Cultures of Anglican hagiography c. 1840-1940 with special reference to the Diocse of Truro

This thesis examines the changing perceptions of hagiography in England from the later nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, drawing together a rich literature ofthe pre-Conquest saints of the British Isles from prayer book calendar commentaries, pageants, commemorations and sermons as well as collections and individual lives. Whilst critical attention has focused on the practice of medieval hagiographers, this thesis identifies the volume, and analyses the sustained significance, of discussion on and about saints' lives in the Victorian period and beyond, as the saints are recruited to construct imagined national, regional, confessional, and imperial communities . •....• ' The first section of the thesis demonstrates that saints' lives are deployed as a means of intervention in contemporary debates within both church and society, from the publication ofNewman's Lives of the English Saints onwards, and that the difficulty for historians in finding appropriate methodologies for dealing with hagiographic materials elicited contested and creative historiographies. The Bede and Caedmon memorials and early twentieth-century pageant culture are shown to produce the saints as figures of foundation and institution as opposed to religious exemplars, to be performed rather than imitated. The thesis shows that tensions and problems inherent in the use of pre-conquest saints - focused particularly around the anniversary celebrations of Alfred and Augustine - ultimately vitiated their usefulness in national discourse, and that their use became fragmented, localized, and domesticated. This regional appropriation is explored through two chapters with a Cornish focus. One discusses the use of saints' lives within the foundational narrative for the new diocese ofTruro, including the successful campaign for its establishment in 1876 and the work of its first bishops. The second examines the hagiographical work of Gilbert Hunter Doble (1880-1945), and challenges current readings of its significance by resituating it within intellectual scholarly networks on the one hand and Doble's own parochial praxis on the other.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo