Saint AEpelberht of East Anglia in the South English Legendary

Abstract

Saint Æþelberht of East Anglia in the South English Legendary Michael S. Nagy The compendious and rather eclectic collection of versified medieval saints' lives commonly known as the South English Legendary provides the modern scholar with a wide range of difficulties. The most obvious of these difficulties resides in the fact that the collection as a whole remains partially unedited. This state of editorial incompletion is particularly conspicuous in the largely ignored lives of Anglo-Saxon saints located in what Manfred Görlach calls the "E" redaction of the SEL manuscripts,1 for having been considered as later additional legends, these lives have until very recently been excluded from membership in the core of the South English Legendary. As Paul Acker asserts, however, because the SEL originated in Worcester and the "E" redaction manuscripts come from that area, the Anglo-Saxon saints' lives "may well have been part of the original SEL from its inception," and not later appendages or afterthoughts.2 A related problem that one encounters in approaching the SEL is that there is no "reliable indication as to . . . the author's intention, or [to] the use these texts actually served when they were current in the 14th Century."3 This lack of knowledge is, it seems, an effect of the difficulty outlined above, for in the absence of a completely edited body of work, one can barely perceive an individual life or group of lives within the whole of the SEL with any accuracy. It is for this reason that the current study, which focuses upon the Life of Saint Æþelberht of East Anglia, seeks not to make generalizations about the South English Legendary as a whole, but to add another edited text to its catalogue and to discuss the social, political, and religious contexts in which this particular life was likely used.4 That the previously unedited texts of the South English Legendary should indeed be edited is not an issue with which many medieval scholars have concerned themselves. Regrettably, this lack of interest is not surprising, for despite the fact that the SEL was one of the most popular vernacular texts in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (if the number of its manuscripts and its wide geographic distribution are any indication), we [End Page 159] know very little about it. The author "(or the different contributors) did not name his sources, nor did he explicitly refer to the scope of his collection."5 In addition, with the exception of the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, no other medieval text quotes or refers to the SEL. Nevertheless, it can hardly be denied that vernacular saints' lives were an influential part of the medieval literary landscape. Caxton's Golden Legend, a translation of the Legenda aurea, was a bestseller from its initial publication in 1483 through the mid-1520s. Similarly, Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale is a translation of the life of Saint Cecelia, and Gower's Confessio Amantis retells the legend of Pope Sylvester's conversion of Constantine. Given the culturally prominent position that hagiography held in the Middle Ages, each augmentation of our limited knowledge is useful. The edition accompanying this essay will add another published text to the record. A logical place to begin one's treatment of a saint's life is to examine its likely sources. Discussing the existing earlier Latin versions from which the SEL Life of Saint Æþelberht might have been derived poses no small problem, for, as Görlach maintains, although "[t]he SEL text keeps to the main tradition [of the legend as] . . . represented by the three major Latin Lives"-that of Osbert of Stoke by Clare in Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina 2627;6 that of Giraldus Cambrensis in London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius E.vii, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina 2626; and the anonymous one in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 3087-"it cannot be affiliated with any particular Latin source."8 This is not a particularly profound revelation, however, for the oldest of the three Latin Lives, the Corpus Christi, is the source for Osbert's version, which is, in turn, the source for Giraldus's.9 Thus, in failing to correspond with one of...