Impolitic Bodies Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham

With this witty and elegant new book, one of our leading medievalistsbreaks new ground in fifteenth-century scholarship, a critical site of culturalstudy. Delany examines the work of English Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, afigure never before written on at any length, and fully explores the relationsbetween history and literature in a particularly turbulent period in Englishhistory, a period extending from the "War of the Roses" through the "HundredYears War." Delany focuses on Bokenham's major work, Legends of Holy Women--thefirst collection of all female saint's lives in any language--composed between1443 and 1447. Organizing the book around the image of the body--a medievalprocedure becoming popular once again in current attention to the socialconstruction of the body--she looks at a number of major concerns. One isBokenham's relation to the body of English literature, particularly Chaucer.Another is the entire genre of saints's lives, particularly female saints'slives, with their striking uses of the body of the saint to generate theirmeaning. Yet another is the image of the body politic and its importance in thepolitical and dynastic crises of fifteenth century England. Delany draws thesediverse strands together to create an innovative and readable portrait ofBokenham's work and its larger cultural and political importance, offering ahost of new insights into this unjustly neglected period in English literaryhistory.

Sheila Delany is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. She is the author of such books as Chaucer's House of Fame: The Politics of Skeptical Fideism, The Naked Text: Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Writing Woman, Medieval and Modern.