Anglo-Norman Hagiography as Institutional Historiography: Saints' Lives in Late Medieval Campsey Ash Priory

Scholarly work on postconquest English convents has tended to assume that, unlike their male monastic counterparts, English nuns lacked institutional self-awareness and conscious historical documentation. On the contrary, this article proposes that certain convent manuscripts functioned as convent chronicles. This article uses the postconquest foundation Campsey Priory and one manuscript, British Library Additional 70513, a collection of Anglo-Norman saints' lives belonging to the priory from the thirteenth century, as a case study, demonstrating how these hagiographic texts operate as a Campsey chronicle. It argues that four saints' lives in particular—the lives of Modwenna, Osith, Audrée, and Katherine—constitute an undercurrent of particularly strong institutional identification in the manuscript. Finally, this case study aims to encourage further research investigating not only networks of female readers in postconquest England but the particular literary cultures of individual convents.