| Abstract | Paper -a:
In Lydgate's Miracles of St Edmund, the shrine functions an important sign for Bury's communal identity and Edmund's prowess. As this paper argues, by focusing on the shrine and not on the relics, Lydgate implicitly presents the shrine as able to signify better than relics. Hence, while Lydgate trumpets Edmund's mystical power, he presents this power as inhering not in Edmund's remains, but rather in the shrine. Lydgate's text thereby complicates the received wisdom about medieval perceptions of relics. He does not quite follow the model we might expect - emphasizing the potency even of the smallest fragment of Edmund's body, or presenting the entire body as the unmediated spot for accessing God's grace. Instead, Lydgate subordinates the body itself to the monument at Bury.
Paper -b:
In the search for an emerging English identity in the centuries following the Norman Conquest, scholars have studied the vitae of male saints for elements of Englishness. However, the Anglo-Saxon female saints' vitae have been largely overlooked. This paper begins to redress the imbalance, approaching the vitae of Sts. Æthelthryth of Ely, Edith of Wilton, and Eadburh of Nunnaminster as potential sources of English identity. It further considers the effects which a female audience may have had on reading Anglo-Saxon saints' vitae, and how this may have helped disseminate a sense of Englishness among the educated women on post-Conquest England.
|
|---|
