Diane,
You might want to contact Jane Zatta, who has worked on Anglo-Norman
representations of pre-Conquest holy women, including Modwenna,
focusing on their "doubly-other" nature in sex and ethnicity as well
as their deep connections with the monastic traditions and political
landscape of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Norman England. I don't
know how much Modwenna's Irish connections/conflation with
Darerca/Monenna figure in her work, but I believe she is on the
med-fem list, so you might want to float your question there.
As for telling "such scurrilous stories about a woman of God because
she was 1. Irish (a "colonial" attitude) and 2. a woman"--are these
stories really exceptional in the collection? They are fairly common
in Lives of Irish Saints, both male and female. Brigid's earliest
extant Life, by Cogitosus, doesn't have either her "illegitimate"
birth or her close association with druids (a druid figures only once
in this Life, I believe, when a millstone with which she had
previously manifested a miracle refused to grind his unworthy grain),
an omission that some have explained as arising from his sense of
propriety, but I think a wide range of explanations are possible.
Richard Sharpe's Medieval Irish Saints' Lives: An Introduction to the
Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) will probably be
very useful for your interests. He discusses the recensions and
transmission of various Lives, with much on Brigid. He focuses
mainly on their Irish history, but he also has a good deal of
information about England and the Continent.
Robert Bartlett, "Cults of Irish, Scottish and Welsh Saints in
twelfth-century England," in Brendan Smith, ed. Britain and Ireland,
900-1300 (Cambridge, 1999): 67-86 should also prove useful, with good
discussion of both Modwenna and Brigid.
There is a great deal of secondary literature on relations between
Ireland and England for the period you're interested in. I'd suggest
you start with the 100+ pages of bibliography in Vol II of A New
History of Ireland, ed. Cosgrove (Oxford, 1987), which is broken down
into several sections including religion, politics and literature,
and take your pick.
Hope this helps,
Maeve
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