does in The Life of Our Lady), nor is Edmund as easy to relegate to the aevum as are Margaret and George (whose Lydgatean passiones occur in the iconic chronotope’s stylized world). Rather, as a familiar Anglo-Saxon royal saint with a longstanding hagiographic tradition whose incorrupt remains were housed in one of England’s most powerful abbeys, Edmund resists iconization. Throughout Bury St Edmunds’ history, the monks deployed his life and miracles as one of the abbey’s many tools for asserting its jurisdictional rights and corporate integrity. Edmund and Fremund retains several elements of this institutional tradition, embracing, as John Ganim and others have shown, this ‘poetic of exemption’ in that it is ‘both performing and preserving the claims of his patrons in the physical and material body of his texts’.15 Although I will qualify some of these claims throughout the chapter – Edmund and Fremund is less explicitly instrumental than has been argued – the poem is available for such deployment, especially when read in concert with the Harley miniatures. Edmund and Fremund’s bifocal temporal vision can be partly traced to the poem’s origins. As its various paratexts make clear, the poem is the product of two fifteenth-century intellects and their distinct goals. Abbot Curteys, invested throughout his career in defending both abbey and order,16 commissioned the poem to enhance the abbey’s standing with the king. Lydgate, on the other hand, wrote much of it as an ‘advice to princes’ treatise and to encourage Henry’s personal devotion to Edmund. As Lydgate makes clear, this poetic gift was the abbot’s idea:

compare EF, 1324–25 to NLA, 2.580/31–32; EF, 1352 to NLA, 2.582/35–37. This usage is not inconsistent with Lydgate’s temporal markers in other poems; see Smyth, Imaginings of Time, esp. 59–93. 15 Ganim, ‘Lydgate, Location’, 165–71, 178–79, at 178. See further, Introduction, pp. 5–6 above. Critics who have read Lydgate’s poetry instrumentally include Sanok, ‘Saints’ Lives’, 474–79; Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 130–51; Lee Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate’, in New Historical Literary Study: Essays in Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 93–95; Reginald Webber, ‘Judas Non Dormit: John Lydgate and Late-Medieval Benedictine Episcopal Conflicts, Parts 1–2’, American Benedictine Review 60 (2009): 337–55; 61 (2010): 81–94, at 1.348–49. On the instrumental potential of poetry more generally, see Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3–4 et passim. 16 Curteys’s career has been thoroughly studied by Elston, ‘William Curteys’; see also Pearsall, John Lydgate, 25–27.

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to the kyng for to do plesance Thabbot William his humble chapeleyn Gaf me in charge to do myn attendance The noble story to translate in substaunce Out of the Latyn aftir my kunnyng He in ful purpos to yeue it to the kyng. (107–12)

Attributing the poem to Curteys’s ‘ful purpos’, Lydgate casts his poetic ‘attendance’ on abbot and king as his duty as an obedient member of the Bury St Edmunds community. Edmund and Fremund therefore invites us to read it as a monastic production, an institutionally commissioned gift from abbey to king, and an expression of Bury’s desired relationship with Henry  VI. When contextualized within Bury and Curteys’s other uses of Edmund, Edmund and Fremund’s instrumental utility is evident. Lydgate’s own goals, however, were otherwise. As several scholars have shown, Edmund and Fremund’s first two books construct Edmund as a paragon of good rulership for the young Henry VI.17 The hortatory focus of the poem’s Fürstenspiegel is best achieved when Edmund is not fixed too firmly in the tempus, and this aim partly contributes to Lydgate’s frequent iconization of Edmund. As the examples of Audrey, Werburgh and Edward have illustrated, the socio-temporal distance between ancient model and contemporary imitator can inhibit rather than encourage emulation, making Edmund’s supratemporal features central to his imitability. Edmund’s elevation to the aevum is also critical for Lydgate’s poetic. Constructing his sublime aureation through Edmund’s sempiternality, Lydgate envisions Edmund and Fremund as the earthly embodiment of Edmund’s praesentia, a co-location of saintly virtus and literary style that is only possible through Edmund’s transcendence. In balancing his and Curteys’s goals, Lydgate – to put it in Bakhtinian terms – foregrounds Edmund and Fremund’s heterochrony, its ‘interplay of different chronotopes … [that] provides the ground for the dialogic inter-illumination’ of the iconic and monastic chronotopes’ separate presumptions.18 Although all saints’ lives are heterochronic to some degree, Edmund and Fremund suspends these spatio-temporal differences in an unreconciled tension. Unlike Bradshaw and the Wilton poet, who privilege the monastic chronotope in their attempts to solidify institutional history and cohesion, and unlike Bokenham, who elevates Audrey’s cloistered life to the same ethical time-space as the iconic chronotope, Lydgate does not attempt to integrate the two smoothly. Rather, the two spatio-temporal constructions engage in a dialogic interplay; from that interplay emerges the figure 17

Katherine J. Lewis, ‘Edmund of East Anglia, Henry VI and Ideals of Kingly Masculinity’, in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004); Jennifer Sisk, ‘Lydgate’s Problematic Commission: A Legend of St Edmund for Henry VI’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 109 (2010): 349–75; Winstead, John Capgrave, 116–37; see also Somerset, ‘Hard is with seyntis’. 18 Falconer, ‘Heterochronic Representations’, 112. My Bakhtinian reading of EF complements Ganim’s observations in‘Lydgate, Location’ concerning Lydgate’s spatio-temporal transformations.

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of the shrinekeeper, the devout individual privileged to speak intimately with the saint and to intervene between saint and devotee. This character type is derived from the monastic chronotope, where he restricts access to the shrine. In Edmund and Fremund, however, the shrinekeeper instead helps the eternal saint focalize his praesentia in the world. Privileging the shrinekeeper’s individual devotion over the institutional office, Lydgate imagines himself as Edmund’s metaphoric shrinekeeper, his poetry becoming the ideal vehicle for conveying Edmund’s glories to Henry. Only through this spatio-temporal interplay can Lydgate construct his ethically inflected poetic of shrinekeeping. Although Lydgate is little interested in Bury St Edmunds’ corporate identity, the ‘devout shrinekeeper’ status that he reserves to himself is transferred to the body of the Bury monks when the poem is read within its presentation manuscript. The pictorial cycle in Harley 2278 further complicates the poem’s heterochronicity because the images embrace a different set of chronotopic presumptions, ones that privilege monastic interests. Harley 2278 is perhaps the most magnificently decorated manuscript of Middle English verse, remarkable not only for its extensive pictorial cycle, but for the close correlation between poem and illustrations, in mise en page and in subject matter.19 In his introduction to the print facsimile, Edwards has shown the faithfulness of these illustrations to the details of Lydgate’s poem, arguing that this interplay ‘create[s] an unusually powerful synthesis in which the verbal and the visual elements of the manuscript complement one another in a carefully integrated way’.20 Edwards therefore concludes that the illustrations ‘provide clear indications that the artists worked in concert with someone who had read the text attentively and wished to reflect the narrative not just in the subject matter of the illustrations but also in their careful positioning within the poem in relation to the appropriate point in the text’.21 Although Edwards is clearly correct about the artists’ engagement with the text, we should not read these images as mere echoes of Lydgate’s poem. Rather, I attend to Cynthia Hahn’s argument that a hagiographic picture cycle is not a mere illustration of a text, secondary to and dependent upon it, but in fact constitutes a ‘partially independent version of the story’.22 As we saw in the pictorial narrative attached to Matthew Paris’s Estoire de seint Aedward le rei, illustrations can amplify, abbreviate, or otherwise refocus the

19

This manuscript is readily available in both a full color print facsimile, Edwards, ed., Life of St Edmund, King and Martyr, and on the British Library’s Digitized Manuscripts website: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_2278. Containing only Edmund and Fremund, its 119 folios are graced with 118 illustrations executed by at least three artists, plus two opening full-page miniatures (by different artists). Full manuscript descriptions are given in Edwards, ed., Life of St Edmund, 13–15; Bale and Edwards, ‘Introduction’, 12; Scott, Later Gothic, 2.225–29. 20 Edwards, ed., Life of St Edmund, 8–11, at 11. Stephen R. Reimer, ‘Unbinding Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund’, in The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 171–74, also makes a cogent argument for reading text and image together. 21 Edwards, Life of St Edmund, 10. 22 Hahn, Portrayed, 45.

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written text’s emphases, and the Harley 2278 artists similarly refashion Lydgate’s narrative through a visual amplificatio that depicts elements Lydgate left unstated. These amplificationes serve a coherent purpose: to cast the manuscript as a monastic production and to emphasize Bury St Edmunds’ necessary role in Edmund’s cult. Although the intellect behind the miniatures is unknown, this cycle – opening with two full-page miniatures depicting the Banner of Edmund (fol. 1v) and the Arms of Bury (fol. 3v) – emphasizes a monastic agenda.23 The presentation miniature on fol. 6r reaffirms the corporate nature of this gift to the king. A young Henry, crowned and enthroned, is surrounded on three sides by (it seems) the entire convent; three monks, blacked-robed and tonsured, are physically proximate to the king and all seem equally involved in presenting the manuscript. By not distinguishing any of these monks from the other – none clearly resembles the monk on fol. 9v, who may represent Lydgate, nor are any distinguished as Curteys by the abbatial regalia24 – the miniature constructs the gift as coming from the whole community.25 As I demonstrate throughout this chapter, the miniatures unwaveringly depict Edmund’s praesentia as bounded by his shrine and overseen by the Bury monks, emphasizing the monastery’s intercessory role between Edmund and Henry. These miniatures’ different chronotopic presumptions enable yet another dialogic interaction between poem and illustrations. Within the extracodicological context of Henry’s readership, the confluence of text and image makes available alternate king–saint–poet relationships that neither poem nor cycle can encompass. This interplay also appropriates the spiritual probity Lydgate derived for himself to the entire community, constructing the abbey as a collection of individual bodies centered on venerating Edmund. Only when read as a composite visual/verbal narrative can Harley 2278’s Edmund and Fremund perform the same institutional identity creation as other late medieval hagiographies, and only then 23

Reimer, ‘Unbinding’, 73 suggests that Lydgate oversaw the production of the miniatures. He bases his argument on the close relationship between the opening full-page miniatures and the accompanying text; however, Edwards has shown that this opening quire, including Lydgate’s first prologue, was a late addition to the manuscript, making it just as likely that Lydgate composed the lines to accompany the new images rather than vice-versa; Edwards, Life of St Edmund, 13. Given the miniatures’ institutional agenda, the abbot’s close engagement with Henry’s visit, and Curteys’s use of Lydgate’s poetry elsewhere, it seems plausible (although unprovable) that Curteys or his direct agent designed the sequence to fit with, and amplify, the poem. 24 The abbot of Bury St Edmunds claimed the right to wear pontificals since Samson’s abbacy, and the abbot is frequently distinguished in Harley 2278 by mitre and crosier (e.g., fols. 108v, 117r): Antonia Gransden, A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, 1182–1256: Samson of Tottington to Edmund of Walpole (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), 21–22, 80–81. 25 This image can be contrasted with the equivalent miniatures in two other fully illuminated copies of Edmund and Fremund, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 46 and the Arundel copy, which both depict only one monk (presumed by Scott to represent Lydgate) praying to a crowned Edmund, and with one illuminated Fall of Princes, BL, Harley MS 1766, fol. 5, in which two monks, presumably Lydgate and Curteys, venerate Edmund: Kathleen L. Scott, ‘Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund: A Newly-Located Manuscript in Arundel Castle’, Viator 13 (1982): 335–66, at 348, figs. 1, 3–4.

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could it persuade Henry VI not only of Edmund’s value for himself, but of the abbey’s importance in England’s spiritual landscape. Lives of Edmund at Late Medieval Bury By the fifteenth century, Bury St Edmunds was one of England’s most powerful and well-respected Benedictine institutions, enjoying complete jurisdiction over a third of Suffolk, independence from episcopal oversight, and a substantial income from its temporalities and spiritualities.26 Frequently in conflict with those who encroached upon these rights, the abbey underpinned its position by means of a lively written tradition emphasizing Edmund’s protection of his familia. This monastic discourse’s chronotopic character was established early, in Abbo of Fleury’s Vita Edmundi: ‘although his [Edmund’s] soul is in heavenly glory, it is nevertheless not by day or night far from the presence of his body’.27 Abbo makes clear that Edmund persists in the aevum; nevertheless, he privileges Edmund’s earthly remains as the site of his virtus. All five of the new Latin vitae penned between 1375 and 1445, each appearing in a historiographic or documentary codicological context, perpetuate this chronotope and witness to Edmund’s institutional utility, especially during Curteys’s abbacy. These vitae’s temporal presumptions align with those of the Wilton Chronicle and Bradshaw’s Werburge, although their historical vision is not as fully developed as these vernacular examples. As such, they prove a valuable foil for Lydgate’s and the Harley cycle’s divergent lives, establishing the Bury St Edmunds historiographic tradition that Lydgate partially resists. The earliest new life, and the primary source for the others, is the lengthy vita et miracula compiled in Bodley 240.28 As Nicholas Heale has shown in his useful (and under-cited) thesis on this manuscript, the renovation of monastic life – the desire to recover traditional principles and best practices – was of concern to the fourteenth-century Bury St Edmunds monks. Drafted as a manual for novice instruction and seeking to identify monasticism’s origins and therefore its core 26

Bury’s history from c.1065–c.1300 has been well examined; see Gransden, History of the Abbey; Gransden, ‘Legends and Traditions’; Gransden, ed. and trans., The Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds, 1212–1301 (London: Nelson, 1964); R. M. Thomson, ed. and trans., The Chronicle of the Election of Hugh, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds and Later Bishop of Ely (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); Thomson, ed., The Archives of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1980); Memorials; M. R. James, On the Abbey of St Edmund at Bury, vol. 1: The Library; vol. 2: The Church (Cambridge, 1895). On the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century abbey, see Elston, ‘William Curteys’; Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests’. 27 ‘licet eius anima sit in caelesti gloria, non tamen per uisitationem die noctuque longe est a corporis presentia’. Abbo of Fleury, Life of St Edmund, 86/28–30. 28 BHL 2399. See NLA, 1.lvii–lxv; Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests’, 243–44 for a table of contents. Much of Bodley 240 is printed in Appendix 2 to NLA vol. 2; the Edmund vita falls at 2.573–688. In the manuscript, it is pages 624–77. Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests’, 173–78 offers a less sympathetic interpretation of the Bodley life and the Latin vitae derived from it.

