Golden Legend Research Articles

Anti-Saints: The New Golden Legend of Sylvain Maréchal ed. by Sheila Delany

Anti-Saints: The New Golden Legend of Sylvain Maréchal ed. by Sheila Delany

Saracens and Turks in William Caxton’s The Golden Legend

Abstract In the late fifteenth century, William Caxton translated into English and published a version of the best-known collection of saints’ lives in medieval Europe, the Legenda aurea. It was the longest and most expensive book he ever produced. Caxton used various sources, including Latin and French versions of the Legenda, to create a collection accessible to the book-buying public who were literate in the vernacular in late-fifteenth and early sixteenth-century England. The Golden Legend includes fifteen lives that incorporate Saracens or Turks into their narratives. It describes their interactions with Christians, both peaceful and violent, as well as their capacity for conversion. The depiction of Muslims in this popular sermon collection would have formed part of the cultural construction of Islamic people in England at the turn of the sixteenth century.

Jacques Le Goff.In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and The Golden Legend. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane.

Jacques Le Goff.<i>In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and The Golden Legend</i>. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane.

The Design of the Golden Legend: English Printing in a European Context

The first 100 years of printing in Europe was a vibrant period full of innovation and adaptation. Continental printers controlled the production of Latin books, many of which were imported into England. English printers worked hard to create an audience for their editions and achieved,this by adopting specific design features from the Latin editions. Yet despite this connection, English printing is often studied in separation from European printing. This article studies the Golden Legend, a hagiographic text popular throughout England and Europe, and shows that the two traditions were interrelated, especially in book design. On the continent, printers found themselves in a crowded marketplace and some adopted established designs to target a particular audience. In contrast, English printers were inspired by the design of continental books. Design was governed by the intended audience but not restricted to national demarcations. Not only was English printing integrated with European printing, it sustained a distinctive character while remaining part of the European tradition.

In Search of Sacred Time: Jacques de Voragine and The Golden Legend by Jacques Le Goff (review)

In Search of Sacred Time: Jacques de Voragine and The Golden Legend by Jacques Le Goff (review)

Vashti and the Golden legend: A pagan queen turns saint?

Hagiographic texts establish a narrative template for shame, avoidance of shame, what looks like death wish in courtly literature. Scenes of shame and its avoidance through death are adapted and folded into romance and other genres and affect how characters behave and are described and gendered. This article treats saints’ lives as literary texts and identifies the language used for female saints in the Old French and Old Occitan versions of the Legenda aurea and uses that codified language to compare the hagiographic text with a vernacular Jewish narrative: the Occitan Romans de la reina Ester , written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets by Crescas Caslari in 1327. This codification gives insight into how widespread such language and description became by the fourteenth century across language and culture barriers. Both the hagiographic texts and the romance are read as narrative, regardless of their intent for the original audiences. Acknowledging the deep-seated literary tradition of shame in a woman’s bodied existence and attempts to avoid that shame through dying, it is argued that both narratives have such substance and language in common that there may be crossover between the readers or writers of Jewish and Christian contemporary texts. This article first establishes the critical approaches to the lives of the saints and the death wish more generally. Secondly, it shows one pattern of the death wish in the French and Occitan Golden legend, that of a desire for death to avoid shame. Thirdly, it presents the language of the death wish for a female character folded into a Jewish text and how the similarities between Christian and Jewish description of such a character could imply an even more widespread sharing of saints’ lives than just among a Christian community.

