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individuals who are listed as having been cured of some affliction by miracles eighteen were women.43 In this respect this 2 : 1 pattern of imbalance in women : men miracle cures is a phenomenon that applies to other twelfth-century saints.44 Women’s testimony and role as sources of information on the saint are therefore one way in which they could influence the shape and content of the text. Georges Whalen has shown that in Goscelin’s Life of Edith statements of women’s theological equality in Christ were employed where women were the majority of witnesses to allay fears
a way which was peculiar to their locality. The portrayal of noblewomen in the literature of the twelfth century was analysed in Chapters 2 and 3 to show how noblewomen exerted power and influence on the production of texts, as patrons and as objects within them. Noblewomen’s spiritual relationships with clerics were an indirect route for female influence in both personal affairs and in wider politics. Such relationships could be close and influential. The portrayal of women in hagiographic sources indicates that women could affect the production and content of
’s Chronique de la Guerre entre les Anglois et les Ecossois is the war between the Scots and the English in 1173–74, and the rebellion of the earl of Leicester. Fantosme wrote to entertain in a classical tradition, to give moral instruction and to show that human folly was subject to divine law.43 This purpose only partially accounts for a story about the martial exploits of Petronella countess of Leicester. Fantosme also wrote for an aristocratic audience who would be able to identify with the story, its content and moral code. Fantosme describes the deliberations of the
a major drawback to charter evidence: conclusions have to be based on incomplete documentation which changed in nature, form, content and style. The apparent decline in participation is not, for example, reflected in Bertrada’s power as an alienor – expressed in comparative statistical terms this shows an increase of 200 per cent for Bertrada, 300 per cent for Lucy and no change for Matilda. Both Matilda and Bertrada were routinely issuing charters as dowager countess. They both acquired seals, which is indicative that other charters probably existed which have
’s role in lordship. Usage and life style These themes can be further explored through an analysis of the use of seals by women in the context of the relationship of seals with the form and content of charters. This can be achieved through an analysis of seal legends, especially filia designations to indicate female heirs, for example, and also an analysis of the contexts in which women sealed documents, such as conjointly with husbands, or solely as wives or as widows. Certainly, seals themselves provide clues about important identities of women through the legends
The first book-length study of the Scottish Legendary (late 14th c.), the only extant collection of saints’ lives in the vernacular from medieval Scotland, scrutinises the dynamics of hagiographic narration, its implicit assumptions about literariness, and the functions of telling the lives of the saints. The fifty saints’ legends are remarkable for their narrative art: the enjoyment of reading the legends is heightened, while didactic and edifying content is toned down. Focusing on the role of the narrator, the depiction of the saintly characters, their interiority, as well as temporal and spatial parameters, it is demonstrated that the Scottish poet has adapted the traditional material to the needs of an audience versed in reading romance and other secular genres. The implications of the Scottish poet’s narrative strategies are analysed also with respect to the Scottishness of the legendary and its overall place in the hagiographic landscape of late medieval Britain.
narrator’s comment puts a halt to the narrative flow. In questioning the content of the story, even though it is only one episode out of many, the South English Legendary’s version of the legend stops its audience from being immersed into the story and marvelling at the saint. Instead, both the saint’s power and the parameters of the genre are questioned. The poet draws attention to the miraculous as one of the defining features of hagiography and at the same time undermines its impact because it may propel the audience to question other episodes as well. Another example
continuing his duties at St-Denis and at St-Germer-de-Flay, a monastery given him by Louis: Flodoard, HRE III–1, p. 191. 8 The remainder of this paragraph restates my arguments in J. L. Nelson, ‘The intellectual in politics: context, content and authorship in the capitulary of Coulaines, November 843’, first published in L. Smith and B. Ward, eds, Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson (London, 1992), pp. 1–14, reprinted in J. L. Nelson, The Frankish World 750–900 (London, 1996), pp. 155–68, with some
Englishness in this region of cultural nexus over a century after the Battle of Hastings reflects the strength of the society that flourished there for so many centuries. After the arrival of the Normans had altered so much in England, the Welsh borderlands remained as a last embodiment of Anglo-Saxon England. The region reflected Britain as it had been, a space where two peoples came together. Notes 1 Stephen Matthews, ‘The content and construction of the Vita Haroldi’, in King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Publications of the Manchester
for her analysis, arguing that the spoken and the written mode of narrative are not separated but based on the same underlying premises. These can be described in terms of the two central processes of narrativisation and narrativity, which focus on the human agent who is necessary for the telling of any narrative. Through a process of narrativisation, the dynamic nature of a narrative is foregrounded (the content of a narrative is put in its narrative form in order to familiarise the audience through the form with the content). Narrativity is defined as a specific