Fifteenth-century English Collections of Female Saints' Lives.

Edwards, A.S.G.

ABSTRACT

This article examines Middle English collections of female saints' lives in manuscript, both in verse and in prose. It enumerates the contents of these collections and discusses their early audiences, as well as the various cultural and literary influences, particularly those of Chaucer and Lydgate, that helped shape their growth.

There has been little discussion of fifteenth-century English verse female hagiography and the various factors that relate to its circulation. Yet this is a form that seems not to have existed in any generically distinct way before this time and some general consideration of the forms of its circulation is warranted. What follows is an attempt to examine various collections containing such lives, to determine, where possible, their audiences, and to assess the various literary pressures that may lie behind their creation. Such factors contribute to the creation of a new kind of miscellany, one in which gender forms a distinctive criterion in establishing content.

I

Cambridge University Library MS Add. 4122 (henceforward A) is a small (85 x 123 mm) mid-fifteenth-century manuscript of a hundred and sixty-two leaves of good quality parchment, comprising twenty gatherings, signed, with catchwords, collating a-t8, v10.1 The contents of the manuscript are exclusively Middle English verse, as follows:

1. fols 6-[38.sup.v]: Life of St Margaret, 412 lines in couplets (IMEV 2672); transcripts of all five surviving manuscript copies, including A, are printed in Religiose Dichtung im Englischen Hochmittelalter: Untersuchung und Edition der Handschrift B. 14. 39 des Trinity College in Cambridge, ed. by Karl Reichl, Munchener Universitats-Schriften, Bd. 1 (Munich: Fink, 1973), pp. 167-249.

2. fols [39.sup.v]-145: 'a tretys of Oure Lady howe sche was wedded', 1678 lines in couplets (IMEV 1835); edited from this manuscript by Karl Reichl, 'Ein Mittelenglische Marienleben aus der Hs. Add. 4122 der University Library in Cambridge', Anglia, 95 (1977), 313-58.

3. fols [145.sup.v]-[166.sup.v]: Life of St Dorothy (IMEV 2447), 344 lines in quatrains; edited from this manuscript by C. Horstmann, Sammlung Altenglische Legenden (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1878), pp. 191-97.

The manuscript is transcribed throughout in a single well-written current anglicana hand with a number of textura features. The opening text leaf (fol. 6) has a full page painted border and an historiated initial depicting St Margaret emerging from the side of a dragon. The beginnings of the other two items in the manuscript are marked by large (five-line) painted blue initials, infilled with fairly elaborate red penwork and tracery extending the length of the text-page. Item 2, in addition, includes a number of generally smaller painted initials. There are also a number of small blue or red initials throughout. The level of decoration and the competence of the scribe indicate that the manuscript was clearly produced for a relatively affluent commissioner.

Although its contents are exclusively verse, the manuscript is written throughout as prose. It seems clear that those responsible for the manuscript's presentation were perfectly aware that it was verse. In item 1 the opening letter of each line is alternately blue or red. In item 2 the opening letter of each couplet (the verse form employed in items 1-2), is throughout alternately red or blue (written over a guide letter). In item 3, in quatrains, the opening letter of each quatrain is similarly highlighted. In addition, in item 1 in long lines, the caesura is regularly marked by a punctus and the end of the line by a distinctive sign that combines a double virgule and colon (.//.). This sign is also used in item 3 to mark the middle of the quatrain; the point is otherwise used to mark the end of lines here. In item 2 the point is used to mark the end of the line. Clearly some effort is devoted to making the reader aware that this is verse while not writing it as such.

The decision to write in prose seems a considered one, one emphasized by having the text frame significantly smaller than the available text space (45 x 75 mm). But even if more space had been employed it would not have been feasible to represent the (roughly) decasyllabic lines as verse. The page is simply too narrow.

