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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture Dear Medieval Religion Subscribers, We would like to announce two recent publications from University of Pennsylvania Press’s The Middle Ages Series which we hope will be of interest. New Legends of England interrogates a host of narratives of saints’ lives across forms, and Nuns’ Priests’ Tales examines the role of medieval churchmen who attended to the spiritual needs of monastic women. With all best wishes, Combined Academic Publishers ________________________________ New Legends of England Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints' Lives Catherine Sanok http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/new-legends-of-england "Impressive in scope and consequence, New Legends of England is a crucial contribution to the study of medieval and early modern literature. I know of no other work that thinks so hard and so productively about the capacities of the legendary or makes hagiography so much a part of the common intellectual landscape of the late Middle Ages." — Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University In New Legends of England, Catherine Sanok examines a significant, albeit previously unrecognized, phenomenon of fifteenth-century literary culture in England: the sudden fascination with the Lives of British, Anglo-Saxon, and other native saints. Embodying a variety of literary forms—from elevated Latinate verse, to popular traditions such as the carol, to translations of earlier verse legends into the medium of prose—the Middle English Lives of England's saints are rarely discussed in relation to one another or seen as constituting a distinct literary genre. However, Sanok argues, these legends, when grouped together were an important narrative forum for exploring overlapping forms of secular and religious community at local, national, and supranational scales: the monastery, the city, and local cults; the nation and the realm; European Christendom and, at the end of the fifteenth century, a world that was suddenly expanding across the Atlantic. Reading texts such as the South English Legendary, The Life of St. Etheldrede, the Golden Legend, and poems about Saints Wenefrid and Ursula, Sanok focuses especially on the significance of their varied and often experimental forms. She shows how Middle English Lives of native saints revealed, through their literary forms, modes of affinity and difference that, in turn, reflected a diversity in the extent and structure of medieval communities. Taking up key questions about jurisdiction, temporality, and embodiment, New Legends of England presents some of the ways in which the Lives of England's saints theorized community and explored its constitutive paradox: the irresolvable tension between singular and collective forms of identity. Catherine Sanok is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. | The Middle Ages Series | February 2018 | 360pp | 9780812249828 | Hardback | £50.00* *Price subject to change. ________________________________ Nuns' Priests' Tales Men and Salvation in Medieval Women's Monastic Life Fiona J. Griffiths http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/nuns-priests-tales "This delightful and learned book examines the ways in which the ordained men who provided sacramental services and spiritual counsel for nuns understood their relationships with women. The setting is primarily the eleventh and twelfth centuries—a period when close bonds between priests and any female were viewed with deepening suspicion. Fiona J. Griffiths, however, explores the positive models that monks and priests evoked at that time to justify and even celebrate their charitable bonds with the nuns they served." — Megan McLaughlin, author of Sex, Gender, and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000-1122 "The reform era was obsessed with clerical celibacy, yet it also witnessed a great expansion of women's religious life—and all those newly founded nunneries required priests to provide pastoral care. In an age known for its shrill misogyny, how did such priests justify their service to women, and what positive roles did nuns play in male spirituality? In her urgently needed book, Nuns' Priests' Tales, Fiona Griffiths teases out some fascinating answers." — Barbara Newman, Northwestern University Celibacy, misogyny, and the presumption of men's withdrawal from women within the religious life have often been seen as markers of male spirituality during the period of church reform. Yet, as Fiona J. Griffiths illustrates, men's support and care for religious women could be central to male spirituality and pious practice. Nuns' priests frequently turned to women for prayer and intercession, viewing women's prayers as superior to their own, since they were the prayers of Christ's "brides." Casting nuns as the brides of Christ and adopting for themselves the role of paranymphus (bridesman, or friend of the bridegroom), these men constructed a triangular spiritual relationship in which service to nuns was part of their dedication to Christ. Focusing on men's spiritual ideas about women and their spiritual service to them, Nuns' Priests' Tales reveals a clerical counter-discourse in which spiritual care for women was depicted as a holy service and an act of devotion and obedience to Christ. Fiona J. Griffiths is Professor of Medieval History at Stanford University. She is author of The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. | The Middle Ages Series | February 2018 | 360pp | 9780812249750 | Hardback | £53.00* *Price subject to change. ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: subscribe medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: unsubscribe medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/medieval-religion