Virgins and Scholars: A Fifteenth-Century Compilation of the Lives of John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Jerome, and Katherine of Alexandria (review)

The Middle English prose saints’ lives presented here evidently belong together because they were written by the same scribe in nearly identical formats, although they were subsequently separated and bound as three separate manuscripts. Especially welcome are the editions of the Lives of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist from Cambridge, St. John’s College MS N.16—texts that survive nowhere else and have not previously been published in any form. Simon Winter’s Life of Jerome is already somewhat known, since it survives not only in Cambridge, St. John’s N.17 but also in an early printed edition and three other manuscripts, two of which have been edited in modern times. Least ground-breaking, although convenient to have here, is the Life of Katherine of Alexandria in Harvard, Houghton Library MS Richardson 44—a text edited in 1884 from this very manuscript by Henry H. Gibbs and translated in full in Karen Winstead’s Chaste Passions (Ithaca, NY, 2000). Claire Waters’s rationale for presenting the four texts together is that their significance can best be understood when they are all seen in relation to each other and to the particular religious and historical context in which they were written. Building on the research of Vincent Gillespie and George Keiser, she links the texts persuasively with the Birgittine community of Syon Abbey and the neighboring Carthusian monastery of Sheen, both founded by King Henry V in 1415, and suggests some possible connections with the political concerns of the Lancastrians in the second quarter of the fifteenth century.

The four Middle English texts themselves make very interesting reading, and Waters has edited them meticulously and well. She has also made the texts more accessible to modern readers by providing facing-page translations. The translations are usually clear and helpful, but not always exact enough for scholarly purposes. The problem most often is the tendency to retain too much of the Middle English wording, ignoring subsequent shifts in meaning. Fasting from “mete,” for example (p. 118), probably means abstaining from solid food in general, not just meat. “Scolers” (p. 180) are not “scholars” in the modern sense, but pupils. When the noble dedicatee of a text is invited to “doo copye” it (p. 178), the suggestion is that she have it copied (by someone else), not copy it herself. Readers who need the precise sense of a passage in these texts, then, will be well advised to double-check the translations, consulting the Middle English Dictionary for the meanings of key terms.

The volume is well presented, with an attractive page layout and binding and very few printing errors. Besides the primary texts and translations, it includes two color facsimiles of manuscript pages, a lengthy and informative introduction (pp. 1–67), extensive textual and explanatory notes, a bibliography, an index, and an appendix that adds more detail on the sources behind each life and the ways in which they are used. Waters’s commentary on the sources is generally well documented and persuasive, but she makes some dubious-sounding attributions to the Legenda aurea—for example, claiming it as the “primary source” for several chapters of this Life of John the Baptist even while conceding that “a number of the details . . . do not appear in the Legenda” (p. 426). Since the Legenda aurea tends just to give abridged versions of earlier sources, it is recommended that readers look into those fuller accounts.