This leads one to suppose that it was not the contents of the manuscript but its size that was the crucial determinant in its layout. It is likely that the texts were deliberately accommodated to predetermined physical constraints. It would seem improbable that the evidently competent producers of this manuscript should have inadvertently miscalculated the appropriateness of its size to a verse format. Nor is it likely that it was a desire to save space, and hence parchment, that prompted the copying of verse as prose; the quite high professional quality of its production does not suggest any economic constraints. Page size was apparently deliberately chosen, and the layout of the verse was shaped accordingly.

This is a distinctive way of proceeding. Although one can point to various factors that occasioned the copying of verse as prose in earlier Middle English, (2) it is unusual at this date and in being so systematically and extensively undertaken. It raises questions as to the audience for which such a compilation might have been intended.

The manuscript's size and mode of transcription provide some insight into this audience, for these factors, in conjunction, seem to have a significant correlation with female readership in the fifteenth century. A number of small manuscripts, in part or whole in Middle English, including verse copied as prose, were designed for and even copied by women. (3) An example is Liverpool Cathedral MS Radcliffe 6, an Hours of the Guardian Angels, containing Middle English verse, apparently made for Elizabeth Woodville by a female scribe. (4) Here the size of the manuscript (89 x 64 mm) means that each line of verse is copied as a small paragraph, but again with line endings indicated, this time by decoration. In Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College MS 37 (135 x 90 mm), a Sarum Book of Hours, a number of Lydgate's verse prayers to female saints occur, written as prose and hence made uniform with the design of the manuscript. This manuscript also seems clearly to have been written for a woman. It contains a presentation miniature including a female patron. (5) The possibility of female ownership here gains a measure of support from other surviving manuscripts containing Middle English in small formats seemingly made for female readers. For example, Cambridge University Library MS Add. 3042 (75 x 110 mm) in Middle English and Latin apparently designed for use by nuns. (6) Similarly, Nijmegen University Library MS 194 (123 x 85 mm), a collection of prayers in Latin and Middle English, includes a number of English verse items. (7) The extent to which small books may have been designed in such ways to meet the specific needs of female readers merits further exploration than is possible here. (8)

The evidence of MSS Radcliffe 6 and Sidney Sussex 37 may have further implications as to female readership. They are Books of Hours. It has been argued that 'a special relationship existed between women and books of hours' in England in the Middle Ages. (9) The evident history of female ownership of such works in England from the thirteenth century provides some support for this view, (10) as does the development, particularly in the fifteenth century, of small Books of Hours in England, some evidently intended for female users. (11) Examples, of a de-luxe kind, limited to East Anglia (for reasons that emerge below), include Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 3-1979, measuring 121 x 81 mm, produced in Bury St Edmunds in the 1440s for a woman; (12) and the recently sold Fitzralph Hours (101 x 75 mm), decorated by the Talbot Master, produced in Rouen c. 1440 for the English market and owned by female members of the family of the Duke of Suffolk. (13) This manuscript is elaborately decorated and includes seven full-page miniatures. The formatting of verse as prose in A may be, at least in part, a function of a desire to make it look as much like a Book of Hours as possible. If so it would provide some additional support for the assumption of a female audience for A.

II

Collections in small formats in which Middle English verse is written as prose offer one strand in the relationship between A and other mid-fifteenth-century manuscripts. But its size and untypical verse layout are not the only unusual aspects of the manuscript. A collection of exclusively female verse saints' lives has few precedents or parallels in fifteenth-century English manuscripts. The most extensive Middle English collection of this kind is that compiled between 1443 and 1447 by the Augustinian friar, Osbern Bokenham, at Clare, Suffolk. This collection, which survives uniquely in British Library MS Arundel 327, contains thirteen such lives (in order): Margaret, Anne, Christina, the 11,000 Virgins, Faith, Agnes, Dorothy, Mary Magdalene, Katherine, Cecilia, Agatha, Lucy, and Elizabeth.

