Medievalbookshop — ACK0063 Delany, Impolitic Bodies

Bargain books on the Middle Ages and all related subjects

See also | Literature | Hagiography | Women’s studies |
Secondhand book for sale
Scanned image of the book’s front cover

Sheila Delany.
Impolitic Bodies— Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham.
Published New York: Oxford U.P., 1998.
ISBN 0195109899;
ISBN-13: 9780195109894
Binding: paperback, perfect bound.
Printed in the USA.
Size: 155×232×18mm.
Page count: xi,236pp.
Main language: English; translations from other language usually given with a translation following.
Overall condition good to very good: these copies are unused but show some evidence of extended storage, the usual milds scuffs and marks etc., a little wear on the edges and corners.

This item £6.00
P&P inc. within the UK
(delivery outside the UK not currently available)

[Publisher’s price £28.49]
Weight without packaging: 375g.

How to order this book

This pioneering book explores the work of English Augustan 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 Bokenham wrote: above all, the work of his two competing masters, St. Augustine and Geoffrey Chaucer. Next comes the female body and its parts as represented in hagiography, with Bokenham’s distinctive treatment of the body and the corporeal semiotic of his own legendary. Finally, the image of the body politic allows Delany to examine the relation of Bokenham’s work to contemporary political life. She analyzes both the legendary and the friar’s translation of a panegyric by the late-classical poet Claudian. The poetry is richly historicized by Delany’s reading of it in the context of succession crises, war, and the connection of women to political power during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Contents: The literary corpus; Friar as critic; Impolitic bodies — Head, feet, face, womb — Tongue, mouth, language — Breast, genital, gut & all; The body politic; Sexual-textual politics; Last things & afterlives.

Illustrations: 5, monochrome
Maps & plans: no

Notes: at end of book
Tables: no
Genealogies: 5
Chronology: no
Glossary: no
Bibliography: 18pp
Index: yes

[BML/UB]
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