The twelfth-century Life of King Edward the Confessor, in Anglo-Norman verse, is here presented in modern English for the first time. Its author, an anonymous Nun of Barking Abbey, offers a many-faceted and absorbing portrait of the celebrated king and saint, together with legendary material found in no other version of this hagiographic narrative; there is in addition a wealth of detail about Edward's times as well as about the twelfth-century context in which the Nun was writing. The poem is thus of the greatest interest not only for literary scholars but also for historians.
It is...