It seems likely that at least a number of these individual lives circulated separately before being assembled into the single collection in which they now survive, which was possibly made for presentation to the nuns of Denny Abbey, near Cambridge. (14) The subject matter of a number of Bokenham's individual legends also has clear links to female readers. Six of them contain dedications to individual, named women: St Anne to Katherine Denston (and her husband John), who recurs with Katherine Howard, in the dedication to St Katherine; St Dorothy to Isabel and John Hunt; Mary Magdalene to Isabel Bourchier, Countess of Eu; St Elizabeth to Elizabeth de Vere; and St Agatha to Agatha Flegge. Although none of the other seven lives contains any dedication it seems reasonable to conclude that Bokenham's primary audience was conceived as one largely of female readers.

The evidence from the Life of St Dorothy provides further parallels in collocations of gendered and generically congruent materials. It occurs in two other manuscripts, British Library MSS Harley 5272 (fols 99-[104.sup.v], ending imperfectly), and Arundel 168. The only other verse work in the Harley manuscript is Lydgate's Life of Our Lady (fols 1-[98.sup.v], signed 'Quod Iohannes fforster'). These poems form a distinct codicological unit from those that follow, the Middle English prose Abbey of the Holy Ghost (fols 105-[115.sup.v]) and the Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost (fols [115.sup.v]-[137.sup.v]). At least one early reader of this manuscript was a woman. (15) Lydgate's Life of Our Lady also appears in BL Arundel 168 (fols 66-[85.sup.v], beginning and ending imperfectly), the contents of which are exclusively verse. It follows immediately after Capgrave's Life of St Katherine (IMEV 6; fols 15-65), and a unique Life of St Christina (IMEV 2877; fols 2-[4.sup.v]) ascribed to William Paris, (16) which precedes the Life of St Dorothy (fols 5-[6.sup.v]), as well as various other verse texts, most of them brief, including a hymn to the Virgin Mary (IMEV 607; fol. [1.sup.r-v]). MS Arundel 168 has been dated to 1460-150017 and is associated dialectally with Norfolk. (18) Although its early readership cannot be more precisely defined, its subject matter obviously suggests a female audience.

These manuscripts are therefore broadly affiliated with A in their other contents as well as by those they share with it. They are all primarily hagiographic and devotional in their orientation. These affiliations gain further support from the unique 'tretys of Our Lady' in A. This offers a Marian resonance reflected in these related manuscripts most distinctively in the appearance of Lydgate's Life of Our Lady. And again, the primacy of the female subject seems relevant to their likely circulation even though the manuscripts offer no other indication of their provenance.

The other manuscripts of the final text in the Cambridge manuscript, the Life of St Margaret, do not provide such pronounced indications of an interest in gendered subject matter. In part, the reason for this may lie in the textual history of the work. The Life of St Margaret seems to be a 'floating' saint's life, incorporated intermittently into hagiographic collections as well as circulating separately. It has an origin significantly predating A. It appears in four other manuscripts. The earliest manuscript, Cambridge, Trinity College MS B. 14. 39 (323), dates from the thirteenth century, and is associated on linguistic grounds with West Worcestershire. (19) It largely comprises a collection of verse texts, many unique, primarily brief and religious. The most substantial, apart from St Margaret, are The Proverbs of Alfred (IMEV 433) and The Debate between the Body and the Soul (IMEV 1461). It also includes a number of Marian poems (IMEV 885, 912, 1836, 2366, 2645, 2687, 2995). (20) In another, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 779 (SC 2567), copied in the first half of the fifteenth century, it is part of the South English Legendary. (21) In another fifteenth-century copy, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery MS 091.21040, it is the sole verse content, added in a different hand to a Sarum Book of Hours. (22) It dates from the middle of the century; its early provenance associates it with a house of Benedictine nuns in Malling, Kent to which it was bequeathed by Elizabeth Hull. (23) Possibly the most suggestive for the present purposes is Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poet. 34 (SC 14528), late fifteenth century, where St Margaret occurs with, among other texts, verse lives of St Katherine (IMEV 227) and St Erasmus (IMEV 173), narratives elsewhere forming part of the Northern Homily Cycle, and a hymn to the Virgin Mary (IMEV 456), as well as romances. (24) These contents provide some indications of a collocation in which the question of gender may play a part. And, in sum, these manuscripts do seem to suggest some general correlation, albeit rather tenuous, both with other saints' lives, and also with Marian materials of the kind occurring in more developed forms in the manuscripts of the Life of St Dorothy.

