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Her Life Historical offers a major reconsideration of one of the most popular narrative forms in late medieval England-the lives of female saints-and one of the period's primary modes of interpretation-exemplarity. With lucidity and insight, Catherine Sanok shows that saints' legends served as vehicles for complex considerations of historical difference and continuity in an era of political crisis and social change. At the same time, they played a significant role in women's increasing visibility in late medieval literary culture by imagining a specifically feminine audience. Sanok proposes a new way to understand exemplarity-the repeated injunction to imitate the saints-not simply as a prescriptive mode of reading but as an encouragement to historical reflection. With groundbreaking originality, she argues that late medieval writers and readers used religious narrative, and specifically the legends of female saints, to think about the historicity of their own ethical lives and of the communities they inhabited. She explains how these narratives were used in the fifteenth century to negotiate the urgent social concerns occasioned by political instability and dynastic conflict, by the threat of heresy and the changing status of public religion, and by new kinds of social mobility and forms of collective identity. Her Life Historical also offers a fresh account of how women came to be visible participants in late medieval literary culture. The expectation that they formed a distinct audience for saints' lives and moral literature allowed medieval women to surface in the historical record as book owners, patrons, and readers. Saints' lives thereby helped to invent the idea of a gendered audience with a privileged affiliation and a specific response to a given narrative tradition.

Christian spirituality --- anno 1200-1499 --- England --- Christian hagiography --- Christian women saints --- Christian literature, English (Middle) --- Christian women --- Hagiographie chrétienne --- Saintes chrétiennes --- Littérature chrétienne anglaise (moyen anglais) --- Chrétiennes --- History --- Biography --- History and criticism. --- Religious life --- Histoire --- Biographies --- Histoire et critique --- Vie religieuse --- History and criticism --- Christian hagiography. --- Hagiographie chrétienne --- Saintes chrétiennes --- Littérature chrétienne anglaise (moyen anglais) --- Chrétiennes --- Hagiography, Christian --- Hagiography --- Christian saints, Women --- Women Christian saints --- Christian saints --- Women saints --- Women, Christian --- Women --- Christian hagiography - History - To 1500 --- Christian women saints - Biography - History and criticism --- Christian literature, English (Middle) - History and criticism --- Christian women - Religious life - England - History - To 1500 --- Angleterre --- Saintes femmes --- Gender Studies. --- Literature. --- Medieval and Renaissance Studies. --- Religion. --- Religious Studies. --- Women's Studies.

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In New Legends of England, Catherine Sanok examines a significant, albeit previously unrecognized, phenomenon of fifteenth-century literary culture in England: the sudden fascination with the Lives of British, Anglo-Saxon, and other native saints. Embodying a variety of literary forms-from elevated Latinate verse, to popular traditions such as the carol, to translations of earlier verse legends into the medium of prose-the Middle English Lives of England's saints are rarely discussed in relation to one another or seen as constituting a distinct literary genre. However, Sanok argues, these legends, when grouped together were an important narrative forum for exploring overlapping forms of secular and religious community at local, national, and supranational scales: the monastery, the city, and local cults; the nation and the realm; European Christendom and, at the end of the fifteenth century, a world that was suddenly expanding across the Atlantic.Reading texts such as the South English Legendary, The Life of St. Etheldrede, the Golden Legend, and poems about Saints Wenefrid and Ursula, Sanok focuses especially on the significance of their varied and often experimental forms. She shows how Middle English Lives of native saints revealed, through their literary forms, modes of affinity and difference that, in turn, reflected a diversity in the extent and structure of medieval communities. Taking up key questions about jurisdiction, temporality, and embodiment, New Legends of England presents some of the ways in which the Lives of England's saints theorized community and explored its constitutive paradox: the irresolvable tension between singular and collective forms of identity.

Christian hagiography --- Christian saints --- Christian saints --- Communities --- Group identity --- Christian literature, English (Middle) --- History --- History --- History --- History and criticism.

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Literature --- anno 500-1499