The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages by Karen A. Winstead

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages by Karen A. Winstead Derrick Higginbotham (bio) The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages Karen A. Winstead Oxford UP, 2018, ix + 243 pp. ISBN 9780198707035, $61.00 hardcover; ISBN 9780198707042, $27.95 paperback. Karen A. Winstead's contribution to the multivolume series The Oxford History of Life-Writing richly surveys medieval English (and select European) texts produced roughly from the seventh to the fifteenth century. Life writing in the Middle Ages is capacious since it surfaces in different types of texts with the genres of history and hagiography looming large; Winstead returns to these two genres repeatedly, examining them from different angles in successive chapters. On the whole, Winstead's survey capably fulfills its mandate to address texts that are central to the literary-historical tradition, such as Bede's Ecclesiastical History (731) and Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women (1385–87), even as she includes lesser-known works such as The Life of Saint Gilbert of Sempringham (c. 1200) and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Life of Merlin (1150). She divides the book into six chapters, and for the most part, each one traces a chronological arc. Beyond chronology, Winstead begins by focusing predominantly on texts categorized as history, yet by the end, she concentrates chiefly on fictional texts, a divide between history and literary fiction that she evokes and astutely troubles throughout the book. In the end, Winstead amply demonstrates that "lives serve the living," as she carefully situates and examines the generic fluidity of life writing over the long Middle Ages (158). In chapter one, Winstead takes readers on a tour of biographies about career religious—a crowd of mostly monks and abbots—starting with those composed before the Norman Conquest. When exploring these texts, she notes at least three common qualities: these narratives offered audiences individualizing details; expressed a concern for the accuracy of the story told; and sometimes adapted details from earlier tales, especially hagiographic tales, thus relying on preexisting narrative conventions that could compromise the impulse for accuracy. This assessment of pre-Conquest biographies enables Winstead to pivot argumentatively when she turns to twelfth-century texts. She contends that sacred biographies, such as William of Malmesbury's The Deeds of English Bishops (c. 1125), show an increasing emphasis on verifiable events (via sources) and a new attention to personal lives. With this textual history established, she more deeply investigates specific narratives such as the itinerant poet Garnier of Pont-Sainte-Maxence's Life of Thomas Becket, composed around 1175, because Garnier, she contends, "is the first medieval biographer to experiment seriously with narrative voice" (30). She also considers two well-known twelfth-century autobiographies, Abbot Guibert of Nogent's Monodies (c. 1115) and Peter Abelard's The Story of My Calamities (c. 1130), as evidence that as a literary mode, autobiography did not disappear in the Middle Ages after Augustine's late fourth-century landmark Confessions appeared. Chapter two complements the first, attending to biographies of religious women, with special attention to the importance of friendship in life writing. Even [End Page 94] as this chapter focuses more strictly on English texts, it too charts a historical trajectory, starting with Goselin of St. Bertin's Book of Encouragement, which he wrote circa 1080, and The Life of Christine Markyate, which an unnamed monk of St. Albans composed sometime in the 1140s. Winstead then transitions to a short analysis of a very early thirteenth-century text, The Life of Saint Gilbert of Sempringham. The chapter ends with the famous Book of Margery Kempe, which narrates Kempe's struggle to have her life story written down some time in the late 1430s. Via this historical trajectory, Winstead shows that this body of life writing highlights the "intense heterosexual bonds" that appear between Goselin and the nun Eve of Wilton and between abbot Geoffrey and the recluse Christina of Markyate (53). Like chapter one, this trajectory enables Winstead to dramatize a shift—a shift linked once more to the twelfth century—that appears specific to English culture. When discussing The Life of Saint Gilbert, Winstead illuminates a cultural change in...