While larger hagiographical collections, most obviously the South English Legendary and the Northern Homily Cycle, continued to be copied, the comparative rarity of collections designed with any special appeal to a literate female readership is striking. Moreover, there seem to be few other fifteenth-century exclusively verse anthologies of female saints' lives that survive apart from those in Bokenham and A. The only other instance of which I am aware is in BL MS Cotton Faustina B. iii. One part of this manuscript (fols 194-280) is unrelated to the other materials with which it is now bound. This part contains verse lives, both in quatrains, of SS Edith (IMEV 243: fols 199-263) and Ethelberta, the latter ending imperfectly (IMEV 3090: fols 265-[79.sup.v]). This part is from the Abbey of Benedictine Nuns at Wilton, Wiltshire. (25) The rarity of such compilations suggests they constitute a new kind of collection aimed at a new kind of reader.

Nor is it the case that there were many examples of Middle English prose collections of female saints' lives. These seem, if anything, rarer than their verse counterparts. Bodleian Library MS Douce 114 contains lives of SS Elizabeth of Spalbeck, Christine, Mary of Oignes, and Catherine of Siena joined to a version of Suso's Horologium. (26) There are apparently unique translations of the lives of SS Dorothy and Katherine in Dublin, Trinity College MS 319, erroneously assumed to be part of the Gilte Legende but seemingly a distinct fragment. (27) Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.9.1 includes, in a distinct scribal and codicological unit, an Assumption of Our Lady (fols [1.sup.v]-[8.sup.v], 30-[48.sup.v]) and a life of St Katherine (fols 9-24), both in prose. (28) BLMSCotton Titus A. xxvi, an early-sixteenth-century manuscript, contains prose lives of Mary Magdalene (fols 174-79) and St Katherine (fols 180-[202.sup.v]) together. (29) None of these has any indication of early female readership.

Related in generic and modal terms are manuscripts that contain relevant materials in both verse and prose. An intriguing example is provided by Manchester, Chetham's Library MS 8009. This is a varied collection, primarily of saints' lives and romances. (30) It begins with a series of female saints' lives, St Dorothy, in prose (fols 1-[2.sup.v]), a verse Assumption of the Virgin (fols 3-[17.sup.v]: IMEV 2165), a verse life of St Anne (fols 18-[29.sup.v]: IMEV 2392), and a prose life of St Katherine (fols 30-47). Each of these lives is a codicologically and scribally distinct unit; only one of the hands (that of St Katherine) recurs elsewhere in the compilation. It suggests a process of piecemeal assemblage of discretely circulating materials that is in some measure confirmed by A. It is perhaps noteworthy that one of the Chetham verse texts, the Assumption of the Virgin, recurs in BL MS Harley 2382, a manuscript that has other associations with A (see below). It has, moreover, been argued that the Chetham's manuscript may also have been, in part or whole, a collection made for women readers. 31)

More clear-cut in its affiliations is BL MS Harley 4012, containing as a sequence another prose life of St Katherine (fols 115-[23.sup.v]), a prose life of St Margaret (fols 124-30), and a verse life of St Anne (fols [130.sup.v]-[39.sup.v]: IMEV 3207). 32) This has a clear female ownership; it has an inscription 'Thys is the boke of dame AnneWyngefeld'. Anne Wingfield owned or can otherwise be linked to a number of other books, secular and religious. She was an East Anglian resident, with connections to, among others, Sir John Fastolf and the Pastons; she may have borrowed the latter's copy of Troilus. (33)

