Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture, c1150-1300: Virginity and its Authorizations

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture, c.1150-1300: Virginity and its AuthoriZations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). xvi + 314 pp. ISBN 0-19-811279-3. L55.00.

This impeccably scholarly and busily factual book resists easy summary or appraisal. The focus is on Anglo-Norman texts that had an especial importance for women: vernacular hagiographies. But the book also excavates a vast amount of historical material relating to laywomen and enclosed women (largely of the seigneurial class) as patrons, translators, writers, and audiences of these texts - women such as the married Lady Elena de Quenci (d. 1274), or Clemence of Barking, translator of a life of St Katherine, or the socially powerful and avid-for-learning Isabella, Countess of Arundel (d. 1279), an Anglo-Norman widow who successfully avoided remarriage and who commissioned biographies of male saints. These women are important because they...