The Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt: An Edition of the Old English Text with Modern English Parallel-Text Translation (review)

210 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) mispronounced, phrase books, although the outcomes in the medieval era might be rather more dramatic than in modern times. Tim Dawson Melbourne, Victoria Magennis, Hugh, The Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt: An Edition of the Old English Text with Modern English Parallel-Text Translation, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2002; paper; pp. xii, 260; RRP £13.99; ISBN 0859896722. Prior to her conversion, St Mary of Egypt lived a life of greedy, indiscriminate sexual abandon, her insatiable appetite resembling that of the French author Catherine Millet in her recent best-selling autobiography, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. But while the latter has been lionised by some sections of the press and the intelligentsia, St Mary was more literally honoured as a lion when a lioness dug a grave for the saint in the desert. This motif, like many others in hagiographical literature, is borrowed form the early lives of the desert fathers (in this case, from Jerome’s Life of St Paul of Thebes), and the story of the ‘wretched harlot’ converted to piety is also conventional. St Mary, once converted by a vision of the Virgin after 17 years of reckless promiscuity, spends the next 47 years of her life alone and mostly naked in the desert with virtually no resources save divine grace. Prompted by a divine vision to seek out greater knowledge and understanding of salvation, the monk Zosimus meets Mary and convinces her to recount her life story. It is a biography in which Mary has done as she wished, both before and after her moment of grace, with no ecclesiastical intervention until she meets Zosimus. As her spiritual student, he represents masculine, patristic conventions, administering the sacrament of Eucharist to the dying Mary and overseeing her burial with the aid of the lioness. Mary’s conversion had been achieved in a conventional way, via the power of the Virgin and the Cross, though without the aid of the clergy, and her newfound life of faith is practiced in solitude. As Magennis explains in his introduction to this handy collection of material, the model of female sanctity and personal autonomy rather than ecclesiastical authority presented in this vita is unconventional to the point of being challenging, and is certainly unlike the type of vita produced by the most prolific Anglo-Saxon hagiographer, the straightlaced Ælfric (pp. 4-6). Reviews 211 Parergon 20.2 (2003) The standard edition of the anonymous Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt prints it within its major manuscript context, London, British Library Cotton Julius E. vii, the sole extant witness to the full collection of Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints (ed. and trans. W.W. Skeat, EETS os 76, 82, 94 and 114 [London, 181-1900], II.2-53). The association of St Mary with this collection is misleading because the vita is one of four in this collection not by Ælfric and is in many ways unlike his work. Magennis succeeds in distinguishing this vita from the dominant hagiographical model of Ælfric’s West Saxon type ‘codicologically … linguistically and stylistically’ (p. 210), arguing that St Mary represents a separate Anglian tradition. His broader conclusion, that the inclusion of this vita in its manuscript context of Ælfrician vitae provides evidence for ‘a more eclectic tradition of transmission of vernacular Christian writing than associated with Ælfric himself’ (p. 22), may not convince all readers. Magennis presupposes a policy of editorial control by a compiler working from closer familiarity with the manuscript contents than we can confidently assume from scant evidence. Aside from this interpretive extrapolation, the Introduction provides a very useful discussion of textual transmission, style, and language (notwithstanding the occasional vagueness: e.g., ‘as is suggested in a later section of the Introduction’[p. 6]; and ‘… at an early date. In the following centuries …’ [p. 10]). As well as the Introduction, the collection of resources in this volume is admirable: the Old English text with facing-page translation; a brief commentary; variant readings from two fragmentary manuscripts; an ‘illustrative’ rather than critical edition of the Latin source text also with facingpage translation; full Old English glossary; and a select...