Anonymous Interpolations in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints ed. by Robin Norris (review)

This collection of essays, the cultivation of which began at the 2004 NEH Summer Institute on Anglo-Saxon England at the University of Cambridge and under the guidance of Paul Szarmach, “the patron saint of this collection” (p. ix), offers four readings of anonymous saints’ lives and is dedicated to the memory of one of the contributors, Stephen Stallcup, who passed away soon after completing revisions on his essay for the collection.

Robin Norris’s Introduction provides clarity to the context and value of this collection by demonstrating how each essay explores the reasons why the anonymous authors of Life of Saint Euphrosyne, Saint Mary of Egypt, Seven Sleepers, and Passion of Saint Eustace were “interested in reading, translating, and transmitting one of these four texts” (p. 9). It has been the case that, in scholarship concerning the corpus of Old English saints’ lives, the anonymous texts are too often read through an “Ælfrician lens,” distorting “both the intentions of the named author and the integrity of his contemporaries’ work” (p. 1). It is refreshing, then, that this collection presents four such anonymous interpolations as rich and delightful in their own rights, not to be overshadowed by Ælfric’s renown. Thus, one of the goals of the collection is to allow “these four interpolated texts to resonate with one another” so that “we may open a window onto the anonymous hagiographic milieu in which Ælfric’s Lives of Saints began to circulate” (p. 2). Such is not only the goal of this collection but also its achievement—and one that ought to be lauded by Anglo-Saxonists for its attempt not only to bring these narratives to modern audiences but also to help those audiences appreciate the significance of these saints’ lives within their cultural milieu.

The first essay, “The Old English Life of Saint Euphrosyne and the Economics of Sanctity,” is by the late Stephen Stallcup and examines a saint whose narrative has inspired much scholarship that is concerned with the subject of her cross-dressing and its cultural implications. As his title indicates, however, Stallcup is less concerned with the transvestite Euphrosyne and more concerned with didacticism—what her Life may have taught its medieval audience about materialism and a right view of wealth. Certainly, as a Christian story, Euphrosyne’s Life stands out among others for its controversial material; yet, as Stallcup astutely argues, her Life ought to be understood as “deeply … steeped in patriarchal ideology” and “read as the story of spiritual chattel in which her inchoate saintly body is commodified and traded between men” (p. 14). It is thus toward the commodification and exchange of Euphrosyne’s body that Stallcup initially calls our attention, suggesting that we also understand her character “not just as a commodity” but also as “an economic agent” (p. 17). Stallcup observes that, as an economic agent, Euphrosyne and the exchanges involving her should be read as an “extended gloss” of Christ’s sermon in Matthew 19:17ff. concerning materialism and spiritual perfection, which is evident in the words “hæfð myccle æhta” that connect Paphnutius (the father of Euphrosyne) to the rich young man in the Gospel. In the end, Stallcup returns to the didacticism of the Life, elucidating the “two radical models of attaining spiritual perfection” that are present within it: “transvestite asceticism and divestment of personal properties” (p. 25). That he does so in such a convincing manner is a mark of his excellent scholarship and an honor to his life.

In a change of pace from the first essay in the collection, Linda Cantara’s “Saint Mary of Egypt in British Library, MS Cotton Otho B.x” turns toward the philological and is a good piece of detective work. The essay delves into the three extant (and incomplete) copies of the saint’s life and is probably for the serious scholar of Old...