Saints Edith and Æthelthryth: Princesses, Miracle Workers, and Their Late Medieval Audience: The Wilton Chronicle and the Wilton Life of St. Æthelthryth (review)

The two anonymous early fifteenth-century vernacular saints' lives edited here— both composed at Wilton Abbey, Wiltshire—are found uniquely in British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B.III. Last edited in the 1880s, they have been comparatively neglected by modern scholars. Mary Dockray-Miller's fine edition of these quirky hagiographies makes them readily accessible to a new generation of feminist historians and cultural theorists. The texts deserve attention because of their subject matter—powerful religious women with royal connections—and their association with the important double monastery at Wilton. But they are also fascinating for a number of other reasons, such as their preoccupation with dreams.

The Wilton Chronicle (4977 lines), despite its received name, consists for the most part of a life of the Anglo-Saxon princess St. Edith, the patron-saint of Wilton Abbey. Indeed, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne—one of the few scholars to have written on this text—refers to it as the Life of Edith. The Wilton Life of St. Æthelthryth (Audrey) (1098 lines)—the title is Dockray-Miller's—relates the life of the East Anglian founder of Ely minster. Edith's sources are the eleventh-century Legenda Edithae by Goscelin, composed at Wilton ca. 1080, William of Malmesbury's Gesta regum and Gesta pontificum, and Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon. There exist numerous medieval versions of Æthelthryth's legend, including one attributed to Marie de France, but the sources drawn on for this version are Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the Liber Eliensis. Edith's vita is set in the Anglo-Saxon conversion era (the hundred years after Augustine's arrival), Æthelthryth's during the Benedictine Reform. While the sources insist that only Edith's thumb and belly did not rot after her death, this life celebrates her total bodily incorruptibility. Æthelthryth's body is similarly incorrupt.

These vitae may have been designed to promote Wilton as a preferred destination for aristocratic women seeking to become nuns, possibly to rival the more famous Syon Abbey. Not only do the poems emphasize the extraordinary postmortem miracle-working powers of each virgin saint, but they figure their monastic subjects as romance heroines in order to affirm that a woman can be both an aristocrat and a nun. Æthelthryth's complexion when dead is still red and white; Edith's many accomplishments—singing, writing poetry, embroidery, and needlework (of Church vestments only)—are a set of life skills both saintly and aristocratic; and as Dockray-Miller notes (p. 17), there is an almost fetishistic fascination with Edith's clothes and their symbolic fate: a gown of purple silk embroidered with gold with a rough hairshirt beneath it; a fur-trimmed mantle rescued from burning. But the fact that the poems are written in English, not French, and their unusual verse form—rhyming ABAB quatrains with varying line lengths—suggest, as Wogan-Browne has argued, that their author was making a bid for historicist authority. At one point the Chronicle addresses its audience in singular terms as "dyscrete reder" (p. 181), but both poems were almost certainly intended for the whole Wilton community, religious and lay, since the Abbey was also home to a number of unprofessed aristocratic women.

Dockray-Miller provides an extremely clean and attractive edition of the Middle English texts, with a modern English translation on facing pages. Since there is only one manuscript witness, the notes are unencumbered with variants. The editorial policy strikes a good balance between readability (modern punctuation; regularized spacing; silent expansions; silent incorporation of corrections) and conservatism (spellings not regularized). The translation is both close and idiomatic, though I query a few instances: "state" might be better translated in some places as "rank," rather than "state" (e.g. pp. 134-35), and "all" as "completely," rather than "all" (e.g...