Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends by Adrienne Williams Boyarin (review)

296 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and [ewlshness in Marian Legends. ByAdrienne Williams Boyarin. Cambridge: D.S.Brewer,2010. ISBN9781 -84384-240-8. Pp. xi + 217. $95.00. Adrienne Williams Boyarin'sMiracles ofthe Virgin examines medieval Marian miracles from the Anglo-Saxon period through the Reformation, with convincing and interesting results. Marian miracles, or Miracles of the Virgin, in the Middle Agesinclude the body of stories, often repeated through time, dealing with miracles performed by the Virgin Mary. These stories tend to stress the way in which Mary comes to the aid of those devoted to her, even when they've fallen away or are deeply involved in sin, including making deals with the devil. Boyarin situates her study by contrasting it with previous scholarshipparticularly Beverly Boyd's The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin (1964), Miri Rubin's Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (1999), and Benedicta Ward's Miracles and the Medieval Mind (1982)-through her "assumption that [Marian miracles] need to be considered and interpreted as texts" (7), rather than as simple and easily dismissed genre pieces. Her approach involves "performing comparative analysis of individual legends in their codicological and historical contexts" (7). It is precisely in these close readings that her work is most successful in supporting her two main arguments: first, that the "miscellaneity" of the English Marian miracles is "not necessarily evidence of a lost corpus;' but instead reveals much about English Marian devotion (7); second, that a subset of these Marian miracles shows "the Virgin Mary as an intercessor interested in, and supremely situated to take care of, matters legal, textual, and Jewish"(7). The book is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter she introduces the reader to Miracles of the Virgin from the late Middle Ages-many of which have yet to be edited-and compares those to early Latin collections (8). In the second chapter she examines A:lfric's Anglo Saxon "Theophilus" and its Latin source. In the third and fourth chapters she examines several literary-vernacular and arthistorical texts, arguing that these reinforce Mary's connection to writing and law (9). In chapter five she focuses on the Middle English corpus of Marian miracle manuscripts. Boyarin begins chapter one by noting that many Marian miracles appear in sermons rather than being collected into a group. She discusses the miscellaneous nature of the Miracles and notes that the major authors of the time-Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate-each wrote only one. The "vernacular corpus consistently points to a prior 'book' of examples;' meaning that "it functions in relation to the idea of an authoritative whole" (16). This may imply that there is no lost exemplar, but that the exemplar is "fluid" and "recreating itself;' and "dependent on this very mode of reproduction" (17). She lists the Middle English Miracles to which she will BOOK REVIEWS 297 return later in the book: The Founding of the "Feast of Mary's Conception"; "Blood on the Penitent Woman's Hand"; Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale"; "The Merchant's Surety"; and "AScholar at the Scalesof Iustice," She examines each closely, with the exception of Chaucer, whom she addresses in a later chapter. The "salient features" of her readings show that Marian tales are consistently concerned with text, the law, and Jewsas "problem motifs" (33). In chapter two, she turns from Middle English texts to Anglo-Saxon texts, both in the vernacular and Latin. She begins her long study of the Theophilus Legend, in particular the Latin version from Paul, a deacon of Naples, and the subsequent version by A:lfric. A:lfric is concerned, in his sermons, with the transmission of Marian material: primarily the spreading of false stories that can't be verified by scripture. He includes the Theophilus story as an example of a substantiated story. A:lfric's primary emphasis is on Theophilus' sealing of his own fate-particularly the charter-and Mary's ability to nullify contracts (54). Paul's piece is longer and more detailed, but also establishes Mary's role as a kind oflawyer: just as the Jewish sorcerer brings Theophilus to the devil and speaks for...