William of Malmesbury: The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary trans. and ed. by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom

Abstract

William of Malmesbury: The Miracles of Blessed Virgin Mary. Edited and translated by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom. [Boydell Medieval Texts.] (Rochester, NY: The Press, imprint of & Brewer. 2015. Pp. lxvii, 154. $115.00. ISBN 978-1-78327-016-3.)In 1120s and 1130s, English Benedictine monks produced an influential and remarkable set of collections of miracles of Virgin Mary. Unlike earlier Marian miracle collections produced on Continent and more usual type of miracle collection being compiled at English shrines in period, stories in these English Marian collections were cosmopolitan, ranging widely in time and place, with stories of Virgin's miracles in Italy, Spain, and eastern Mediterranean as well as in northern Europe. William of Malmesbury's lengthy text of some fifty-three chapters holds an important place within this flowering of Marian collections: it represents, as editors of this text put it, the culmination of this first creative impulse, before its spread to Continent and incorporation in much larger collections, from late twelfth century onward (p. xviii).William's collection has been edited twice before, once in 1959 in an unpublished Ph.D. thesis and again in 1968. This edition, including a facing-page translation, is first title in Boydell Medieval Texts series. It was undertaken by two scholars, Rodney Thomson and Michael Winterbottom, who have edited and translated nearly all of William of Malmesbury's other works. Their combined efforts have given William's Marian collection edition it deserves, and will make this important text far more widely available and accessible.Much of edition's introduction is taken up by a discussion of how editors decided to order chapters of collection, necessary because there are only two manuscripts that preserve William's text, and both have problems. The first manuscript is a preliminary version of collection which appears to include a pending file of stories that William planned to integrate into a text at a later date. The second manuscript, though it is clearly William's later, revised version of text, is missing quires and badly fragmented. In addition to their painstaking comparative analysis of these two manuscripts, editors draw on a number of other manuscripts that contain selections and abbreviations of William's stories to aid them in their reconstruction of text as a whole. …