Additional information
by Karen A. Winstead (Author)
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages explores the richness and variety of life-writing from late Antiquity to the threshold of the Renaissance. During the Middle Ages, writers from Bede to Chaucer were thinking about life and experimenting with ways to translate lives, their own and others', into literature. Their subjects included career religious, saints, celebrities, visionaries, pilgrims, princes, philosophers, poets, and even a few 'ordinary people.' They relay life stories not only in chronological narratives, but also in debates, dialogues, visions, and letters. Many medieval biographers relied on the reader's trust in their authority, but some espoused standards of evidence that seem distinctly modern, drawing on reliable written sources, interviewing eyewitnesses, and cross-checking their facts wherever possible. Others still professed allegiance to evidence but nonetheless freely embellished and invented not only events and dialogue but the
sources to support them.
Author Biography
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University
Karen A. Winstead is a Professor of English at the Ohio State University. Her specialty is the literature and culture of late-medieval England, with a particular interest in gender and popular culture. She has published widely on saints' lives and on literature by, for, and about medieval women. Her monographs include John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century and Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England, and she is completing a study of saints' lives in fifteenth-century England. She has also translated and edited John Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine and translated a selection of Middle English virgin martyr legends.
