Sabra the Saint: Hagiography in Richard Johnson’s The Seven Champions of Christendom

• Authors: Drzazgowski Kyla Helena
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

This paper looks at the influence of hagiography, or the writing of the lives of saints, on Richard Johnson’s wildly popular text, The Seven Champions of Christendom (1596). The author focuses on the character Sabra, who represents a female saint figure in opposition to her not-so-saint-like husband St George, in order to show how the tradition of hagiography is changed in the sixteenth-century as it moves away from its pious and medieval origins. A text that has been mostly overlooked by literary scholars, The Seven Champions of Christendom emerges as more than simply a part of the culture of popular literary fiction of the 1590s as it considers Protestant hagiography and its cultural pertinence at the time Johnson wrote.

Keywords

EN

Richard Johnson; Protestant Hagiography; the female saint-figure; romance

• Publisher: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw
• Journal: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2016
• Issue: 25/1
• Pages: 35-46

Contributors

author

Drzazgowski Kyla Helena

References

• Delany, Sheila. 1998. Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in FifteenthCentury England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Diehl, Huston. 1997. Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestant and Popular Theater in Early Modern England. New York: Cornell University Press. 46
• Fellows, Jennifer. 2003. “Introduction.” The Seven Champions of Christendom. Ed. Jennifer Fellows. Vermont: Ashgate. xiii–xxxi.
• Johnson, Richard. 2003. The Seven Champions of Christendom. Ed. Jennifer Fellows. Vermont: Ashgate.
• King, John N. 2009. “Introduction.” Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Select Narratives. By John Foxe. Ed. John King. New York: Oxford University Press. xi‒vl.
• Liebler, Naomi Conn. 2007. “Bully St. George: Richard Johnson’s Seven Champions of Christendom and the creation of the bourgeois national hero.” Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading. Ed. Naomi Conn Liebler. New York: Routledge.
• Mentz, Steve. 2006. “Early Modern Romance and the Middlebrow Reader.” Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction. Burlington: Ashgate.
• Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. 2002. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Summit, Jenifer. 2008. “A Library of Evidence: Robert Cotton’s Medieval Manuscripts and the Generation of Seventeenth-Century Prose.” Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 136‒196.
• White, Helen C. 1963. Tudor Books of Saints and Martrys. Madison: Wisconsin University Press.