Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England—the Work of Osbern Bokenham by Sheila Delany (review)

Abstract

running head? sheila delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Enghnd—the Work ofOsbern Bokenham. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xii, 236. isbn: 0-19-510989-9. $19.95. Sheila Delany's book is as complex and ambitious as its title and subtitle suggest; ImpoliticBodies examines the work ofthe Osbern Bokenham and his workin a range of contexts linked by ideas of the body, but also as diverse as Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England implies. In the process ofher examination, she makes a case for the value of Bokenham's all-female legendary as an important work ofthe fifteenth-century, showing it working in multi-valent ways. Readers ofDelany's earlier works won't be disappointed; while sharing critical perspectives and lively (if occasionally contentious) prose with her previous oevre, Impolitic Bodies also illuminates the importance of an obscure figure whose work does a great deal more that most fifteenth-century authors are generally given credit for. In 'Introductions,' Delany lays out her project. Acknowledging Bokenham's obscurity (the only current edition ofhis work is Delany's translation ofhis Legendary, published in 1992), she provides a useful biography, and locates him at Clare Priory in East Anglia, during 'an especially disturbed period of England's national history' (22). For those ready to dismiss the fifteenth century and its literature as dull or insignificant, Delany notes that Bokenham's poetry is 'both good enough and important enough to illuminate Chaucer's work and Chaucer reception, gender studies, late-medieval European cultural history, the development of hagiography, and English political life. The friar's achievements are substantial' (4). She then reveals how her work will consider these virtues through the lenses of three different types ofbody: the corpus ofpoetic and theological works that Bokenham used and critiqued, the female body represented in his hagiography, and the 'body politic' of English society on the brink of the Wars of the Roses. This discussion reveals Osbern Bokenham as a poet aware of his limited audience, his literary forebears, and the political world to which he was connected by friends and patrons. The corporal metaphor, Delany demonstrates, is essential to Bokenham in the structuring ofhis work and in producing its doctrinal meaning. While not building a 'text-as-body' herself, Delany relies on these metaphors as a 'taxonimic device' (28). She begins with the textual body of literary tradition, focusing particularly on Bokenham's ambivalence towards Chaucer, especially his Legend of Good Women, which the Legendary echoes structurally and thematically in order to critique. She next considers the actual bodies ofthe thirteen saints in Bokenham's own work, with attention to the theological and moral implications of his specific portrayals, and finally considers the role of the individuals who make up Bokenham's patrons and audience and their function in the body politic. Delany concludes with a consideradon of the 'issues of historicist and feminist theory relevant to my argument about the sexual politics of Bokenham's legendary' (28). The enormous scope ofthis project is apparent from its first chapter, but Delany further divides her categories, particularly in the three chapters on the corporeal bodies of the saints in Bokenham's collection. The three chapters that cover the arthuriana second part ofDelany's taxonomy fragment the saint's bodies into pieces, considering them in the groups suggested by the ordering of the legends in the text. This is a microcosm ofthe whole work, which (in a very medieval way) divides and subdivides, ending up at a conclusion which is titled 'Last Things and Afterlives,' perhaps in recognition ofthe fragmentary nature of the work's argument. This is not a criticism; that Delany rejects a neat summation ofwhat Impolitic Bodies provides prevents her discussion from being reductive, from enclosing what she proves to be a complex and intriguing work in overly-neat categories. What I was left with at the end of her book, apart from a desire to go read Osbern Bokenham myself, was a strong sense of how important a so-called (not by Delany) 'marginal' or 'minor' workmay be, how it can engage its literary, historical, and religious moment in complex ways. Delany...