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time by Carolyn Dinshaw (review)

Reviewed by: How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time by Carolyn Dinshaw Robert S. Sturges Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012, 251 pp. Carolyn Dinshaw, author of two of the most influential theory-inflected books in Middle English studies of the past twenty-five years (Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics [1989] and Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern [1999]), is, in addition, one of the few medievalists—perhaps the only one—who is also influential among Queer Theorists, a group, by and large, with little direct interest in the Middle Ages or medieval literature. Queer Theory’s recent turn to questions of temporality has led thinkers such as Judith/Jack Halberstam (In a Queer Time and Place [2005]) and José Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia [2009]) to cite Dinshaw’s pioneering work on queer historicity approvingly, especially her classic essay “Chaucer’s Queer Touches / A Queer Touches Chaucer” (Exemplaria 7 [March 1995]: 76–92) and Getting Medieval. It thus seems appropriate that the blurbs on the back cover of Dinshaw’s new book, How Soon Is Now?, come both from medievalists and from Queer Theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton. How Soon Is Now? is a fascinating, clearly argued, and beautifully written book that will be of considerable interest to both constituencies, medievalist and queer-theoretical, as well as to those of us whose professional lives dwell in their intersections. As the 1995 essay’s title suggests, Dinshaw throughout her career has been interested not only in temporality, but in the interactions of temporality and affectivity, another longtime concern of Queer Theory. Linking the past and the present through desire (modernity’s and postmodernity’s ongoing desire for the Middle Ages, for example) is one way to demonstrate the fallaciousness of linear, developmental conceptualizations of time; Queer Theory’s alternate temporalities, in their resistance to narratives of reproduction and development, also challenge straight time. It is this kind of understanding that connects Dinshaw’s work with recent developments in Queer Theory, and that is also the subject of How Soon Is Now? Dinshaw views this queer, affective resistance to linear time through the lens of certain “amateur” medievalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, medievalists who stood at a tangent to the period’s professionalization and institutionalization of medieval studies as a discipline, that is to say, of medievalists who did it for love. Dinshaw never forgets that one sense of “amateur” is “lover.” Following [End Page 350] the theoretical introduction outlining this potential queerness of time, each of the book’s four chapters (and an epilogue) takes up one or more medieval texts explicitly concerned with non-linear, asynchronous time, and examines both the text itself and its afterlife in the work of an amateur medievalist, suggesting that the amateur’s affective relation to the asynchronous text creates a related asynchronous, queer present, a “now” whose temporality is multiple and non-linear. Thus Chapter One, on “asynchrony stories,” centers on narratives about time slowing down and/or speeding up: the exemplum of “The Monk and the Bird,” drawn from the Northern Homily Cycle, the story of the Seven Sleepers as found in Caxton’s translation of the Golden Legend, and Walter Map’s story of King Herla in De nugis curialium are all stories in which a character experiences a magical or miraculous reorientation in time, one that forces the reader to hold two or more temporalities in tension simultaneously. These medieval stories in turn are invoked by amateur medievalist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the nineteenth century, who retells “The Monk and the Bird” in his own medievalizing Golden Legend. The result, for Dinshaw, is that for Longfellow, “reading and recounting medieval texts foster a productive asynchrony, bringing the past into the present” (68). This temporality is also queer in that Longfellow’s story addresses male homosociality “to express attachments and ways of being that were obsolescent in his present world”; thus “the dissolution of temporal boundaries serves as imaginative and affective—serves, that is, as queer—resource” (71). Succeeding chapters are concerned with further links between medieval challenges...

Four books on (neo-)liberalism

(Neo-)liberalism has been at the centre of many debates on economic institutions and policies as well as social issues, and particularly so since the financial crisis of 2008. The Great Recession was initially regarded by many as the end of the belief in the supreme efficiency of the market as well as the return of the state. Yet, only a few years after the subprime crisis and still in the midst of a long-lasting recession, in Europe at least, the influence of the neo-liberal doctrine on economic policies seems stronger than ever, leading many to wonder how such a devalued and contested ideology could still be so prominent.1 In order to understand this apparent puzzle, it is necessary to investigate what neo-liberalism actually is. The books featured in this review contribute to this effort. In order to understand contemporary neo-liberalism, it is necessary to look at its foundations, i.e. liberalism. The association of liberalism with the unconditional promotion of freedom and autonomy is usually taken for granted. Domenico Losurdo's book, Liberalism: A Counter-History, originally published in Italian in 2006, questions this belief with an investigation of liberalism from the 18th Century until 1914. Losurdo not only examines the writings of the most important contributors to liberal thought, but looks at real-existing liberalism and its concrete political realisations. The book aims to unveil the elements of liberalism usually left aside. And the picture he draws is far from the “Golden legend” told by the hagiography of liberalism. The book shows in detail how liberalism considered slavery, the condition of “coloured” or colonised populations, the treatment of the poor and their children as well as the working conditions of the industrial workers.

