Verse Saints’ Lives Written in the French of England by Delbert W. Russell (review)

This most recent volume in the admirable French of England Translation Series published in Arizona has as its centre the translation of four Saints’ Lives from MSS of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: St Giles, St George, St Faith, and St Mary Magdalene. They are of varying length, the Life of St Giles being six times as long as the Life of St Mary Magdalene. The brief account of Mary Magdalene’s life seems largely due to the sheer difficulty of portraying a prostitute become saint to a medieval audience. Recreating her image as a protector of pregnant women did not help.

The format is similar for the four Lives. Each Life begins with a solid introduction, about twenty pages long, tracing the creation and growth of the cult, telling something about the authors and their public, outlining the treatment of the Latin sources, and ending with a section discussing important ideas or literary techniques specific to the particular Life. The four translations constitute half the bulk of the book, forming its second half, looking oddly subordinate to the scholarship. Carefully researched notes accompany the translations of the Lives, and an appendix provides short samples of all four texts in Anglo-Norman.

Delbert Russell refrains from commenting on the religious values promoted by the Saints’ Lives, leaving that evaluation to the readers. Some of the conventions in these Saints’ Lives are absurd and need no comment, but there are troubling aspects that one might expect comment upon, like the fact that there is little evidence in the Saints’ Lives to indicate that their God is a loving God. Russell’s book would have benefited from remarks specifically placing the Lives within the context of Christianity as we understand it to have been maintained in the later Middle Ages. It was a Christianity that was severely judgemental, emphasising pain and suffering: the medieval God was not the loving God that some modern Christians like to portray. And Russell does not recognise sadistic or pornographic elements: the book in that respect exists in a psychological vacuum. In the Life of St George, God seems to take a keen interest in prolonging George’s tortures: George is tortured and executed three times before his fourth and final series of tortures and execution. One of St George’s tortures, his being set upon a sharp-pointed ‘bucket seat’ and anally impaled, is clearly pornographic as well as sadistic. The beautiful St Faith is passively stripped naked before she is attached to her metal rack and roasted while a devout (?) admirer looks on from a distance.

The general picture of the saints that emerges is of highly opinionated, rigid figures, patronising at times towards God, asocial, and masochistic. It is hard to accept these often irritating figures as admirable. And how are they going to endure Heaven? The image of God Himself varies according to the author of the tale. George’s God is sadistic, Giles’s is kinder, while Mary Magdalene’s, not quite knowing what to do with her, is unreliable in granting her her miracles: a woman who becomes pregnant after praying to Magdalene dies during childbirth in spite of her prayers, remains dead but incorrupt for two years, to be finally restored to life in response to another prayer to Magdalene.

This book is a work of dedicated scholarship, adding four previously untranslated Saints’ Lives to the growing body of works in Anglo-Norman now available.