Inventing the Past in Henry Bradshaw's Life of St Werburge

Abstract

Henry Bradshaw's long hagiographic poem, The Life of St Werburge (before 1513), attempts to derive contemporary legitimacy for Chester Abbey from a reconstructed Mercian lineage. Werburge invents a continuous history for Bradshaw's monastic community, back to an Anglo-Saxon "golden age," through the genealogy and holy body of its patron saint, the seventh-century Mercian princess Werburgh. This article reads Werburge as a composite "poetic history," opening up the ways Bradshaw enlists poetic features to play precise historiographic functions, including his continual remetaphorization of Werburgh's body in order to transmit her Mercian heritage through time. Using Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's concept of a female saint's "dotality" — her ability to give herself — alongside Michel de Certeau's The Writing of History, the article traces the ways Bradshaw strives to overcome two major obstacles to the coherence of this history: the geopolitical distance between Chester and ancient Mercia, and the eventual decay of Werburgh's lineage-bearing, incorrupt corpse. Werburge demonstrates not only late medieval investment in the pre-Conquest era, but also the power of the holy female body to transmit that past into the late medieval present.