In Fifteenth-Century Lives: Writing Sainthood in England, Karen Winstead argues that the fifteenth century witnessed a dramatic change to vernacular hagiography that was at once both conservative and daring. The styles were daring because writers freely experimented with how to explain the lives of the holy by trying out new styles and formats; they were conservative because their experiments took place within the context of the censorship and repression that grew out of parliamentary statute De heretico comburendo. This statute made heresy a capital crime in 1401, and many people were executed as a result. De heretico comburendo was followed by Archbishop Arundel's “Constitutions” of 1409 that prohibited unauthorized translation and transmission of religious thought. Scholars debate the overall impact of these measures. Some have claimed it watered down—even infantilized—English devotional practices. Others have shown that many writers and their patrons found ways around them, blending orthodox practices and ideas with heretical approaches. Winstead argues that the new mid-century hagiography, in trying to teach readers and hearers, reflected this fraught moment by emphasizing themes that were resoundingly appropriate while still skirting the law through extended translations of scripture or expositions of doctrine. Winstead traces these maneuvers by showing how fifteenth-century vernacular saint's lives came to emphasize family, education, and community at the expense of individual striving for salvation, all within a genre that promoted strong female saints and feminized piety and theological exploration.
Hagiography was an old and familiar genre by the fifteenth century, so none of the authors or compilers under consideration here were starting out with a blank slate. The most commonly tapped source of saints’ lives for fifteenth-century hagiographers was Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend, but these writers felt free to delete, add to, and extemporize events from this and other Latin sources.
In five chapters and an afterword, Winstead looks in detail at the different ways that fifteenth-century hagiographers altered their source texts. In the first chapter, Winstead analyzes the changes that John Lydgate brought to his lives of SS. George, Giles, and Austin (Augustine of Canterbury). Lydgate used a different format for each life, but together presented these three saints as valuing service to community and education over the conflict or rebellion that were a part of the Golden Legend's version of their lives. For the well-connected Lydgate, good governance was always an important theme, which necessitated addressing abuses by both king and subject. In chapter 2, Winstead takes up Osbern Bokenham's works and how he adapted de Voragine to focus on the challenges of marriage, partnership, and community. His accounts of female saints in particular offer new models of female piety for his female patrons, one that specifically emphasizes intellectualism. Chapter 3 expands on this theme of intellectualism by looking at how different hagiographers, such as Symon Wynter and the author of the Digby Mary Magdalene but also Osbern Bokenham, used hagiography to teach theology as complicated as the Trinity. Winstead argues that rather than behaving in rebellious and violent ways, these retellings have saints like Barbara, Katherine, and Cecilia become promoters of orthodox theology in a time of anxiety over such issues. Chapter 4 considers England's lack of holy biographies of women compared to the Continent. While we get glimpses that there were women like Bridget of Sweden in England, their lives were not recorded. Instead, English women had vernacular translations of Continental lives, such as assembled in Douce 114, which contains lives of Christina Mirabilis, Marie d'Oignies, and Elizabeth Spalbeek, adapted to an English climate interested in downplaying heroics of individual spirituality for the value of community. England also had Margery Kempe, who Winstead argues crafted her own all-too-human spiritual work by combining the various models available to her because she did not have one that satisfied her. Chapter 5 first considers fifteenth-century translations of the Golden Legend: the Gilte Legende and Bokenham's and Caxton's translations. Winstead then moves out of the fifteenth century to consider how John Foxe treated the saints from the Golden Legend that made their way into his Acts and Monuments. The deep variety of translations of the Golden Legend shows the depth and richness of fifteenth-century theology, which Winstead argues compels resituating Foxe. No longer just an exposer of fraudulent saints, his work frequently reintroduces events in the lives of his saints that fifteenth-century writers had expunged in an effort to promote family and community, values that Foxe also advocated.
The fifteenth century is often an overlooked century in English literature and history. It is in the shadow of the exciting developments in Italy, and for many scholars anticipating the Reformation, it seems to have no graspable events. Winstead's afterword, in looking briefly at seventeenth-century saints’ lives, tries to nuance the long story of English piety by putting the experimentations, compassion, and psychology introduced in the fifteenth-century back into that narrative. If we do that, Winstead argues, we are forced to read both the late Middle Ages and the early modern period differently.
Winstead makes a compelling case for arguing that fifteenth-century hagiographers were innovative and daring. Her long experience with these texts makes her an authoritative voice with accessible prose and comfortable familiarity with her authors. As both a work of broad discussion and a detailed study, I wish Winstead had also sought to situate her texts into the fraught social and economic context facing men and women of the fifteenth century. This was a world still grappling with a diminished population, growing material consumption, a serious economic depression, and a vibrant and dynamic parish life. How did these factors contribute to fifteenth-century hagiographers’ desires to experiment? But wanting Winstead to push her ideas further is surely a sign of a book that made me think both about long historical narratives as well as vernacular saintly ones.
