Argues that the late-tenth-century lives of St Edmund by Abbo and Ælfric form an opus geminatum which uses the posthumous reattachment of Edmund’s heard to figure the possibility of married clerks becoming chaste monks, in accordance with the goals of the ‘Benedictine Reform’.
Reference: Mark Faulkner, ‘”Like a Virgin”: the reheading of St Edmund and monastic reform in late-tenth-century England’, in Heads will Roll: decapitation in the medieval and early modern imagination eds. Larissa Tracy and Jeff Massey (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 39-52.
Mark Faulkner 