| Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham Contributor(s): Delany, Sheila (Author) |
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ISBN: 0195109899 ISBN-13: 9780195109894 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA OUR PRICE: $73.26 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: February 1998 Annotation: In a pathbreaking new inquiry into 15th-century cultural studies, leading medievalist Sheila Delany examines the work of English Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham to fully explore the relationship between history and literature in a particularly turbulent period in English history. Illustrated. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh - Literary Criticism | Medieval |
| Dewey: 821.2 |
| LCCN: 97040311 |
| Lexile Measure: 1400 |
| Physical Information: 0.69" H x 6.12" W x 9.17" (0.80 lbs) 256 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - Medieval (500-1453) - Cultural Region - British Isles |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This pioneering book explores the work of English Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, an ardent Yorkist on the eve of the Wars of the Roses and a gifted poet. Sheila Delany focuses on a manuscript written in 1447, the Legend of Holy Women. Narrating the lives and ordeals of thirteen heroic and powerful saints, this was the first all-female legendary in English, much of it commissioned by wealthy women patrons in the vicinity of Clare Priory, Suffolk, where Bokenham lived. Delany structures her book around the image of the human body. First is the corpus of textual traditions within which Bokenham wrote: above all, the work of his two competing masters, St. Augustine and Geoffrey Chaucer. Next comes the female body and its parts as represented in hagiography, with Bokenham's distinctive treatment of the body and the corporeal semiotic of his own legendary. Finally, the image of the body politic allows Delany to examine the relation of Bokenham's work to contemporary political life. She analyzes both the legendary and the friar's translation of a panegyric by the late-classical poet Claudian. The poetry is richly historized by Delany's reading of it in the context of succession crises, war, and the connection of women to political power during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. |