Translating the Northern English Saints within Late Medieval Vernacular Legendaries: Oswald, Cuthbert, Ninian

Abstract

Late medieval vernacular legendaries, such as the South English Legendary and the Gilte Legende, include a much smaller number of northern English saints' lives than those from the Midlands and South. This essay explores the lives of those northern saints from the "Lindisfarne-Durham" cluster that have been selected for transposition into these vernacular collections-Oswald, Cuthbert and Ninian-in order to ascertain to what extent they retain markers of northern English identity. In each case, the life of the saint in question is considered in relation to its major Latin sources in order to map changes in emphasis, and in each case, the essay demonstrates that the saint has been subjected to a geo-political pull, either north over the border into Scotland, or south into Yorkshire and the Midlands. These centrifugal pulls undermine Northumbria and Durham as meaningful northern polities, and erode the strong image of northern saintly identity first created by Bede in his Historia ecclesiastica.