Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community

354 Pages·2012·6.87 MB·English

by  Jennifer N. Brown, Donna Alfano Bussell (eds.)

Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture
Authorship and Authority in a Female Community
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YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS
York Medieval Press is published by the University of York’s Centre for Medi-
eval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Limited. Our objective is
the promotion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval cul-
ture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the
Centre’s belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which
its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other.
Editorial Board (2012)
Professor Peter Biller (Dept of History): General Editor
Dr T. Ayers (Dept of History of Art)
Dr J. W. Binns (Dept of English and Related Literature)
Professor Helen Fulton (Dept of English and Related Literature)
Dr K. F. Giles (Dept of Archaeology)
Professor Christopher Norton (Dept of History of Art)
Professor W. M. Ormrod (Dept of History)
Professor J. G. Wogan-Browne (English Faculty, Fordham University)
Consultant on Manuscript Publications
Professor Linne Mooney (Dept of English and Related Literature)
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eval Press, University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies, The King’s Manor,
York, YO1 7EP (E-mail: [email protected]).
Publications of York Medieval Press are listed at the back of this volume.
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Barking Abbey
and Medieval Literary Culture
Authorship and Authority
in a Female Community
Edited by
Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell
YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS
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© Contributors 2012
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,
transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner
First published 2012
A York Medieval Press publication
in association with The Boydell Press
an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
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and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
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and with the
Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York
ISBN 978 1 903153 43 7
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CONTENTS
List of Contributors vii
Acknowledgements x
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction: Barking’s Lives, the Abbey and its Abbesses 1
Donna Alfano Bussell with Jennifer N. Brown
I. barking abbey and its anglo-saxon context
1. Barking’s Monastic School, Late Seventh to Twelfth Century:
History, Saint-Making and Literary Culture 33
Stephanie Hollis
2. The Saint-Maker and the Saint: Hildelith Creates Ethelburg 56
Lisa M. C. Weston
3. Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and the Translation Ceremony
for Saints Ethelburg, Hildelith and Wulfhild 73
Kay Slocum
4. ‘The ladies have made me quite fat’: Authors and Patrons
at Barking Abbey 94
Thomas O’Donnell
II. barking abbey and its anglo-norman context
5. ‘Sun num n’i vult dire a ore’: Identity Matters at Barking Abbey 117
Delbert Russell
6. ‘Ce qu’ens li trovat, eut en sei’: On the Equal Chastity of Queen Edith
and King Edward in the Nun of Barking’s La Vie d’Edouard le confesseur 135
Thelma Fenster
7. Body, Gender and Nation in the Lives of Edward the Confessor 145
Jennifer N. Brown
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8. Clemence and Catherine: The Life of St Catherine in its Norman and
Anglo-Norman Context 164
Diane Auslander
9. Cicero, Aelred and Guernes: The Politics of Love
in Clemence of Barking’s Catherine 183
Donna Alfano Bussell
10. The Authority of Diversity: Communal Patronage in Le Gracial 210
Emma Bérat
III. barking abbey and the later middle ages
11. Keeping Body and Soul Together: The Charge to the Barking Cellaress 235
Alexandra Barratt
12. Rhythmic Liturgy, Embodiment and Female Authority in Barking’s
Easter Plays 245
Jill Stevenson
13. Liturgy as the Site of Creative Engagement
Contributions of the Nuns of Barking 267
Anne Bagnall Yardley
Afterword. Barking and the Historiography of Female Community 283
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Bibliography 297
Index 325
vi
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CONTRIBUTORS
Diane Peters Auslander recently received her Ph.D. from the Graduate
Center, City University of New York. She has published several articles and
book chapters on saints and saints cults in the British Isles. She is currently
teaching medieval history and women’s history at Lehman College, City Uni-
versity of New York.
Alexandra Barratt is Professor Emeritus at the University of Waikato, New
Zealand. She has worked for many years in the area of medieval texts for and
by women. Her most recent monograph is Anne Bulkeley and her Book: Fash-
ioning Female Piety in Early Tudor England (Brepols, 2009). In retirement she
continues her work on the fifteenth-century English translator Dame Eleanor
