Rethinking the South English Legendaries edited by Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (review)

This collection represents another milestone in the history of South English Legendary (SEL) studies and makes a substantial contribution to that history. It contains twenty-one essays on the SEL by both long-established SEL scholars and new voices. The editors have wisely chosen to reprint some particularly important articles from the past. Thus, they have included earlier essays by Thomas Liszka (“The South English Legendaries”), Oliver Pickering (excerpts from “South English Legendary Style in Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle” and “The Outspoken South English Legendary Poet”), John Frankis (“The Social Context of Vernacular Writing in the Thirteenth Century”), and Thomas Heffernan (“Dangerous Sympathies: Simon de Montfort, Politics, and the South English Legendary”). Anne Thompson, who wrote the first literary-critical monograph on the SEL, is represented by a short, helpful afterword, in which she reviews the contents of the collection and suggests areas ripe for future study.

The collection is divided into five major parts and Thompson’s afterword. In the first section, entitled “(Re-)situating the South English Legendary,” the editors include the essays cited earlier by Liszka, Frankis, and Pickering. Also included is a contribution by Sherry Reames, whose essay, entitled “The South English Legendary and Its Major Latin Models,” discusses the SEL’s debt to Latin collections of saints’ lives written for use in the church liturgy.

The second section of the collection is entitled “Manuscripts and Textual Cultures of the South English Legendaries.” Within this section, Chloe Morgan’s interesting essay, “‘Lite bokes’ and ‘grete relikes’: Texts and Their Transmission in the South English Legendary,” is an exploration of the SEL’s characteristic attitude toward written (as opposed to oral) language. Stephen Yeager’s essay, “Documents, Poetry and Editorial Practice: The Case of ‘St. Egwine,’” finds that the SEL’s narrative of St. Egwine was primarily an “‘account’ in the more bureaucratic sense of the term … confirming the possessions and privileges of the monastery he founded” (p. 168).

Essays by Catherine Sanok, Virginia Blanton, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and E. Gordon Whatley make up the third section, “Textual Communities and the South English Legendaries.” In “Forms of Community in the South English Legendary,” Sanok approaches the coherence of the legendary by considering its (flexible) formal principles, principles reflecting the compilers’ strong interest in community. In “Counting Noses and Assessing the Numbers: Native Saints in the South English Legendaries,” Blanton focuses on English saints. One fifth of all legends in the SEL concern English saints, but Blanton focuses on the much smaller number of lives of the native female English saints “to challenge the essentialist arguments put forward about male saints as representative” (p. 233). Wogan-Browne’s “Locating Saints’ Lives and Their Communities” argues that the legend of St. Kenelm cannot simply be seen, as it often is, as an endorsement of English nationalism. Finally, Whatley’s essay, “Pope Gregory and St. Austin of Canterbury in the Early South English Legendary,” explores the SEL’s enthusiastic embrace of Pope Gregory as “Apostle to the English,” while ironically relegating St. Augustine, who actually traveled to England and proselytized the English, to a secondary, more passive role.

The fourth and largest section of the collection is entitled “Contexts and Discourses.” In this section, Heather Blurton’s “‘His right hond he liet of-smite’: Judas/Quiriac and the Representation of Jewish Identity in the South English Legendaries” treats the SEL’s passio of St. Quiriac, the apocryphal first Bishop of Jerusalem, within the historical context of the late thirteenth-century English coin-clipping scandal and the subsequent persecution and forced conversion of English Jews. Sarah Breckenridge’s article, “Mapping Identity in the South English Legendary,” shows how the SEL’s chronological structure (the liturgical year) intersects with its emphasis on geographical place.

Karen A. Winstead’s essay focuses on the only illustrated SEL manuscript, produced ca. 1400. In this article, entitled “Visualizing the South...