The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution by Alice Dailey (review)

Reviewed by: The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution by Alice Dailey Gerard Kilroy The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution. By Alice Dailey. [ReFormations Medieval and Early Modern.] (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. xvi, 332. $38.00 paperback, ISBN 978-0-268-02612-7; $26.00 e-book, ISBN 978-0-268-07778-5.) When Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador was saying Mass on March 24, 1980, witnesses say he flinched as he saw a gunman at the door of the church, just before a single, high-velocity bullet went cleanly through his chasuble and expanded inside his chest. When Jan Graffius came to examine his clothing under a [End Page 611] microscope, she found salt crystals, “the residue of a sudden and profuse sweat.” There was a moment of intense fear as the archbishop realized what was about to happen; yet he stayed at the altar. In 1996, Christian de Chergé and his fellow Cistercians decided to stay in their monastery at Tibhirine, Algeria. They were seized on the night of March 26 and beheaded on May 21. De Chergé left a testament that ends with forgiveness of the man who might murder him and the hope that, God willing, they would meet “like happy thieves” in paradise. Both Romero and the monks of Tibhirine bore witness to their faith before anyone told their story. It is necessary to say this, because the starting point of Alice Dailey’s book is that “the martyr is a retrospectively constructed figure created in and through literature” (p. 3); her interest is in the “dialogue between history and literary form” (p.2). Dailey challenges the “limitations of historicist readings of martyrology” (p. 5). Brad Gregory, through “inattention” to literary form, “reads martyrology as a transparent record of early modern Christian belief” (p. 5), whereas “genre structures the history that the genre in turn narrativises, and vice versa” (p. 5). Dailey surveys martyrdom across the confessional divide from the medieval models in the Golden Legend and John Foxe’s great Actes and Monuments (London, 1563) to St. Edmund Campion and King Charles I. Because martyrs rehearse a “paradigmatic story” (p.3), Acts and Monuments best fits her thesis. She is not the first to be gripped by the physical detail or convinced that Foxe allows “the hideous facts to speak for themselves” (p. 67). When she comes to the Catholic martyrs, she sees their deaths as the “fractured performance of conflicting scripts” (p. 114); Campion is forced into “a delicate medial space” (p. 107) between competing discourses of treason and martyrdom, having “failed in one of the necessary acts of Christian martyrdom, the confession of the tenets of the faith” (p. 108). This is despite the fact that, just before the cart was pulled away beneath his feet, Campion asked those Catholics present to join in reciting, “with as much fervour as they could,” theSymbolum Apostolorum: one of the oldest expressions of faith in the Church. Campion, at the moment of “his agony,” transformed the crowd around the scaffold into a community of faith. When Lord Charles Howard returned to the Court, he told Queen Elizabeth I that he thought the three papists “had died for no fault.” The queen, apparently stunned, said, “Is that so? Well, let those who are responsible look to it.” Howard was unconvinced by the treason narrative, and the queen disowned it, but Dailey sees Campion as “compromised” (p. 114) by his prayer for the queen. Campion revealed at his trial that he had told the queen that he accepted her authority and that the deposition of monarchs was not part of the potestas ordinata of the pope; it was certainly not an article of faith. Those who look at the early-modern period with postmodern detachment will like this book; others will find the idea that martyrdom is a literary genre, created posthumously, profoundly surprising. The past may be “a foreign country,” but these men and women sweated with fear, stood their ground, and bore witness with their blood, long before anyone constructed the narrative. Henry Walpole wrote his [End Page 612] fine poem, “Why doe I use my paper...