Less conclusive in terms of their possible female readership, but still highly suggestive, are two further collection of analogous materials. One is Cambridge University Library MS Ll. 5. 18, which contains the Charter of the Holy Ghost (fols 1-[9.sup.v]) and Abbey of the Holy Ghost (fols [9.sup.v]-[24.sup.v]) as a codicologically distinct unit, followed by a prose life of St Dorothy (fols 25-[28.sup.v]) and Lydgate's verse Life of St Margaret (IMEV 439) all in the same hand. Also noteworthy in these terms is Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 237, (34) the chief contents of which are Lydgate's Life of Our Lady (fols 158-240) and the Middle English Pilgrimage of the Soul, but which has prefacing these works a small, codicologically distinct booklet (fols 1-[16.sup.v]) containing a Middle English prose life of St Katherine (fols 1-12) and a verse life of St Margaret from the South English Legendary (IMEV 2987: fols [12.sup.v]-[16.sup.v]). We have already encountered Lydgate's poem with other female saints' lives; several manuscripts of the Pilgrimage of the Soul also have evidence of early female ownership or readership. (35)

III

The broad patterns of affiliation for all these collections is fairly clear: their construction suggests a preoccupation with aspects of female piety reflected in both female saints' lives and works associated with the Virgin. The most recurrent presence here is St Margaret, in different versions. But other, more crucial aspects of both A and those manuscripts most closely related to it remain harder to resolve. What, for instance, can be inferred about the region of production for A?

Such evidence as there is is literary but does have gendered and geographical implications. Given the rarity of models of collections of female verse saints' lives in Middle English, it is at least suggestive that, like Bokenham's Legends of Holy Women, A begins with a life of St Margaret and contains the only other verse life of St Dorothy apart from his. (36) It may be that A reflects some awareness of Bokenham as model, in attempting like him to assemble a number of separate female saints lives into a larger collection, albeit on more heterogeneous principles, as does MS Arundel 168, a collection with clear East Anglian affiliations with saints' lives by Capgrave and Lydgate. In smaller ways they both offer parallels to Bokenham's procedure, although drawing obviously on more varied textual sources.

Linked to Bokenham is Lydgate. Bokenham alludes to his Life of Our Lady in his own collection of female saints' lives. (37) As I have demonstrated, it is associated in various manuscript contexts with other poems from A. Lydgate's poem provides the most powerful and influential model of Marian narrative in the fifteenth century. As will be apparent, it provides the central element in a number of collections which include Middle English female saints' lives in either verse or prose: BL MSS Arundel 168 and Harley 5272, Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 237. The presence of a unique narrative, 'the treatise of our lady', on the same subject in A may suggest a conscious emulative motive in compilation, of a kind like the possible compilational gestures to Bokenham noted above. Such an argument gains some support from the clear associations of Lydgate's poem with women readers. (38)

To the links of A with Bokenham at Clare and Lydgate at Bury St Edmunds can be added, albeit more tenuously, John Capgrave at King's Lynn. His only verse female saint's life, The Life of St Katherine, was a substantial work that survives in four manuscripts, including MS Arundel 168 and also MS Arundel 396, owned by an Augustinian nun at Campsey Priory in Norfolk. (39) Bokenham also alludes to Capgrave's Life of St Katherine in his own life of the saint. (40) In view of Bokenham's and Lydgate's ties to Suffolk and Capgrave's to Norfolk, some East Anglian association for these female saints' lives seems most plausible.

