An anonymous fifteenth-century satirical poem, Why I Can't be a Nun, suggests that a girl who has been inspired by exemplary early medieval saints would have a better chance of emulating them outside the major religious houses that contained their remains. How some of those houses tried to claim an inherited and continuing sanctity from their Anglo-Saxon saints is the subject of Cynthia Turner Camp's Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England. Her case studies, based largely on five Middle English poems, are three princess-saints, Edith of Wilton, Æthelthryth and her kinswomen at Ely, and Werburgh of Chester; and two kings, Edward the Confessor at Westminster and Edmund of the East Angles at Bury St. Edmunds. Three of the poems are by known authors, Osbern Bokenham of Ely, Henry Bradshaw of Chester, and John Lydgate of Bury St. Edmunds, and assessment of their works benefits from knowledge of the circumstances in which they wrote or in which their works were cited. Henry Bradshaw's poem on Werburgh, for instance, is known only from a printed copy produced in 1521 during a bitter dispute between Abbot Birchenshawe of Chester and Cardinal Wolsey.
These poems are not exactly unknown, and the fifteenth-century engagement with the early medieval past has been the subject of a number of notable studies in recent years. Camp readily acknowledges her debt to the likes of Virginia Blanton, Catherine Clarke, Katherine Lewis, Catherine Sanok, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. She ably develops aspects of their work rather than presenting any major new thesis of her own. She is particularly concerned to show how the poems present a homogenized, ideal early medieval Christian past with inconvenient aspects of Anglo-Saxon history played down. Drawing on Ernst Kantorowicz's theory of the “king's two bodies,” she explores how the saints' bodies and the shrines that housed them helped to project a corporate identity for their religious houses founded on the nobility of their saints' royal birth and commensurate high sanctity. In such ways, the established Benedictine houses sought to answer their critics while also producing exemplars that might encourage individuals towards reform. None of this was, of course, sufficient to save them from Henrican Dissolution.
Although having many features in common that reflect broader fifteenth-century trends and concerns, each poem is distinct and justifies being explored in its own chapter. The nature of surviving Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman sources is one major factor that helped shape the later poems. Sometimes the fifteenth-century authors struggled to accommodate their earlier source material. The Anglo-Norman poet Goscelin had already inconveniently revealed that when Edith's tomb was opened at Wilton in the late eleventh century, her eyes, feet, and hands (apart from the thumb with which she used to make the sign of the cross) had decayed. Edith herself appeared in a vision to explain that this selective decay was because of “girlish light-mindedness.” The fifteenth-century poet felt obliged to reproduce this content, but elsewhere his Edith makes full-body appearances, more in keeping with fifteenth-century expectations, where Goscelin had more spectral ones.
Not all the poets had the same preoccupations. John Lydgate in his poem Edmund and Fremund seems to have bucked the trend for providing both a precise historical context for his subjects and clear links with the fifteenth-century monastery that housed their remains. However, the illustrations accompanying the poem in the presentation copy given to King Henry VI are shown to have made up for that and to have advanced more specifically the reputation of Bury and its monks. A couple of black-and-white illustrations barely do justice to these, and sadly none of the visual sources for Edward the Confessor at Westminster, which are also discussed, are illustrated.
Camp's book has the strengths and weaknesses of a doctoral dissertation turned into a book. The first chapter has that sine qua non for a thesis: the literature review and establishment of methodology. Thankfully, sentences such as “a generic chronotype, therefore, is a supratextual spatio-temporal construction” are relatively rare in what follows. But favored terms such as “chronotype” and “dotal” are used repetitively, sometimes appearing several times on the same page. The study's research aims are pursued in detail, but the approach can seem at times rather too narrowly focused. Camp provides very little assessment of the poems as poetry, and although attention is paid to the use of metaphor, there is no interest in language or vocabulary. Rather surprisingly there is no conclusion to draw the work together. Some comparisons are made between the poems within the chapters, but a final overview would greatly have clarified the study's contribution to current debates. Did Wilton's poem, the only one written for a nunnery, have the same or different concerns as the others? A conclusion would also have provided the opportunity to explore some interesting implications that have not been fully developed. One of these is that there seems to have been a reluctance on the part of the later medieval authors to invent details or depart from their sources even when these contained inconvenient details. This holds out the hope that when a fifteenth-century poem such as the Wilton Chronicle refers to information about the house's pre-Conquest history not recorded elsewhere, it may have been drawing on a lost source. An interesting discussion of the tabula in the church of Stone with which the book opens provides a possible example of just such a source. Perhaps when Camp has had time to distance herself from her intensive research, she will feel better able to reflect on some of the broader potential of her detailed studies.
