Abstract
This chapter examines the representation of St Paul’s as a sacred space in the late fourteenth-century Middle English miracle narrative St Erkenwald. The poem stages a dramatic encounter with the pagan past that challenges and redefines the relationship between sanctity, memory, and material buildings, made all the more prominent by its Ricardian reimagining of the Anglo-Saxon past. This chapter explores the poem’s representation of the Christianisation of pagan temples and its suggestion that the present sanctity of St Paul’s depends upon the material destruction and erasure of past history. The chapter brings Foucault’s theory of ‘heterotopia’ into conversation with Mary Carruthers’ work on medieval memory architectures to show how St Erkenwald destabilises the cathedral’s linear relationship with history and presents a sanctity that thrives on and is strengthened by the profane challenge of pagan history.
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Varnam, L. (2021). Sacred Space, Memory, and Materiality in St Erkenwald. In: Altman, S., Buckner, J. (eds) Old St Paul’s and Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77267-3_4
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