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Sheila
Delany.
Impolitic
Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England.
New York: Oxford U.P., 1998.
Paperback, perfect bound.
155x232mm.
xi,236pp
inc. 5 monochrome illustrations, 5 genealogies.
English.
Unused
bargain.
This
item
£8.50
Publisher's
price £19.00
How to order this book
This
pioneering book
explores the work of English Augustan 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 historicized 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.
See
the "book
descriptions" page for explanations of the criteria used in this
listing.
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