There is other more tenuous art historical evidence that supports such a localization. Images of SS Margaret and Dorothy appear together only in a single fifteenth-century English manuscript, the Heller Hours, now University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library MS UCB 150, a Book of Hours. The representation of St Dorothy has been characterized as 'probably unique'. (41) The most authoritative account of this manuscript suggests that it was made for an East Anglian commissioner. (42)

Other literary associations, albeit of an even more diffuse kind, also bear on both modal and geographical factors. Chaucer may be of some importance, particularly the Chaucer of the Second Nun's Tale which he composed before the conception of the Canterbury Tales. (43) Chaucer's poem is possibly the earliest influential model of the separately circulating female saint's life in Middle English verse. It may itself have an East Anglian genesis: it has been argued that it may have been written for Adam Easton, a Benedictine monk of Norwich. (44) Its influence has been detected in William Paris's late-fourteenth-century Life of St Christina, (45) which, it will be recalled, survives uniquely in BL MS Arundel 168 (discussed above) and is clearly evident in Bokenham's own Life of St Cecilia in his Legends of Holy Women. (46) The Second Nun's Tale retained its distinctive identity in some fifteenth-century manuscripts in which it appears separate from the Canterbury Tales sequence, as in British Library MS Harley 2382 and Manchester, Chetham's Library MS 6709, in both of which it occurs with Chaucer's Prioress' Tale, and Lydgate's Life of Our Lady. In the Harley MS it appears with another Marian parallel to A, a verse Assumption of Our Lady. In the Chetham's manuscript it also is joined with another life of St Margaret, by Lydgate, in which the influence of the Second Nun's Tale has also been detected. (47) It may also be worth noting that Lydgate's Life of Margaret appears in two other complete manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, (48) and that the Canterbury Tales had an extensive East Anglian circulation. (49)

Such echoes of content and subject may reflect patterns of compilation which bear on the construction of A, offering literary and codicological analogues that draw on models of pious verse compilations, primarily hagiographic, some of which may have been constructed on gendered criteria. These are not topics that have, to the best of my knowledge, been systematically investigated in Middle English books.

A suggests the pervasiveness in the mid-fifteenth century of certain models of devotional discourse, particularly in verse and drawing on traditions influenced by Chaucer but shaped and extended particularly within an East Anglian environment by Bokenham, Lydgate, and Capgrave and linked most distinctively to forms of devotion to the Virgin and St Margaret. But it also suggests less definable cultural pressures to do with gender which are reflected in matters of book size and the crucially connected decision to write verse as prose. It seems possible that these pressures were in their turn shaped by regional influences probably within East Anglia, where the literary and pious needs of affluent laywomen may have served to create new literary markets. In such respects it provides an avenue for lines of enquiry that may help to clarify some important aspects of late-medieval English lay religious literary culture. (50)

(1) The first leaf, in the modern foliation, is numbered '6'.

(2) For discussion of some of the factors that bear on the copying of verse as prose see my article 'Editing and Manuscript Form: Middle English Verse Written as Prose', forthcoming in English Studies in Canada, 26 (2000), 1-18.

(3) I do not mean to suggest that there is a close, or necessary correlation between book size and female ownership; for some instances of small devotional books clearly owned by men and women see Colin Richmond, 'Margins and Marginality: English Devotion in the Later Middle Ages', in England in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Nicholas Rogers, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 4 (Stamford: Watkins, 1994), pp. 242-52, in discussion of Manchester, Rylands MS 165 (pp. 247-48) and Bodleian MS Gough liturg. 19 (pp. 249-50).

(4) Anne Sutton and Livia Visser Fuchs, 'The Cult of Angels in Late Fifteenth-Century England: An Hours of the Guardian Angel presented to Queen Elizabeth Woodville', in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. by Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (London: British Library, 1996), pp. 230-63.

(5) For description see M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895), pp. 24-25; James observes 'the book was written for some lady' (p. 24); see further Julia Boffey, 'Lydgate's Lyrics and Women Readers', in Women, The Book and the Worldly, ed. by Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995), pp. 139-49 (p. 147 and n. 21).

(6) See Alexandra Barratt, 'Books for Nuns: Cambridge University Library MS Add. 3042', Notes & Queries, n.s. 44 (1997), pp. 310-19.

(7) See Margaret Connolly, 'Some Unrecorded Middle English Verse in a Nijmegen Manuscript', Notes &Queries, n.s. 56 (1999), pp. 442-44.

