Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin's Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius (Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts)

This collection of essays and translations brings together two closely related works by an important but little studied late eleventh-century author, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, who was resident in England from 1058. From c. 1080 to 1090, following the death of his patron, Bishop Herman Sherborne, he took temporary refuge at a succession of monasteries before finding a permanent home at St Augustine's, Canterbury. Over 30 hagiographical and polemical works are attributed to him, with varying degrees of certainty; about half of these are lives of Anglo-Saxon women saints, many of them still unedited. He was foremost among the authors engaged in rewriting the Anglo-Saxon past for the Norman regime, and is a notable harbinger of the literary and spiritual developments of the twelfth century Renaissance. His Legend of Edith, like his account of the life of Wulfhilda of Barking and the translation her relics by an early eleventh-century Abbess of Barking, is of exceptional historical value--apart from Bede's History, these represent the only near contemporary narrative accounts of Anglo-Saxon women's communities that we have. The only full-length study of Goscelin and his works is an unpublished doctoral dissertation by T.J. Hamilton (1973).