New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints' Lives by Catherine Sanok (review)

In my 2008 review of A Companion to Middle English Hagiography (a collection edited by Sarah Salih which deserves far more attention), I lamented that no one had addressed "the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the hagiographical texts written in Middle English" (p. 744). Such an enterprise would be a considerable undertaking and would require a sustained investigation, and so I am pleased that Catherine Sanok addresses this fundamental question and offers an excellent assessment of how vernacular lives figured in the social, political, temporal, and spatial worlds of fifteenth-century England. Borrowing from the work of complex-system theorists, Sanok resists a taxonomy of hagiography and instead works to "recognize relationships between phenomena different in kind, scale, and even ontological status" (p. 16). Sanok seeks affiliations between hagiography written in English among those very different in literary form: prose chronicle writing to situate saints in the historical chronology of England, prose and verse lives, lives written in stanzaic poetry, and forms of music such as carols and ballads that celebrate the saints. Sanok considers how these diverse texts shape complex identifications and competing communities. As such, she argues that these narratives allow us to "explore how different forms of community—regional, national, and supranational; religious and secular; intimate and imagined—relate to one another" (p. 5). She contends that Middle English hagiographical texts support a local image of particularity that is not a universal to all in that community, even as they can support a competing supranational identity that remains fluid and unbounded. Further, Sanok elegantly steps into the minefield of what it meant to be a "nation" to reconsider how late-medieval England was being framed through religious discourses, such as when the Council of Constance demarcated a voting nation as a "political category defined by the heterogeneous places, people, and languages it contains" (p. 23).

In moving beyond studies that see a direct causality of the political and social world on the production of saints' lives, Sanok presses us to think more globally about hagiographical writings that have been heretofore seen as bounded by time, place, and event. Even still, she provides excellent close readings of saints' lives in their contexts that remain largely unknown to most: lives of English saints in the South English Legendary; an account of Edith in the Wilton Chronicle and the appended life of Etheldreda; Bokenham's life of Wenefred as well as John Audelay's carol in her honor; prose lives of English saints added to the Gilte Legende; the companion lives of Edmund and Fremund and of Alban and Amphibalus, which were promoted by the great Benedictine houses of Bury St. Edmunds and St. Albans respectively; texts celebrating Thomas Becket and the civic rituals of London that supported his cult; and Edmund Hatfield's verse Lyf of Saynt Ursula. This incomplete list hints at the research necessary to analyze such a broad spectrum of writings. I am awed by this achievement, even as I continue to think long and hard about the association among these narratives. Where many, myself included, have focused our attention on a singular cult as a means to contain a research project, Sanok navigates multiple cults deftly, all the while thinking about them at the supranational level and how they coalesce (or do not). If I have one criticism of this book, it is that the nature of this project forecloses the possibility of a significant engagement with the early sources of these texts. As a result, a reader is not always certain what is new or specific to the texts under discussion and how these novelties distinguish these lives further. I might qualify Sanok's assertion, moreover, that "[w]hile there had been considerable interest in England's native saints following the Conquest, when a flurry of Anglo-Norman and Latin Lives were written, by the end of...