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nature,29 Bodley 240 (dated internally to 1377) interleaves historical texts, didactic works like Augustinian sermons, and hagiography like its vita Edmundi to educate novices in Bury’s monastic culture and institutional history. Opening with papal bulls on Edmund’s feast and translation,30 the compilatio that is the Bodley vita Edmundi leans strongly to institutional history, its fifty-four double-column pages integrating a coherent, largely continuous narrative of Edmund’s cult with the monastery’s growth. Always precise with dates and marginal citation of sources, the compiler sometimes rewrites these sources completely to create a new narrative, sometimes copies miracles or episodes verbatim, and sometimes (especially for more recent events) composes entirely new material.31 The vita elaborates on Edmund’s various relic translations; emphasizes Edmund’s continued incorruption; lays out the privileges and liberties granted by late Anglo-Saxon kings; and details the devotion of the kings, clerics, and bishops who supported his community. Intertwining miracles with a detailed account of Bury’s increased liberties, the Bodley 240 vita fuses Edmund’s afterlife and Bury’s history, shaping Bury identity by introducing its novice readers to this longstanding hagio-historical tradition. The monks who came into their own in the early fifteenth century – including Lydgate and Curteys – would have been among the first to encounter Bodley 240 during their novitiate. This cohort produced four more Latin vitae of Edmund, all based on the Bodley text; all are similarly concerned with Edmund’s place in England’s and Bury’s past. The 1425 customary of Curteys’s kitchener, Andrew Astone, includes a ‘vita et passio sancti edmundi breviter collecta’ (fols. 32–36) alongside a detailed list of the abbey’s benefactors (fols. 7–25v) and an account of Edmund’s translation (fols. 30–31v), suggesting a commemorative function for this vita.32 More historically minded is Cambridge, University Library MS Add. 850. This c.1400 copy of the Cronica Buriensis is preceded by an ambitious metrical vita of Edmund; detailing his early life, martyrdom, and history of the abbey until the late eleventh century, the vita provides a ‘prehistory’ for the Cronica, which begins with Cnut’s refoundation of Bury.33 Cnut’s decision to replace the canons who served at Edmund’s tomb with reformed Benedictines is a watershed point in the abbey’s history, one that could (like the replacement of nuns with canons at Stone Priory) sever the late medieval institution from its ninth-century origins; the Cronica Buriensis performs this separation by beginning with Cnut. The CUL 29 30 31

Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests’, 15–23, 48–63 et passim. NLA, 2.573–74; Bodley 240, pp. 623–24. On the compiler’s treatment of his sources, see Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests’, 172–73. 32 Douai, Bibliothèque de la Ville, MS 55; see Thomson, Archives, 146–47; Heale, ‘Religious and Intellectual Interests’, 178–79. Note that a life of Edmund does not appear in the other Astone register, BL, Cotton MS Claudius A.xii, fols. 84–199v, as claimed by Bale and Edwards, ‘Introduction’, 20. See Thomson, Archives, 155–57 for a full list of contents. 33 The vita is contained on fols. 1r–100r, the Cronica on fols. 100v–123r, and the final folios of the manuscript (124r–130v) contain a letter of Edward  I and a list of episcopal provinces. On the manuscript, see James, On the Abbey, 56. On the Cronica, see Memorials, 3.vii–xv, 1–73; Antonia Gransden, ‘The “Cronica Buriensis” and the Abbey of St Benet of Hulme’, Historical Research 36 (1963): 77–82.

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MS 850 compiler’s decision to preface the Cronica with the metrical vita therefore implies (via textual juxtaposition) some degree of continuity between the events recorded in the two texts. A structurally different yet historiographically comparable use of Edmund’s life appears in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 251, which integrates Edmund’s life into England’s history.34 This early fifteenth-century Bury St Edmunds manuscript contains a Latin chronicle of England from Brutus to Richard II, into which the historian has inserted a lengthy vita of Edmund at its proper point, set off from the rest of the narrative by a nine-line illuminated S and running headers (fols. 34r–42v). Condensed from the Bodley life and extending through the 1340s, this vita pauses the manuscript’s diachronic account of England’s past to recount a full if highly abbreviated story of Edmund’s life and afterlife. While Edmund’s vita plays a different function in each manuscript, all locate him within an instrumental context that emphasizes his shaping of monastic identity. The fifth vita, the ‘vita et passio abbreviata’ found in Abbot Curteys’s register,35 is best understood within the context of the abbot’s career. As John Elston demonstrates, Lydgate’s abbot had long been involved in defending his order and upholding his abbey’s jurisdictional privileges against high-ranking nobles and ecclesiasts, even Archbishop Chichele.36 This defense included strategic deployment of written records and literary propaganda. Curteys consolidated the abbey’s archives during conflicts with the city, and his registers (BL, Add. MSS 7096 and 14848) reveal ‘a shrewd and competent administrator who recognized the importance of establishing truth by scrupulous documentary analysis’.37 Several of Lydgate’s poems, some (perhaps all) commissioned by Curteys, participate in these defenses of monastery and order by engaging in a poetic of exemption. The Legend of Austin at Compton, with its emphasis on tithes, may respond to an anti-tithe proposition at the Council of Basel,38 while ‘De Profundis’, written at Curteys’s request, implicitly defends the (still monastic) duty of masses for the dead.39 Most overtly, Bury’s cartae versificatae – Middle English poetic summations of Bury’s earliest royal grants – emphasize the abbey’s ancient rights and 34

James, On the Abbey, 57. A detailed manuscript description is available at Parker Library on the Web, http://parkerweb.stanford.edu. 35 BHL 2402; BL, Add. MS 14848, fols. 240r–242r. I cite the Curteys vita from ‘Vita et passio S Edmundi Regis abbreviata et sumpta de prolixa vita ejusdem Sancti’, in Antiquitates S Edmundi Burgi ad annum 1272 perductæ, by John Batteley (Oxford, 1745). 36 Elston, ‘William Curteys’, 20–21, 33, 112–19, 328–34, 338–437; Pantin, Documents, 2.121–24; BL, MS Add. 14848, fols. 133v–134r; Memorials, 3.252–57; Webber, ‘Judas Non Dormit 1–2’; Kathryn A. Lowe, ‘The Poetry of Privilege: Lydgate’s Cartae Versificatae’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 50 (2006): 151–65, at 157–62. 37 Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 139–48, at 139–40; see also Elston, ‘William Curteys’, 29–32 et passim; Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 20–29; Thomson, Archives, 34–40. 38 John Lydgate, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, vol. 1: The Religious Poems, ed. Henry Noble McCracken, EETS e.s. 107 (London: EETS, 1911), 193–206; Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-Bibliography (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1997), 36. 39 Lydgate, Minor Poems, 1.77–84, line 164; Webber, ‘Judas Non Dormit’, 2.83.

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the interdependence of monastery and royalty.40 Unsigned but almost certainly by Lydgate, these cartae are explicitly instrumental in their vernacular dissemination of these valuable documents. These poetic cartae return us to Curteys’s defensive use of Edward, for they are recorded in his Add. 14848 register alongside the original Latin charters and the abbreviated vita. This cluster of documents asserts Bury St Edmunds’ ancient status and most hotly defended rights. As claimed in the headnote to the charters on fol. 243r and as Kathryn Lowe has shown, these charters and Lydgate’s versifications provided the abbey with concrete evidence of its franchise and independence from episcopal oversight.41 What has not been noted is how the ‘vita et passio abbreviata’, immediately preceding these charters, enhances their value: it contextualizes these rights and elaborates Bury’s prestige beyond them. The vita’s importance is marked visually. It opens with a historiated initial depicting a crowned Edmund being shot full of arrows, an image that fuses holy passio and instrumental text into a single graph figuring hagiography’s historical power.42 Omitting the famous story of the wolf and Edmund’s head, the hagiographer decenters the cult’s miraculous aspects in favor of the political and economic growth of the community that served his shrine.43 He emphasizes the construction of the first church at Bedricesworth and the pomp of Edmund’s relic translation, details Cnut’s introduction of Benedictinism, and highlights Bury’s long-held exemption from episcopal oversight.44 The vita also claims conversion-era origins for the abbey, stating that Sigeberht, the East Anglian king who exchanged crown for tonsure, had constructed for himself a monastery at Bedricesworth, and that Edmund’s abbey was built on the same site.45 Assimilating Sigeberht to Bury’s history, the vita claims that Bury had long been the site of regular monastic life, such that Cnut’s Benedictine foundation returned the community to its monastic origins. This short vita makes Curteys’s investment in Edmund clear: he is the focal point for Bury’s legal body, he accepts the devotion of kings and bishops alike, and he protects thaumaturgically his community’s ancient immunities. The vita’s emphases tie it not only to the subsequent charters in the register, but also to 40 BL, Add. MS 14848, fols. 243r–246v, printed in Memorials, 3.215–37. On the register, see Thomson, Archives, 135–38. Studies include Lowe, ‘Poetry of Privilege’; Summit, Memory’s Library, 23–72; Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 148–50; Webber, ‘Judas Non Dormit’, 2.81–91; Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (London: British Library, 2004), 57–61. 41 BL, MS Add. 14848, fol. 243r; Lowe, ‘Poetry of Privilege’; see also Webber, ‘Judas Non Dormit’, 1.350 and n. 48. 42 On the relationship of the historiated initial (the register’s only figural representation) to other Bury illuminations, see Nicolas J. Rogers, ‘Fitzwilliam Museum MS 3-1979: A Bury St Edmunds Book of Hours and the Origins of the Bury Style’, in England in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987), 240–41. 43 ‘Vita et passio abbreviata’, 124. 44 Ibid., 124, 126–27, 127–30. 45 Ibid., 126–27; HE, 3.18 (pp. 266–68). Bede does not locate Sigeberht’s monastery at Bedricesworth.

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Curteys’s consolidation of Bury’s traditional rights. Elsewhere in the register, Curteys imagines Edmund as still miraculously intervening in monastic affairs. For instance, the register implies that the murder of a man who had wronged the abbey was the result of Edmund’s vengeance, while throughout the records of his conflict with the Archdeacon of Sudbury, Curteys emphasizes Edmund’s personal involvement.46 Together, and when read alongside the other poetry Curteys commissioned of Lydgate, vita and register hint at the kind of vita Edmundi Curteys may have expected Lydgate to write: one that defends long-held freedoms, emphasizes institutional history, and imagines Edmund as integrally bound to the corporate body. If Curteys had such expectations, they were not unreasonable. The five vitae Edmundi establish the sort of monastic chronotope and instrumental approach we see in other monasteries’ redeployment of their patron saints, such as the Wilton poet’s use of Edith’s corpse, Bradshaw’s portrayal of Werburgh’s heritage, or St Albans’ renewal of interest in its martyr’s cult. As Clark demonstrates, the monks revivified Alban’s hagiographic dossier in the fifteenth century, drafting sermons, copying older vitae, and writing three new ones to confirm the abbey’s position during conflicts with the town and to affirm institutional identity within the cloister.47 Like these other lives, the Bury texts not only situate Edmund precisely in England’s past, but they also emphasize his utility for asserting political rights. This is not to deny these vitae’s devotional potential; the musical evidence for his liturgical celebrations, for instance, suggests that Edmund’s status as king was also integral to his spiritual role in the community’s life.48 These vitae nevertheless do emphasize Edmund’s value for forging continuities within the tempus, a historicizing approach to Edmund’s cult that Lydgate largely resists. Heterochronicity in Edmund and Fremund and the Harley Miniatures Compared with the Bury St Edmunds vitae and contemporary vernacular hagiography, Edmund and Fremund seems temporally unstable. On the one hand, it makes little attempt to locate Edward’s life and reign within English history. Hinguar and Ubba do invade, but Lydgate does not contextualize that invasion within the other Danish incursions of the ninth century, as do chroniclers like Robert of Gloucester and hagiographers like the SEL ‘Edmund’ writer.49 The legend of Fremund, opening Book Three, is equally dehistoricized and the subse46 47

BL, Add. MS 14848, fols. 185r, 284r, 285r, 286v; Elston, ‘William Curteys’, 329, 422, 427, 429. James G. Clark, ‘The St Albans Monks and the Cult of St Alban: The Late Medieval Texts’, in Alban and St Albans: Roman and Medieval Architecture, Art and Archaeology, ed. Martin Henig and Phillip Lindley (Leeds: British Archaeological Association, 2001). 48 Lisa Colton, ‘Music and Identity in Medieval Bury St Edmunds’, in St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint, ed. Anthony Bale (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), esp. 90–93, 102–3. 49 Robert of Gloucester, Chronicle, 5300–5306. The SEL ‘Edward’ spends twenty-odd lines – one-fifth of its length – detailing the ravages of Hinguar and Ubba before the Danes confront

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quent miracula are largely unrelated to Bury’s past. This lack of interest in both Anglo-Saxon and institutional history effectively untethers Edmund from the monastic chronotope. Lydgate, on the other hand, does not affix Edmund firmly within the iconic chronotope either, for the miracula sometimes reference Bury history and Edmund at times aids his community. The Harley pictorial cycle (on yet a third hand) is clearly invested in monastic concerns, generating another layer of spatio-temporal tension. At stake in this heterochronic interplay is the locus of Edmund’s praesentia: does Edmund’s thaumaturgical virtus emanate from his shrine, under the abbey’s control, or does it manifest from Edmund’s position in the aevum? This question is crucial to the king–saint relationship the poem constructs. Under the former scenario, the Bury monks must intervene between saint and king; in the latter case, Henry accesses Edmund’s power directly through the mediation of Lydgate’s poetry. I explore this chronotopic indeterminacy’s contribution to Lydgate’s poetics in the next section; here, I show how it affects the poem’s ahistoricity, its portrayal of Edmund’s praesentia, and its construction of the king–saint–monastery dynamic. Although they do not dominate the poem, many passages in Edmund and Fremund do echo the Latin vitae to imagine Edmund’s virtus and the monastery’s prestige to be intimately tied. The most explicit instance presenting Bury as mediator between Henry and Edmund falls in the poem’s second prologue. The ‘chapleyns’ had ‘conceyue[d] in ther opynyoun’ that Bury, as ‘an hous of his [Henry’s] fundacion’ is to ‘synge ay for him and preie’ (76, 78, 64, 65) that the holy martir which restith in that place Shal to the kyng be ful proteccioun Ageyn alle enmies, be vertu and grace, And for his noblesse procure and purchase, For to rassemble, by tryumphal victory, To his fadir most notable of memory. (lines 79–84)

In exchange for Bury’s intercession with Edmund, Henry is hoped to ‘Been to that chirch diffence and protectour’ in order ‘Them to releue ageyn al wordly shoures’ (86, 90). In this patronal relationship, Henry is indebted to the Bury monks for their prayers, which will result in Edmund’s heavenly aid for Henry’s political and martial welfare. Henry, in return, supports the abbey against ‘wordly’ detractors. Lydgate’s economic language (‘procure and purchase’) emphasizes Bury’s necessary intermediation, while calling Edmund the ‘martir which restith in that place’ foregrounds Bury’s possession of the saint’s relics. Edmund and Fremund ends similarly; the refrain of the poem’s final prayer exhorts the saint to ‘Pray for then­herytour off Ingelond and France’ (3515) while the manuscript’s final stanza requests that Henry, on account of the ‘notable reuerence’ (3611) he holds to Edmund,

Edmund (7–28). Also compare NLA, 2.580–82; Castleford Chronicle, 29220–330; Mannyng, Chronicle, 417–46; Brut, 106/17–107/13; Langtoft, Chronicle, 1.312.

