Encounters with Frideswide: Adapting the lives of the saints

Parish, Romola 2023. Encounters with Frideswide: Adapting the lives of the saints. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The creative part of this thesis comprises a long sequence of poems, Embertide, that engage with the many different versions of the written Lives of St Frideswide, and with the places associated with her lived life in and around Oxford. The sequence opens with the voice of Prior Robert of Cricklade, the author of a Latin version of her Life. The remainder of the text is in two voices: the saint, and an inquisitor who is looking for the saint, and trying to make sense of the alternative readings. The poems explore the gaps and contradictions between the different versions of the written texts, the landscape around Oxford associated with the saint, her presence and appropriations in modern Oxford. It is an ironic, witty, liminal, anachronistic and complex engagement with the contradictions of historical texts, the elusive nature of faith and ultimately, what the point of a saint is. The critical analysis explores the adaptation of written saints’ Lives, focusing on the different versions and interpretations of the life of St Frideswide of Oxford. Selected aspects of adaptation theory and related concepts form a framework to interrogate and explore the genre of hagiography, a specific approach to saints’ life-writing. The analysis is applied to medieval and modern refashionings of Frideswide’s Lives, and to other modern poetic engagements with other saints’ Lives. It distinguishes works that are adaptations of extant texts from those that appropriate their original sources. I conclude with a proposed new category of ‘appropriated Life’ to distinguish some modern refashionings of saints’ Lives, including my own, from others.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	6 September 2023
Last Modified:	07 Sep 2023 08:02
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/162259

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