Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Conventions
- Introduction
- Part I Background and Context
- Part II Authors
- 3 Thomas Hoccleve
- 4 Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes
- 5 John Lydgate's Major Poems
- 6 John Lydgate's Religious Poetry
- 7 John Lydgate's Shorter Secular Poems
- 8 John Capgrave and Osbern Bokenham: Verse Saints' Lives
- 9 Peter Idley and George Ashby
- 10 John Audelay and James Ryman
- Part III Themes and Genres
- Chronology
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
8 - John Capgrave and Osbern Bokenham: Verse Saints' Lives
from Part II - Authors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Conventions
- Introduction
- Part I Background and Context
- Part II Authors
- 3 Thomas Hoccleve
- 4 Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes
- 5 John Lydgate's Major Poems
- 6 John Lydgate's Religious Poetry
- 7 John Lydgate's Shorter Secular Poems
- 8 John Capgrave and Osbern Bokenham: Verse Saints' Lives
- 9 Peter Idley and George Ashby
- 10 John Audelay and James Ryman
- Part III Themes and Genres
- Chronology
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
Summary
Until relatively recently, hagiography was not really considered an appropriate subject for serious scholarly attention. The pioneering nineteenth-century editing efforts of scholars such as Carl Horstmann were almost exclusively philological in their approach, with little sense that the saintly narratives themselves were worthy of literary or historical consideration (Horstmann 1878, 1881). The comments of the editor of Osbern Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen, working in the 1930s, might be taken as evidence of a much more widespread disregard for the genre:
My treatment of such questions as Bokenham's sources, literary value, and so forth, is obviously only the briefest of sketches. Though I am much attached to Bokenham, I am not at all sure that he is worth extended study from these points of view. Further investigation of the sources might, however, be a useful and interesting exercise.
(Bokenham, ed. Serjeantson 1938: vii)As late as the 1990s, similar views could be found; M. C. Seymour, discussing Capgrave's hagiographical endeavours, refers casually to ‘the general mediocrity of the genre’, with no suggestion that such a judgement might require examination or justification (Seymour 1996: 21). Happily the world has changed, and scholars of hagiography no longer find themselves compelled to defend their field of research. The popularity of saints’ lives among all medieval social strata proclaims their importance to the social, cultural and religious historian; the relationship between saints’ lives and other narrative genres is now more widely appreciated and explored; detailed studies are gradually bringing to light the extent to which these highly conventional narratives are in fact deeply responsive to changing social, historical and political contexts.
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- A Companion to Fifteenth-Century English Poetry , pp. 99 - 112Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013