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The twelfth-century Life of King Edward the Confessor, in Anglo-Norman verse, is here presented in modern English for the first time. Its author, an anonymous Nun of Barking Abbey, offers a many-faceted and absorbing portrait of the celebrated king and saint, together with legendary material found in no other version of this hagiographic narrative; there is in addition a wealth of detail about Edward's times as well as about the twelfth-century context in which the Nun was writing. The poem is thus of the greatest interest not only for literary scholars but also for historians.
It is arguably the earliest vernacular text known to be by a woman, and so will also be of value to scholars investigating medieval female authorship. Long neglected, perhaps because mistakenly thought to be a mere translation of Aelred of Rievaulx's Vita in Latin, it proves on examination to be remarkably independent of its main source and raises questions about the freedom and originality of medieval translation.
