Catherine Sanok. New Legends of England

Catherine Sanok’s New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints’ Lives calls attention to the revival of interest in native saints by fifteenth-century Middle English writers. This development she attributes to the need to imagine competing “forms of community,” religious and secular, at “local, national, and supranational scales: the monastery, the city, and local devotional groups; the nation and the realm; European Christendom,” and eventually transatlantic worlds (2). The operative theoretical term in her analysis of the new phenomenon is “scale”—a concept articulated by cultural geographer Neil Smith in Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (1984) and by political theorist Saskia Sassen in Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2006). Admittedly difficult to define, the concept of scale enables comparison between different forms of affiliation, and the mobility of “re-scaling” introduces an even more striking theoretical dynamism to the analysis. While the body of discussion in New Legends of England has significant implications for historiography, Sanok is clear at the outset that her primary interest is in the fifteenth-century lives of saints as a new kind of literary grouping based on variety rather than similarity of form and theme. Yet such an approach does illuminate cultural history. “Form” at the macro level allows her to explore the way these saints’ lives “recognize, disaggregate, and organize the overlapping jurisdictions in medieval England, where civic, royal, ecclesiastical, and monastic jurisdictions were continually contested and remapped” (5).

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