Wonder, derision, and fear: The uses of doubt in Anglo-Saxon saints' lives

This dissertation examines the narrative depiction and uses of incidents of doubt in Anglo-Saxon hagiography. Considered against Michael Goodich's findings about the hagiographic use of doubt in the later Middle Ages, Anglo-Saxon hagiography shows a much wider range both in the ways doubt is depicted and the purposes for which it is deployed. Anglo-Saxon hagiography has examples of not one, but four broad types of doubt: questions about the saint, accusations against the saint that sow doubt in the minds of others, self-doubt on the part of the saint, and postmortem doubt which derides the saint's sanctity and assumes the saint is powerless to act.;Unlike the examples Goodich cites, not all hagiographies treat doubt as sinful. Some doubt merely results from a lack of understanding, the misleading of others, or a need for further information. When doubt is sinful it stems from a wide variety of motives. Furthermore, not all sinful doubt is punished; some hagiographers treat doubt much more leniently than others.;Anglo-Saxon hagiographers had several patristic sources available to them which offered incidents upon which a theology of doubt could have been modeled, but they did not settle on one. It was not that the hagiographers of this period were uninterested in the issue of doubt. Quite the opposite. They wrote in the period leading up to the establishment of the canonization process, one in which doubts about a saint's sanctity could not be automatically answered by pointing to the approval of Rome. When canonization became a formal process, subject to the central control of Rome, doubt was, in a sense, institutionalized as a part of the canonization process. Prior to this, written accounts were fast becoming essential to canonization, but were not yet part of a formal process. A written document was a way of creating and solidifying the memory of the saint so that the memory (and hence the veneration) of a saint would not be lost to forgetfulness or to the doubts of others. To write doubt was, to one degree or another, to risk writing against the cult's success because it introduced into the text the very thing the text was intended to allay.;Considered against their historic contexts, the moments in which hagiographers chose to use doubt and the ways in which they chose to portray it show a high correspondence between the concerns, agendas and pressures under which the hagiographer wrote and the way in which doubt is treated in the hagiography. Several hagiographers introduce or reproduce doubting incidents in ways which address threats to the cult of their saint. Other hagiographers, Bede and AElfric, use incidents of doubt to model virtues or characteristics which they wish to spread through the English people. This reminds us that, despite hagiography's investment in the universal and eternal, each hagiography was still directly bound to the concerns and issues of the time and place in which it was written. Those hagiographers who take the narrative risk of using doubt reveal those pressures and concerns under which they wrote.