The Old English Life of Saint Margaret in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. III: Sources and Relationships

The hagiographic tradition of St. Margaret of Antioch is one of the most sensational of the early Middle Ages.¹ In particular, the most salient feature of the saint’s story is the scene in which the imprisoned saint has two subsequent confrontations with the devil, first in the shape of a dragon and, secondly, of a small black demon.² The present essay will focus on the rendition of this scene in the Old English version of the passion³ of St. Margaret attested in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, a mid-eleventh-century codex from Canterbury, Christ Church.⁴ As we shall see, the Tiberius version of the passion is the one within the vast Anglo-Saxon tradition of St. Margaret’s legend⁵ that best preserves the emphasis on the saint’s conflict with the devil and ultimately conveys a vision of sanctity in which the devil plays a defining role as “saint-maker.”⁶ More specifically, the Tiberius text is the only Old English rendition of the passion that retains the most iconic feature of St. Margaret’s legend, the swallowing of the saint by her first demonic contender, the dragon.

Previous scholarship has been investigating the imagery of the swallowing dragon in the Passion of St. Margaret for nearly a century, pointing out both general and specific analogues in a vast corpus of early apocryphal literature of Eastern origin.⁷ This paper will put forward a possible ultimate source-text in yet another Eastern apocryphon, the so-called Seven Heavens Apocryphon, thereby hoping to contribute to an even more detailed mapping of the cultural milieu of St. Margaret’s legend and to a better understanding of its Anglo-Saxon elaborations. A defining element of this legend (and perhaps one of the main reasons for its appeal in early medieval England) will also be brought into focus, namely, the combination of the apocryphal eschatology and demonology, on the one hand, and some of the most iconic narrative and demonological topoi of the hagiographies of the Desert Fathers, on the other. As I have argued elsewhere, the desert theology and eremitic ideals of the earliest monks of the Eastern deserts were not so much at odds with Anglo-Saxon Benedictinism as with received notions of it.⁸ Indeed, an analysis of the manuscript context of the Tiberius Life of St. Margaret will show that a sensational, apocrypha-imbued hagiography such as St. Margaret’s could feature beside the key texts of the Benedictine Reform as well as be fully integral to the reformers’ pastoral program and their restorative, retrospective drive to restate the most crucial values of monastic spirituality and Christian sanctity by appropriating the legacy of the Desert Fathers.

THE LEGEND OF ST. MARGARET IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

The hagiography of St. Margaret—or Marina, the Greek name by which she is known in the early tradition,⁹ still attested within the Old English Martyrology¹⁰—reflects the familiar narrative of the passion of the virgin martyr.¹¹ Margaret is a very young and virtuous Christian woman who falls prey to the wantonness of a prominent pagan man (here the prefect of Antioch, Olibrius). Because of her resolve in keeping to her faith and preserving her chastity, she is repeatedly subject to gruesome tortures, from which she manages to escape unharmed thanks to divine intervention, until she is finally martyred and triumphantly ascends to heaven, in a sort of assumption that likens her to the Virgin Mary.¹² Although St. Margaret was one of the most widely venerated women saints in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages, the evidence concerning her life as well as the genesis and early stages of her cult are still obscure, so much so that it was suppressed by the Vatican in 1969.¹³ As Hugh Magennis has summarized, “[T]he transmission and interrelationship of early medieval versions of the Passio Margaretae still remain to be studied in detail.”¹⁴ For the sake of the present discussion, however...