QMUL CRLE Seminar – Veronica O’Mara – ‘Saints’ Lives for East Anglian Nuns: From C15 to C18′
All are welcome to this third seminar of the Centre for Religion and Literature in English at Queen Mary University of London:
Time: Wednesday 6 July 2016, 5.15-6.45pm
Place: Lock-Keeper’s Cottage Graduate Centre, Westfield Way, Queen Mary University of London, E1 4NS
Dr Veronica O’Mara (Hull), ‘Saints’ Lives for East Anglian Nuns: From the Medieval Period to the Eighteenth Century’
This paper will focus on a collection of twenty-two Middle English saints’ lives from the end of the fifteenth century that are currently being edited by Virginia Blanton (University of Missouri-Kansas City) and Veronica O’Mara (University of Hull). These lives, all but two of which concern women, are a complex mixture of native English and international saints whose sources may be partly identified. They survive in a single manuscript that was owned in the eighteenth century by a recusant family in Norfolk, a family that sent its daughters to be professed on the continent in the post-Dissolution period. This unique collection, which may be associated with a range of East Anglian convents and was at one time owned by a member of the royal family, provides links between medieval Catholic England and eighteenth-century England, between Norfolk and the capital, between Europe and England.