Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends (review)

Adrienne Williams Boyarin’s book is a welcome and erudite contribution to Marian scholarship. Its chronological coverage is broad and necessarily patchy, given her chosen subject and the diffuse, varied, and sporadic nature of the sources for it, including Latin and vernacular texts, and illustrations in manuscripts and stained-glass. Out of these miscellanea, ranging from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, whose randomness the author convincingly asserts is a key aspect of their value as evidence, emerges the argument for an enduring “Marian paradigm” in English religious culture. This is characterized by Mary’s repeated associations, inflected in different ways at different times, with having dominion over texts; possessing an expertise in legal texts, procedure, and judgment; and—through her moral and theological distinction as both Jew and mother of Christ—having an enduring narrative value in the service of antisemitic Christian polemic.

The “Miracles of the Virgin” genre was an English innovation of twelfth-century Benedictine monks, the legendary and disparate nature of whose contents distinguished it from conventional miracle collections more grounded in institutionally oriented and historicized miracle collections. Their literary and miscellaneous qualities spurred what Anthony Bale has called the “exemplary imagination” (qtd. on p. 17) of vernacular clerical culture in the later medieval period—certainly from the end of the thirteenth century, when they surface in the South English Legendary and take their authority from the Anglo-Norman moment of their monastic invention. In fact, Boyarin traces these stories to Anglo-Saxon liturgical and homiletic precursors, demonstrating continuity in the themes and motifs explored by Ælfric in his Catholic Homilies and those of Anselm of Bury, Dominic of Evesham, and William of Malmesbury’s Marian collections, through the South English Legendary, John Mirk’s Festial, Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale,” sermon cycles, the Vernon manuscript, the thirteenth-century de Brailes Book of Hours, a fifteenth-century religious miscellany, and ultimately to Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam’s satirical take on the shrine of St. Mary at Walsingham. The power of these stories, Boyarin contends, is in their very exemplary and flexible properties, which made them irresistible points of recurring reference where enduring themes could be repeatedly played out in different versions and combinations. Three particular landmarks in English history are broadly evoked as contexts against which these “versioning” processes occurred: the legal innovations of late-twelfth and thirteenth-century England, the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, and the Reformation. The book is an entertaining and convincing accumulation of readings of Mary, who appears sometimes merciful, often fiercely judgmental, but always powerful (occasionally to the point that her relative status to God becomes controversial). A marvelous instance of symmetry to emerge out of this miscellaneous material—which Boyarin uses to affirm her central thesis—is the way that Erasmus’s satirical colloquy on the cult of St. Mary of Walsingham really “nails” this distinct, legalistic, textual, and antisemitic aspect of English Marian culture. After learning in chapter 2 of Ælfric’s association of Mary with St. Jerome as legislatrix of the Christian biblical canon and disposer of Marian apocrypha and the old Hebrew law, we discover in the final chapter that Erasmus’s gift to the Walsingham shrine of Greek verses in honor of Mary was misconstrued by the English canons there, for they “call Hebrew anything they don’t understand” (p. 166).