The Vita of Marie d’Oignies and Late Medieval England

Abstract

Two late medieval Latin manuscripts and one fifteenth-century Middle English manuscript testify to English interest in Jacques de Vitry’s thirteenth-century Vita of Marie d’Oignies, a mulier religiosa of the diocese of Liege. Both the Latin fifteenth-century Oxford codex, St. John’s College, MS 182 and the Middle English fifteenth-century Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 114 were owned by Carthusian charterhouses. The contemplative English Carthusians helped supply secular readers with texts as can be seen in MS Douce 114 which contains the Middle English translation of De Vitry’s Latin Vita. Readers of the Book of Margery Kempe recall that Margery writes that her priest-amanuensis comes to understand her tears after reading about Marie’s weeping in De Vitry’s Vita. De Vitry saw Marie d’Oignies as the icon of a new type of lay piety; Margery Kempe takes her as a model.