Omissions, Emissions, Missionaries, and Master Signifiers in Norman Canterbury

Abstract

he first hagiographical treatment of Augustine of Canterbury, the missionary sent by Gregory the Great to convert the English in 597, is an exhaustive dossier of materials by Goscelin, the Flemish monk who came to England some years before the Norman Conquest and finally settled at St. Augustine's Abbey in the late 1080s, or at least by 1091.1 Augustine's late emergence into hagiography parallels the cases of a large number of Anglo-Saxon saints who were accorded full literary treatments only in the generations after the Conquest. The cultural dynamics of these respective entries into written language are complex and various; they have been treated obliquely or directly by a number of scholars.2 Goscelin's Augustine dossier is something of an overkill. In addition

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