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

This edition and translation of two Middle English poems in Wiltshire dialect, rarely examined since they were last edited in the 1880s, makes accessible two texts which have much to contribute to the study of late medieval women's religious communities and their literary culture. The Wilton Chronicle and the text that Mary Dockray-Miller has christened The Wilton Life of St Æthelthryth are in the same hand, and now form the conclusion to a composite manuscript, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B.III. Between the two texts is an entry in Latin, also in the same hand, which purports to list the sources consulted by the author of the Chronicle, as well as the 'founders' (or benefactors) of the Wilton nunnery. The list of founders includes the name of every king of England from Ecgberht to Henry V, hence the scholarly consensus that the manuscript is datable to c. 1420. Both texts, as Dockray-Miller remarks, are late medieval examples of Anglo-Saxonism, defined by Frantzen and Niles as 'the process through which a self-conscious national and racial identity first came into being among the early peoples of the region that we now call England and how ... that identity was transformed into an originary myth available to a wide variety of political and social interests' (p. 13).

The Wilton Chronicle, almost 5,000 lines long, consists primarily of an account of the life and posthumous miracles of St Edith of Wilton (d. 984). The hagiographical narrative is preceded by an account of the kings of Wessex from Ecgberht (r. 802-39), celebrated here as the first king of England because he united under his rule four of the six other kingdoms existing at that time, up to Edgar (r. 959-75), the father of St Edith. This account includes mention of a number of royal benefactions to Wilton.

Most notably, it relates that Ecgberht founded the first community of nuns at Wilton at the request of his widowed sister, who became its first prioress. It also relates that Alfred the Great subsequently re-founded Wilton as an abbey, at the request of his daughter and daughter-in-law, for the sake of Alfred's infant granddaughter, who was buried at Wilton. It seems unlikely that these stories represent ancient traditions handed down at Wilton, orally or otherwise, since the author's stated purpose in relating them is to make known to his audience the names of the benefactors for whom they should pray. He might, as he claims, have derived them from the now lost De fundatione monasteriorum in Anglia of Henry Crump (fl. c. 1376-1401). But there is no surviving documentation of any religious community at Wilton pre-dating the 930s, and a recent study of the abbey's early history regards the Chronicle as transparently unreliable (Foot, Veiled Women, Ashgate, 2000, II.229-30).

It seems highly probable that the author of the Chronicle also composed the Life of St Æthelthryth, given the stanzaic and dialectal similarities. It is less evident that the Life was specifically composed for the Wilton community (the term potentially includes lay boarders, etc., as well as professed nuns). St Æthelthryth (d. 679), whose cult was widespread throughout England in the late Middle Ages, was famous as an East Anglian princess who founded Ely, and the authorial addresses which identify the primary audience of the Chronicle as the Wilton community are lacking in the Life. It is therefore worth noticing the specific import of the history of Wessex kings that precedes the hagiographical narrative in the Life.

Ecgberht's unification of four of the six Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under the rule of Wessex, mentioned in the Chronicle's historical preamble, is narrated in...