PART ONE

Textual History of the Old English Mary of Egypt

The Life of Mary of Egypt is the story of the desert encounter of an erudite monk named Zosimus with a repentant harlot turned ascetic known as Mary of Egypt. After living an exemplary life of monastic spirituality for more than fifty years, Zosimus becomes troubled by the notion that he has achieved perfection. He is visited by an angel who assures him no man is perfect. The angel directs him to leave the security of the monastery that has been his home since childhood for a more austere religious community near the Jordanian desert, telling him that there he will know and understand hu miccle synd hælo wegas ("how many are the ways to salvation") (26(56)r7:60).[12]

Zosimus follows the angel's advice, and soon after arriving at his new monastery, ventures into the desert on an obligatory Lenten retreat, praying to meet a spiritual guide who can teach him something he does not already know. His prayer is answered in the form of a naked and sun-blackened old woman. At his urging, she tells him the story of her life, namely, that afflicted by insatiable sexual desire, she willingly prostituted herself to any man who would have her from the time she left her home in Egypt at the age of twelve until her repentance seventeen years later. Through the intervention of the Virgin Mary, she tells him, she acknowledged the severity of her sin and for the past forty-seven years has lived alone in the desert, serving a life of severe penance without food, clothing, or shelter. Awestruck by her miraculous powers (she addresses him by name, levitates in prayer, and walks on water), Zosimus calls her personal testimony a halwendre gerecednysse ("sanctifying narrative").

At the woman's request, Zosimus returns the following year, bringing with him the Holy Eucharist. When he returns the third year, however, he finds her dead, an inscription in the sand instructing him to bury the body of Mary. With the assistance of a docile lion he complies with Mary's request, then returns to his monastery where he relates her story to his abbot and fellow monks, and goes on to serve God another hundred years.

It is uncertain when the story was first introduced into England. The earliest extant copy of the Latin vita known to be in England because it contains Old English glosses (Ker 176-177) is found in BL MS Cotton Claudius A. i, a manuscript written on the Continent in the mid-tenth century (Magennis 1996, 99-100; Stevenson 42-3).[13] However, the inclusion of Mary of Egypt in ninth-century Anglo-Saxon calendars of saints indicates the existence of an earlier cult of devotion to the repentant prostitute (Magennis 1996, 99),[14] and circumstantial evidence has led some to speculate such a cult may have existed as early as the late seventh century (Lavery 113).

For example, in 669, following the deaths of the archbishop of Canterbury as well as his chosen successor, Wigheard (Colgrave 329), the pope sent to Britain to assume the bishopric of Canterbury a Greek-speaking monk from Naples named Theodore and commanded a Neopolitan abbot named Hadrian to accompany him (Lapidge 1986, 45). Theodore and Hadrian established a school at Canterbury where "they attracted a crowd of students into whose minds they daily poured the streams of wholesome learning" (Lapidge 1986, 46; Colgrave 335). Veronica Ortenberg observes that "Naples was a centre from which a variety of devotions particularly popular in the Greek world found their way into England," and speculates that since Theodore and Hadrian were most likely familiar with the Greek Mary of Egypt, it is possible they introduced it to England. Both Ortenberg and Simon Lavery point out that in twelve Anglo-Saxon calendars that include Mary of Egypt, her feastday is commemorated on 9 April, the date usually observed in the Orthodox East, whereas only two record her date as 2 April, the date usually observed in the Latin West, suggesting the Greek influence of Theodore and Hadrian (Ortenberg 115, Lavery 113).

Pádraig Ó Riain, however, proposes that early knowledge of Mary of Egypt in England was due to the arrival in Northumbria in the late seventh century of John the Arch-Chanter, precentor of St. Peter's in Rome (1). According to Bede, following the instructions of the pope, John "taught the cantors of the monastery [at Jarrow] the order and manner of singing and reading aloud and also committed to writing all things necessary for the celebration of festal days throughout the whole year" (Colgrave 389). Ó Riain argues that John the Arch-Chanter brought with him to Northumbria a copy of the Hironymian Martyrology, a sixth-century compilation written in northern Italian. The Hironymian Martyrology was one of Bede's literary sources (Ó Riain 2) and was also, most likely, the exemplar for the Martyrology of Tallaght, a ninth-century Irish collection of saints' lives of Northumbrian provenance. Although missing from the Martyrology of Tallaght, Mary of Egypt's feast day is recorded in three other redactions of the Hironymian Martyrology as 28 March (Ó Riain 19n103).