(8) An obvious aspect of this is girdle books, small volumes designed to be hung from the waist. Records of their survival are elusive, but for a late, secular example associated with a woman, see the accounts of a George Medley in 1550, which record a payment 'for a boke for my cosen Margarett covered with velvett to hange at hir gerdell', cited in Julia Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), p. 50. There is a valuable general discussion in Sotheby's Sale Catalogue, 17 June 1997, lot 70 with further references. See also John B. Friedman, 'Harry the Haywarde and Talbat his Dog: An Illustrated Girdlebook from Worcestershire', Art into Life: Selected Papers from the Kresge Symposia, ed. by Kathleen Scott and Carol Fisher (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), pp. 115-53.

(9) See Sandra Penketh, 'Women and Books of Hours', in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. by Jane H. M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995), pp. 266-80, for a general survey of their relationship (the quotation is from p. 270).

(10) Claire Donovan, The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth Century Oxford (London: British Library, 1991), points out that 'laywomen were portrayed in five of the eight surviving books of hours in England [in the thirteenth century]' (p. 152).

(11) The most helpful general discussion of small Books of Hours is in Sotheby's Sale Catalogue, 18 June 1991, lot 155, with plates, of an early-sixteenth-century French miniature Book of Hours (37 x 23 mm) with further references.

(12) For description and further references see Kathleen Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390-1490, 2 vols (London: Miller, 1996), ii, 233-35.

(13) This was sold Sotheby's, 6 July 2000, lot 20. It contains the ownership inscription 'This boke is myn Dorothe de la Pole'.

(14) See further A. S. G. Edwards, 'The Transmission and Audience of Osbern Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen', in Late-Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. by A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), pp. 157-68.

(15) The anathema 'Thys ys Elsabeth danes boke he that stelhyn shall be hangyd by a croke' (fol. 42, in lower margin) occurs in an early-sixteenth-century hand.

(16) Printed in Samlung Altenglische Legenden, ed. by C. Horstmann (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1878), pp. 183-90. On the basis of its appearance with a work of Capgrave's and some perceived stylistic parallels with his saints' lives Gordon H. Gerould ascribed the Life of Dorothy to Capgrave; see his Saints' Legends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), pp. 271-72. There do not seem to be any firm grounds for this view.

(17) P. J. Lucas, 'John Capgrave O. S. A. (1393-1464): Scribe and "Publisher"', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 5 (1969-71), 5.

(18) R. Beadle, 'Prolegomena to a Literary Geography of Later Medieval Norfolk', in Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. by Felicity Riddy (Cambridge: Brewer, 1991), p. 104, no. 56.

(19) See Margaret Laing, Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), p. 37.

(20) For description see Laing, pp. 34-37.

(21) For description see M. Gorlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary, Leeds Texts and Monographs, n.s. 6 (Leeds: School of English, 1974), pp. 75-77.

(22) For description see N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries II: Abbotsford-Keele (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 109-11.

(23) Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries II: Abbotsford-Keele, p. 110.

(24) The most recent description is in N. Jacobs, The Later Versions of Sir Degarre: A Study in Textual Degeneration, Medium AEvum Monographs, n.s. 18 (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1995), p. 38: 'a short and decidedly scruffy miscellany [...] by two cursive hands' with references to earlier descriptions and noting its relationship to Bodleian Library, MS Douce 326 (SC 21900), another booklet by the same two scribes.

(25) See N. R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, 2nd edn (London: Royal Historical Society, 1964), p. 198. Between the two saints' lives (fols 263-[64.sup.v]), in Latin, a list of the names of the prioresses of Wilton (fols 263-64) followed by (fol. [264.sup.r-v]) 'ista auctores sunt nomina de quorum libris et autoritatibus exilis materia istius libelli est extracta et compilata'. The list comprises primarily historians, including Bede, Higden, William of Malmesbury, Henry Huntington, Gildas, John of Salisbury, and Geraldus Cambrensis, but the first item is 'legenda sancta Edithe virginis'.

