Miracles of the Virgin in Middle English, ed. and trans. by Adrienne Williams Boyarin. A Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Peterborough, Ont., 2015, 164 pp., 12 b/w ill.

The admiration and worship of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages was simply paramount, both in clerical and in secular literature, in the visual arts, and in music. Mary <?page nr="292"?>appears countless times in legendary literature, and so also in Middle English. She might produce miracles and help miserable people in need if they pray hard enough. Those stories were ubiquitous all over medieval Europe, as Williams Boyarin comments, referring to Latin, French, Anglo-Norman, Provençal, Italian, Spanish, Castilian, Arabic, and Ethiopean (10). I wonder, however, what the difference between Spanish and Castilian might be, and why German, French (Gautier de Coincy) or Swedish, Polish or Czech texts are missing entirely in this list. Nevertheless, the focus of the present book rests on Middle English examples, such as those contained in The South English Legendary, in the Vernon Manuscript, and in the collection produced by the printer Wynken de Worde in 1496.

Conversations with the Living and the Dead

This chapter considers the ways in which ideas permeated and changed society over time, through mechanisms that cannot directly be seen in the literary record. It seeks to adumbrate the vibrant oral culture of the period by tracing the movement of ideas between texts, contexts and audiences, using romances, lyrics, sermons, devotional works, anecdotes and proverbs, and accounts of legal cases. Extended discussions are offered of the figure of King Arthur in the Latin of Geoffrey of Monmouth, French of Wace, and English of Laȝamon; the Marian lament at the Passion, in Latin and its French and later English translations; the early Middle English religious lyric; the Mirror of the Church in Latin, French, and English; the South English Legendary, and several other texts.

Thirteenth-century anonymous Margaret poems and their later redactions

Chapter 2 examines thirteenth-century verse lives of St Margaret that continued to be copied, rewritten, and adapted well into the sixteenth century. These include multiple versions of two Middle English poems, a free-standing Meidan Maregrete, and the saint’s life from the South English Legendary corpus, their variations, deviations, manuscript context, raising the question of their genre – a hagiography–romance hybrid. Then it looks into Anglo-Norman and French versified lives of St Margaret, paying special attention to the so-called G version, immensely popular in Europe and preserved in over one hundred manuscripts. This popularity appears to result from the text’s claim that a copy of the poem can itself act as the saint’s relic.

Uncovering the Secret: Medieval Women, Magic and the Other

For medieval audiences women occupied a specific, designated cultural area which, while they could freely form it according to their will and nature, was in fact imaginary and immaterial. Women in social, legal, and religious contexts were mostly counted among the receptive, inactive, and non-ruling groups. On both levels, there was a group of features universally defining all women: the strong, virtuous and independent model Aquinas lamented was replaced in real life by the sinful, carnal and weak stereotype, and the erotic, emotional, mysterious, and often wild type present predominantly in literature. Indeed, women were a source of scientific, theological, and cultural fascination because of their uncanny and complex nature, producing both fear and desire of the source and nature of the unattainable and inaccessible femininity. In social contexts, however, the enchantress seems to lose that veil of allure and, instead, is forced to re-define her identity by suppressing, denying, or losing her supernatural features. With the example of Saint Agnes from the South English Legendary Life of Saint Agnes, and Melior from Partonope of Blois (ca. 1450), the article will explore how medieval texts dealt with the complex and unruly female supernatural, and how its neutralization and subduing fitted into the moral, scientific, and cultural norms of medieval society.