Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends (review)

246 Reviews In her detailed examination of Riddle 12, Nina Rulon-Miller finds a sneering narrator denigrating the autoerotic act of the wonfeax wale (dark-haired Welsh-woman). Nevertheless, there is humour in the way the joke is turned upon the ox, and the riddler, who is himself a victim of fettered desire. Rulon-Miller ranges from Freudian interpretation to philology in order to explicate the riddle and suggest alternate translations. Shari Horner examines humour in ^Ifric's Lives of Saints, focussing in particular upon female martyrs who, through humorous verbal sparring, empower themselves and expose their tormentors' intellectual and verbal weakness. JE\fhc draws upon a well-established tradition of such hagiographical humour from his sources. Hugh Magennis, writing on 'Humorous Incongruity in Old English Saint's Lives', finds that some authors including JE\fr'\c nevertheless tended to depersonalise and idealise the saints they portray, often flattening or reducing humorous source-material. The author of the Legend of the Seven Sleepers, on the other hand, augments the humour and 'responds positively to the idiosyncrasy and human interest' of the source (p. 151). Greg Waite Department ofEnglish University ofOtago Winstead, Karen A., ed and trans., Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2000; pp. 201; 7 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$39.95; ISBN 0801485576. Chaste Passions is an edition and translation of several Middle English virgi martyr legends written between 1200 and 1485. It forms afinecompanion volume to Karen A. Winstead's earlier study, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England also published by Cornell in 1997. The earlier work locates this group of legends within late medieval understandings of female sainthood, and the new book provides sample texts as an effective adjunct to the study of the legends and of their cultural contexts. Winstead regards the period during which the selected legends were composed as crucial both to the development of hagiography of female saints and for their contribution to the piety of the later middle ages. The vernacular translations of existing Latin vitae made the texts available to a broader audience as well as catering to the literary partialities of the laity. The Introduction makes Reviews 247 clear that the selection is simply a sample of the many legends surviving from the period. The texts chosen for this edition have been taken from a wide canon and the choices were made to provide as broad a sample of styles and plots as possible both to demonstrate the nature of the genre and to divert and enlighten the modem audience. The development in hagiographical styles over the period i s revealed in the selected texts. The early legends reflected the impetus to enhance lay piety through provision of vernacular collections of saints' vitae. But from the earliest translations lay tastes and interests imposed changes to both content and style. Fourteenth-century saints often displayed what Winstead describes as 'anti-social behaviour', while theirfifteenth-centurycounterparts were constructed as demonstrating more conventionally pious female qualities. Each legend is briefly introduced in a page or so by locating it within its historical context though no further analysis is attempted, no doubt as this has already been accomplished in Virgin Martyrs. The legends are drawn from a variety of sources: Agatha, Lucy, Justine and Barbara from the South English Legendary; Anastasia from the North English Legendary; Cecilia by Geoffrey Chaucer; Christine by William Paris; Eugenia from the Scottish Legendary; John Mirk's Winifred; Margaret and Petronilla by John Lydgate; Osbern of Bokenham's Agnes and Dorothy; and the anonymous legends of Juliana, Katherine, and Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins. Each legend is provided with a good bibliography including Middle English editions, other translations where available, and relevant secondary studies. In the case of three legends which do not exist in printed editions (the verse legends of Saints Justine and Barbara, and part of a prose conversion legend of Saint Katherine) the Middle English versions are provided in appendices. The translations have been made into idiomatic m o d e m English for the reading comfort ofpresent-day audiences. The verse legends have been rendered in prose, and in all cases the vocabulary...