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Beth to his chyrche dyffence and champion, Because yt ys off your ffundacion. (3612–13)

Framing Edmund and Fremund, these passages articulate an ideal relationship among king, saint, and monastery. They imagine Henry’s royal wellbeing to depend upon Edmund’s aid, which is available only through the convent’s petitions. Lydgate does not sustain this institutional emphasis throughout the poem; the Harley pictorial cycle, however, consistently highlights monastic oversight of Edmund’s shrine. Its visual rhetoric of institutional control begins early, in the narratively complex sequence depicting the discovery of Edmund’s head after his martyrdom. The first of those three panels portrays all the seekers as laymen, armed and searching with dogs (fol. 65r); in the second, the head is found by a mixed group of laymen and clerics, with a cleric lifting Edmund’s radiant visage from between the paws of the guarding wolf (fol. 66r); finally, the cleric, assisted only by other clerics, returns Edmund’s head to his body (fol. 67v). This gradual shift from an all-lay to all-religious cast of devotees, and the clerics’ exclusive contact with the saintly corpse, establishes a visual norm that continues throughout the miracula, identifying saint and religious community as coextensive. Edmund’s praesentia is thereafter represented by his shrine.50 One might argue that the consistent lexis of this visual relic discourse is simply a function of the medium. How could the artists visualize sempiternality, after all? But such a suggestion fails to account for occasions where the miniatures do depict Edmund in his heavenly splendor.51 The infrequency of such depictions, coupled with the frequency with which the shrine metonymically represents the saint, indicates a deliberate representational strategy to anchor the idea of Edmund to his shrine. The consistent presence of clerics with the shrine then reinforces the monastic priorities underlying this pattern of imagery. In asserting the Bury monks’ governance of Edmund’s reliquary, the Harley miniatures present a key presumption of the monastic chronotope: the saint’s praesentia is fixed in his or her shrine, and monastic possession of that shrine makes the monks gatekeepers of the saint’s virtus. Although such ideology was always part of monastic hagiography, institutions’ desire to assert control over saints’ remains became increasingly common in the later Middle Ages, for that control established the monasteries’ necessity in a spiritual economy increasingly driven by diverse loci of sanctity: altars, images, new saints, and of course the Host.52 In the late medieval pilgrim’s experience at a shrine, monastic shrinekeepers wielded increasing control – architecturally, liturgically, and interpersonally – over who could interact with a saint’s relics, when, and how.53 As Malo details, these relic 50

After this point, fols. 100v, 106r, 108v, 109r, 110v, 112v, 113v, 114v, 115r, 117r; earlier, fols. 4v, 9r. Fols. 68v and 117r emphasize Edmund’s presence within the tomb. Of the miracula’s seventeen miniatures, ten focus on Edmund’s shrine. 51 See fols. 102v and 103v, where Edmund appears glorified to Egelwyn and Sweyn. 52 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, esp. 89–205. See also Clark, ‘Selling the Holy Places’, 24–32. 53 Ben Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 81–91, 96–99; Robyn Malo, The Pardoner’s Relics (And Why They Matter the Most)’, Chaucer

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custodians were crucial components of relic discourse, constructing both material and textual representations of the saints’ shrine-grounded praesentia.54 Because relic discourse establishes saint and shrine as coterminous, both relic custodians and the metaphors they control locate the saint within the monastery’s spatiotemporal orbit, as is true of the Harley miniatures’ visual relic discourse. In turn, when Lydgate eschews standard relic discourse, he also rejects the accompanying monastic chronotope. In any saint’s life, one would anticipate this fusion of saint and institution to occur most strongly in the miracula, as is true of the Wilton Chronicle, Bradshaw’s Werburge, and Edmund’s Bodley vita. Edmund and Fremund’s miracle stories, however, avoid co-locating Edmund and shrine under Bury St Edmunds governance. The miracula’s eight episodes are drawn from Bodley 240, but are not recounted in the order recorded there (or elsewhere).55 Lydgate gives dates for none except the first (Sweyn’s death) and the last (Baldwin’s 1095 translation of Edmund’s relics), and he neither writes Bury’s history through Edmund’s miracles nor fixes these events (with one exception) within England’s past.56 In Edmund’s late medieval vitae, certain events are inevitably narrated to cast Bury and Edmund as inseparable: Edmund’s first relic translation from Hoxne to Bury, the early discovery of his incorruption, Cnut’s refoundation of Bury, Baldwin’s translation of Edmund’s undecayed corpse into the new Norman church. Lydgate narrates only the last, in truncated form. This historical silence is accompanied by geographical vagueness, remarkable after Books One and Two’s careful naming of key sites.57 Whereas the Curteys vita insists on the unity of Bedricesworth and Bury, using a shared locale to assert corporate continuity,58 Edmund and Fremund so lightly references Bury in the third book that it is not clear whether the earliest miracles occur there.59 Although the reader is not likely to assume they happened elsewhere, Lydgate’s decision not to include these standard events focuses the miracula away from institutional concerns. Review 43 (2008): 82–102, at 86–89; Cynthia Hahn, ‘Seeing and Believing: The Construction of Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints’ Shrines’, Speculum 72 (1997): 1079–106, at 1099–101. 54 Malo, Relics and Writing, 90–98. 55 For example, the story of the thieves who steal from Edmund’s first church and are executed precipitously by the bishop, originally recorded in Abbo’s Vita, accordingly appears early in Bodley 240 (NLA 2.594–96); Lydgate, however, has made it the fifth miracle (3249–90). He also mentions Edward the Confessor in the sixth miracle (3325–28, 3335), but that is followed by the brief sojourn of Edmund’s shrine in London during one period of Danish invasions (3366–451). Lydgate, it is clear, is little concerned with temporal plausibility. James I. Miller, Jr., ‘Lydgate the Hagiographer as Literary Artist’, in The Learned and the Lewed: Studies in Chaucer and Medieval Literature, ed. Larry D. Benson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974) argues for these miracles’ formal rather than diachronic unity. 56 That exception is the slaying of Sweyn, discussed below. Lydgate does mention Edward the Confessor’s grant of Mildenhale, but only in passing (3329–32). 57 Reimer, ‘Unbinding’, 177–82. 58 ‘Vita et passio abbreviata’, 126. 59 References to Bury occur at lines 3294, 3453, 3464. Unplaced miracles include those of Sweyn (2901–3157), Sheriff Leofstan (3165–220), and others who challenged Edmund’s freedoms (3221–90).

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The different chronotopic priorities of Lydgate’s poem and the Harley miniatures can be seen by comparing their treatment of the thieving knights miracle. Knyhtes fyue, off malice and rauyne, Ageyn the ffredam off Edmund ful coupable, Haberyowned and in platis fyne, Entred his court, took hors out off his stable, With swerdis drawe to shewe hemsylff uengable, Lyst any man wolde make resistence, Ladde forth the pray bextort violence. But sodenly thus with hem it stood, Or they passyd the boundis off the gate, Trauayled with furye, and echon wex wood. Repented affter, offred up mayl and plate, Confessyd, assoiled, in cronycle set the date, Euer afftir off hool affeccion, Hadde to the martir gret deuocion. (3221–34)

Using the nouns ‘Edmund’ and ‘martir’ alongside the two personal pronouns in line 3224 and without any reference to shrine or monastery, Lydgate makes the saint himself, not his relics or community, the only possible wronged party. In the first miniature, on the other hand, the knights lead the stolen horses out from the abbey gates, menacing with their swords the protesting monks behind (fol. 108r). In the poem, the knights’ restitution has no explicit object beyond the ‘martir’ to whom they afterward had ‘gret deuocion’. The second miniature, however, shows the breeches-clad knights kneeling before Edmund’s shrine while the abbot, dressed in pontificals, scourges the first of the five (fol. 108v). The two versions of this miracle also prioritize different ethical outcomes. Lydgate emphasizes the knights’ spiritual regeneration in their personal ‘affeccion’ and ‘deuocion’ for Edmund, whereas in the miniatures the thieves make restitution to Bury’s corporate body. While the paired miniatures reveal the silences within Lydgate’s abbreviatio, poem and miniatures read in conjunction suggest that spiritual renewal, brought about by Edmund’s virtus, properly subordinates the layperson to monastic governance. The rare occasions when Lydgate does assimilate praesentia, shrine, and convent in the miracula primarily serve to accentuate his overall pattern of abbreviatio and indirection on the matter. He explicitly locates Edmund in his shrine on only three occasions (3304–6, 3419, 3451),60 though he does cast several of the monks’ prayers as a necessary means to a miraculous end. When the Flemish man tried to bite a piece from Edmund’s shrine, for instance, the ‘couent kam, praying the seynt off grace’ (3244) before he could be freed; monastic prayers are similarly needful to restore the Dane Osgoth’s sanity (3340–46).61 Such miracles affirm a mediating role for the monastic body between Edmund and his devotees (and detractors) 60

In the Extra Miracles, not included in the Harley manuscript, this co-location becomes more prominent: Malo, Relics and Writing, 68. 61 Ibid., 75–79.

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without casting the monastery as sole mediators. For instance, the Bury monks’ intercessory efficacy is quietly sidelined when the sheriff Leofstan tries to seize a woman who has taken refuge at Edmund’s shrine. The convent intercedes with Edmund on the woman’s behalf, but the miracle privileges her voice over theirs, attributing six lines of direct address prayer to her and only one to the convent (3191–94, 3196, 3205–6). Such silences are crucial, contributing to the poem’s chronotopic instability and inhibiting the easy co-location of saint, shrine, and abbey. Lydgate’s tendency to dissociate Edmund from his shrine, and the miniatures’ tendency to fuse the two, is important because it affects the relationship the manuscript imagines between Edmund and Henry. Although we have examined how the ‘chapelyns’ in the second prologue envision a triangular interaction among king, saint, and abbey based on Edmund’s enshrined praesentia, Lydgate’s first and dominant model envisions direct, unmediated interaction between the two young rulers. At the end of the first prologue, he introduces the closing antiphon by dislocating Edmund’s virtus from his shrine: To alle men present or in absence Which to seynt Edmund haue deuocion With hool herte and dew reuerence Seyn this anteph[o]ne and this orison Two hundred daies ys grantid off pardoun Write and registred afforn his hooly shryne, Which for our feith suffrede passion Blyssyd Edmund kyng martir and virgyne. (P73–80)

These lines are implicitly addressed to Henry, who had just been compared to Edmund in the previous stanza and who is depicted in the accompanying miniature. Although the pardon itself is firmly attached to Edmund’s enshrined body, Lydgate makes its benefits available to ‘alle men’, whether they be ‘present’ before the shrine or ‘in absence’. Only the ethical state of the petitioner – who must pray ‘With hool herte and dew reuerence’ – determines the availability of Edmund’s grace and the orison’s efficacy. If Henry requests Edmund’s aid with suitable devotion and fervor, the stanza claims, his presence at the shrine is not required. The miniature that follows this stanza, however, configures the triangular rather than the dual king–saint relation (Plate 1). The stanza is written on the top of fol. 4v, with the accompanying miniature below; opposite the stanza, on the top of fol. 5v, appear the Latin antiphon and prayer. King Henry kneels on the left half of the image with his retinue behind him, looking up and right toward Edmund’s tomb and therefore also facing the antiphon and prayer on the opposite page. The miniature represents Edmund’s praesentia as earth-bound through a doubled metonymic substitution: the image stands in for the shrine, and the shrine for Edmund’s relics. This devotional image, both encouraging and enacting Henry’s petitions, thereby renders the Bury-controlled representation of Edmund’s praesentia perpetually present to both the reading king and his prayerful image. The miniature additionally insists upon the mediation of the Bury monks. Two black-robed monks stand to the far right of the tomb; although 190

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they do not intervene between the kneeling Henry and the shrine, they interpose themselves between him and the prayer and antiphon on the opposite page. The miniature therefore tempers the stanza’s claim that anyone who has ‘deuocion | With hool herte and dew reuerence’ can invoke Edmund’s aid directly (P74–75), for it suggests that Henry can best avail himself of Edmund’s aid at his shrine, in the monastic church. Despite this chronotopic dissonance – Lydgate’s stanza representing Edmund within the iconic chronotope, the miniature fixing him within the monastic – the dialogic interplay between the two, within the physical context of Harley 2278, enables yet a third, performative relationship among abbey, saint, and king. Henry, reading the manuscript away from Bury St Edmunds Abbey, is nevertheless constantly in Edmund’s presence, embedded in picture and verse. Just as Henry’s image in the miniature prays unceasingly before Edmund’s shrine, so does Henry the man have Edmund (and the promised indulgence) perpetually available through the medium of the manuscript. Using this two-page spread as a devotional aid, Henry’s prayers would constitute the inscribed promise of image and poem. The book’s mobility thereby makes true both Lydgate’s assertion that Edmund’s blessings are available to Henry, whether ‘present or in absence’ (P73) of Edmund’s shrine, as well as the miniature’s privileging of both shrine and monastic aid. Edmund’s relic custodians now become the manuscript’s creators – Lydgate as poet, Curteys as commissioner, the scribes and limners as craftsmen. They facilitate Henry’s access to Edmund and shape his devotion, ensuring that Henry always venerates Edmund under monastic oversight (as the miniature enacts) even when the king is far from the abbey (as the stanza promises). This dynamic, however, is only available within the extracodicological interplay among the manuscript, its contents, and its reader: only, that is, were Henry to use the codex. On the manuscript page, without the royal performance of veneration, the tensions between poem and image – is Edmund’s power transcendently available, or fixed in his shrine? – remain suspended. This discursive indeterminacy can be traced to Lydgate’s nonstandard use of relic discourse. Such a claim may seem counterintuitive in light of Malo’s recent work on Edmund and Fremund. Using the Harley miniatures to illustrate her point, she argues that the poem’s relic discourse is prototypical: throughout the poem ‘words such as “martir” or even “body” could function as metonyms for a reliquary’.62 If, however, we read poem and miniatures not as two expressions of the same discourse, but as alternative and sometimes divergent narratives, we see that Lydgate’s language rarely assimilates Edmund’s praesentia to his shrine. Although he describes Edmund with the kinds of lapidary metaphors typical (as we saw in Bradshaw’s Werburge) of relic discourse, that imagery gestures toward Edmund’s sempiternality, not his enshrined relics. The aureate prayer that closes the second prologue, for example, uses gemological language to etherealize, not temporalize, Edmund. I suggested earlier that 62

Malo, Relics and Writing, 70–72 et passim, at 70. Malo’s reading of the miracula also emphasizes the way Lydgate’s language does not collapse saint into shrine when read apart from the miniatures.

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Plate 1.  Henry VI prays before Edmund’s shrine, facing both tomb and the indulgenced prayer on the opposite page (BL, Harley MS 2278, fol. 4r–5v).

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such imagery was especially useful for characterizing incorrupt saints because gems commonly figured the perfected, eternal resurrection body as well as saints’ jewelencrusted tombs.63 We also saw how Bradshaw uses this discourse to obscure Werburgh’s decay with her shrine.64 Lydgate, however, curtails this polyvalent potential, as the prayer illustrates: O precious charboncle of martirs alle! O heuenly gemme! saphir of stabilnesse! Thyn heuenly dewh of grace let doun falle Into my penne, encloied with rudnesse. And blissid martir my stile do so dresse Vndir thi wengis of proteccion That I nat erre in my translacion. O richest rube, rubefied with blood! In thi passion, be ful meek suffraunce, Bounde to a tre, lowly whan thow stood, Of arwes sharp suffryng full gret penaunce. Stable as a wal, of herte in thi constaunce. Directe my stile, which haue vndirtake In thi worshepe thi legende for to make. (120–33)

The prayer continues, further characterizing Edmund as ‘amatist with peynes purpureat’ and ‘Emeraud trewe of chastite’ (134, 135). As is true of Bradshaw’s characterization of Werburgh as a ‘diamonde of dignite’ and ‘rutilant saphire of syncerite’ (Werburge 2.318, 321), these jewels’ imperviousness and brilliance point toward Edmund’s virtues and imitatio Christi. However, rather than also gesturing toward the saint’s enshrined presence, as Bradshaw’s lapidary invocations do, Lydgate’s prayer references neither relics nor shrine. Instead, by solely metaphorizing different facets of Edmund’s sanctity – his bloody, painful martyrdom and his chastity – this passage’s relic discourse is unidirectional, gesturing to his spiritual perfections rather than enshrined remains.65 As ‘heuenly gemme! saphir of stabilnesse!’ who in death was ‘Stable as a wal’ in his ‘constaunce’, Edmund enjoys the stasis of the iconic chronotope, the ethical conditions of the passio superseding the spatio-temporal details of his life. The accompanying miniature (fol. 9r), on the other hand, configures this prayer in the terms suggested by Malo, substituting gems and shrine for Edmund’s sempiternality. Depicting a black-robed monk kneeling before Edmund’s shrine, the miniature imagines the prayer addressed not to a transcendent being but to an enshrined relic. In this visual context, the epithets ‘saphir of stabilnesse’ and ‘richest rube’ evoke most readily the red and blue gems that visibly encrust the 63 64 65

See Chapter 2 pp. 82–84. See Chapter 3, pp. 120–21. Compare Lydgate’s use of lapidary discourse in his ‘Ballad at the Reverence of Our Lady’, lines 29, 85, 87, et passim, wherein gems figure Mary’s eternal stasis and perfection: Lydgate, Minor Poems, 1.254–60.

