Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Barking's Lives, the Abbey and its Abbesses
- I BARKING ABBEY AND ITS ANGLO-SAXON CONTEXT
- 1 Barking's Monastic School, Late Seventh to Twelfth Century: History, Saint-Making and Literary Culture
- 2 The Saint-Maker and the Saint: Hildelith Creates Ethelburg
- 3 Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and the Translation Ceremony for Saints Ethelburg, Hildelith and Wulfhild
- 4 ‘The ladies have made me quite fat’: Authors and Patrons at Barking Abbey
- II BARKING ABBEY AND ITS ANGLO-NORMAN CONTEXT
- III BARKING ABBEY AND THE LATER MIDDLE AGES
- Afterword. Barking and the Historiography of Female Community
- Bibliography
- Index
- YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS
4 - ‘The ladies have made me quite fat’: Authors and Patrons at Barking Abbey
from I - BARKING ABBEY AND ITS ANGLO-SAXON CONTEXT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Barking's Lives, the Abbey and its Abbesses
- I BARKING ABBEY AND ITS ANGLO-SAXON CONTEXT
- 1 Barking's Monastic School, Late Seventh to Twelfth Century: History, Saint-Making and Literary Culture
- 2 The Saint-Maker and the Saint: Hildelith Creates Ethelburg
- 3 Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and the Translation Ceremony for Saints Ethelburg, Hildelith and Wulfhild
- 4 ‘The ladies have made me quite fat’: Authors and Patrons at Barking Abbey
- II BARKING ABBEY AND ITS ANGLO-NORMAN CONTEXT
- III BARKING ABBEY AND THE LATER MIDDLE AGES
- Afterword. Barking and the Historiography of Female Community
- Bibliography
- Index
- YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS
Summary
The literary culture of Barking Abbey during the High Middle Ages was founded on the enthusiastic welcome had there by out-of-house authors. The nuns' patronage shaped the careers of some of the most remarkable ecclesiastical writers of the age – Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Osbert of Clare, Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence – establishing a vibrant tradition of commemorative literature from which would emerge the in-house vitae of St Edward and St Catherine. But understanding the nature of the nuns' literary activity before the time of Clemence of Barking requires us to think about patronage during the twelfth century in a new way. The image of a static, hierarchical relationship between patron and client must be discarded in favour of a model that recognizes medieval patronage as a vital exchange, in which the interests of both parties play across a wider, shifting field of collaborators and competitors, allies and rivals.
I will argue that in the uncertainty of post-Conquest England, Barking acquired a rich literary corpus, which defined the Barking sisters' collective identity through their relationship to their relics and their past. Furthermore, the act of patronage itself was used by the Barking community as a way to assert and enlarge its presence within a fluid and expanding network of patrons and artists across southern England.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary CultureAuthorship and Authority in a Female Community, pp. 94 - 114Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012