Saint Mary of Egypt: Three Medieval Lives in Verse (review)

This volume adds three translations of medieval narrative poems on Mary of Egypt to the considerable literature of that saint. Mary of Egypt is something of an anomaly in the annals of sainthood, since she was neither virgin, martyr, nor queen: as her original vita had it, she was a working-class nymphomaniac. Her story may be linked with a small group of early Byzantine lives of penitent harlots, but unlike those of her fellow-sinners such as Pelagia and Thais, her story was widely told and re-told in the Latin-speaking West after having been translated by the ninth-century Paul the Deacon. The numerous versions in Latin, French, Spanish, and other Western languages have been the subject of an extensive modern literature which includes translations of most of the versions: the notes to Feiss and Pepin's introduction give details.

In their introduction, Feiss and Pepin do an excellent job of putting together the background and first context of the story. A slight tendentiousness in their approach is suggested by their describing the story of a hermit called Mary told by Cyril of Scythopolis as "the earliest mention of the story of Saint Mary of Egypt." The life outlined for Mary of Jerusalem has, obviously, points of contact with that told a little later by Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, about Mary of Egypt, but there is no actual way of telling whether we are looking at a developing tale-type or a revised biography.

Subsequently, the translators round up the Latin redactions and the translation history, in order to context the three metrical versions which are their particular concern: two Latin poems by Flodoard of Rheims and Hildebert of Lavardin (tenth and late eleventh centuries respectively), and a Spanish poem based on medieval French redactions from the first half of the thirteenth century. In keeping with the usual practice in the "Cistercian Studies" series, the highly readable translations are given without parallel texts, and annotation is minimal.

Flodoard stays extremely close to the original story. Hildebert is somewhat more prolix, and introduces extraneous minor themes, notably the role of alcohol in Mary's youthful folly, which was generally a concern of his. The Spanish version is the most digressive from the original narrative. In it, the narrative begins with Mary rather than Zosimas, and Mary's story is modified to bring it within the conventions of vernacular romance. Thus pre-conversion, she is a young noblewoman, her personal beauty and her clothes minutely described from her white brow to her shoes of cordovan leather decorated with gold and silver, and most surprisingly of all, "the son of the emperor took her as his wife." In her penitent wanderings, her beauty is systematically undone, feature by feature, by her privations, just as that of François Villon's "belle Heaulmière" was undone by age.

Thus the last of these three versions may be of interest to anyone interested in Christian romance, but otherwise, only those very deeply concerned with the minutiae of the development of the Mary legend will find themselves interested in the minor adjustments which Flodoard makes to his prose source, the Life of Paul the Deacon. As an introduction to the life of Mary of Egypt, the book is readable, accessible, and attractive, but there are few readers likely to find it of more use than Benedicta Ward's Harlots of the Desert, also in "Cistercian Studies," and still in print.