Recovering the histories of women religious in England in the central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin

Abstract

ABSTRACTBuilding upon the efforts made by scholars over the past 20 years to enrich our understanding of the vibrancy and sophistication of the literary cultures fostered within English communities of women religious during the central Middle Ages, this article shows that these women kept their communities' histories and preserved their saints' cults through their own writing. The evidence for this is uncovered through comparative analysis of the two extant versions of the post-mortem miracles of the late Anglo-Saxon saint Edith of Wilton (c.961–c.984): the Vita et translatio Edithe, composed c.1080 by the Flemish hagiographer Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c.1040–d. after 1107), and the early fifteenth-century Middle English Wilton Chronicle. This analysis reveals that the writer of the Chronicle depended on a collection of Edith's and other Wilton saints' miracles that was maintained by their consorors throughout the late tenth and eleventh centuries, independently of Goscelin's account.