Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England by Cynthia Turner Camp (review)

Hagiography, historiography, time, and ethics are entwined at the center of Cynthia Turner Camp's well-written book Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England. Camp argues that Middle English hagiographers rewrite the lives of Anglo-Saxon saints in order to rearticulate the past in a deliberate way to shape their present, especially in terms of the ethical values represented by the saints themselves. By looking at the native saints Edith of Wilton, Audrey of Ely (Etheldreda), Werburgh of Chester, Edward the Confessor, and Edmund of Bury, Camp suggests that their late medieval hagiographers struggle with reconciling the historical realities of the Anglo-Saxon past with the notion of continuity that they would like to present in the hagiographic accounts.

The book is divided into five chapters, one addressing each of the above-named native saints. Camp employs a few different lenses through which to view the saints she discusses. Using Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies as her model, she argues that saints represent both "ethical" and "institutional" bodies that define monastic identity. The former speaks to the individual monk, the latter to the monks as a whole. Camp also turns to Michel de Certeau's The Writing of History as an overall schematic, where the historiographer/hagiographer's writings will have moments of "absence, amnesia, and aspiration" that are redefining the present moment and needs in terms of the past. She articulates two modes of time presented in the writings she examines—tempus, or worldly time, and aevum, heavenly and sacred time, suggesting that the writers alter their form depending on the elements of time they mean to convey: tempus gets conveyed in a linear, chronological structure (marked by named years, rulers, etc.), while aevum lends itself to more figurative discourse, outside of historical markers.

Camp attempts to bring all these strands together in each of her chapters, using the Middle English hagiography of the saint as a touchstone for these issues of temporality, ethics, the historical past, and the audiences of present time. The first three chapters cohesively examine the three female saints—Edith, Audrey, and Werburgh—and build on the scholarship of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Catherine Sanok, and Virginia Blanton, among others. In "Edith of Wilton and the Writing of Women's History," Camp looks at the rewriting of the hagiographic tradition to include the incorruptibility of Edith's body as a metonym for the wholeness of the female religious community at Wilton. "Audrey Abroad: Spiritual and Genealogical Filiation in the Middle English Lives of Etheldreda" examines how non-Ely writers shape Audrey as exemplar and ethical model for the nuns who read them, frequently focusing on Audrey's spiritual "genealogies" and relationships. The third chapter on a female saint, "Henry Bradshaw's Life of Werburge and the Limits of Holy Incorruption," contrasts and combines the main themes of the preceding two, looking at the genealogical ties of Werburge and the incorruptibility (and then decay) of her body and the ways in which it defines Chester Abbey.

The last two chapters turn to male, royal saints and address the complexity related to their "two bodies" as rulers and exemplars. "The Limits of Narrative History in the Written and Pictorial Lives of Edward the Confessor" examines the Middle English record of Edward's cult, which largely detaches him from his historical moment and his role as king. Camp suggests that these omissions show how the hagiographers truly dismiss the elements that are not useful or are problematic, focusing only on his saintly characteristics to recast him for their audiences. Similarly, in "The Limits of Poetic History in Lydgate's Edmund and Fremund and the Harley 2278 Pictorial Cycle," Camp writes that Lydgate dismisses chronological or historical events in Edmund's life in order to cast a more idealized version of holy kingship...