Full Description
The twelve essays in this collection advance the contemporary study of the women saints of Anglo-Saxon England by challenging received wisdom and offering alternative methodologies. The work embraces a number of different scholarly approaches, from codicological study to feminist theory. While some contributions are dedicated to the description and reconstruction of female lives of saints and their cults, others explore the broader ideological and cultural investments of the literature. The volume concentrates on four major areas: the female saint in the Old English Martyrology, genre including hagiography and homelitic writing, motherhood and chastity, and differing perspectives on lives of virgin martyrs. The essays reveal how saints' lives that exist on the apparent margins of orthodoxy actually demonstrate a successful literary challenge extending the idea of a holy life.
Contents
Introduction - Paul E. Szarmach Old English Martyrology Female Hagiography in the Old English Martyrology - Christine Rauer (University of St. Andrews) Bodies and Land: The Place of Gender in the Old English Martyrology - Jacqueline Stodnick (University of Texas) Form and Genre Why is Margaret's the Only Life in London, BL, Cotton Tiberius A.iii? - Tracey Anne Cooper (St. John's University) Aethelgifu's Will as Hagiography - Mary Louise Fellows (University of Minnesota Law School) Assuming Virginity: Tradition and the Naked Narrative in Aelfric's Homily on the Assumption of the Virgin - Rebecca Stephenson (University of Louisiana at Monroe) Genre Trouble: Reading the Old English Vita of Saint Euphrosyne - Robin Norris (Carleton University) More Genre Trouble: The Life of Mary of Egypt - Paul E. Szarmach (Western Michigan University) Mothers 'Nutrix Pia': The Flowering of the Cult of Aethelthryth in Anglo-Saxon England - John Black (Moravian College) The Kentish Queen as Omnium Mater: Goscelin of Saint-Bertin's Lections and the Emergence of the Cult of Saint Seaxburh - Virginia Blanton (University of Missouri, Kansas City) Virgin Martyrs Agnes Among the Angles: Patristic Influences in Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Saxon Versions of the Passio of Saint Agnes - Rhonda McDaniel (Middle Tennessee State University) Heavenly Bodies: Paradoxes of Martyrdom in Aelfric's Lives of Saints - Renee Trilling (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) 'Torture Me, Rend Me, Burn Me, Kill Me!' Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and the Depiction of Female Sanctity - Rosalind Love (University of Cambridge)
