The Legends of Anglo-Saxon Women Saints in Middle English Manuscripts:
Transmission and Tradition

By Larissa Tracy

In the introduction to his edition of MS Stowe 949 (c.1610-1615), Carl Horstmann says: “Twice in the earlier English (and no other) literature was an attempt made to put together the lives of female saints: by Bokenham in verse, and in the present collection – a peculiar instance of the veneration which the weaker part of mankind, especially in its godlike members, enjoys in this island.” Horstmann, whose work laid the foundation for much of the modern scholarship on female hagiography, claims that the veneration of women saints was peculiar to England. But since his edition, which includes the legends of some Anglo-Saxon female saints, further evidence of Anglo-Saxon hagiography has surfaced in various extant copies of the Middle English Gilte Legende, which takes as its primary source the Latin Legenda Aurea of the thirteenth century. The inclusion of Anglo-Saxon saints, particularly women saints, in the fifteenth century collections of vernacular hagiography indicate that English scribes adapted the older legends of local saints, whose origins are distinctly Anglo-Saxon, perhaps in an effort to promote an English sense of sanctity and tradition. This practice of inserting the legends of Anglo-Saxon saints into the corpus of the Latin Legenda Aurea during its transmission and translation into Middle English shows the position these legends held in English society. Anglo-Saxon saints do not appear in every version of the Gilte Legende, however William Caxton choose a version of the Middle English collection that included Anglo-Saxon saints’ lives as an exemplar for his printed edition of 1483, perhaps highlighting the significance of Anglo-Saxon women saints in the literary and hagiographic traditions of England. The primary focus of this paper is to compare the legends of Anglo-Saxon women saints that appear in Middle English legendaries, specifically in the Gilte Legende manuscript B.L. Additional MS 35298 (A2), with the original versions found in Anglo-Saxon collections and trace their evolution and the significance of their transmission.