Fifteenth-Century Lives: Writing Sainthood in England by Karen A. Winstead (review)

Reviewed by: Fifteenth-Century Lives: Writing Sainthood in England by Karen A. Winstead Laura K. Bedwell Fifteenth-Century Lives: Writing Sainthood in England. By Karen A. Winstead. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. Paperback: ISBN 978-0-268-10854-0. Pp. xi + 197. 45. Ebook: 978-0-268-10855-7. 35. 99. Karen A. Winstead's study argues for a shift in emphasis in English hagiography of the fifteenth century. Though most authors of this era draw on Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea as a primary source, they revise his work in ways that are consistent from author to author. The saints in these new collections are "vulnerable, even fallible" people whom their lay readers can emulate as role models; their family lives and relationships take on new importance; and virtues other than chastity—such as "humility, piety, and gentility"—gain recognition and sometimes take center stage (1). The hagiographic collections of this age demonstrate a greater interest in Christian intellectualism and education, with a corresponding decrease in focus on torture and martyrdom, and many more of the saints are women. These changes, particularly the interests in "intellectual and family life" (137), flow over into John Foxe's sixteenth-century Acts and Monuments. Winstead asserts that the changes correspond to the Church's repressive, censorial attitude at the beginning of the 1400s: the authors of the new saints' lives moderate the tales of the saints to encourage similar moderation in the church as a whole. Winstead divides her text into five chapters, plus an introduction and an afterword. The introduction establishes her primary arguments and provides an overview of each chapter's content. The chapters themselves run in roughly chronological order, with chapters 1 and 2 focusing on the work of Lydgate and Bokenham, respectively; chapters 3 and 4 considering miscellaneous works grouped by the themes of education and concern for women; and chapter 5 demonstrating how Catholic hagiography of the fifteenth century impacted Foxe's Protestant Acts and Monuments. The afterword reiterates the book's themes and asserts that the changes in hagiography that scholars have long attributed to the English Protestant Reformation actually began in the previous century. As noted above, Winstead's first two chapters focus on individual hagiographers. Chapter 1, "New Directions: The Hagiography of John Lydgate, " discusses Lydgate's treatment of five saints: George, Giles, Austin of Canterbury, and Alban and Amphibalus, whom Lydgate covers together. Winstead notes that Lydgate uses radically different forms for each of these lives. His tale of the life of St. George takes a conventional form, but the life of St. Giles is structured as a prayer to the saint in second person. The life of St. Austin provides some biographical details, but largely focuses on a single miraculous episode, while the joint life of Alban and Amphibalus reads more End Page 300 like an epic of the founding of Britain than typical hagiography. Despite these differences in form, Lydgate maintains a consistency of treatment across these various tales; each serves to humanize the faith, promoting compassion, biblical instruction, and leading by example on the part of the clergy. Chapter 2, "Osbern Bokenham's Holy Women, " claims that Bokenham treats hagiography in ways quite similar to Lydgate. Bokenham wrote a series of freestanding lives of female saints, many of which were later collected into a volume titled Legendys of Hooly Wummen. Though his adaptation of the Legenda Aurea includes male saints as well, his focus is "female sanctity" (42). Bokenham's earlier works portray his female saints living conventional holy lives, but over his corpus, female roles expand into more radical areas, such as scholarship, teaching, and preaching. As a general rule, Bokenham's women live lives that are less ascetic and more family oriented than their counterparts in the Legenda Aurea, which he frequently supplements with continental and British sources. Like Lydgate, Bokenham focuses on the "emotional and spiritual lives" of the saints rather than their miracles, thus providing models that lay people could follow (73). Winstead's next chapter, "Holy Educators and 'Teaching Hagiographies, '" illuminates the saint as teacher, demonstrating the saint's life as a vehicle of instruction about church doctrine. In practice. . .