Impolitic Bodies

This pioneering book explores the work of English Augustinian 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 historized 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.