Hull, and has recently developed an interest in medieval manuscript waste in
early printed books held in New Zealand
Jennifer N. Brown is an Associate Professor of English and World Literature
at Marymount Manhattan College. She has published widely on women and
women’s writing in the Middle Ages, including the book Three Women of Liège:
A Critical Edition of and Commentary on the Middle English Lives of Elizabeth of
Spalbeek, Christina Mirabilis, and Marie of Oignies (Brepols, 2008). Her 2011
article in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, ‘The Chaste Erotics of Marie
d’Oignies and Jacques de Vitry’, won the 2011 prize for Best Article of Feminist
Scholarship on the Middle Ages, given biannually by the Society for Medieval
Feminist Scholarship.
Emma Bérat is a doctoral candidate in the English and Comparative Literature
department at Columbia University. Her interests include multiculturalism,
historiography and women’s literary culture in the high Middle Ages. Previ-
ously she has published on the relationship between clerk and female patron
in Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis.
Donna Alfano Bussell is an Associate Professor of English at the University of
Illinois, Springfield. Her research focuses on women’s participation in literary
culture and depictions of women’s influence in liturgy and devotional texts.
Publications include ‘The Fantasy of Reciprocity and the Enigma of the Sene-
schal in Marie de France’s Equitan’, Le Cygne: Journal of the International Marie de
France Society 2 (2003), 7-48, and ‘Heloise Redressed: Rhetorical Engagement
and the Benedictine Rite of Initiation in Heloise’s Third Letter’, in Listening
to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth Century Woman, ed. B. Wheeler (New York,
2000). Forthcoming publications include a translation of the Anglo-Norman
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Prologue of Adgar’s Gracial in Vernacular Literary Theory and Practices: The
French of England 1130-1450, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster and
Delbert Russell (Pennsylvania State University Press) and ‘Challenging Cluny
in England: The Magdalene Liturgies at Lewes and Pontefract’, in Mary Mag-
dalene in Medieval Culture: Conflicted Roles, ed. Peter Loewen and Robin Waugh
(Routledge Press).
Thelma Fenster, Professor Emerita, French and Medieval Studies, Fordham
University, has published on Christine de Pizan, the medieval workings of
fama, Arthurian women and gender. With Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, she co-
directs the French of England Project and has translated works by Matthew
Paris. She is currently collaborating on a large anthology of literary prologues
in the French of England.
Stephanie Hollis is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Auckland, where
she was until recently Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern
European Studies. Her publications include Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church:
Sharing a Common Fate (Boydell 1992), and Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s
Legend of Edith and Liber Confortatorius (Brepols 2004). She is currently research-
ing the literary culture of nunneries founded in the Anglo-Saxon period, and
is working with Michael Wright on a translation and study of texts written by
Goscelin for Barking Abbey.
Thomas O’Donnell is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University in
New York City. Previously he was Lecturer in High Medieval Literature at the
University of York. He has published on the English, French and Latin literary
cultures of England between the years 975 and 1330, and his current book project
explores community writing, networks, and identity in high-medieval English
monasteries from before the Conquest until the mid-thirteenth century..
Delbert Russell, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Waterloo,
has edited La Vie de s. Laurent (1973), Le Légendier apostolique anglo-normand
(1989), La Vie seint Richard de Cycestre (1995), La Vye de seynt Fraunceys (2002).
His translation and introduction to four saints’ lives (George, Giles, Faith and
Mary Magdalene) is in press (for the French of England in Translation Series,
Arizona). He is currently collaborating with Mark Finkelstein on a new edi-
tion of Denis Piramus, Vie s. Edmund le rei, and with Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
and Thelma Fenster on a critical anthology of medieval French literary theory
written in England.
Kay Slocum is Emeritus Professor of History and Humanities at Capital Uni-
versity. Her publications include Liturgies in Honour of Thomas Becket (Toronto,
2004) and several articles concerning Becket, most recently ‘Martir quod stillat
primatis ab ore sigillat: Sealed with the Blood of Becket’, Journal of the British
Archaeological Association (2012). Her current research concerns Barking Abbey.
Jill Stevenson is an Associate Professor of Theater Arts at Marymount Manhat-
tan College. She is the author of Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional
viii
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