(26) The manuscript was owned by the Charterhouse of Beauvale, Notts.; see Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, p. 9.

(27) I am indebted to Larissa Tracy of Trinity College, Dublin (who is studying this manuscript as part of her doctoral dissertation) for helpful discussion of this manuscript.

(28) For description see M. R. James, The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), iii, 440-41.

(29) These texts are followed by verse versions of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and St Julian. For description of this manuscript see The Early English Carols, ed. by R. L. Greene, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 297. He identifies a Cheshire provenance for the manuscript.

(30) For a full description see N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries. III: Lampeter-Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 361-64.

(31) For recent discussion in these terms see Rhiannon Purdie, 'Sexing the Manuscript: The Case for Female Ownership of MS Chetham 8009', Neophilologus, 82 (1998), 139-48.

(32) Described most recently in Edward Wilson, 'A Middle English Manuscript at Coughton Court, Warwickshire, and British Library MS. Harley 4012', Notes &Queries, n.s. 24 (1977), pp. 292-303 (see especially p. 301).

(33) See Wilson, 'A Middle English Manuscript', pp. 301-02.

(34) Described most recently in The Pilgrimage of the Soul, ed. by R. P. McGerr (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. lxiii-lxviii.

(35) For example, Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 124/61, Hatfield House MS Cecil 270, New York Public Library MS Spencer 19; for details see McGerr, The Pilgrimage of the Soul, pp. lxxiii-iv, lxxxiii-iv.

(36) Bokenham's own Life of Dorothy is the only one of his Lives to survive in a separate form, now fragmentary, apart from Arundel 327, in British Library MS Add. 36983; for discussion see Edwards, 'The Transmission and Audience', pp. 162-63.

(37) Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. by M. S. Serjeantson, EETS OS 226 (1938), l. 2007.

(38) On female readers of Lydgate's Life of Our Lady see Carol Meale and Julia Boffey, 'Gentlewomen's Reading', in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, ed. by Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 527-30.

(39) See Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, pp. 28, 238.

(40) Bokenham, Legendys, ll. 6356-57.

(41) Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, ii, 335; for the illustration itself see ill. 460.

(42) Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, no. 126, pp. 334-36 (especially p. 336). Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 171, draws attention to representations of St Dorothy on East Anglian rood-screens; see also his 'Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: The Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth-and Sixteenth-Century England', Studies in Church History, 27 (1992), 175-95, especially pp. 178-80.

(43) The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women establishes that Chaucer had already 'maad the lyf also of Seynt Cecile' (F Prologue, 426, G Prologue, 416) by the mid-1380s; I quote from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

(44) See Mary Griffin, Studies in Chaucer and His Audience (Hull, Quebec: E ditions l'E clair, 1956), pp. 294-98.

(45) G. H. Gerould, 'The Legend of St Cristina by William Paris', Modern Language Notes, 29 (1914), 129-33. On Paris see further Mary Ann Stouck, 'A Poet in the Household of the Beauchamp Earl of Warwick', Warwickshire History, 9 (1994), 113-17.

(46) Eileen S. Jankowski, 'Reception of Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale: Osbern Bokenham's Lyf of S. Cycyle', Chaucer Review, 30 (1996), 306-18.

(47) On this influence see Lois Ebin, John Lydgate (Boston: Twayne, 1985), p. 130. For the text of Lydgate's Life see The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. by H. N. MacCracken, EETS ES 107 (1911), pp. 173-92.

(48) These are Bodleian MS Bodley 686 (SC 2527) and the olim Devonshire MS, now in private hands.

(49) On the East Anglian circulation of the Canterbury Tales manuscripts see Jankowski.

(50) I am much indebted for assistance to Julia Boffey, Margaret Connolly, Ralph Hanna, Phillipa Hardman, George Keiser, Richard Linenthal, and Kathleen Scott.

A. S. G. EDWARDS

London