Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England. The Work of Osbern Bokenham by Sheila Delany (review)

REVIEWS SHEILA DELANY. Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth­ Century England. The Work of Osbern Bokenham (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). vii, 236 $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Osbern Bokenham, a fifteenth-century Augustinian friar at Clare Priory, Suffolk, is identified as the author of two works: a collection of thirteen lives of female saints known by the editorial title Legends ofHoly Women and a translation of a portion of Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon entitled Mappula Angliae: he is also the likely author of a genealogical poem de­ scribing the historical patronage of Clare Priory and a translation of a portion of Claudian's De consulatu Stilichonis. In Impolitic Bodies, Sheila Delany argues that Bokenham's writing, particularly the legendary of female saints, can enhance our understanding of a wide range of issues, including "Chaucer's work and Chaucer reception, gender studies, late­ medieval European cultural history, the development of hagiography, and English political life" (p. 4). Delany demonstrates Bokenham's rele­ vance to these topics largely through situating the author's life and work within a series of highly detailed contexts, ranging from East Anglian patronage networks and fifteenth-century political theory to late medi­ eval representations of the breast and recent feminist debates on sexual­ ity and violence. This proliferation of contexts suggests the value of Bo­ kenham's work for scholars of literary history and late medieval politics, as well as for historians and theorists of gender and power. Delany's first three chapters include biographical detail and much in­ formation about the education of Augustinian friars, late-medieval ec­ clesiastical politics, the regional history of East Anglia, and local power structures in the town of Clare. Delany notes that the development of lay piety and the important role of women, especially as addressees of devotional writing, meant that the "time was ripe" (p. 29) for Boken­ ham's legendary, the first collection of lives of female saints written in English. However, she argues, it was neither the tradition of English devotional writing nor Latin and Anglo-Norman legendaries that served as the primary model for Bokenham's work, but rather Chaucer's Legend ofGood Women. Delany identifies a series of parallelisms between the two works: Bokenham's Saint Margaret is a reconstruction of Chaucer's daisy, or marguerite; Saint Anne and Alceste are each related to the god of love and their lives include some association with hell; Christine and Cleopatra are each associated with three officials, a snakebite, and a scene at sea; Dido and Faith each die on a bed, and so forth. But, as Delany 343 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER admits, some of the similarities are minor (the stories of Lucrece and Dorothy each include a detail about the woman's feet [p. 41}), or are so generalizable as to be unremarkable (Hypermnestra and Cecelia are "young brides with a secret" [p. 42}), and the correspondence does not extend to the last three lives of Bokenham's legendary, although, Delany improbably suggests, this "could correspond to a lost portion of Chau­ cer's Legend" (p. 43). A further problem lies in Delany's decision to sin­ gle out Chaucer as Bokenham's most significant predecessor. Although Bokenham mentions Chaucer throughout the legendary, it is always in the context of a formulaic triumvirate-"Gower, Chaucer, Lydgate"representing an emergent English literary tradition. It is Bokenham's development of an ongoing dialogue with a collective literary tradition that gives a surer sense of the legendary's order and coherence. This broader relationship to courtly culture is the subject of Delany's discus­ sion of Bokenham's Augustinianism; she argues that the legendary is an "Augustinian polemic against the abuse of rhetoric and of classical cul­ ture by the courtly classicizing trend in recent English poetry" (p. 70), an attempt to "cleanse hagiography of its courtly ironic and its bureau­ cratic accretions to return to the fundamentals of faith" (p. 65). The middle third of the book is a conceptual unit, in which Delany argues that Bokenham deliberately organized his legendary in the image of a body. Delany claims that "Bokenham deliberately produced a so­ maticized text; that...