“God did play the child”: Robert Southwell’s “Christes childhoode”

WHAT KIND OF WISDOM and knowledge did the Christ Child have? (1) Robert Southwell's poem Christes childhood, from the Maeoniae, offers a carefully constructed reply that provides evidence about Counter-Reformation attitudes toward this ancient question and, more important for our purposes, evidence about Southwell's own understanding of the Christ Child's nature as fully human and fully divine. Pierre Janelle once remarked that the lyric presents the Christ Child as an ideal Jesuit hero--the attitude of the boy Jesus seems to be modeled after the pattern of classical--and Jesuit--moderation (162). This description, while it responds to the poem's careful searching for balance and integration, ignores its argumentative edge. The lyric is celebratory of Jesus's virtues but it is also instructive: in its own subtle way it takes a stand against very common folkloric depictions of the Christ Child as wonder working and even disruptive to reintroduce the simplicity and mystery of the Gospels' depiction of Jesus the boy and reaffirm his divine knowledge and power, while retaining one aspect of extrabiblical depictions that Southwell, unexpectedly, seems to consider important: the Christ Child at play. This poem differs from his other more famous poems on the Christ Child in that it presents the Child in a hieratic stance, an image of power and judgment rather than that of an active lover, eager sacrifice, or Warrior Babe. On the other hand, true to Southwell's love of paradox, while the poem presents us with a Child who is Judge of the World, it also represents him as a God who plays and perhaps experiences mirth. Though Southwell verges on declaring the humanity of Christ an act performed by a divinity, he achieves a balance that demonstrates that he also wishes to affirm the humanity of Christ. Southwell does not explicitly deny the folk tradition of a wonder-working Christ Child any more than he denies that the Christ Child grew and learned: he merely asserts that even the Gospel writers are unworthy to write of the miraculous acts springing from his divinity and humanity in this period of Christ's life. The claim is surprising in the end, for it implies that the wonders, teaching, and redeeming acts of Jesus depicted in the Gospels can be written of by men, but the wonder of his childhood is too great for human pens. The Counter-Reformation, like the Reformation itself, was concerned to remove extraneous pious legend from the truth of the Gospel, and in particular to safeguard the honor of Christ and his saints from a folk imagination that mythologized and embroidered with a very strong basis in the generally accepted apocryphal stories that had been handed down from very early centuries of the Church, some so old that they were known to Mohammed and included in the Koran, such as the tale of the boy Jesus breathing life into clay birds. The Catholic thinker Molanus, or Jan van der Meulen, even had called The Golden Legend the Legend of Lead because it was so filled with lies (De Picturis et Imaginibus Sacris, pro vero earum usu contra abusus [Treatise on Sacred Images] of 1570). Even before the decree of the Council, tales about the boy Jesus had been omitted from some versions of the collection, a sign of sensitivity about their inappropriateness or even their potential to subvert orthodox doctrine about Christ. (2) Southwell's assertion that only angels might write of what Christ did during those childhood years seems to have no other reason for being in the poem other than to imply that what the legends passed on in popular religious culture was untrue. This odd caveat aligns itself with the decrees of the Council of Trent on sacred art, which made it clear that extrabiblical fables about the life of Christ were not to be represented: And if any abuses have crept in amongst these holy and salutary observances, the holy Synod ardently desires that they be utterly abolished; in such wise that no images, (suggestive) of false doctrine, and furnishing occasion of dangerous error to the uneducated, be set up. …

THE BIBLE MORALISÉE, THE GOLDEN LEGEND AND THE SALVATOR MUNDI: OBSERVATIONS ON THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE WESTMINSTER RETABLE

The iconography of the Westminster Retable is compared primarily with sources in the Bible moralisée tradition created in France in the thirteenth century. Through analysing the iconography of the miracle scenes displayed on the Retable and relating them to specific copies of the Bible moralisée it is suggested that the artist of the Retable had close personal knowledge of French models. Analysis of the iconography of the central section of the Retable suggests that the text of the Golden Legend may also have been used by the artist and/or the iconographer as a source. It is also suggested that there is an underlying theme in the Retable that relates closely to the creation of the Westminster pavement. Finally, it is suggested that the artist of the Westminster Retable should be integrated into the history of French painting as much as of English painting in order to explore more fully the possibility that he was trained in France.

