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Saint Mary of Egypt in British Library, MS Cotton Otho B.x [Includes Figures]
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SAINT MARY OF EGYPT in British Library, MS Cotton Otho B.x Linda Cantara There are three extant, although incomplete, copies of the anonymously translated Old English version of The Life of Mary of Egypt, all written in the early- to mid-eleventh century.1 Three leaves of the text survive in GloucesterCathedral35,acollectionoffragmentsfrombindingsnowkept in a portfolio.2 In 1861, John Earle, Rawlinson Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford,publishedaphotozincographicfacsimileofoneofthesefolios(6 recto)alongwithatranscriptionofallthreeleavesandbrieftextualnotes.3 The most complete copy is in London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius E.vii. This is the base manuscript for Skeat’s edition, De transitu Mariae Aegyptiace, published in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints more than a century ago;4 it is also the base manuscript for Hugh Magennis’s edition, published in 2002.5 There is, however, a third fragmentary copy found in London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho B.x., a collection of penitential and confessional texts, homilies, and prose saints’ lives, including three of the anonymous lives found in Julius E.vii: Euphrosyne, Mary of Egypt, and The Seven Sleepers. The manuscript was reduced to “burnt lumps and crusts” by the greatfirethatsweptthroughtheCottonLibraryin1731.6 When Sir Frederick Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts, rediscovered the fragments of Otho B.x in a garret of the British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century, and subsequentlyhadthemrestoredandreassembledin1863,theleaveswere rebound in the wrong order, and in some instances placed upside down and backwards. Mary of Egypt,forexample,comprisesfolios26vr(upside downandback-to-front),56rv,16rv,17rv,15rv,and59rv. Based on Magennis ’scountofabout8,185wordsintheJuliusE.viiversion,7 the text surviving in Otho B.x comprises approximately one-third of the most complete extant version of the uita. In normal light, the text of many of the fragmentary leaves is illegible as a result of heat and water damage and distortion, fissures and cracks in the vellum, and applications of conservation materials such as gauze, glue, and paper tape that mask extant text, or paper frames that preserve brittle edges but cover surviving letters or parts of letters.8 As Kevin Kiernan has demonstrated with the Electronic Beowulf project,9 digital imaging of 29 damaged manuscripts, in concert with ultraviolet fluorescence and other special lighting techniques, is extremely effective for restoring the legibility of previously inaccessible texts. By means of such digital facsimiles of Otho B.x,10 I have transcribed the text of Mary of Egypt, have collated this text with Skeat’sedition(inconsultationwiththemicrofilmversionofJuliusE.vii), and have discovered that Otho B.x contains textual evidence not found in Julius E.vii.11 Ker lists the surviving leaves of Mary of Egyptasfolios27,56;16,17; 15;12 however, Kiernan notes that Ker misidentifies the first extant folio of Mary of Egyptasfolio27insteadoffolio26,andthathedoesnotindicate thatfolio26isreversedorthatbothfolios26and27areupsidedown.13 These two leaves are quite legible and Ker rarely made such a blatant error, soitispossiblethatfolio26wasreversedandfolios26and27wereplaced upside down when the manuscript was rebound in 1963, after Ker had examined the manuscript and published his description.14 In his catalog entry for Otho B.x, written before the great fire, Humphrey Wanley documents that the Life of Mary of Egyptbeganonfolio76v and that the following text, The Seven Sleepers,beganonfolio95v.15 While Ker normally gives in brackets “the probable number of each leaf of the manuscript in Wanley’s time and according to his foliation,”16 he omits Wanley’s number 91, which ultraviolet clearly identifies in the upper right corneroffolio30(59)r.17 AlthoughOthoB.xfolios56and59arebadlydamagedandvirtually unreadableinnormallight,folios26,16,17,and15arequitelegible,yet Skeatcollatedonlyfolios16,17,and15,missingfolio26altogether.Magennis includesvariantreadingsfromfolios26,16,17,and15,andacknowledges folio56,buthetooomitsreferencetofolio59.Digitizedwith...
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