John Capgrave

Abstract

John Capgrave (b. 1393–d. 1464), an Augustinian friar from King’s Lynn, Norfolk, was one of medieval England’s most prolific authors. His earliest surviving work is a Latin commentary on Genesis, one of many Latin theological tracts attributed to him, most of which are now lost. In 1440, he composed his first known work in Middle English, a verse life of Saint Norbert of Xanten, the founder of the Premonstratensian order, at the request of John Wygenhale, a Premonstratensian abbot in nearby West Dereham. More saints’ lives followed. Capgrave addressed a verse life (c. 1445) of one of the most popular saints of the time, Katherine of Alexandria, to a general audience; wrote a life of Augustine of Hippo (c. 1450) for an unnamed gentlewoman; and supplied a life of Gilbert of Sempringham (1451) for the Gilbertine nuns at Sempringham. Though Capgrave was long thought to have written the Nova Legenda Anglie, a voluminous anthology of lives of British saints, Peter Lucas has effectively refuted that attribution. Besides saints’ lives, Capgrave’s works include a pilgrim’s guide to Rome, The Solace of Pilgrims, completed shortly after his own pilgrimage in 1450, and historical works. A set of biographies about illustrious people named Henry was dedicated to King Henry VI in 1446. Capgrave’s final project, the Abbreviation of Chronicles, was a concise history of the world (with particular attention, in later sections, to England), from Creation to the 1417 Council of Constance. Augustinian historians undertook much of the early research on Capgrave in the twentieth century. Because most of his works survive in manuscripts that he wrote or corrected himself, Capgrave has also been studied by scholars concerned with dialect and with matters of paleography and codicology. Lately literary scholars have taken an interest in Capgrave’s work. His Life of Saint Katherine, especially, is remarkable for its scope and complexity, with rich characterizations, extended forays into history and theology, and the first extended discussion in English literature of whether women are fit to rule. Once regarded as a dull denizen of a cultural wasteland, Capgrave, like many of his contemporaries, has benefited from revisionist scholarship on the fifteenth century. He is now widely regarded by medievalists as an innovator and a liberal thinker who, though orthodox, championed religious reform.