The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia by Rebecca Pinner (review)

St. Edmund of East Anglia (d. 869) was one of the most popular "native" English saints before the Reformation. The foundational hagiographic account of his life was composed by Abbo of Fleury in the late tenth century, and, from the eleventh century onwards, Edmund's cult was vigorously promoted by the abbey housing his relics in Bury St. Edmunds. The cult was also encouraged by English monarchs with a particular attachment to the royal martyr, from Cnut to Henry VI. Rather than attempt a comprehensive account of St. Edmund's medieval cult, Rebecca Pinner's book focuses specifically on its origins and later development in the martyr's former kingdom of East Anglia. That geographical limitation allows her to consider a wide range of visual, architectural, musical, and other material in addition to the written hagiographic tradition that has received so much previous scholarly attention. The chronological range of Pinner's study is from the ninth century to the dissolution in 1539 of the abbey in Bury St. Edmunds.

The book's Introduction begins by acknowledging Edmund's popularity and goes on to note how little is known of the historical Edmund from the chronicle tradition and from numismatic evidence. Much previous scholarship has been preoccupied with distinguishing fact from fiction and more interested in working out what happened in 869 than in understanding the posthumous development of Edmund's cult. Pinner instead offers what she calls a "longitudinal study" of Edmund's cult across the Anglo-Saxon and later medieval periods. The book is also self-confessedly interdisciplinary. However, the many kinds of evidence analyzed are to a large extent separated into different parts of the book; readers may feel that a different arrangement of the material might have allowed different disciplinary approaches and different kinds of evidence to illuminate each other even more effectively.

Following the Introduction, the book is divided into three parts of unequal length. The longest, Part One, is devoted to the written hagiography on St. Edmund that was produced in, or otherwise associated with, East Anglia. John Lyd­ gate's fifteenth-century description of Edmund as "martir, mayde and kynge" structures much of Pinner's discussion of the whole tradition. Chapter 1 is devoted to the seminal hagiographic account of Abbo of Fleury, written not for Bury but for the monastic community at Ramsey. Pinner argues that from the beginnings of the tradition, Edmund's royal status, virginity, and regional association are emphasized. The second chapter charts the development of miracle story collections by later Latin hagiographers of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Their texts are read in relation to contemporary local history, such as the translation of Edmund's relics in 1095 and later disputes between the abbey and the bishop of Norwich. The next chapter examines two Bury manuscripts in which Edmund's vita and miracula are combined, with a special focus on the famous miniatures in Pierpont Morgan MS M.736. Chapter 4 surveys the elaboration of the hagiographic tradition in Geoffrey of Wells's De infantia sancti Eadmundi, commissioned by the abbey in the mid-twelfth century, and in two Anglo-Norman verse lives: Denis Piramus's La Vie seint Edmund le Rei, composed at the abbey ca. 1180-1200, and the anonymous La Passiun de seint Edmund, a versification of Abbo's vita written by someone with local East Anglian knowledge ca. 1200. Pinner plausibly relates these two Anglo-Norman lives to the reinvigoration of Edmund's cult by Abbot Samson (1182-1211). Abbo's seminal text was also rendered into verse ca. 1220 by the leading Anglo-Latin poet of the thirteenth century, Henry of Avranches, who added some details culled from the subsequent hagiographical tradition: Pinner suggests that this version may reflect a desire on the part of Hugh de Northwold (abbot 1215-28) to make his mark after a controversial...