Sanctifying history: Hagiography and the construction of an Anglo -Saxon Christian past

"Sanctifying History" examines the relationships between the practice of hagiography and history in the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition. The first Anglo-Saxon hagiographies were produced in the late seventh and early eighth centuries by writers like Bede who wrote in Latin to commemorate the founders of the English Church. Over time, the tradition came to incorporate vernacular narrative verse. In the late tenth century, AElfric drew upon the history of the English Church to offer lives that could serve as didactic models. The use of hagiographic material in a range of different genres and contexts demonstrates the cultural as well as exemplary significance of native traditions of sanctity. For the Anglo-Saxons, who traced the beginnings of their Christian past back to the missionaries of Gregory the Great, hagiography provided a coherent framework for situating and exploring their cultural history.;The intersections between hagiography and history offer perspective into how this Christian culture constructs and relates to its past. Chapter One focuses on the historiographical tradition that influenced the writing of Anglo-Saxon history, exploring Bede's Ecclesiastical History in the context provided by late-antique historians Eusebius, Orosius and Gildas. Chapter Two continues this focus on the Ecclesiastical History, examining Bede's text within the framework provided by contemporary hagiographies such as the anonymous Whitby Life of Gregory the Great, the anonymous Life of Cuthbert, and Bede's prose Life of Cuthbert. Chapter Three analyzes Felix's Latin prose Life of St. Guthlac and the Old English poems Guthlac A and Guthlac B to highlight how differences in genre also express differences in the relationship between cultural history and Christian tradition. Chapter Four explores how Cynewulf's Fates of the Apostles and Elene bring the missionary age of the faith into an Anglo-Saxon setting, in this way transforming Christianity's distant past to reflect the cultural perspective conveyed in heroic verse. Chapter Five addresses the sermons devoted to Gregory the Great and Cuthbert in AElfric's Catholic Homilies, examining how these vernacular homilies locate the Anglo-Saxon cultural past within the larger framework of Christian history.