Abstract
Living in a time when the Lollard movement was still active and the Wars of the Roses were imminent, Osbern Bokenham seeks to bridge political and religious gaps by writing saints’ lives in the native tongue. He aims at creating a sense of an English “nacioun” based on a common language and an orthodox belief in saints. At the origin of his literary endeavour is St. Margaret, who assumes a maternal role of engendering the proper employment of the English tongue and the Christian faith. Just as the saint’s body has the strength to convert and heal, so her anglicised vita is presented as a regenerative force to make the audience (re)turn to the true faith against heresy and in the name of political unity.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Margaret Bridges, who kindly commented on a draft of this paper. Thanks also to Katharina Berger-Meister, Rahel Orgis and Matthias Heim for their constructive feedback. Any errors are mine.
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Rupp, K. (2018). Engendering a Sense of Englishness: The Use of the Mother Tongue in Osbern Bokenham’s “Vita Sanctae Margaretae”. In: Orgis, R., Heim, M. (eds) Fashioning England and the English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92126-6_2
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