Diana Denissen, Middle English Devotional Compilations: Composing Imaginative Variations in Late Medieval England. (Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages.) Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019. Pp. x, 141; 2 tables. £70. ISBN: 978-1-7868-3476-8. Marleen Cré, Diana Denissen, and Denis Renevey, eds., Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England. (Medieval Church Studies 41.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Pp. xii, 464; 3 color figures. €120. ISBN: 978-2-5035-7477-6. Table of contents available online at http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod_id=IS-9782503574776-1.

We can always use critical studies that question both what constitutes a literary text in the Middle Ages and what form those texts have, as is the case with the essays collected by Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok. They define form as “a historically contingent set of attributes defining privileged texts as literature so that the latter may serve particular social, economic, and political interests” (4). They hasten, however, and quite correctly, to warn us about the difficulty in being overly specific in light of the contingency of such formal criteria, which might undermine the entire effort here to some extent, even though they then emphasize again that the articles “meditate upon the question of the relation between form and the literary” (6), as it manifested itself in medieval and late medieval England, which is supposed to be the exclusive terrain covered here, thought that is not always true. Taking us back to this deliberate (?) seesaw, they then return to highlight that in the pre-modern world the differences between literary and non-literary were rather fluid (8). What might then be the focus of this book? The sub-heading of the book itself leaves us a bit puzzled: “Beyond Form,” so why does the introduction then highlight formality issues so centrally?

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Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: the Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century England

Studies in Church History ◽

10.1017/s0424208400012079 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 27 ◽

pp. 175-196 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Eamon Duffy

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Medieval England ◽

Late Medieval ◽

Women Saints ◽

John The Baptist ◽

Late Medieval England ◽

The Trinity ◽

The Middle Ages

The cult of the saints, according to Emile Male, ‘sheds over all the centuries of the middle ages its poetic enchantment’, but ‘it may well be that the saints were never better loved than during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ Certainly their images and shrines were everywhere in late medieval England. They filled the churches, gazing down in polychrome glory from altar-piece and bracket, from windows and tilt-tabernacles. In 1488 the little Norfolk church of Stratton Strawless had lamps burning not only before the Rood with Mary and John, and an image of the Trinity, but before a separate statue of the Virgin, and images of Saints Margaret, Anne, Nicholas, John the Baptist, Thomas à Becket, Christopher, Erasmus, James the Great, Katherine, Petronilla, Sitha, and Michael the Archangel.

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