John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century (review)

Karen Winstead's title is a teasing one, but it is also potentially somewhat misleading. Anyone who expects that the book will be demonstrate either that John Capgrave had a special insight into the historical affairs of his time or that his outlook on those affairs was typical of the age will find that Winstead has a rather different objective. Her primary interest, as her previous work on Capgrave foreshadows, is in Capgrave as a hagiographer, although she endeavors to demonstrate that his bias in that task was not the conventional one. Far from typifying the fifteenth century or its attitudes, Winstead aims to establish Capgrave's individuality, even eccentricity.

Capgrave was an Augustinian friar, born in 1393 at King's Lynn. He studied in Cambridge, became prior provincial of his order in the 1450s, and died in 1464. Most notably, he was confessor to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, for several years until the latter's sudden death in 1447. He authored a number of vernacular saints' lives, in prose and in verse; two histories of his own country, one in Latin, the other in English; an English guide to the churches of Rome; and various scriptural commentaries in Latin, not all of which survive. Despite earlier hostile criticism, both for his literary skills and for his apparently lukewarm political loyalties, recent work has attempted to rehabilitate Capgrave's reputation. Peter Lucas, who could have been cited more often here, has been concerned with Capgrave's involvement with the production of books. Winstead's primary focus is on the content and outlook of some of the saints' lives, such as Katherine, a version of which she edited in 1999. Given the inclusion of fifteenth century in the book's title, the reader may be surprised that Capgrave's Abbreuiacion of Chronicles does not feature more prominently, even though its narrative ends in 1417.

Winstead's aim appears to be to demonstrate from this handful of saints' lives that Capgrave, living in a time of political difficulty and ecclesiastical stringency, was an independent thinker who "did not care deeply whether York or Lancaster governed but cared that England be governed well; he was orthodox but not Arundelian; he sympathized with the aspirations and frustrations of women but did not favor radical social change"(p. 163).Such a view is an interesting one, but it is one that is not altogether easy to demonstrate from the texts. Capgrave is very reticent, as Winstead admits; consequently, much of the case has to be made from silences or subtle allusions—omissions from source texts, minor modifications of wording, a rare comment that is entirely independent and hardly ever outspoken. The problem is compounded by the fact that there are difficulties about those source texts: the precise source has not been identified for the life of Katherine, and others are not always easy to access. But sometimes more generous quotation of those sources might help. The Liber de illustribus Henriciis is described (p.159) as "a diabolically subversive text," a provocative comment that requires further evidence. Comparisons with other fifteenth-century orthodox writers could also be extended: orthodoxy, like heresy, came in various shades. All in all, the book opens a variety of questions. Capgrave may not become a widely popular author, but the details here can contribute to a wider picture of late-medieval outlooks.