Abstract
AbstractThis article highlights the textual distinctiveness of the Old EnglishLife of Saint Mary of Egyptin its manuscript context in British Library, Cotton Julius E.vii. The Cotton Julius version of theLifeis distinctive in the sheer number of scribal errors it contains but also in the purposeful changes to the original translation evident in it. Consideration of scribal performance across the manuscript and comparison with texts ofSaint Mary of Egyptextant elsewhere lead to the conclusion that the purposeful changes in the Cotton Julius witness have probably been inherited from an exemplar, while the number of errors is likely due to the pressure under which the scribe was working in adding this text at a late stage of the manuscript’s composition. Despite its distinctive features, there is no evidence to contradict the recently argued contention that this version ofSaint Mary of Egypt, along with the second half of the immediately preceding item in the manuscript, theLegend of the Seven Sleepers, was copied by the main scribe of Cotton Julius rather than being delegated to a colleague: althoughSeven Sleepersalso seems to have been copied under pressure,Saint Mary of Egyptstands apart from it in broadly the same ways as it does from the rest of the manuscript.
Highlights
The text of the anonymous Life of Saint Mary of Egypt1 in London, British Library, Cotton Julius E.vii (W) is our principal witness to the Old English translation; substantial fragments of the Life survive in two other manuscripts, London, British Library, Cotton Otho B.x (O) and Gloucester, Cathedral Library, 35 (G), but nearly half of it is extant in W alone
Almost completely lacking in the second half of Seven Sleepers, on the other hand, are instances of seemingly purposeful intervention like those we have identified in Saint Mary of Egypt
This article has highlighted the distinctiveness of the W Life of Saint Mary of Egypt in its manuscript context
Summary
The text of the anonymous Life of Saint Mary of Egypt in London, British Library, Cotton Julius E.vii (W) is our principal witness to the Old English translation; substantial fragments of the Life survive in two other manuscripts, London, British Library, Cotton Otho B.x (O) and Gloucester, Cathedral Library, 35 (G), but nearly half of it is extant in W alone. W, which dates from the very early eleventh century, is celebrated as the manuscript that uniquely contains Ælfric’s Lives of Saints as an integrated collection, as well as Saint Mary of Egypt and three other anonymous items, Saint Euphrosyne, Saint Eustace and Seven Sleepers. O, a compendium mostly of saints’ lives, dates from the first half of the eleventh century, while G, of which very little survives apart from the Saint Mary of Egypt fragments, comes from the mid-eleventh century. Saint Mary of Egypt and the second part of Seven Sleepers are written in the same generally regular form of Late West Saxon as the Scribe A texts This form of Late West Saxon, referred to in scholarship as ‘Standard Old English’, was widely in use in late Anglo-Saxon England.. Examples of miscopying in O include (out of six instances) lufode ‘loved’ for W leofode ‘lived’ (387, Skeat 345, D 46) (reflecting Latin viventi ‘living’, 403); middan for W ( G) middaneardes ‘world’ (560, Skeat 487, D 65) (translating orbis, 552); gewæg for W se wæg ‘the way’ The idiosyncracy of the W text of Saint Mary of Egypt is confirmed by comparison with G and O, but it is evident in the parts of the text extant only in W, in which there are a large number of departures from what the scribe would have seen in the exemplar in front of him or her (unless the W scribe heedlessly copied existing mistakes)
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