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shrine, orienting Lydgate’s lapidary descriptors toward Edmund’s earthly, shrineenclosed and Bury-governed praesentia. Just as Lydgate’s selective use of the language of relic discourse – largely eschewing opportunities to assimilate saint to shrine – downplays the monastic chronotope, so does his silence about Edmund’s incorruption. Although he follows the martyrdom account with a declaration that God miraculously rejoined Edmund’s head to his decapitated corpse (1987–95), only once, nearly at the end of the poem, does he assert that Edmund ‘lith hool now in his shryne’ (3451). Viewed from one perspective, this obfuscation is remarkable. Incorruption’s ability to figure corporate integrity was so strong in the later Middle Ages that, as we have seen, both the Wilton poet and Bradshaw strove to annex that symbolic potential despite their saints’ decay. Edmund’s reputation for wholeness was untarnished; making use of that reputation would have been simple for Lydgate. Edmund’s undecayed remains were certainly deployed to represent institutional integrity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Antonia Gransden, for instance, has argued that Abbot Baldwin staged Edmund’s 1095 relic translation, with a viewing of Edmund’s corpse, to bolster Bury’s shaky reputation. William  II had earlier revoked certain privileges when he heard rumors that Edmund was no longer completely whole, so Baldwin displayed Edmund’s incorrupt body to prove Bury St Edmunds’ freedom from episcopal and royal interference.66 A hundred years later, under Samson’s abbacy, Edmund’s corpse was again invoked as a metonym for the monastic body. After Edmund’s shrine was damaged in a fire – cause for much finger-pointing within the convent, as Jocelyn of Brakelond tells it – one monk dreamed that Edward’s body lay naked and hungry outside the shrine. Abbot Samson claimed that Edward’s nakedness represented the grumbling of the monks in the face of his internal reforms, while the convent asserted that it signified the abbot’s despoiling of their long-held customs.67 Despite the discord, both sides shared the belief that Edmund’s mistreated corpse figured a corporate body that ought to be well tended and unified.68 Edmund’s incorruption thus had the same potential as Etheldreda’s or Cuthbert’s for figuring institutional integrity and longevity, and Lydgate had several examples, in these earlier accounts and in the recent vitae,69 for using Edmund’s body in this way.

66

Antonia Gransden, ‘The Alleged Incorruption of the Body of St Edmund, King and Martyr’, The Antiquaries Journal 74 (1994): 135–68, at 149–50, 152; Memorials, 1.84–89. 67 Memorials, 1.307–9. On this episode and Edmund’s cult under Samson’s abbacy, see Gransden, History of the Abbey, 94–106. 68 Memorials, 1.312–13. 69 The Bodley vita preserves several such stories: NLA, 2.624–30; Memorials, 1.166–73. See also SimonYarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 49–51. The Curteys vita emphasizes Edward’s incorruption and the punishments that befall doubters, while a contemporary Bury register (CUL, MS Ff.2.29, a register tempus Henry  VI) preserves narratives concerning Edmund’s incorruption amidst accounts of institutional privileges: ‘Vita et passio abbreviata’, 124–25; Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1857), 347–54, at 352–53.

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Viewed within the pattern of Lydgate’s other rhetorical decisions in the poem, however, his near silence on Edmund’s incorruption is unsurprising. When one rejects Clio, one must also avoid incorruption’s time-bridging potential. In downplaying the monastic chronotope, Lydgate accordingly effaces Edmund’s corpse to eliminate the corporeal symbol uniting Edmund’s stasis in the aevum with his tempus-bound remains. Lydgate’s refusal to speak of Edmund’s incorruption reveals the extent of the undecayed body’s historiographic ability to collapse the iconic moment into diachronic time and thus to figure simultaneously sempiternality and historical continuity. Edmund’s incorruption, that is, becomes a potential spanner in Lydgate’s achronic poetic works. Just as Werburgh’s and Edith’s putrefaction destabilizes their hagiographers’ attempts to write institutional history through their relics, so would Edmund’s bodily wholeness disrupt Lydgate’s attempt to disentangle Edmund’s afterlife from Bury St Edmunds’ history. Lydgate initially avoids telling of the discovery of Edmund’s incorruption by simple elision: he does not narrate Edmund’s first translation from Hoxne to Bury.70 Omission only goes so far, however, and the poem concludes with Abbot Baldwin’s 1095 transfer of Edmund’s relics into the new abbey church. In this instance, Lydgate obscures Edmund’s incorruption through a textbook case of relic discourse that rhetorically substitutes shrine for relics: With dreed and reuerence off ryht as they were bounde, Out off a chapel that callyd was rotounde They took the martir on ther shuldres squar And to the shryne deuoutly they it bar. Whych was afforn prouyded for the nonys With clothis off gold arrayed, and perre, And with many ryche precyous stonys Longyng vnto his roial dignyte. Which off his grace and merciful bounte To our requestis shal goodly condescende, Geyn al our enmyes this lond for to dyffende. (3497–507)

Instead of describing Edmund’s miraculously undecayed corpse when the clerics elevate him or gesturing toward his sempiternality, Lydgate focuses on the gold-draped shrine, detailing its encrustation with ‘many ryche precyous stonys’. Lydgate’s relic discourse here occludes the gloriously preserved body with an equally glorious container that manifests Edmund’s enshrined praesentia. Unlike Bradshaw, who uses such a tactic to mask Werburgh’s fragmentary remains, Lydgate actively conceals a powerful corporeal symbol of Edmund’s sanctity and Bury’s authority. This time, however, the cloth-of-gold and jewels also represent Edmund’s ‘roial dignyte’ that can ‘Geyn al our enmyes this lond for to dyffende’ in response to 70 Compare Bodley 240 and the Curteys vita, which both relate the translation at length: NLA, 2.589/16–591/11; ‘Vita et passio abbreviata’, 124.

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‘our requestis’. Edmund’s shrine here figures his ability to intervene in the tempus, for the good of king and commonweal, at the behest of the Bury monks. Reiterating the triangular patronage relationship he both espouses and rejects in the opening prologues, Lydgate foregrounds relic discourse’s ability to ground saintly praesentia under the tempus-bound jurisdiction of monastic shrinekeepers. In so doing, however, he conceals the eschatological promise of Edmund’s incorruption. By substituting for the body a relic discourse that voices monastic ideology, Lydgate here, as with the earlier lapidary prayer, sidesteps the opportunity to fuse iconic and monastic chronotopes through Edmund’s body, the only symbol able to figure simultaneously sempiternal perfections and supradiachronic stability, spiritual virtues and monastic integrity. The final image (fol. 117r) in Harley 2278, on the other hand, performs exactly this co-location of monastic body, incorrupt corpse, and eternal stasis (Plate 2). Falling between lines 3507 and 3508 – between the stanza describing Edmund’s translation and Lydgate’s closing prayer that Edmund aid ‘thenherytour off Ingelond and France’ (3515) – this miniature shows a crowned Edmund lying in his tomb, whole and intact, seemingly asleep. Golden lines radiate from his face, signaling his transcendent presence71 and visually articulating the glorification of his resurrection body; the fabric that endrapes the tomb base also depicts blue clouds from which stream similar golden beams. Fusing Edmund’s ­ethereal praesentia and incorrupt corpse, the miniature also locates the corpse within his shrine, underwriting the miniatures’ visual relic discourse elsewhere in the manuscript. The golden shrine canopy hovers over the open tomb, echoing in color and medium (gold leaf ) the golden rays that articulate Edmund’s heavenly stasis. Surrounding the shrine, much as the shrine encloses Edmund, are the monks and bishops gathered for the translation, echoing Edmund’s glory in their gold-trimmed brocade and golden censers. Visually, they are unified within a static composition: all sight-lines and vectors of motion focus on the shrine. This final image conflates Edmund’s glorified praesentia with both the shrine and the community of Bury monks to imbue the monastic corporation with the saint’s glory and perduring identity. In so doing, the miniature performs the figuring of monastic body in saintly body envisioned by Jocelyn of Brakelond, the Liber Eliensis, and other hagiographers – throwing into sharp contrast Lydgate’s refusal to similarly deploy Edmund’s incorrupt corpse. The Poetic of Shrinekeeping Lydgate’s persistent segregation of the monastic and iconic chronotopes leaves Edmund and Fremund perpetually off-balance, its historical narrative nascent, its institutional priorities muted. These temporal instabilities, highlighted by the 71

Compare fols. 102v and 103v, where similar rays signal Edmund as a heavenly being when he, in the first miniature, appears to the sleeping Egelwyn and, in the second, stabs the sleeping Sweyn.

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Plate 2.  Edmund, lying incorrupt within his tomb, surrounded by Bury monks (BL, Harley MS 2278, fol. 117r).

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miniatures’ consistent monastic emphasis, are not without purpose, however. Through the dialogic play between these spatio-temporal presumptions, Lydgate constructs intimate, even transcendent relationships between Henry and Edmund, himself and Henry, and – most importantly for his aureate poetics – himself and Edmund. Lydgate must de-emphasize Edmund’s life and afterlife in the tempus to depict his own authorial persona as spiritually and poetically productive via Edmund’s sempiternal aid. Lydgate’s downplaying of diachronic history, I suggested earlier, aids the first two books’ Fürstenspiegel. Constructing Edmund as a model for Henry, Lydgate can partially avoid the historiographic contingency that tempers the exemplar’s universal applicability by dissociating Edmund from England’s history. He establishes Edmund’s broad imitative potential, and downplays his status as ninthcentury ruler, by casting Edmund’s virtues as applicable to contemporary failings,72 lauding Edmund’s admirable qualities as a ruler (728–1008), and typing Edmund against classical military figures (951–57). Lydgate’s poetic descriptors also raise Edmund above temporal flux. Symbolizing his God-directed governance in the golden, gem-encrusted scepter (792–98), portraying him as ‘Heuenly of cher’ and ‘lik an heuenly knyht’ (912, 900), and metaphorizing him as ‘the ruby, kyng of stonys alle’ (897), Lydgate co-locates Edmund’s spiritual perfection and royal governance through the language of transcendent stasis. Such imagery reinforces Edmund’s ethical perfection – ‘In him was nothyng for to be amendid’, Lydgate writes (329) – while also underwriting calls to imitation and the typological similarities between him and Henry.73 Even before death, Edmund stands outside the mutability of the tempus. Of course, he ultimately models royal failure (if success as a martyr) when he submits to the Danes, his martyrdom thereby becoming the historically precise event that disrupts Edmund and Fremund’s imitative utility.74 Earlier in the poem, however, Lydgate can hold up Edmund as ‘An exaumplaire and a merour cler’ for the young king by depicting Edmund within a royal iconic moment (339). A different principle governs Lydgate’s partial rejection of the monastic chronotope in Book Three’s miracula. There, by not intertwining Bury St Edmunds’ history with Edmund’s afterlife, Lydgate develops himself and his transcendent poetry as the ideal conduit between Henry and Edmund. Lydgate, enjoying saintly inspiration, becomes a metaphoric relic custodian who, through his verse, mediates effectively between saint and devotees; he largely eschews standard relic discourse within the narrative so that his entire poem can instantiate that discourse. The aureate, rhetorically bejeweled poem becomes a shrine, containing and channeling Edmund’s virtus. Like Edmund, Lydgate’s poetry transcends temporal flux even as his aureate style ultimately replaces – as is true in all relic discourse – the saint himself. 72 73

Winstead, John Capgrave, 127. Sisk, ‘Lydgate’s Problematic Commission’, 354–55; see also Lewis, ‘Edmund of East Anglia’, and Lydgate’s affiliation of Henry and Edmund in lines P52–72 and 92–98. 74 Sisk, ‘Lydgate’s Problematic Commission’, 361–63; Winstead, John Capgrave, 129–31.

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The poem’s chronotopic tension is necessary to this ‘poetic of shrinekeeping’. The relic custodian, as Malo shows and I discussed above, is central to relic discourse’s construction of the shrine as the ultimate locus of the saint’s praesentia; custodians ‘corroborate, even construct, the saint’s efficacy and presence’.75 As such, the relic custodian is a major figure in the monastic chronotope. Not only is he (occasionally she) a key member of the saint’s familia but, controlling contact with the relics and interpreting their significance, he represents monastic control over the saint’s power. Finally, as Malo also hints, relic discourse implicitly constructs the custodian as always, already spiritually perfected, able to access the saint because he is pure rather than (as true of lesser pilgrims) beseeching the saint for aid.76 When the shrinekeeper belongs to a community, this ethical presumption can synecdochically imbue the monastic body with equal virtue. In de-emphasizing the monastic chronotope, however, Edmund and Fremund detaches the relic custodian from these institutional concerns. The custodian still advocates on behalf of the saint’s petitioners, but that dynamic is no longer tied to relics or religious community. ‘Shrinekeeping’, detached from the shrine, becomes a metaphor for any intercessory act, and the shrinekeeper any holy individual who intervenes between saint and populus. Shrinekeeping is therefore an apt descriptor for Lydgate’s poetic project in Edmund and Fremund, for that life (and the manuscript that contains it) substitutes for Edmund’s enshrined praesentia. In the miracula’s narrative, Edmund’s shrinekeeper is the chaplain Egelwyn, whom Lydgate constructs as the ideal relic custodian. Egelwyn emerges paradoxically from Edmund and Fremund’s heterochronicity in the most historicized of the poem’s eight miracula: the story of Sweyn’s death. It is not only the first and longest miracle, but also the most historically precise one, carefully dated (2899, 2904–5, 3153–55) and situated within the events of Æthelred’s reign. Referring to ‘cronycles’, Lydgate claims that, when Sweyn invaded, Æthelred had no ‘force to withstonde his cruel tyrannye’ and so fled to Normandy, leaving England vulnerable to Sweyn’s violence (2910, 2928). This is the only time Lydgate engages in the historical contextualization common to other fifteenth-century lives, so one would expect the following miracle to fall within the monastic chronotope. Scholars have suggested as much, arguing that this miracle upholds the abbey’s longstanding independence;77 a close reading, however, suggests otherwise. Sisk notes that Edmund appears to defend the liberty of the eight and a half hundreds, the administrative unit covering much of western Suffolk and held from the king by the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds since at least Edward the Confessor’s reign.78 While Lydgate’s language of ‘ffredam’ and ‘ffranchise’ (2954) supports this interpretation, the narrative simultaneously resists it. In this instance, the franchise

75 76 77

Malo, Relics and Writing, 90–98, at 92. Ibid., 109–17. Sanok, ‘Saints’ Lives’, 477–78; Sisk, ‘Lydgate’s Problematic Commission’, 365–66; Webber, ‘Judas Non Dormit’, 1.354–55. 78 Sisk, ‘Lydgate’s Problematic Commission’, 365. Lydgate mentions this grant later in the miracula (3331–32).

