Middle English Legends of Women Saints
Middle English Legends of Women Saints

Author: Sherry L. Reames

Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13:

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Middle English Legends of Women Saints presents a collection of saints' Lives intended to suggest the diversity of possibilities beneath the supposedly fixed and predictable surfaces of the legends, using multiple retellings of the same legend to illustrate that medieval readers and listeners did not just passively receive saints' legends but continually and actively appropriated them. The collection opens with legends about two royal (or supposedly royal) women, Frideswide and Mary Magdelen, and continues with those of three popular virgin martyrs, Margaret of Antioch, Christina of Tyre, and Katherine of Alexandria. The final portion of the collection is devoted to St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary. The collection includes a number of relatively unknown texts that have not appeared in print since Horstmann's transcriptions in the nineteenth century and a few that have never before been published.

Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the South English Legendary
Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the South English Legendary

Author: Anne B. Thompson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1351938088

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Anne Thompson here gives the fullest account and explanation to date of the diversity of the more than sixty manuscripts of the South English Legendary, a late thirteenth-century collection of lively verse lives of saints, in a southern English dialect. The importance of the SEL to hagiographic and cultural studies has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years. Without denying the legendaries’ religious purpose, this book looks at the way SEL narratives reflect and address the complex, interwined tapestry”political, social, religious”of Edward I’s England, while retaining a strong emphasis on the craft of story-telling. Thompson shows the SEL to be a fresh and exciting early example of popular vernacular literature. Firmly grounded in rural and small town life of the 1270s to 1290s in the west of England, it is uniquely significant for any understanding of that culture.

A Companion to Middle English Hagiography
A Companion to Middle English Hagiography

Author: Sarah Salih

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9781843840725

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The saints were the superheroes and the celebrities of medieval England, bridging the gap between heaven and earth, the living and the dead. A vast body of literature evolved during the middle ages to ensure that everyone, from kings to peasants, knew the stories of the lives, deaths and afterlives of the saints. However, despite its popularity and ubiquity, the genre of the Saint's Life has until recently been little studied. This collection introduces the canon of Middle English hagiography; places it in the context of the cults of saints; analyses key themes within hagiographic narrative, including gender, power, violence and history; and, finally, shows how hagiographic themes survived the Reformation. Overall it offers both information for those coming to the genre for the first time, and points forward to new trends in research. Dr SARAH SALIH is a Lecturer in English at the University of East Anglia. Contributors: SAMANTHA RICHES, MARY BETH LONG, CLAIRE M. WATERS, ROBERT MILLS, ANKE BERNAU, KATHERINE J. LEWIS, MATTHEW WOODCOCK