‘Mary of Nemmegen’

Abstract

A ‘Miracle of the Virgin’ is the source of the anonymous late fourteenth-century Dutch play, A very marvellous story of Mary of Nemmegen who for more than seven years lived and had ado with the Devil. This miracle play was turned into an English narrative by a translator in the employ of Jan van Dvesborch, who printed it in 1520. H. S. Bennett in English Books and Readers, 1475–1557 suggests that this English version, A lyttel story of a mayde that was named Mary of Nemmegen, may be the work of Laurence Andrewe, who translated several works for van Dvesborch. In the prologue to Hieronymus von Braunschweig’s The vertuose boke of Distyllatyon (1527), Andrewe declares that he has translated ‘dyvers and sondry small volumes and tryfles of myrth and pastaunce, some newly composed and some translated and of late finished’.