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is not held by the abbey, and Egelwyn, the only cleric in the story, is not wronged by Sweyn’s taxation. Rather, the Dane asks tribute directly of ‘Estyngland’, identified as the place ‘Wher seynt Edmund whilom was crownyd kyng’ (2960, 2961); in response, ‘The peeple’ of East Anglia ‘Cleymed franchise off Edmund ther patron’ (2962, 2963). When Edmund appears in a vision to Egelwyn and then to Sweyn, the saint similarly intervenes in defense of ‘my peeple’, the East Anglians, and ‘Ther ffranchise’ (3021, 3022; see also 3025–29, 3080). These freedoms are never cast as monastic prerogatives. Moreover, the poem conflates several jurisdictions into this ‘ffranchise’. Freedom from the Danegeld was associated with the liberty of the four crosses (the body of privileges proper to the town of Bury St Edmunds), but here Lydgate extends it to the liberty of the eight and a half hundreds (insofar as ‘Estyngland’ maps better onto the larger jurisdiction).79 Lydgate cannot be accidentally fusing these liberties, for his versification of the Cnut charter clearly states that this taxation right applied to ‘a large myle aboute’ Edmund’s shrine (i.e., the liberty of the four crosses).80 He, and probably every other Bury monk, knew the difference. This miracle also presents the liberty as long predating Sweyn’s reign, and therefore also predating Cnut’s refoundation charters (2962). The rights are instead associated with Edmund’s earlier reign, for Sweyn’s attempted ‘tribut and talliage’ (2955) is inappropriately extended to those lands once ruled by Edmund (2960–61). That is, Edmund and Fremund imagines freedom from the Danegeld as derived from Edmund’s earlier rule, applicable to all the citizens of East Anglia, and not necessarily under the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds’ governance. Close attention to Lydgate’s silences reveals the way that, even within the passage’s seeming legal detail, Lydgate obscures the abbey’s privileged relationship with Edmund. The poem’s most historicized and politically instrumental passage proves spatially, legally, and temporally indefinite, destabilizing standard Bury understandings of the interplay among saints and prerogatives, kings and institution. While Lydgate leaves interpretive room for the reader to conflate Edmund’s rights and Bury’s, any such assumption must be based on longstanding tradition rather than explicit claims. The miracle instead suggests that the hagiographic time-space in which Edmund defends his rights need not be identical with that of the monastery. In focusing this miracle away from Bury’s liberties, Lydgate reconfigures the character of the relic custodian. A shrinekeeper without a monastic corporation, Egelwyn’s intercessory abilities are predicated solely on his ethical status. Here and in the following miracles, where he plays a major role guarding Edmund’s remains, Egelwyn is rarely portrayed as a Bury St Edmunds cleric. Lydgate, significantly 79

On the liberty of the eight and a half hundreds, and its relationship to the liberty of the four crosses, see Elston, ‘William Curteys’, 4–5, 255–56; Gransden, History of the Abbey, 236–38; Robert S. Gottfried, Bury St Edmunds and the Urban Crisis: 1290–1539 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 167–72; Florence E. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs, 2nd ed. (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1989), 138–39, 145–48, 154–55, 160–61, 164–65; M.  D. Lobel, The Borough of Bury St. Edmund’s: A Study in the Government and Development of a Monastic Town (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 2–7. 80 Memorials, 3.218. See the Cnut charter of 1021 × 1023 (S 980) and Memorials, 1.342–44.

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amplifying his role, instead highlights Egelwyn’s personal bond with Edmund, starting with the Sweyn miracle. Calling him the saint’s ‘cheeff cubyculer’ and ‘his chaumberleyn’ (2991, 2992), Lydgate casts Egelwyn as intimately attendant upon Edmund, a privileged position granted because of his spiritual probity: The perfeccion off Ayllewyn was so couth, So renommed his conuersacioun, That many a tyme they spak togidre mouth be mouth Touchynge hyh thynges off contemplacion, Expert ful offte be reuelacion Off heuenly thynges to speke in woordes fewe, Be gostly secretys which God lyst to hym shewe. (3004–10)

This passage, reminiscent of Margery Kempe’s ‘homely’ conversations with Christ, imagines Egelwyn to be of such ‘perfeccion’ that he can enjoy fully mystical ­‘reuelacion | Off heuenly thynges’ as well as a viscerally immediate, ‘mouth be mouth’ chat with Edmund. Moreover, although Egelwyn does pray to Edmund at his shrine, their exchanges ‘mouth be mouth’ and through ‘reuelacion’ presume that Egelwyn’s experience of Edmund not to be limited to the shrine: he also has direct apprehension of ‘gostly secretys’ and Edmund’s glories. The next stanza portrays such a ‘mouth be mouth’ exchange: Edmund manifests his sempiternal praesentia within the world by appearing to Egelwyn with ‘angelik cleernesse’ and a ‘cheer celestiall’ (3012, 3014). Throughout this lengthy miracle and beyond, Egelwyn’s spiritual perfections manifest as effective and saint-aided speech, his ‘renommed … conuersacioun’ (3005). The betaxed East Anglians in the Sweyn miracle in hym [Egelwyn] hadde so gret beleue Thoruh his request Edmund sholde hem releue. (3002–3)

Their trust in his intervention is not misfounded. When the saint appears to the prayerful Egelwyn in a dream, Edmund names Egelwyn ‘Myn enbassiat’ to Sweyn, telling him to exhort the Dane to respect the franchise: ‘For yiff thow do’, Edmund tells Egelwyn, ‘God and I ther damagis shal redresse’ (3036, 3037, 3038). Even though Sweyn ignores Egelwyn’s message from Edmund (3049), Edmund takes vengeance on the tyrant – not because Sweyn impinged on Edmund’s jurisdictions but, these lines suggest, because Egelwyn embraced his role as Edmund’s ambassador. Lydgate thereby imagines the famous scene in which Edmund runs Sweyn through with a spear as determined by Egelwyn’s position as shrinekeeper: his effective intercession, his ‘renommed … conuersacioun’, and his role as ‘enbassiat’. Lydgate continues to privilege Egelwyn’s verbally efficacious shrinekeeping throughout the miracula. In the miracle of Osgoth, his recommendation that the monks take the insane Dane to Edmund’s shrine ultimately enables the cure (3354–59). He is the sole caretaker of Edmund’s remains on their eventful journey to and from London and, when Edmund prevents the Bishop of London from translating his relics to St Paul’s, Egelwyn’s prayer, spoken ‘with humble 202

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affeccion’ (3413), allows him to lift Edmund’s previously immovable reliquary and return it to Bury St Edmunds. In conflating Egelwyn’s perfected piety, role as shrinekeeper, and productive speech, Lydgate crafts him not as a simple chaplain but as a figure for himself as hagiographer and poet. Like Egelwyn, Lydgate’s privileged relationship with Edmund imbues his speech with the saint’s virtus, making Lydgate’s verse, like Egelwyn’s intercession, spiritually generative. Lydgate’s poetic prayers, especially in the opening prologues and final epilogue, establish this poet–saint relationship. They construct Edmund and Fremund as a supratemporal, saint-inspired articulation of Edmund’s virtus and grace, ensuring the efficacy of Lydgate’s own textual intercession for ‘thenherytour off Ingelond and France’ (3515) and substituting poem for both shrine and saintly corpse. In the first prayer, the second prologue’s lapidary invocation of Edmund discussed earlier, Lydgate imagines his own aureate, timeless poetic ‘stile’ (132) as manifesting Edmund’s sempiternal praesentia within the world. This conflation of aureate poetics with holy perfection begins when Lydgate rejects Clio in favor of Edmund’s ‘grace’ ‘To forthre my penne’ (12, 13). While this image initially appears simply to substitute saint for classical muse, Lydgate extends the trope in his gemological invocation of Edmund’s sempiternality, where he conflates his poetic ‘stile’ with Edmund’s persistence in the aevum: O precious charboncle of martirs alle! O heuenly gemme! saphir of stabilnesse! Thyn heuenly dewh of grace let doun falle Into my penne, encloied with rudnesse. And blissid martir my stile do so dresse Vndir thi wengis of proteccion That I nat erre in my translacion. (120–26)

As I suggested earlier, this prayer’s gems figure Edmund’s transcendent stasis, particularly captured in the epithet ‘saphir of stabilnesse’. The carbuncle, however, possesses an array of additional significations. As a deep red stone, it can signal Edmund’s bloody martyrdom (as line 120 suggests); as self-luminescent, it also figures divine inspiration.81 When Lydgate asks Edmund to grace his pen with his ‘heuenly dewh’ and so ‘dresse’ his ‘stile’, he invokes the saint as both ‘charboncle’ and ‘saphir’ – as symbol of heavenly inspiration and eternal perfection. The prayer continues in this vein: Lydgate requests Edmund as bloodied ‘richest rube’ again to ‘Directe my stile’ and to ‘Send doun of grace thi licour aureate’ to aid his hagiographic project (127, 132, 141). His pen drips Edmund’s ‘heuenly

81

Anglo-Norman Lapidaries, ed. Paul Studer and Joan Evans (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Édouard Champion, 1924), 49/518–24, 110, 153/9–10; ‘The Peterborough Lapidary’, in English Mediaeval Lapidaries, ed. Joan Evans and Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS o.s. 190 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 82; John Lydgate and Benedict Burgh, Secrees of Old Philisoffres, ed. Robert Steele, EETS e.s. 66 (London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894), line 444.

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dewh’, transforming the celestial liquor into his aureate words on the page.82 These lines imagine Lydgate’s poetics, the formal elements he employs for translating Edmund’s life from his Latin sources, to be themselves the textual manifestations of Edmund’s own sublime perfections. Edmund’s sanctity does more than inspire the poem; it inheres in it. Edmund and Fremund itself becomes the shrine that contains and mediates Edmund’s praesentia. Lydgate’s lapidary discourse, I argued earlier, points heavenward rather than shrine-ward; simultaneously, I now suggest, these lapidary terms also instantiate a more refined form of relic discourse wherein Lydgate’s poetry actualizes Edmund’s virtus. Lydgate engages in what Seeta Chaganti deems a ‘poetics of enshrinement’ in which ‘inscription and performance existed dialectically’.83 Because prayer is always a performative utterance, these stanzas voicing Lydgate’s devotion also enact the saint’s indwelling, verbally ‘enshrining’ the saint’s power; the elevated language Lydgate uses, like the gold and jewels that decorate a shrine, stand in (as in all relic discourse) for the saint’s absent remains. This poetic encapsulation of Edmund’s praesentia is therefore predicated on his transcendent persistence in the aevum, for Lydgate’s poetry can only manifest Edmund’s glories from the spiritual plane. Lydgate has therefore minimized references to Edmund’s incorruption, his tomb, and the monastic chronotope so that his own poem can replace the shrine and he can thereby become Edmund’s principal shrinekeeper. More than a work of devotion or the fulfillment of Curteys’s commission, Edmund and Fremund becomes the earthly manifestation of Edmund’s virtus, simultaneously evidence of his supratemporal praesentia and that praesentia itself. What Lydgate performs rhetorically in this opening prayer, he enacts structurally later in the poem. In the two passages where (had Lydgate followed Bodley 240’s example) one would expect a description of Edmund’s incorrupt remains – after the first interment of his corpse (2010–30) and during Abbot Baldwin’s 1095 relic translation (3501–7) – Lydgate places his own aureate prayers. The first instance, lines 2031–51, echoes the earlier lapidary orison in requesting the ‘glorious martir’ to ‘Qwyke my penne! Enlumyne my rudnesse!’ as the poet tackles the life of Fremund (2031, 2033). Lydgate again prays for and performs the indwelling of Edmund’s glory in his poetry, these stanzas continuing the earlier poetic of enshrinement. The second prayer, immediately following the description of Edmund’s shrine, extends Lydgate’s saint-infused poetry to Henry’s aid. This petition – set off from the preceding narrative by the intervening miniature on fol. 117r and by a formal change, from rhyme royal to eight-line stanzas with refrain – enacts that intercession within a rhetorically elaborated prayer that mimics poetically the gold and gem-encrusted shrine just described. These eight stanzas are a rhetorical tour de force, showcasing Lydgate’s control over his poetic style and his ability to elaborate form in support of matière. The use of only three rhymes throughout the 64-line 82

Compare Meyer-Lee’s reading of a similar passage in Life of Our Lady: Meyer-Lee, ‘Emergence of the Literary’, 328–30. 83 Chaganti, Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary, 7; see further 40–45.

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poem; the numerical repetition of eight stanzas of eight lines each; the unobtrusive interplay of native English words with French or Latin-derived terms; the heavy presence of anaphora, asyndeton, parataxis, and extended metaphors; all without taxing the syntactic clarity of the poetic line: this embedded prayer-poem is an example of Lydgate’s aureate poetics at its best. The prayer’s object, however, has shifted: Lydgate no longer seeks aid for his versification, but instead asks Edmund to intervene for ‘thenherytour off Ingelond and France’ (3515), as the refrain emphasizes. Although he had earlier imagined the Bury monks to intercede on Henry’s behalf (65, 77), all Lydgate’s prior prayers (e.g., in the second prologue, at the end of Book Two) sought aid for his poetry – and these prayers proved efficacious, as the existence of Edmund and Fremund witnesses. In this closing prayer, Lydgate cashes in the saint-based poetic equity he had built up with his readers. If Lydgate’s poetry is inspired by Edmund, then his versified prayer to the saint will be heard; if Edmund, invoked by Lydgate, helped write this poem, then so will Edmund, again invoked by Lydgate, assist Henry and England. By imagining his aureate poetics as not only saint-infused but also spiritually efficacious, Lydgate establishes Edmund and Fremund as a powerful intermediary between Edmund and Henry. Just as Henry need not stand at Edmund’s shrine to capitalize on the indulgenced prayer, he need not travel to Bury St Edmunds to encounter Edmund’s sanctity and power. He can hold a poem endewed with Edmund’s grace, produced with his aid, and voiced in an aureate diction as otherworldly as Edmund’s heavenly self. This poetic of enshrinement transforms Lydgate into a shrinekeeper like Egelwyn: a holy monk who, conversant with the martyr, mediates between reader and saint. The resultant ‘poetic of shrinekeeping’ thereby shifts focus from the performative instantiation of saintly virtus (as in my adaptation of Chaganti’s ‘poetic of enshrinement’) to the ethical orientation of the poet, for Lydgate’s devotional probity is evidenced by his saint-animated poetry’s efficacy. The importance of Egelwyn’s holy communication becomes clear. Just as Egelwyn speaks ‘mouth be mouth’ with Edmund (3006), so does Lydgate write with the saint’s ‘licour aureate’ (141); just as Egelwyn the ‘enbassiat’ (3036) takes Edmund’s message to the (disbelieving, condemned) Sweyn, so does Lydgate’s poem convey Edmund’s eternal verities, lending weight to the exemplary passages of Books One and Two. And, just as Egelwyn’s intercession between Edmund and the world is successful, so are Lydgate’s prayers to Edmund fruitful. Contained within a codex owned by the king, Edmund and Fremund can perform within Henry VI’s world that which Egelwyn performs within the miracle narrative: efficacious spiritual intercession voiced by a privileged shrinekeeper. Advocating for both king and commonweal, Edmund and Fremund becomes both prayer and promise of fulfillment, witness to and manifestation of Edmund’s virtus. These similarities with Egelwyn also construct other shrinekeepers’ ethical bodies, developing a claustral ethic that indicates, if hesitantly, the Bury corporation to be ideally constituted by well-governed individual bodies. For example, in the miracle of the impious Dane Osgoth who disdains Edmund and becomes mad as a result, it is the convent’s ‘hooly praier and deuout oryson’ (3341), encouraged 205

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by Egelwyn and Edward the Confessor (in a cameo appearance), that restores the Dane to health.84 Such convent-aided miracles, read through the example of Egelwyn, hint that the monastic familia’s successful oversight of Edmund’s shrine is predicated on individual monks’ spiritual probity. Egelwyn and Lydgate thereby gesture toward a different construction of Bury monasticism than found in the Curteys vita: Bury as a collection of Edmund’s individual devotees, not a corporation intent of accruing privileges and freedoms. Moreover, the Egelwyn miracles suggest that a direct saint–devotee relationship can enhance individual monks’ institutional roles. Much as the Bulkeley ballad closing the printed version of Werburge constructs monastic renovation as possible only through Werburgh’s assistance, so does Edmund and Fremund imply that Bury monasticism is best constituted through personal devotion to Edmund. This cloistered ethics does not govern the whole miracula, let alone the entire poem, nor does it dislodge the dialogic tension Lydgate maintains elsewhere. Nevertheless, Egelwyn’s example momentarily envisions the monastic and the supratemporal as complementary, imagining a scenario in which ‘thynges … celestial’ can indeed serve the needs of ‘thyngis temporal’ (1614, 1612). Although Edmund and Fremund only tentatively attributes shrinekeeping status to the Bury monks, that transfer is wholeheartedly completed by the Harley pictorial cycle. The linchpin panel falls at fol. 9r, the image of (presumably) Lydgate before Edmund’s shrine that accompanies the lapidary prayer analyzed above. Gray-haired and tonsured, kneeling before the shrine with hands clasped prayerfully, his gazed fixed on the golden canopy atop the shrine base, the monk’s posture declares his humble devotion to Edmund, while his location – inside the metal feretory screen, on the shrine’s steps – signifies his intimacy with the saint. The relic custodian qualities suggested by this figure’s position can be transposed to the current Bury corporation through two visual devices. First, fol. 9r’s shrine probably portrays Edmund’s fifteenth-century shrine.85 This miniature’s mimesis signals that this is a contemporary monk, thereby extending Egelwynlike shrinekeeping qualities into the present. Second, fol. 9r’s monk wears black Benedictine robes; this unsurprising visual detail unites the Bury monks across the manuscript. The artists typically clothe their subjects in grisaille attire, so the Benedictines’ stark black robes leap out in contrast, punctuating the pictorial cycle at crucial moments.86 Like Lydgate, Egelwyn is easily identified by his black robe,

84 85

Other examples fall at EF, 3189, 3195–96, 3244, 3342–45. Nicholas Rogers, ‘The Bury Artists of Harley 2278 and the Origins of Topographical Awareness in English Art’, in Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Economy, ed. Antonia Gransden, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 20 (London: BAA, 1998), 223–24 suggests that the shrine on fols. 4v and 9r represents Edmund’s shrine as it stood in the 1430s and 1440s. See also John Crook, ‘The Architectural Setting of the Cult of St Edmund at Bury, 1095–1539’, in Gransden, Bury St Edmunds: Medieval Art, 39–42. 86 e.g., Egelwyn’s confrontation of Sweyn, fol. 102v; the knights stealing from the abbey, fol. 108r; Egelwyn’s travels with Edmund’s shrine, fol. 112v.

