Joining traditional manuscript study with feminist criticism, affect theory, and art historical interpretation, The Katherine Group and the Construction of Medieval Literary History analyzes an early thirteenth-century collection of Middle English devotional literature through an interdisciplinary study of its manuscripts and their thirteenth-, seventeenth-, and twentieth-century contexts. Comprising three legends of female saints, an allegorical homily, and a virginity treatise, the Katherine Group is often studied as a regionally-focused compilation for a limited audience of women reading in religious isolation (anchoresses). This study demonstrates that the three extant codices were deliberately curated and re-fashioned—physically and metaphorically—to serve different antiquarian and scholarly narratives across time. Codicological and historiographical criticism reveals that canonical, nationalist literary histories have distorted the original audiences and contexts for these works, obscuring the multilingual milieu in which the Katherine Group was created and copied.
The introduction and two opening chapters address the Katherine Group’s historiography and reception, exploring how post-medieval owners’ curation and modern scholars’ methodologies continue to shape scholarly approaches to the group. The third chapter assesses the manuscript evidence using paleography, codicology, and dialectology, demonstrating that the Katherine Group manuscript tradition must have included many now missing manuscripts. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on the medieval context, placing the Katherine Group alongside histories, plays, prayers, and hymns as well as other types of manuscripts, including illuminated Books of Hours, legal documents, and prayer rolls. The fourth chapter locates the texts’ material and writing metaphors within the context of thirteenth-century manuscript production and aesthetics. The fifth chapter applies affect theory to the figures of demons to analyze how Seinte Iuliene manipulates established tropes in hagiography by making a demon, rather than the saint, the affective device for guiding the audience to experience sympathy, disgust, and pleasure as training for confession and other liturgical practices. The Katherine Group and the Construction of Medieval Literary History pushes the Katherine Group out of the shadows of a narrow, restricted readership and broadens the interpretive framework for future studies of this Early Middle English literature.