Women from the Golden Legend: Female Authority in a Medieval Castilian Sanctoral by Emma Gatland (review)

Women from the Golden Legend: Female Authority in a Medieval Castilian Sanctoral by Emma Gatland (review)

Saints Alive!

Saints Alive! Peter Heinegg Robert Bartlett Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. xvii + 787 pp. $39.95. St. Augustine's question, which gives this massive tome its title, was prompted by the many reports of miracles worked by (strictly speaking, through) the saints. Bartlett, who teaches medieval history at St. Andrews in Scotland, doesn't try to explain why, how, or if the long‐dead Christian heroes could perform the mighty deeds attributed to them. Instead, he downplays theology and presents a minutely detailed taxonomic guide to the cult of the saints, one of the features of Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Eastern Orthodoxy that most vividly distinguishes them from other Christian churches (not to mention Judaism or Islam). The density and thoroughness of Bartlett's survey can be numbing at times, but this is a magisterial achievement. The cult of the saints, he argues, is based on three components: the name (specific identification) and day (the liturgical feast, often assigned to the day the saint died), the body (or at least some physical remnant of the person), and the literary commemoration or hagiography. The reasons for the appeal and success of the cult are obvious: The Lord God could seem vague and inaccessible, if not terrifying. Saints were like us, only much better (and hence explicit proof of the ultimate in human potential). God was everywhere, but saints had particular national, regional, or local roots, which they shared with believers. They were the patrons of religious orders, guilds, and monasteries, as well of countries (although England's beloved St. George was a mostly fictitious martyred soldier from the eastern Mediterranean). They served both as a source of pride and help in time of need. If they delivered that help, they could be honored by votive offerings, such as gold or wax images of body parts healed through their intercession. Veneration (doulia, as opposed to latria, divine worship) was a quid pro quo affair. The first saints were the Virgin Mary, the apostle, and martyrs. Once Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, opportunities for martyrdom drastically diminished (except for missionaries); and its place was taken by monastic asceticism, along with the more quotidian categories of “confessor” (though that could rise to the lofty title of “Doctor of the Church”) and virgin. A bit confusingly, the archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael were also venerated as saints, despite their celestial status, since all three are mentioned in the Bible or the Apocrypha as helpers of humans. And in one bizarre episode, a French greyhound was canonized as St. Guinefort. The dog had been slain by its master, thinking it had killed a baby (whom it had in fact tried to save). Neighboring peasants honored the dog as a martyr, but a Dominican friar named Stephen de Bourbon (whose order had close ties to the Inquisition), indignantly dug up the animal's grave and burned its bones. There were limits to sainthood. Statistics for the gender of saints are disputed, but starting from a low of 8% in the 6th century, by the 15th century perhaps as many as 28% of canonized saints may have been women. The proportion has never climbed higher than that. Canonization itself was loosely regulated throughout western Christendom, until about the year 1200, when the papacy claimed supreme authority in the matter. And the popes have been at it ever since: John Paul II canonized a record 480‐plus saints during his long reign. New canonizations still make headlines, and people still talk about the devil's advocate. The fame of outstanding saints like Anthony of Egypt (d. 356) or Martin of Tours (d. 397), gave birth to the incredibly voluminous genre of hagiography, rife with fantastic legends, spectacular miracles, and (for the martyrs) sadistic horrors. A majority of the miracles involved the cure of diseases, but they spanned a gamut from relieving sterility to raising the dead to predicting the future, driving out demons, levitating, and receiving the stigmata. Classics like The Golden Legend (ca. 1260) and The Little Flowers of St. Francis (ca. 1390) enjoyed a steady...