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tonsure, and proximity to Edmund’s shrine,87 visual details also true of nearly all the cycle’s Bury monks: those mediating between Henry and the indulgenced prayer (fol. 4v), those presenting the manuscript to Henry (fol. 6r), and those wronged by the thieving knights (fol. 108r).88 This aesthetic uniformity not only affiliates all the miniatures’ monks into a transtemporally stable unit; shared Benedictine garb also appropriates the black-robed Egelwyn’s and Lydgate’s ethical probity to all the Bury monks, those pictured within the miniatures and those who wear Benedictine habit and venerate Edmund in the 1420s abbey. Moreover, because the pictorial equivalent of collective nouns like ‘convent’ is always a group of individual monks, those repeating black garments also complete the poem’s tentative suggestion that the monastic body is not an impersonal corporation but a collective of singular creatures united in veneration of, and blessing by, Edmund. This synthetic construction of the Bury corporation proves beneficial to the abbey in several ways. In the immediate context of Harley 2278’s presentation to Henry, it envisions the entire convent as mediating between saint and king. If all Bury monks share in the virtuous protection of Edmund’s praesentia, and if the manuscript is indeed (as fol. 6r’s presentation miniature claims) a gift from convent to Henry, then the codex becomes the ultimate expression of monastic intervention between abbey and crown. Any time the young king invokes Edmund’s aid, he does so only with Bury’s help. And in exchange for monastic intercession, the second prologue and closing prayer remind Henry, the king ought to prove a benevolent patron. In this way, the manuscript’s miniatures displace the privileged intercessory role Lydgate created for himself, transferring that ability to the community so that the book itself can remind Henry of his debt to Bury St Edmunds Abbey. Transforming Lydgate’s transcendent poetics into a vehicle for institutional promotion, the codex also exposes the way Lydgate’s saint-inspired aureation does, and does not, engage fifteenth-century concerns about monastic culture. Many critics have read Lydgate’s development of the sublime literary as a response to royal and ecclesiastical pressures on abbey and order.89 Lydgate’s aureate poetic becomes a ‘potential sacral power wielded by an authoritative English poet … and marshaled in defense of his own and his religious order’s position vis-à-vis the crown and alternative official vernacular theologies’.90 Such a reading situates Edmund and Fremund’s poetic of shrinekeeping as one weapon in Lydgate’s literary arsenal, not only because it affiliates poetry’s suprahistorical legitimizing power with the abbey’s defining saint, but also because it constructs the unimpeachable purity of the poet and his works. To some degree, especially in the second prologue and the closing prayer, the poem does so. However, in privileging the sempiternal

87 88

See fols. 100v, 102v, 112v, 113v, 114v, 115r. See also fols. 109r and 110v. The miniatures portray Bury monks in white albs at times, as in fols. 108v and 117r. 89 Sanok, ‘Saints’ Lives’, 470–77; Meyer-Lee, ‘Emergence of the Literary’, 338–42; Ganim, ‘Lydgate, Location’; Nisse, ‘Was it not Routhe’. 90 Meyer-Lee, ‘Emergence of the Literary’, 324.

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over the mundane, Edmund and Fremund – read apart from the Harley miniatures – backs away from fully embracing the instrumental, political potential of this shrinekeeping ethos. In the poem’s silence and indirection regarding the monastic corporation, Lydgate’s ‘aureation itself figures the monastery’s remove from the secular order’91 only insofar as the ethical status instantiated by that aureation is transferred from individual shrinekeepers to the entire abbey. And that transfer is more pronounced in pictorial cycle than in poem. Only, therefore, in the dialogic interplay of text and image, of iconic and monastic chronotopes, can the Harley manuscript fully imagine the abbey as embodying Edmund’s sublime virtues. Whether read separately or together, Edmund and Fremund and the Harley pictorial cycle construct a more complicated image of their monastic institution than do the Wilton Chronicle and Werburge. Lydgate’s resistance to the formal techniques useful to other monastic hagiographers – relic discourse, diachronic or genealogical emplotment, affiliation of incorrupt saint with monastic body – allows him to prioritize the individual’s relationship with Edmund, a relationship he elevates above mundane concerns. This attention to the ethical body allows him, like Bradshaw or the CUL legendary’s compiler, to suggest ways the contemporary monk might define himself ethically via ancient saints. In this instance, however, individual ethical governance occurs through veneration rather than imitation. Lydgate and Egelwyn (and by extension the other shrinekeeping monks) prove their ‘perfeccion’ (3004) simply by honoring Edmund. Contrition, individual striving, faults acknowledged and rectified – characteristics of the moderate reformist texts I have discussed – are absent. Edmund and Fremund therefore aligns on this point with Bokenham’s ‘Audrey’, imagining that participation in the corporate body can assure the monk’s elevated ethical state. By venerating Edmund, something Bury monks do anyway, the monk can enjoy privileged ‘shrinekeeper’ status. Lydgate thereby reinscribes the ethical implications of Edmund’s late medieval vitae, especially the Bodley vita, by aligning individual monkish bodies with the institutional body through ongoing devotion to Edmund. Ironically, therefore, Lydgate’s insistence on the ethical benefits of individual piety ends up privileging corporate identity – despite Lydgate’s best attempts to downplay the Bury corporation to develop his aureate poetics. When the Harley miniatures, therefore, visually reinstate the monastic body, they reveal the excess ‘forgotten’ but not absent from Lydgate’s poem: Edmund’s historicity as a ninth-century king and patron saint of a venerable institution. Lydgate cannot construct his poetic of shrinekeeping without acknowledging, if at several removes, the necessary intersection of saint and community, the fact that Edmund is grounded in the tempus and that his story cannot be written without invoking the monastic chronotope. The final miniature in the manuscript  – Edmund’s incorrupt body lying in its tomb, surrounded by the corporate body – exposes Lydgate’s elisions: Edmund’s reputation is inextricably linked to the abbey’s identity. And even as Edmund and Fremund strives to imagine Edmund’s

91

Sanok, ‘Saints’ Lives’, 479.

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sublime elevation, furnished for a young king by sole means of poetry inspired by the saint himself, the poem cannot conceal what other vernacular hagiographies willingly acknowledge. To write native saints’ lives is to refashion English history and to seek a better future for the kingdom’s monks, nuns, and rulers.

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Bibliography Manuscripts Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 251 (Cronicon Buriense) Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 2604 (Legendary of prose saints’ lives) Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 850 (Cronica Buriensis and metrical life of Edmund) Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.8.2 (Kingston St Michael’s convent book) Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee.3.59 (Matthew Paris, illuminated La estoire de Seint Aedward le rei) http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-EE-00003–00059/1 London, BL, Add. MS 14848 (Register of Abbot Curteys of Bury St Edmunds) London, BL, Add. MS 36542 (Stone Priory stemma fundatorum) London, BL, Add. MS 38692 (Stone Priory stemma fundatorum) London, BL, Cotton MS Faustina B.iii (Wilton Chronicle and Wilton Audrey) London, BL, Egerton MS 1993 (SEL) London, BL, Harley MS 2278 (Lydgate’s Lives of Edmund and Fremund) http://www. bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_2278 London, BL, Yates Thompson MS 26 (Illuminated Life of Cuthbert) http://www.bl.uk/ manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Yates_thompson_MS_26 London, Royal College of Physicians, MS 409 (The Wilton Psalter) Melrose, Scotland, Abbotsford House Library, Abbotsford Legendary (Osbern Bokenham’s Legenda Aurea) New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.105 (Hours of William Porter) http://utu. morganlibrary.org/medren/mslistview.cfm?ACCNO=M.105&StartRow=1 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.736 (Illuminated Life of Edmund) http:// utu.morganlibrary.org/medren/mslistview.cfm?ACCNO=M.736&StartRow=1 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 240 (Bury St Edmunds novice-book) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Dugdale 12 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a.1 (Vernon manuscript) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson G.23 (Wilton Abbey psalter) Printed Sources Abbo of Fleury. Life of St Edmund. In Three Lives of English Saints. Edited by Michael Winterbottom, 65–87. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972. Abou-el-Haj, Barbara. The Medieval Cult of Saints: Formations and Transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Abram, Andrew. ‘Augustinian Canons and the Survival of Cult Centres in Medieval England’. In The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles, edited by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber, 79–95. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Acker, Paul. ‘Saint Mildred in the South English Legendary’. In The South English Legendary: A Critical Assessment, edited by Klaus P. Jankofsky, 140–53. Tübingen: Francke, 1992.

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Index Note: Bold page numbers refer to illustrative material; works are alphabetized under the author’s name when known. Abbo of Fleury Vita Edmundi  44, 174, 181 abbreviatio  14, 156, 179, 189 Annales Cestrienses  106, 107 Ælfgifu (mother of King Eadwig)  37, 37 n.51, 39–40 Ælfgifu, Abbess of Wilton  50, 62 Ælfheah, Archbishop of Canterbury  55–6 Ælfhild (of Wilton)  50 Ælfthryth (mother of King Æthelred)  34, 38, 39–40, 56 Aelred of Rievaulx Genealogia regum Anglorum  141, 143 Vita Edwardi Regis et Confessoris  133, 135, 139, 140, 141–4, 145, 147, 150, 158, 159, 160, 168 Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians  36, 107 Æthelred, King of England  38, 40–2, 41 n.67, 54, 55, 56, 57, 137, 139, 143, 145, 147, 150, 200 Æthelred, King of Mercia  114 Æthelstan, King of Mercia  107 Æthelwold, Archbishop of Canterbury  48 aevum  15, 21, 23, 48, 82, 109, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 186 and sempiternality  16, 17, 20, 153, 196, 203–4 Agatha  92, 94 Agnes  84 Alcock, John, Bishop of Ely  84 Spousage of a Virgin  84, 92, 100, 130 Alfred, King of England  36, 37, 76, 144 Alfred (brother of Edward the Confessor) 140 Algide (of Wilton)  50–1 Alhflæd (of Northumbria)  112 amplificatio  14, 155–6, 179–80 Andachtsbild  153 Anglo-Saxon chronotope  2, 4, 18–20, 31, 37, 46, 67, 68, 71, 85, 101 ethically desirable  19, 21, 74, 99, 100, 113, 125, 132 Mercia  106, 109–10, 111, 112, 113, 115, 123

Anna, King of East Anglia  65, 71, 78, 89 Athelstan  35 n.48 Audrey of Ely  4, 21–2, 64–101, 94 incorruption  46, 47, 65, 66–7, 82, 109, 195 genealogy  64, 66–7, 76, 78, 85, 86, 87, 90, 95, 96, 101, 102, 113 and spiritual kinships  69, 71–3, 91–3, 99, 144, 167 exemplarity  65, 67–8, 79–80, 81, 101 shrine  65–6, 72, 77, 78, 79, 82 and Ely Priory institutional identity  47, 65, 66–7, 175 relic protection miracles  47–8, 51, 66 virginity  82–3, 85, 90, 138 in marriage  80–1 see also Liber Eliensis; Ely Priory; Wilton Life of Audrey; see also under Barclay, Alexander; Bokenham, Osbern; Marie (of France?); pictorial hagiography; South English Legendary Augustine of Canterbury  108 Bakhtin, Mikhail  17, 18, 178 Baldredus, King of Kent  122 Baldwin, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds  188, 195, 196, 204 Barbara  94 Barclay, Alexander  5, 104 ‘Vitam Etheldrede’  65 n.2 Bede Historia Ecclesiastica  2, 19, 31 n.28, 44, 64, 66, 71, 77, 82, 87, 110 Vita Cuthberti  44 Benedicta of Origny  95, 97 Beornwulf, King of Mercia  122 Birchenshawe, John, Abbot of Chester Abbey 104, 105, 106, 123, 124 Bridget of Kildare  99 Bridget of Sweden  99 British history  2, 107–8; see also Geoffrey of Monmouth Brigittines  6, 9, 62, 63 Bokenham, Osbern  5, 77, 77 n.78

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index Life of Audrey  67, 75, 77–84, 92, 100, 101, 109, 126, 130, 159, 178, 208 source  77, 77 n.38 Life of Margaret accessus  14 Life of Wenefrede  77 nn.39–40 Legenda Aurea  75, 78 Legendys of Hooly Wummen  78 Bradshaw, Henry  5 Life of St Werburge  19, 22, 53, 65, 100, 101, 102–32, 134, 178, 181, 187, 208 as history writing  86, 103, 106, 107–8, 109, 110, 116, 123 literary translation  111, 114, 124, 130 as a printed text  104, 123, 129 protection miracles in  105 sources  110 see also Werburgh of Chester The Brut  55, 144, 147–8, 149 Bulkeley, Charles (monk of Chester Abbey) 129, 130, 131, 206 Bury St Edmunds Abbey  23 charters  183–4, 201 and Henry VI  173, 178, 181, 186–7, 190–1, 192–3, 207 institutional identity  100, 177, 179, 180, 181, 184–5, 186–7, 188, 200–1, 206, 207, 208 and incorruption  46, 132, 195, 197, 198 as intercessory body  179, 180, 186–7, 189–91, 197, 205, 207 legal franchises  200–1 see also Edmund of Bury; Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund under Lydgate, John Capgrave, John Life of Katherine of Alexandria  44 Carthusian order  7, 9, 127 Castleford’s Chronicle  149 Cecilia  94 Certeau, Michel de  3, 11, 12, 17, 18, 108, 119, 121, 169 Chad, Bishop of Mercia  1, 86 Chandler, John, Bishop of Salisbury  29–30 Chaucer, Geoffrey  5, 104 Monk’s Tale  170–1 Chester Abbey  22, 66 charters  106 conflict  105, 123–4 desire for origins  102, 103–4, 106–8, 109, 112–13, 115–16, 121 early history of  106–8 institutional identity  67, 84, 86, 118, 121, 123–4, 131, 132, 175, 185

and Mercia  90–1, 103, 106, 112–13, 115–16 see also Werburgh of Chester; Life of Werburge under Bradshaw, Henry Chichele, Henry, Archbishop of Canterbury 27, 183 chronotopes  17, 20–1 and ethical action  17–18, 20, 21, 101 generic chronotopes  18 heterochronicity  20, 23, 51–2, 178, 179, 186, 190, 191, 197, 199, 200, 208 see also Anglo-Saxon chronotope; monastic chronotope; iconic chronotope Cistercian order  9 Cnut, King of England  26, 28, 41, 147 and Bury St Edmunds  182, 184, 187, 201 and Edith  28, 32, 43, 53, 54, 56–62 reputation of  54–6 story of the tide  55, 60 Coenred, King of Mercia  66, 114, 115 Columba of Sens  94 coronation rites  135–6, 160–1 regalia  136, 161, 164, 167; see also Sudbury, William iconography  160, 161–2, 163, 165–6 corporate bodies see institutional bodies Council of Basel  183 Council of Constance  127 Crompe, Henry  28, 28 n.14, 31, 36 Cronica Buriensis  182–3 Curteys, William, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds  173, 177–8, 181, 183–5 ‘vita et passio S Edmundi Regis abbreviata’ 183, 184–5 Cuthbert  20, 44, 46, 108, 154, 195 Danish incursions  54 n.104, 37, 56–7, 103, 118, 119, 145–6, 147, 150, 152, 176, 185, 200–2 Dartford Priory  42 Domitilla  93, 95, 97, 99 Domne Eafe  76 dotality  21–2, 47, 49, 53, 54, 58, 60, 113, 115, 119, 136, 137 Doulre, Christine, Abbess of Wilton  29 Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury  41, 51–2, 56, 150 Durham Priory  46 Eadbald of Kent  76 Eadburgh of Thanet  93, 94, 97 Eadburgh of Winchester  75, 76–7, 76 n.30 Eadflede  35 n.48; see also Elflede (daughter of Edward the Elder)

