With this witty and elegant new book, one of our leading medievalists breaks new ground in fifteenth-century scholarship, a critical site of cultural study. Delany examines the work of English Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, a figure never before written on at any length, and fully explores the relations between history and literature in a particularly turbulent period in English history, a period extending from the "War of the Roses" through the "Hundred Years War." Delany focuses on Bokenham's major work, Legends of Holy Women--the first collection of all female saint's lives in...

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...

This edited collection explores how and why the Jews continued to play an important role in the English Christian imagination of the 14th and 15th centuries - long after Jews were expelled from Britain in 1290. Delany focuses attention on the historical context, the analysis of Chaucerian texts, and the consideration of texts by xonremporary authors Gower, Langland, Lydgate and Kempe.

Shiela Delany's translation on Osbern Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wuumen (1443-1447) makes available in modern English the first all-female hagiography. Closely translated from elaborate, Latinate Middle English verse into prose, A Legend of Holy Women contains the Augustian friar's version of the stories of 13 women saints from gospel, apocrypha, martyrology, and high-medieval history.