In the late Middle Ages, English people were increasingly interested in their own native saints, as demonstrated by the appearance of new prose and verse versions of saints’ Lives in Middle English. It would be very easy to interpret this phenomenon—native saints in the native tongue—as evidence of a growing sense of “nationalism” or some such phenomenon. This notion may be true, but Catherine Sanok's New Legends of England offers a much more subtle and nuanced discussion, for not only is the nation figured in these Lives, but many different and overlapping forms of community, both geographical and temporal. Sanok, Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, has previously examined how saints’ Lives acted as prescriptive models of female behavior in Her Life Historical (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). This latest study, of an era before the nation enjoyed “indexical status,” and at a point when it may be losing such status, is timely.

Sanok begins her study with an examination of the South English Legendary, a collection of some ninety-two saints’ Lives first set down in the mid-thirteenth century and available in some sixty extant manuscripts. In it she discerns communities defined by gender, vocation, or region; moreover, these “varying and overlapping” forms of affiliation can be connected through scale, where a part represents a whole or smaller communities can nest within a graduated spatial order. The fifteenth-century Lives of Saints Etheldreda (d. 679) and Edith (d. 986), both composed at Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire, distinguish between monastic and national community by rejecting the customary role of the virginal female as embodying bounded space. Rather, these two lives define virginity as a “practice of mediation,” something that can bring together different forms of community, both sacred and secular. A carol by John Audelay (d. 1426) and a ballad by Osbern Bockenham (d. 1464), both about St. Wenefred (d. 660), the Welsh abbess of Holywell in Flintshire, both emphasize the local and resist the contemporary Lancastrian attempt to nationalize Wenefred's cult. Audelay's carol does this, in part, through emphasizing a local weekly pilgrimage to Wenefred's shrine, while Bokenham's use of direct address and colloquial speech casts “community” as a phenomenon of everyday interaction.

The most famous medieval collection of saints’ Lives is, of course, the so-called Golden Legend, composed in Genoa in the 1260s and subsequently translated into English, one anonymously as the Gilte Legende and another by Osbern Bockenham (this is the recently discovered Abbotsford Legendary). In both of these cases, the texts were supplemented by the legends of native English saints, and they accordingly imagine an English membership in a pan-Christian community. In these collections, “England” stands as a middle point between the local and all of Christendom. But there are different ways to figure England as well: it is both an ecclesiastical and a royal jurisdiction, and these two conceptions were converging in the fifteenth century, as witnessed in the careers of Thomas Arundel (d. 1414) and Henry Chichele (d. 1443), both archbishops of Canterbury and enthusiastic royal servants. However, the Prose South English Legendary Life of St. Edward the Confessor and two pairs of saints’ Lives by John Lydgate, Edmund and Fremund (1433), and Alban and Amphibalus (1439), resist this movement. Instead, they figure England as parallel to a Benedictine monastery, “a transhistorical community exempt from the secular order” (176). Saint Thomas Becket, martyred in 1170 for resisting royal encroachment on ecclesiastical rights, also stands as a rebuke to the convergence; his example fit uneasily into fifteenth-century trends, so carols to him by John Audelay and an aureate legend by Lawrence Wade focus on Becket's connection to London, substituting urban community for the jurisdictional contest between the king and archbishop. Talk of the city focuses attention on the individual, often seen as a product of the city, and brings to the foreground the interior piety characteristic of the late Middle Ages.

The final chapter investigates Saint Ursula and “the scale of English community.” Saint Ursula was a British saint who had been martyred by the Huns, along with 11,000 of her female companions, at Cologne. Edmund Hatfield's Lyf of Saynt Ursula (1509) and Richard Pynson's Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande (1516) promote Ursula as a native saint, but they are not primarily concerned with the English national community. Instead, they are occupied with “movement between and across communities either smaller or larger than England”—the most obvious larger one being a Britain that includes Wales and Scotland, and the overseas claim to Ireland as well, soon to extend to the New World.

This is a specialized book on a relatively obscure set of texts. Nonspecialists interested in late medieval English saints should probably read the texts themselves, rather than this analysis of them. Moreover, this reviewer found something about the methodology slightly problematic: Sanok notes that her texts “do not constitute a genre or subgenre, or really even a corpus or tradition” (4), which makes it entirely unsurprising that they would reflect variable and heterogeneous conceptions of community. Still, in its own terms this is a very good book, shrewdly and intelligently argued, reminding us that in late medieval England, the nation was not the only, or even primary, community for its putative members. It also shows us, once again, how much can be gleaned from medieval hagiography.