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index Eadwig, King of Wessex  37 and n.51 Eanswith of Folkstone  95, 97, 98 earthly time see tempus Ebba  66 Ecgberht, King of Wessex  36 Ecgfrith of Northumbria  66, 81–2 Edgar, King of Wessex  26, 37, 38, 58, 70, 137, 143 Edgar of Mercia  106, 107 Edith (daughter of Godwin)  139, 142, 144, 147, 148, 149, 151, 156–7, 159 Edith of Polesworth  30 n.22, 93, 99 Edith of Wilton  4, 21, 22, 25–63, 68, 100 and Æthelred  40–1 and Cnut  28, 32, 43, 53, 54, 56–62 cult of  29–30, 30 n.22, 65 decay of  43, 51–3, 62, 131, 196 and Edward King and Martyr  38–40, 41, 43, 62 and exemplarity  30–1, 49, 131 incorruption of  22, 25, 41, 43, 46, 50–3, 54, 57, 58–9, 60, 62, 67, 109, 130, 131, 185 and institutional identity of Wilton Abbey 47, 49–51, 53, 61, 62, 67, 84, 132, 175, 185 legitimizes kings  32, 54, 56, 58–61, 62–3 life in Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 2604  30, 93, 94, 97 relic translation  43, 51–3, 54, 60–1 relics  28 royal heir  40–1, 53, 57, 58, 61, 70, 87, 115, 137 shrine  43, 50–1, 54, 60–1 in tenth-century history  26, 40 see also Wilton Chronicle; Wilton Abbey; see also under pictorial hagiography Edith-Matilda (wife of Henry I)  143 Edmund Ironside  54, 55, 56 Edmund of Bury  4, 22–3, 41, 173–209 and Bury St Edmunds institutional identity 46, 177, 179, 181, 184–5, 186–7, 188, 195, 206, 207, 208 cult of  174 and exemplarity  177, 178, 199 and Henry VI  169, 177–8, 180, 181, 186–7, 190–1, 192–3, 199, 205, 207 incorruption of  23, 44, 46, 109, 174, 175, 177, 195–7, 195 n.69, 197, 198, 204 late medieval vitae of  100, 174, 176, 181–5, 186, 188 and Lydgate  175, 199–200, 203–4, 205 relic translation of  188, 195, 196–7, 204 relics of  186, 189, 190, 191, 194, 202 sempiternality of  175, 177, 178, 187, 191, 194, 199, 202

shrine of  180, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194–5, 196–7, 205, 206 n.85 in pictorial hagiography  190–1, 192–3, 197, 198, 206–7 Wilton Diptych  133, 166, 174 see also Bury St Edmunds Abbey; Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund under Lydgate, John; London, BL, Harley MS 2278 under manuscripts; under pictorial hagiography Edmund of Mercia  107 Edward Ætheling  147, 148, 151, 152 Edward the Confessor  4, 8, 22–3, 133–72, 174, 206 and coronations  135–6, 160–1 cult of  134, 141 cures by  142, 159 fifteenth-century Latin vita of  168–9 and Henry III  138, 139, 159, 160, 168, 169 heraldry of  164–5 in history writing  136, 137–8, 139–42, 144, 146–52 incorruption of  118 n.38, 136 and John the Evangelist’s ring  138, 148, 159, 160, 165, 166, 169 and Richard II  133–4, 138, 139, 159, 160, 162, 163–8, 169 as royal antecessor  138, 141–4, 159, 160, 162, 164, 167, 169 as royal exemplar  138, 141–2, 144, 169 shrine of  157, 163 and n.126, 164, 167 stasis of  138, 142, 159, 160, 165, 168 visions by  142, 143, 145, 148, 171 virginity of  40–1, 137–8, 144, 145–6, 147, 148–9, 151–2, 156–7, 167–8, 170–1 and Westminster Abbey  134, 135–6, 153, 155–6, 157–9, 160–1, 168 see also Life of Edward who Rests at Westminster; Wilton Diptych; see also under Aelred of Rivaulx; Église de la Trinité, Fécamp; Gilte Legende; Osbert of Clare; Paris, Matthew; pictorial hagiography; South English Legendary Edward the Elder  36, 77 Edward, King and Martyr  38–40, 43, 56, 152 Passio Eadwardi  38 Edward II  164, 170 Edwin, King of Deira and Bernicia  87, 143 Egelwyn  200, 201–3, 205, 206–7, 208 Église de la Trinité, Fécamp stained glass pictorial hagiography of Edward the Confessor  157 Egwine (wife of King Alfred)  36 Elbright (nun of Wilton)  49, 53

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index Elburwe (sister of King Ecgberht)  36 Eleanor of Provence  144–5 Elflede (sister to Edward the Elder)  36–7 Elflede (daughter of Edward the Elder)  37 Ely Priory  21 institutional identity  47, 65, 66–7, 175 Elvine see Ælfgifu Emma (wife of Æthelred)  143, 150, 159 emplotment  14, 25, 31, 37, 41, 57, 108, 111, 144, 208 Eorcenberht, King of Kent  66, 78 Eorcengota of Faremoutier  66, 71, 94, 96 Eormenhild (niece of Audrey)  1, 12, 13, 66–7, 71, 74, 85–6, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100, 104, 112, 113, 114 Eormenred of Kent  76 Etheldreda of Ely see Audrey of Ely Ethelburgh of Brie  65, 94, 95, 96 ethical bodies  8, 9, 10, 22, 51, 69, 77, 85, 92, 95, 100, 101, 109, 126, 180, 201, 205–7 and institutional bodies  49, 65, 84, 91, 127, 129, 130, 208 exemplarity  4, 10, 17, 22 imitatio Christi  17, 139, 194 for kings  137, 138, 141–2, 143–4, 160, 167–8, 169, 177, 178, 199 for laywomen  79–80, 109, 125, 130 for monks  91, 104, 109, 123, 124, 125–7, 128–30, 208 for nuns  30–1, 49, 64, 65, 76, 79–80, 81, 91–2, 93, 97–9 and reform  64, 84–5, 100–1 and spiritual kinship  67–8, 69, 70, 72–3, 74–5, 91, 96–7, 98–100 temporal distance  5, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 21, 22, 100–1, 104, 109, 127–8, 132 female saints abbesses and nuns  35, 64, 71–2, 92, 93, 96–9, 114–15, 125–6 as foundresses  86, 98, 137 and institutional identity  25, 46, 47 matrons  66–67, 71–72, 90 virgin martyrs  44, 93, 96, 97 see also dotality; female under virginity; and individual saints by name figura  16, 153 Flete, John, Prior of Westminster Abbey De fundatione ecclesiae Westmonasteriensis 70, 135, 161 Flores Historiarum  149 Westminster continuation  135, 161, 162, 164 Fox, Richard, Bishop of Winchester  100

Fremund  174, 185 Gautier de Coinci Vie de Sainte Cristine  73 genealogy  12, 16, 22, 65, 76 blood  58, 65–6, 67–8, 69–71, 85, 86–91, 92, 93, 98–9, 142–4 diachronicity  67, 68, 69–70, 72–4, 99 exemplarity  72–3, 88, 91 historiographic form  67–8, 69–70, 108, 137, 208 metaphor  70, 74–5, 87, 90, 91–2, 96–7, 143, 144 rejection of  79 typology  72–4, 96, 113, 138, 141, 142–3, 144, 161, 166, 167 virginity  85, 89, 90, 136, 144, 145–6, 159 see also lineage; matrilineage; patrilineage; spiritual kinship Geoffrey of Monmouth  2, 19 Gilte Legende  5 Life of Edward the Confessor  144, 146–7, 150, 169 Godiva, Abbess of Wilton  26 Godwin, Earl of Wessex  137, 140, 141, 142, 148, 151, 159 Goscelin of Saint-Bertin Vita Wihtburge  21, 66 Vita Werburge  105, 110, 120, 124, 130 Vita et translatio Edithae  26, 28, 29, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 48, 50, 51–2, 58, 59, 61 vitae of Ely saints  88, 90, 110 Guy of Warwick  19 hagiography achronicity in  15–16, 141, 154, 176 as history writing  2, 3, 3 n.9, 4, 5, 12, 21, 23, 25, 67, 145, 150, 208–9; see also under individual texts institutional  3, 5–6, 21, 29–30, 61, 62, 66–7, 86–7, 104, 105–6, 112–13, 123, 136, 177–8, 180, 181–2, 184–5, 186–7, 207 instrumental  5–6, 105–6, 123, 177–8, 184, 185, 200–1, 207–8 ‘literary’  5–6, 104, 176, 207–8 for kings  141–4, 173, 175, 177–8, 186–7, 190–1, 199, 205 for monks  10, 20–1, 104, 109, 127–8, 141, 187 for nuns  25, 28–9, 65, 75, 77–8, 91–2, 99, 100 and tragedy  170–1 see also pictorial hagiography; names of individual texts

240

index Hambury, Staffordshire  117, 118, 120 Hardyng, John Chronicle  148 Harthcnut  140 Harold Godwinson  140, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152 heavenly time see aevum, aeternitas Henricus  78 Henry II  133, 141 Henry III  8, 23, 133, 161 Edward the Confessor  138, 139, 159, 160, 168, 169 Henry IV  32 Henry V  6, 7, 42, 54, 62, 63 Henry VI  6 n.18, 23, 41, 162 and Bury St Edmunds  173, 178, 181, 186–7, 190–1, 207 and Edmund of Bury  169, 186–7, 190, 192–3, 205, 207 and Edward the Confessor  168–9 and London, BL, Harley MS 2253  173, 180, 190–1, 204–5 Henry VII  105 Henry of Huntington Historia Anglorum  55, 139, 140, 148 Hereswith  65, 72, 78, 89, 90, 96 Higden, Ranulf Polychronicon  26, 28, 29, 31, 42, 61, 87, 110, 111, 114, 148 Westminster continuation  135 John Trevisa’s translation  42, 71 Hild  68, 72, 78, 87, 95, 97, 98 history writing desire for continuity with origins  3, 5, 6, 11, 12–13, 21, 33, 46, 65, 85, 86, 181–2, 184 see also under Chester Abbey diachronicity  2, 11, 15–16, 23 ethical practice  4, 5, 6, 7–8, 10–11, 20, 21 formal written structures  13–14, 18, 20, 31, 35–6, 65, 67, 69, 71, 104, 108, 116, 119, 138 see also emplotment intelligible past  10, 11, 18, 23, 40–1, 51, 53, 62, 108, 116, 121, 122, 138, 168, 169, 171–2 problems within ethical distance between past and present  5, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 21, 22, 100–1, 104, 109, 127–8, 132 impossibility of recovering past  5, 11–12, 53, 62, 85, 90–1, 103–4, 107–8, 116, 118, 121, 123, 208 limits of diachronic history writing  23, 134, 136–9, 144, 152, 153, 159, 160, 167–8 women’s history  25, 26, 31–42, 53, 57, 63

Hyde Abbey Breviary  77 iconic chronotope  20, 21, 23, 50–1, 153, 157, 159, 177, 186, 191, 194, 197 conventual chronotope  75, 77, 79, 82–4, 100, 178 iconic moment  16, 20, 138–9, 144, 168, 196, 199 see also aevum; pictorial hagiography; sempiternality under time iconography (single image) see pictorial hagiography incorruption  22, 23, 25, 43–5, 66 decay  51–3, 90, 104, 109, 116, 118–21, 130–1, 196 gender  46 virginity  25, 44, 46 as hagiographic trope  45, 52 as historiographic device  25–6, 45, 54, 57, 59, 109, 116, 117, 196 and institutional identity  46, 47–8, 49, 53, 62, 66, 67, 104, 117, 131, 132, 195, 208 and resurrection body  44–5, 82, 118, 197 virtue in life  52–3, 58–9 see also relic discourse; and under individual saints institutional bodies  20, 22–3, 50, 69, 77, 85, 96, 100, 101, 185, 189 and ethical bodies  49, 65, 84, 91, 127, 129, 130, 208 and incorruption  51, 53, 104, 109, 123, 124, 130–1, 132, 175, 195 and kingship  160, 162, 165 as transtemporal  8–9, 10, 70 institutional identity  9, 11–12, 20, 21, 68, 178 ethical action  2, 7, 104, 117, 131, 205–6, 208 incorruption  46, 47–8, 49, 53, 62, 66, 67, 104, 117, 131, 132, 195, 208 virginity  46–7 see also under individual institutions imaginative memory  11–12 Jesus College, Cambridge  84 Jocelyn of Brakelond  195, 197 John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford  63 John of Tynemouth Sanctilogium  92 and n.66, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99 John (‘Florence’) of Worcester Chronicon ex chronicis  107, 139, 140, 148 John the Baptist  84, 92, 94 on Wilton Diptych  133, 166 John the Baptist, Chester, church of  106, 107

241

index John the Evangelist  94 and Edward the Confessor  138, 148, 159, 160, 165, 166, 169 Justina of Antioch  95, 97, 99 Kalendre of the Newe Legende  30, 92 n.66 Kantorowicz, Ernst  8, 160 Katherine of Alexandria  44, 84 Kenilworth Priory  12 kingship duties of  22–3, 40–1, 137, 145–6, 167–8, 171 royal succession  38, 137–8, 144, 145–6, 147–9, 151–2, 157, 162–3, 167–8, 170–1 legitimization of  42–3, 114, 138, 144, 159, 162–3, 167; see also under Edith of Wilton institutional body of  160, 162, 165 see also coronation; individual kings Kingston St Michael’s Priory  42 Lawrence, Abbot of Westminster Abbey  141 Leofric, Earl of Chester  107 Leonard  92, 93, 95, 98 Liber Eliensis  21, 47, 66, 77, 80, 110, 197 Liber Regalis  162 Life of Edward who Rests at Westminster  139, 157 lineages  2, 12, 22 blood see under genealogy poetic  5, 104 royal  143–4, 164, 166, 167, 190 see also genealogy; matrilineage; patrilineage; spiritual kinship Longland, John, Bishop of Lincoln  127, 130 Lucius, King of the Britons  107 Lydgate, John  5, 6, 104 aureate poetics  6, 174–5, 176, 178, 199, 203–5 cartae versificatae  183–4 ‘De profundis’  183 and Edmund  175, 199–200, 203–4, 205 Legend of Austin at Compton  183 Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund  23, 134, 173–81, 185–209 as advice for princes  177, 178, 199 apparition miracles in  195 as instrumental hagiography  177–8, 200–1 gift for Henry VI  169, 173, 177–8, 186–7, 190–1, 199, 204–5, 207 as history writing  176, 200–1 and pictorial hagiography see London,