Ó Riain notes that although the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, "probably the most popular saint (after the Virgin Mary) in all of medieval Europe" (Karras 4), is almost always celebrated on 22 July, in the Martyrology of Tallaght she also appears on 28 March. He interprets the substitution of Magadelene for Mary of Egypt as "the editor's obvious preference" (19), but it also exemplifies a phenomenon repeated over and over again throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, that is, the conflation of the lives of Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalene. Although no full-length Old English life of Mary Magdalene survives, the Old English Martyrology, a ninth century compilation of "'epitomes' or 'notices' on saints in the liturgical calendar" (Cross 1994, 414), includes an entry for Mary Magdalene. It has been suggested that the end of the entry, which relates Magdalene's last thirty years as a desert recluse, is directly derived from the Life of Mary of Egypt (Cross 1978, 16-17n9; Mycoff 6; Karras 29).

Three copies of the anonymously translated Old English version of the Life of Mary of Egypt are extant, all written early in the eleventh century.[15] Three leaves of the text survive in Gloucester Cathedral 35, a collection of fragments from bindings now kept in a portfolio (Ker 154). In 1861, John Earle, Rawlinson Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, published a photozincographic facsimile of one of these folios (6 recto) along with a transcription of all three leaves and brief textual notes.[16] The most complete copy is in BL MS Cotton Julius E. vii. Associated with the monk Ælfric because it contains a collection of his homilies on saints' lives, preceeded by his Latin and Old English prefaces and a contemporary table of contents (Ker 206), it also contains four saints' lives not ascribed to Ælfric, including the Life of Mary of Egypt. A third fragmentary copy is found in BL MS Cotton Otho B. x., a collection of prose saints' lives, penitential and confessional texts, and homilies once owned by the seventeenth-century antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton. The manuscript was reduced to "burnt lumps and crusts" (Prescott 1997b, 417) by a great fire that swept through the Cotton Library in 1731, but was restored in 1863 under the direction of Frederic Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts of the British Museum (Prescott 1997b, 453n.312, 429).

The only edition of the Old English Life of Mary of Egypt is W. W. Skeat's De Transitu Mariae Aegyptiace in Ælfric's Lives of Saints.[17] Using the version in Julius E. vii as his base text, Skeat footnotes variant readings from Earle's transcription of the Gloucester fragments and from three of the six leaves of Otho B. x (folios 16, 17, and 15). Although Otho B. x ff. 56 and 59 are badly damaged and virtually unreadable in normal light, ff. 26, 16, 17, and 15 are quite legible, yet when Skeat collated Otho B. x with Julius E. vii, he somehow missed folio 26 altogether. Skeat calls Otho B. x "so imperfect as to be nearly useless," yet he acknowledges "it supplies some various readings...and it is worth notice that these readings are frequently more correct than those in A [Julius E. vii]" (2:446). In instances where Skeat finds a reading in Otho B. x "more correct than" the one in Julius E. vii, in his edition he replaces the Julius reading with the Otho reading, enclosing the substituted text from Otho in square brackets.

Skeat's edition of Mary of Egypt was published more than a century ago in the third of the four volumes of Ælfric's Lives of Saints issued by the Early English Text Society (EETS), an organization founded in 1864 by Frederick J. Furnivall. In support of the Philology Society's decision in 1857 to write the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, a dictionary that eventually became what is now the Oxford English Dictionary, the role of the EETS was to transcribe, miminally edit, and publish the texts of all known English manuscripts in order to collect the words necessary to write the dictionary (Aarsleff 262-63; Greetham 330; Pearsall 127). The EETS never had "any proclaimed editorial policy, either concerning the works to be published...or concerning method of edition" (Hudson 37; Pearsall 131). Nevertheless, it produced a major number of editions of Old English texts still in use by scholars today,[18] including Skeat's edition of Mary of Egypt, in spite of widespread acknowledgement that his readings are frequently inaccurate and incomplete.[19]

Clearly, there are valid reasons for re-editing older editions. Fred Robinson notes that the Microfiche Concordance of Old English, the original word list compiled by the editors of the Dictionary of Old English in preparation for writing the dictionary, "records only the standard editions of texts. It does not record variant readings, and it does not reference manuscript readings which modern editors have emended."[20] He observes "wistfully" that perhaps Angus Cameron, the initial editor of the Dictionary of Old English, was right when he "proposed early in the history of the Dictionary of Old English that we should consider concording the manuscripts rather than modern editions" (Robinson 1985, 253). As Kiernan states, "by returning to the manuscript foundations of our discipline with the same intensity and persistence...applied to the modern texts and editions derived from them...we are bound to discover things our predecessors overlooked or missaw" (Kiernan 1990, 48). As my discussion in Part Three illustrates, digital facsimiles make it possible to examine previously inaccessible texts as well as to cast new light on older editions.