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.
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