BL, Harley MS 2278 under manuscripts protection miracles in  185, 189, 202–3, 205–6 as resistant to history writing  175–6, 185–6, 188 Life of Our Lady  176, 177 Life of Margaret  176 Life of George  176 and poetic of shrinekeeping  199, 200, 204–5, 207 Lytlyngton, Nicholas, Abbot of Westminster Abbey  166–7 Mannyng, Robert Chronicle  54, 148 manuscripts Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 251  183 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.10.2   158–9, 159 n.106, 166 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.9.1  158 Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 2604  30, 68, 76, 91–100, 109, 130, 167, 208 Cambridge, University Library, MS Add. 850  182–3 Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.8.2 42 n.70 Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee.3.59 154–7, 179 Cardiff, Public Library, MS I.381  26 n.3 Douai, Bibliothèque de la Ville, MS 55 182 and n.32 London, BL, Add. MS 14848  183, 184–5 London, BL, Add. MS 35295  146 n.57 London, BL, Add. MS 36542  1 n.1 London, BL, Add. MS 38692  1 n.1 London, BL, Add. MS 70513  69 n.13 London, BL, Cotton MS Faustina B.iii  27 n.10, 28–9, 31, 61, 63 London, BL, Cotton MS Nero C.xii  1 n.1 London, BL, Cotton MS Otho A.xvii  1 n.2 London, BL, Egerton MS 1993  75 n.28 London, BL, Harley MS 2278  23, 162, 173, 174, 177, 179–80, 186, 187, 189, 192–3, 197, 198, 205, 206, 208 London, BL, Lansdowne MS 436  42 n.71 London, BL, Yates Thompson MS 26  154 and n.87 London, Gray’s Inn Library, MS 3  110 nn.28–30 London, PRO MS E36/284  157

242

index London, Royal College of Physicians, MS 409  28 n.12, 61 Manchester, Chetham Library, MS 6712 (A.6.89)  162 n.123 Melrose, Scotland, Abbotsford House Library, Abbotsford Legendary  75, 78 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.105  30 n.21 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.736  154 and n.87 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 240 176, 181–2, 188, 204 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 779 75 n.28 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Dugdale 12 35 n.45 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. A.1  75 n.28 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS C.938  26 n.3 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS G.23  28 n.12 Oxford, Bodleian Library, University College MS 165  154 and n.87 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS lat. 17294  30 n.21, 63, 158 Margaret of Scotland  142 Marie (of France?) Vie seinte Audree  67, 68, 69, 71, 80, 87, 88, 93, 96, 134 genealogy in  70, 72–5 Martha  93, 95, 97, 99 matrilineage  65, 67, 69, 70, 71–2, 74, 85, 88–90, 93, 95, 96, 115, 123 Mary Magdalene  93 Mercia  1, 86, 87, 102, 108, 109, 110–11, 114–15, 118, 121 and Cheshire identity  103, 112–13, 122 Merewalh of Mercia  76 metaphor genealogy as  70, 74–5, 87, 90, 91–2, 96–7, 143, 144 lapidary  77, 79, 82–3, 88, 115, 119, 120–1, 191, 194, 203–4 as historiographic device  109, 119–21 horticultural  87, 88–9, 90, 112, 113–14, 115–16, 117, 119–20, 121, 126, 151 water  89, 113 Mildburg of Wenlock  71 Mildgith  71 Mildrith of Minster-in-Thanet  68, 71, 87, 93, 97, 100 SEL life  76–7, 76 n.30

miracles apparition  50–1, 195 blood  48–9 cures  128, 159, 189, 202 institution protection  106, 185, 189 monks, performed for  128–9 relic protection  47–8, 49, 51, 60, 66, 189, 202–3, 205–3 visions  142, 145, 148, 150, 151, 171 Modwenna  93, 95, 98–9 monastic chronotope  20, 21, 23, 53, 82, 86, 104, 178, 181, 185, 191, 195, 196 and Anglo-Saxon chronotope  106, 186 and iconic chronotope  50, 197, 208 and shrinekeeping  179, 187–8, 199, 200, 204 monks and monasteries hagiography for  10, 20–1, 104, 109, 127–8, 141, 187 exemplarity for  124, 125–7, 128–9, 131, 208 and reform  6–7, 9–10, 23, 127, 130, 208 Norman Conquest  138, 146, 148–9, 152 Northumbria  87, 112 Nova Legenda Angliae  30, 92 n.66 nuns and nunneries hagiography for  25, 28–9, 65, 75, 77–8, 91–2, 99, 100 history writing for  29, 32–5, 42 and exemplarity  30–1, 49, 64, 65, 76, 79–80, 81, 91–2, 93, 97–9 and reform  64, 65, 84–5, 100–1 and stasis  77, 79, 80, 82–5 ordinatio  28, 68, 91–3, 95, 96, 98, 155, 184 Osbert of Clare, Prior of Westminster Abbey Vita Ædwardi regis  139, 140, 141, 142 Osgoth  202, 205 Oswald, King of Northumbria  143 Painted Chamber, Westminster Palace  161, 162, 164 paratexts  31, 61, 68, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 129 Paris, Matthew Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei  133, 144–6, 154, 156–7, 160, 179 see also Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee.3.59 under manuscripts patrilineage  12–13, 70, 136, 143, 171 Peada, King of Mercia  112 Penda, King of Mercia  1, 102, 111, 112 Periculoso  84 Peter  134 pictorial hagiography  153–4, 159–60

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of Audrey  78 of Edith  28, 61, 63 of Edmund  23, 154, 184 see also London, BL, Harley MS 2278 under manuscripts of Edward the Confessor  23, 138–9, 153, 157–9, 160, 161–2, 169 see also Wilton Diptych; Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee.3.59 under manuscripts see also under relic discourse poetic of enshrinement  204, 205 see also poetic of shrinekeeping poetic of exemption  5, 177 see also instrumental under hagiography poetic of shrinekeeping  175, 179, 199, 200, 203, 204, 205, 207–8 praesentia  15, 17, 20, 45, 82, 83 of Edith  43, 47, 50–1, 53 of Edmund  175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 196–7, 203–4 prophecy  37–8, 39, 40, 142, 150 Pynson, Richard  30, 104 Radegund’s Priory, Cambridge  84 reform Cardinal Wolsey  10, 123, 127 and desire for origins  7–8, 9, 181–2 and exemplarity  64, 84–5, 100–1 moderate responses to  10–11, 22, 65, 91, 92, 100–1, 104, 109, 123, 127, 129, 130, 132 monastic  6–7, 9–10, 23, 127, 130, 208 nunneries  64, 65, 84–5, 100–1 reactions against  10, 127 relic custodians  see shrinekeepers relic discourse  82 in Bokenham’s Life of Audrey  82–3 in Bradshaw’s Life of Werburge  104, 116, 119–20, 121, in Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund  187–8, 191, 194, 195, 196–7, 199, 200, 203–4, 208 in pictorial hagiography  194–5, 197, 198 relics  13, 17, 30, 32, 45–6, 48, 108, 116, 117, 187–8 see also incorruption; under individual saints Richard II  8, 23 chastity  167–8 coronation regalia  164, 167 Edward the Confessor  133–4, 138, 139, 159, 160, 162, 163–8, 169 heraldic innovations  164–5 reburial  42–3, 54, 62 Wilton Diptych  133, 165–6, 167–8 Richard of Cirencester Speculum historiale  136

Robert of Gloucester Metrical Chronicle  19, 31, 38, 54–5, 144, 149–52, 185 Ruffin see Wulfhad and Ruffin Sæthryth  65, 72, 96 Samson, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds  195 Seaxburgh  66–7, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78 and n.39, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100 sempiternality see aevum; see under time shrinekeeping  179, 187–8, 191, 197, 206–7 as metaphor  175, 199, 200 see also poetic of shrinekeeping and ethical action  201–3, 205 shrines  15, 17, 20, 78, 82, 179, 187–8, 199, 200, 204 see also relic discourse; shrinekeepers; under names of individual saints Sigeberht, King of East Anglia  184 Simon (monk of Chester Abbey)  128, 130, 131 Skelton, John  104 South English Legendaries  4, 5, 19 Life of Audrey  67, 75–7, 82 E group of legends  75–6, 75 n.30 Life of Eadburgh  76–7, 76 n.30 Edith in  30 Life of Edmund  185 and n.49 Life of Edward King and Martyr  30, 38 n.56 Life of Edward the Confessor  144, 149–52, 169 prose adaptation of  169 Lives of Frideswide  76, 76 n.30 Life of Mildrith  76–7, 76 n.30 Robert of Gloucester  149–52 spiritual kinship  22, 65, 73, 91, 92, 93, 96–9 and diachrony  70, 72, 74 and exemplarity  67–8, 69, 70, 72–3, 74–5, 91, 96–7, 98–100 as synchronic  67–8, 69–70, 74, 99 see also genealogy; lineage; matrilineage; patrilineage St Alban’s Abbey  185 Stafford family  1, 12–13 Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham  1 n.1 stemma fundatorum  1, 2, 12–13, 16, 35–6, 67, 70 Millicent  12–13, 70 Sweyn, King of England  54–5, 56, 188, 200, 201, 202, 205 Stone Priory, Staffordshire  1–2, 12–13, 70, 86, 132, 181

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index Sulcard of Westminster Prologus de construccione Westmonasterii 134 Sudbury, William (monk of Westminster) treatise on the coronation regalia  136 n.14, 164, 167 tabulae  1, 2, 3, 12–13, 78, 106, 107 tempus  45, 47, 48, 75, 83, 84–5, 139, 176, 177, 178, 181, 185, 196, 197, 199 chronotopes  20, 21, 23, 208 longitudinal structure  15–17, 65, 69–70, 116, 153, 159, 168 time achronic stasis  15, 17, 20, 21, 99, 142, 175, 176 see also aevum and exemplarity  65, 75, 77, 178, 199 in iconography  20, 136, 138, 153, 159, 194 as historiographic device  136–7, 138, 142, 144, 153, 159, 160, 168 and incorruption  25, 67, 68, 116, 117, 175, 196–7 diachronic time  15, 16, 116, 137, 150, 172, 199, 208 see also tempus in lineage  12, 16, 67–8, 69–70, 74, 93, 104, 164 and holy stasis  136, 138–9, 196 and ethical distance  5, 7–8, 9–10, 53, 84–5, 100–1, 104, 126, 127, 132, 178, 199 medieval representations of  14–16 in pictorial hagiography  153–4, 159, 160, 168 sempiternality  4, 21, 82, 84–5 see also aevum of poetry  175, 176, 178, 199, 202, 203, 207–8 of saints  12, 15, 17, 22, 45, 53, 109, 120, 142, 178, 187, 191, 194, 199, 202, 203 transtemporality and exemplarity  70, 88, 99, 130 of institutional bodies  8–9, 26, 63, 116, 207 of the royal body  59, 161, 165 Tole (of Wilton)  50–1 Tondberht, lord of the Gyrwe  66, 76, 80 translation literary  46, 92, 95, 96 see also under individual texts of relics  46 see also under individual saints translatio studii et imperii  108, 117, 119 transtemporality see under time tropology  74, 82

typology  13, 16, 20, 21, 48, 88, 90, 131, 140, 144, 164 and exemplarity  17, 68, 70, 72–3, 199 and lineages  72–4, 96, 113, 138, 141, 142–3, 144, 161, 166, 167 Ulminus (canon of Chester Abbey)  128–9, 130, 131 virginity female  22, 46–7, 77, 80, 82, 114, 168 genealogical problem  85, 89, 136, 144, 145–6, 159 as historiographic device  46, 136 male  23, 40–1, 86, 136 in marriage  80–1, 138, 144, 148–9, 156–7 in nunneries  79, 82–4 royal  136, 137, 138, 144, 147, 151–2, 156–7, 167–8, 171 Wales  19, 103, 108 Walston, Earl  36 Wenefrede Abbotsford Legendary life  77 nn.39–40 GiL life  146 n.57 SEL life  76 n.30 Werburgh of Chester  4, 21, 22, 66, 71, 72–3, 74, 94, 95, 96, 97, 102–32 and Chester Abbey institutional identity  67, 84, 86, 90–1, 103, 106, 115–16, 118, 121, 123, 131, 132, 175, 185 cult of  104–5 decay of  118, 119, 121, 124–5, 130–1, 194, 196 and exemplarity  88, 99, 109, 123, 124, 125–7, 128–9 and genealogy  67, 85, 86–91, 109, 113, 114, 115 incorruption of  22, 46, 67, 90, 103, 109, 113, 115, 116–20, 130–1 as inheretrix  58, 87, 109, 113–15, 116, 121 lost miracle collection of  105, 110 relic translation of  117, 119–20 relics of  86, 107, 109, 116, 120–1, 122, 126 shrine of  105, 116, 119–22 virginity of  114, 115 see also Chester Abbey; Life of Werburge under Bradshaw, Henry Werebode  85, 114 Wessex  22, 26, 31, 35, 37, 41, 42, 54, 57, 58–9, 62, 106, 133, 138, 143, 146, 149, 170, 171 Westminster Abbey  42, 127, 134, 155, 157, 158, 159 institutional identity of  70, 134–5, 158 n.105

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index and Edward the Confessor  134, 135–6, 141, 153, 155–6, 160, 168, 171 and royal coronations  136, 160–1, 164 ‘Why I Can’t Be A Nun’  64, 65, 67, 68, 77, 84, 92, 109, 126 White, Hayden  13, 17 Wihtburgh of Dereham  21, 65, 94, 95, 97, 98 incorruption of  66 Wilfrid of York  81 William II  195 William of Normandy  139, 146, 147, 148, 151 William of Malmesbury  2, 31 n.28, 139, 148 Gesta Pontificum Anglorum  52, 54, 57 Gesta Regum Anglorum  55, 140–1, 142 Wilton Abbey  22, 25, 32, 56 charters of  35 and n.48, 37 n.51 history of  26–7, 36–7 institutional identity of  29, 47, 49–51, 53, 61, 62, 65, 67, 84, 132, 175, 185 manuscripts from  27–9 see also Edith of Wilton; Wilton Chronicle Wilton Chronicle  22, 25, 28–9, 30, 43, 64, 68, 70, 100, 130, 134, 137, 178, 181, 188, 208 apparition miracles in  50–1, 59–60 authorship of  29 and literary translation  39, 40, 41, 43, 48, 50–1, 52–3 as history writing  28–9, 31, 35–6, 53, 62, 103, 110

women’s history  26, 31–2, 22, 35–7, 42, 57, 63 relic protection miracles in  48–9, 60 sources  31 and n.28, 61 see also Edith of Wilton; Wilton Abbey; Wilton Life of Audrey Wilton Diptych  133, 138, 165–8, 174 Wilton Life of Audrey  25, 28–9, 67, 69 genealogy in  70–2, 74, 85, 113 sources of  42, 71 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal  10, 106, 123 monastic reform  10, 123, 127, 129, 130 women’s history  26, 29, 31–2, 33–42, 53, 57, 63 Worde, Wynkyn de life of Edward the Confessor  169 Wroxall Priory  34–5 Wulfhad and Ruffin  12–13, 66, 85–6 in Life of Werburge  85–6 Middle English legend from Stone Priory 1, 2, 12–13, 67, 85–6 Middle English verses from Peterborough Abbey  85 relics of  13, 86 vita of  1, 2, 13, 110 Wulfhere, King of Mercia  1, 66, 71, 85–6, 89, 104, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114 Wulfthryth of Wilton  26, 31, 38–9, 48, 58, 93

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