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  • The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia by Rebecca Pinner
  • Michael Schmoelz
The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia. By Rebecca Pinner. (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer. 2015. Pp. xii, 276. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-78327-035-4.)

Both the cult of St. Edmund and the monastic community in which his “riche shrine” was housed have been subject to extensive historical and archaeological scrutiny for many years. Since the publication of Thomas Arnold’s Memorials (London, 1890) the works of historians such as Antonia Gransden, Dorothy [End Page 590] Whitelock, and (more recently) Tom Licence have sought to shed light on the cult of the Anglo-Saxon royal martyr saint and the activities of his custodians at the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Despite this proliferation of academic writing on the subject, Rebecca Pinner’s account is a timely and important book. Previous publications on the subject have certainly achieved great depth in the construction of coherent narratives of particular aspects of the cult or the intellectual life at the abbey, but Pinner takes a very wide-reaching and holistic approach, and attempts to embed and contextualize the wealth of material relating to this topic in her ambitious narrative, which attempts to draw a continuous line from the death of the last king of the East Angles in 869 to the dissolution of the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in 1539. As such, this book should hold significant appeal for the general reader wishing to become acquainted with this very popular, but ultimately rather enigmatic, early-medieval saint.

The hagiographic tradition of St. Edmund in its fully fledged late-medieval form depicts him as a tripartite personage bearing the epithets of king, martyr, and virgin; Pinner appears to have taken inspiration from her subject in this regard and likewise structures her narrative as three distinct sections. The first introduces us to the evolving hagiography of St. Edmund, beginning with Abbo of Fleury’s tenth-century Passio and continuing via the curiously punitive miracles recorded by Herman the Archdeacon in his De Miraculis in the late-eleventh century, and the entirely spurious additions (from a historical perspective) made to the tradition by Geoffrey of Wells in the mid-twelfth century before alighting on John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century English verse life of St. Edmund, which represents the final flowering of his cult. Other authors have written about these manuscripts in greater detail, but as previously noted, the value of this book lies in its discussion of all the extant hagiographical material in an integrated context.

Section 2 of the book focuses on the shrine of St. Edmund and seeks to contextualize it in its devotional and iconographical context. Once again, Pinner’s holistic approach bears fruit, and her attempts to integrate the physical and spiritual aspects of the shrine into one seamless narrative are laudable and create a very vivid impression of how medieval pilgrims may have experienced the shrine and its environs.

The last part of the book leaves Bury St. Edmunds behind and seeks to fix St. Edmund in the wider landscape, drawing on a multitude of different evidence bases from textual sources to archaeology and iconography. This allows the reader to gain an insight into the importance and reach of the cult throughout East Anglia and finally embeds this saint into the entirety of his ancient domain and not just his own banleuca.

In summary, Pinner’s book achieves the difficult feat of drawing together different kinds of evidence and strands of narrative associated with St. Edmund into one cohesive whole, which makes for a lively, engaging, and thought-provoking read. [End Page 591]

Michael Schmoelz
University of East Anglia
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