Anti-Saints: The New Golden Legend by Sylvain Maréchal (review)

Anti-Saints: The New Golden Legend by Sylvain Maréchal (review)

Women from the Golden Legend: Female Authority in a Medieval Catalan Sanctoral

Women from the Golden Legend: Female Authority in a Medieval Catalan Sanctoral

La « tragédie » de Judas. La légende de Judas d'après le manuscrit 1275 de la bibliothèque municipale de Reims

Medievalists are familiar with the Oedipal legend of Judas as it appeared in the Golden Legend by the Dominican monk Jacobus de Voragine. In the Middle Ages, this was one of the best-known versions of the traitor’s Vita. From the twelfth century, however, several other accounts circulated through the West. The Vita Jude Scarioth in Manuscript 1275 in Reims (at the end of the XIIIth century) was one of the longest and most elaborate versions of the Judas legend. The originality of this long prose narrative is in its wealth of descriptive and narrative detail. This version may have drawn on a variety of literary and vernacular traditions, and is evidence that Judas developed from an initially ill-defined presence to a fully-realized character, independent of the Gospels. In this text, Judas appears as more tortured than wicked, and his life becomes, in its own terms, a “tragedy”.

Cultural democratisation in the struggle between public intellectuals and the state: the debate on the ‘Theatre of the People' in France (1895–1905)

This paper deconstructs the golden legend of cultural democratisation as the achievement of the French Republican model. To do so it goes back to the years 1895–1905 when the debates on cultural democratisation were first structured. It shows how the intellectuals who ‘went to the people’ to give them culture and/or to promote a ‘people's culture’ found in this proselytism a way to express their vision of the ways to transform the social order, and to define a form of democracy in which intellectuals could play a prominent role. By doing so, they tried to oppose an alternative to the traditional methods of political representation that is to say they tried to compete with State officials as legitimate political representatives. Beyond this short-time historical period, this paper sheds light on the articulation between cultural democratisation, cultural policy and democracy in France.

Male Saints and Devotional Masculinity in Late Medieval England

This article considers the ways in which the lives of male monastic saints circulating in late medieval England (and the cults of male saints more widely) were underpinned by certain ideas and ideals of masculinity and the functions which these performed. It argues for the significance of male saints serving as devotional models for the lay audience of these texts (both men and women). The two main sources are William Caxton's Golden Legend (published in 1483) and his Vitas Patrum (published after his death by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495). It therefore seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of the ways in which piety was used to assess masculinity, but also the extent to which piety as a social identity (both public and private in nature) was informed by notions of manliness.

Dante and the Frescoes at Santi Quattro Coronati

It would be hard to find a more effective visual source for understanding the political ideology that underscores Dante's relationship to Boniface VIII in the Divina Commedia than the frescoes that line the walls of the Oratorio di San Silvestro in the Basilica of the Santi Quattro Coronati in Rome. These frescoes, which depict episodes from the life of St. Sylvester and his relationship to the emperor Constantine, express as their clear subtext the thirteenth-century papacy's view of the proper relationship between ecclesiastical and secular power (Fig. 1). Their vivid dramatization of these events synthesizes and, more importantly, interprets two well-known literary sources: the life of St. Sylvester that was thought to have been composed by Eusebius of Caesarea and the text of the Donation of Constantine, the Constitutum Constantini. The account of the life of St. Sylvester that is contained in the Golden Legend (probably composed around 1260) also provides a readily accessible point of reference for t...

Karl Tamburr, The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval EnglandThe Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England. Karl Tamburr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. Pp. xii+211.

<i>Karl Tamburr,</i> The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England<i>The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England</i>. Karl Tamburr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. Pp. xii+211.