CONCLUSION

The new textual evidence for the Old English Life of Mary of Egypt in Otho B. x suggests many potential directions for future research. Foremost for a discipline based on a finite corpus is the need to examine manuscripts considered too damaged to be edited. Even the most damaged Old English manuscripts contain evidence which, if accessed, can augment our knowledge of Old English language and literature, scribal practices, and representations of Anglo-Saxon culture and society.

The new textual evidence also supports the urgent need to re-edit older editions. Since the scholarship of humanists is necessarily grounded in the past, it is imperative that current scholarship be based on accurate and reliable primary sources. Nineteenth-century editors did not have the technological resources available to scholars today, so cannot be totally held responsible for misrepresenting the texts they edited. Because digital facsimiles, captured and processed by experienced practitioners, provide an optimal means of studying medieval manuscripts, scholars now have an unprecedented ability to re-exam texts within their manuscript contexts, texts otherwise available only in older editions.

Another potential area for future research is the study of scribal interpretation and editing of texts. Although some scholars write about scribes with disdain, accusing them of misrepresenting textual evidence through laziness and carelessness, others recognize the significant role scribes played in transmitting textual evidence to future generations.[63] The variant readings provided by the Mary of Egypt scribes raise interesting questions about the significance of variants, and support the re-examination of variants in other Old English prose texts surviving in multiple witnesses.

The new textual evidence for Mary of Egypt in Otho B. x also raises the issue first suggested by Cameron that not only editions but manuscripts themselves should be concorded. As indicated throughout Part Three, variant readings are not consistently or accurately documented in Skeat's apparatus for Mary of Egypt. Furthermore, editors are not infallible and even the most conscientious editor may sometimes fail to document all the manuscript readings emended in a modern edition. Flawed or not, the manuscript evidence is all scholars of Old English language and literature have to work with, so it follows that providing as complete a body of information as possible is crucial.

Other potential areas of research specific to saints' lives and particularly to Mary of Egypt should be considered as well. As discussed in Part Two, scholarship of the Old English Mary of Egypt frequently includes reference to the saints' lives of Ælfric. The Life of Mary of Egypt has been cited as a late addition to the Julius E. vii manuscript, along with three other anonymous saints' lives, in blatant disregard for Ælfric's injunction in his Preface,

gif hwa þas bóc awritan wille þæt he hí wél gerihte be þær bysne and þær namare betwux ne sette þonne we awendon.

("if any man desire to transcribe this book, that he correct it well according to the copy; and set down therein no more than we have translated.") (Skeat 1:6-7)

Although the Julius scribe obviously ignored Ælfric's request by including Mary of Egypt, an anonymous text, in a manuscript primarily devoted to Ælfric's saints' lives, one could argue that in his injunction Ælfric was referring only to the lives he had translated, not to the inclusion of his translations in a different collection such as Otho B. x. Since both scribes copied anonymous saints' lives as well as saints' lives attributed to Ælfric, an interesting focus of research might be to determine whether the scribe who wrote Mary of Egypt in Otho B. x demonstrates as much diversity in the transmission of Ælfric's translations included in Otho B. x as is evident in this anonymous life.

Additional areas of research that might be pursued include further investigation into Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards female sexuality, new source studies that take into consideration the evidence of Otho B. x, and examination of other texts which include rare words discovered in Mary of Egypt to discern possible parallels between them.

By means of digital facsimiles, I have transcribed the text of a manuscript Skeat declared "so imperfect as to be nearly useless" (2:446). As the discussion in Part Three illustrates, although nearly two-thirds of the text of the Otho B. x version of the Life of St. Mary of Egypt was destroyed, the surviving fragments preserve variant readings not found in parallel passages of the copy in Julius E. vii. Nevertheless, since the text of the two versions is identical in most cases, the possibility of more than one translator is quite remote, yet it is probable that both scribes made deliberate changes to their exemplars. The diversity of variant readings between the Otho and Julius versions demonstrates that these Anglo-Saxon scribes were not mere copyists: the variants include differences of spelling, vocabulary, and syntax as well as, in some instances, totally different phrases. Although it is a great misfortune that so much of the text is gone, it is gratifying to have had the opportunity to both recover readings misrepresented in Skeat's collation and to uncover previously illegible readings from the unedited Mary of Egypt in BL MS Cotton Otho B. x.