In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • William of Malmesbury: The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary trans. and ed. by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom
  • Rachel Koopmans
William of Malmesbury: The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Edited and translated by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom. [Boydell Medieval Texts.] (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, imprint of Boydell & Brewer. 2015. Pp. lxvii, 154. $115.00. ISBN 978-1-78327-016-3.)

In the 1120s and 1130s, English Benedictine monks produced an influential and remarkable set of collections of the miracles of the Virgin Mary. Unlike earlier Marian miracle collections produced on the Continent and the more usual type of [End Page 118] miracle collection being compiled at English shrines in the period, the stories in these English Marian collections were cosmopolitan, ranging widely in time and place, with stories of the Virgin’s miracles in Italy, Spain, and the eastern Mediterranean as well as in northern Europe. William of Malmesbury’s lengthy text of some fifty-three chapters holds an important place within this flowering of Marian collections: it represents, as the editors of this text put it, “the culmination of this first creative impulse, before its spread to the Continent and incorporation in much larger collections, from the late twelfth century onward” (p. xviii).

William’s collection has been edited twice before, once in 1959 in an unpublished Ph.D. thesis and again in 1968. This edition, including a facing-page translation, is the first title in the “Boydell Medieval Texts” series. It was undertaken by two scholars, Rodney Thomson and Michael Winterbottom, who have edited and translated nearly all of William of Malmesbury’s other works. Their combined efforts have given William’s Marian collection the edition it deserves, and will make this important text far more widely available and accessible.

Much of the edition’s introduction is taken up by a discussion of how the editors decided to order the chapters of the collection, necessary because there are only two manuscripts that preserve William’s text, and both have problems. The first manuscript is a preliminary version of the collection which appears to include a “pending file” of stories that William planned to integrate into a text at a later date. The second manuscript, though it is clearly William’s later, revised version of the text, is missing quires and badly fragmented. In addition to their painstaking comparative analysis of these two manuscripts, the editors draw on a number of other manuscripts that contain selections and abbreviations of William’s stories to aid them in their reconstruction of the text as a whole.

The introduction’s extensive discussion of the manuscript tradition and structure of the collection leaves little room for discussion of the text itself. Aside from a few spare paragraphs noting the collection’s internationalism, virulent anti-Semitism, and arrangement of stories by rank (starting with bishops and ending with lay men and women), the editors say little more about its contents. It is left to others to explore the text’s many other fascinating aspects, such as its stories regarding images of the Virgin, liturgical celebrations, pregnancies, alms-giving, monasticism, the deaths of children, miracles that strike William as trivial, and the fact that a number of the miracles do not concern the Virgin at all. Some of the most interesting passages in the collection signal William’s hesitations regarding the content of some of the stories he found in his sources. Though the editors comment on the often “significant differences” between William’s source texts and his own retelling of the miracles, the nature of these differences is not discussed in detail in the introduction nor in the footnotes to the individual stories: readers will have to consult William’s sources on their own. The laconic nature of the edition’s footnotes and abbreviations is something to be regretted. Though the footnotes are a very rich reserve of references and cross-references, they can be difficult to follow. For example, though there are frequent references to the English Marian collections “MB,” [End Page 119] “HM,” and “TS,” the reason for these abbreviations is never given, and the reader is directed to short footnotes in the introduction...

pdf

Share