Fifteenth-Century English Collections of Female Saints' Lives

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Middle English collections of female saints' lives in manuscript, both in verse and in prose. It enumerates the contents of these collections and discusses their early audiences, as well as the various cultural and literary influences, particularly those of Chaucer and Lydgate, that helped shape their growth. There has been little discussion of fifteenth-century English verse female hagiography and the various factors that relate to its circulation. Yet this is a form that seems not to have existed in any generically distinct way before this time and some general consideration of the forms of its circulation is warranted. What follows is an attempt to examine various collections containing such lives, to determine, where possible, their audiences, and to assess the various literary pressures that may lie behind their creation. Such factors contribute to the creation of a new kind of miscellany, one in which gender forms a distinctive criterion in establishing content. I Cambridge University Library MS Add. 4122 (henceforward A) is a small (85 x 123 mm) mid-fifteenth-century manuscript of a hundred and sixty-two leaves of good quality parchment, comprising twenty gatherings, signed, with catchwords, collating a-t8, v10.1 The contents of the manuscript are exclusively Middle English verse, as follows: 1. fols 6-[38.sup.v]: Life of St Margaret, 412 lines in couplets (IMEV 2672); transcripts of all five surviving manuscript copies, including A, are printed in Religiose Dichtung im Englischen Hochmittelalter: Untersuchung und Edition der Handschrift B. 14. 39 des Trinity College in Cambridge, ed. by Karl Reichl, Munchener Universitats-Schriften, Bd. 1 (Munich: Fink, 1973), pp. 167-249. 2. fols [39.sup.v]-145: 'a tretys of Oure Lady howe sche was wedded', 1678 lines in couplets (IMEV 1835); edited from this manuscript by Karl Reichl, 'Ein Mittelenglische Marienleben aus der Hs. Add. 4122 der University Library in Cambridge', Anglia, 95 (1977), 313-58. 3. fols [145.sup.v]-[166.sup.v]: Life of St Dorothy (IMEV 2447), 344 lines in quatrains; edited from this manuscript by C. Horstmann, Sammlung Altenglische Legenden (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1878), pp. 191-97. The manuscript is transcribed throughout in a single well-written current anglicana hand with a number of textura features. The opening text leaf (fol. 6) has a full page painted border and an historiated initial depicting St Margaret emerging from the side of a dragon. The beginnings of the other two items in the manuscript are marked by large (five-line) painted blue initials, infilled with fairly elaborate red penwork and tracery extending the length of the text-page. Item 2, in addition, includes a number of generally smaller painted initials. There are also a number of small blue or red initials throughout. The level of decoration and the competence of the scribe indicate that the manuscript was clearly produced for a relatively affluent commissioner. Although its contents are exclusively verse, the manuscript is written throughout as prose. It seems clear that those responsible for the manuscript's presentation were perfectly aware that it was verse. In item 1 the opening letter of each line is alternately blue or red. In item 2 the opening letter of each couplet (the verse form employed in items 1-2), is throughout alternately red or blue (written over a guide letter). In item 3, in quatrains, the opening letter of each quatrain is similarly highlighted. In addition, in item 1 in long lines, the caesura is regularly marked by a punctus and the end of the line by a distinctive sign that combines a double virgule and colon (.//.). This sign is also used in item 3 to mark the middle of the quatrain; the point is otherwise used to mark the end of lines here. In item 2 the point is used to mark the end of the line. Clearly some effort is devoted to making the reader aware that this is verse while not writing it as such. …