New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints’ Lives, by Catherine Sanok

Abstract

Following the Norman Conquest, there was a resurgence of interest in, and writing about, English saints. Catherine Sanok argues here that, by the end of the fourteenth century, there was barely any interest in them apart from the South English Legendary (SEL). This situation had rapidly reversed by 1420, and there began an outpouring of Middle English writing of English saints’ lives which continued after the introduction of print and was still visible at the Reformation and Dissolution. In a detailed and thought-provoking new study, Sanok proposes that this should be regarded not simply as a narrative revival but as a literary phenomenon which explored ‘competing forms of secular and religious community’ at every level. Using complex-system theory following Sassen, Sanok offers a new methodology for examining these apparently diverse texts. Her key assumption is that late medieval English saints’ lives constitute a system of formal networks which use form variably to explore a concept, in this case community. Her threefold approach is to identify and question how these literary works reveal concerns about community; to examine how these concerns were played out in a ‘dizzying array’ of literary genres (epic, prose, verse and even translation between genres) in a manner more usually seen in secular texts; and to study all these different texts and forms as a whole, searching for communality underlying their variety, to see how they engaged with topical issues of interest to the historian of the late medieval period.