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Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)

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The Legend of Frideswide

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About the text:
Text name: The Legend of Frideswide
Alternative names: The Longer South English Legendary Life of St. Frideswide; Saint Frideswitha that holy maid was here of England
Content: The poem The Legend of Frideswide narrates the story of the seventh or eighth century saint Frideswide: Frideswide lives a chaste and pure life as an abbess of a well-endowed Anglo-Saxon monastery at Oxford. The Devil fails to deceive her and so he goes to the king and convinces him to take Frideswide as his lover. Mad with desire, the king goes to Oxford, but Frideswide has gone into hiding. The king threatens to have the population killed and is blinded by God as a punishment for his wickedness. Frideswide lives a saintly life in Binsey, where she builds a chapel, asks God for a well, and helps a man who committed the sin of working on a Sunday. On her return to Oxford, she heals a leper with a kiss. She dies and is immediately raised to Heaven.
Genre/subjects: saint's life, Saint Frideswide, Saint Frideswida, Saint Frithuswith, woman saint, hagiography
Dialect of original composition: Unknown
The poem’s original dialect has not been explored in any detail. Since the poem reports events in and near Oxford, it may have originally been composed by a local patriot. Hence the archetype may be Southern.
Date of original composition: 1275-1350
The date of the earliest manuscript witness, Ashmole 43 (MED a1350), functions as the terminus ante quem for the composition of the text.
The Legend of Frideswide forms a part of a collection of hagiographical writings known as The South English Legendary (SEL). The evolution of SEL is very complex (see notes). Issues surrounding the dating of the collection are summarized in Liszka (2011, especially pages 42-46). Ultimately, every text in the SEL may have its own distinctive history and require independent dating.
The legend only survives in manuscripts from about the middle of the fourteenth century on. It is not found in the earliest witnesses of texts of the SEL (Laud 108, Harley 2277, Corpus Christi 145). This may suggest that the text does not form part of the earliest core of the SEL, but is a somewhat later adaptation (Thompson 2003: 142). The poem was therefore grouped into PCMEP period 2b (1300-1350).
An example of a conservative linguistic feature in the text is then as a definite determiner (then wei l.85, then Soneday l.135, then tyme l.137 etc.), which preserves the distinctive n of the masculine singular accusative in Old English (Reames 2003: textual note for line 85). This may indicate (inconclusively) a date of composition before the fourteenth century.
Suggested date: 1305
PCMEP period: 2b (1300-1350)
Versification: couplets, aa
Index of ME Verse: 2900 (IMEV), 2900 (NIMEV)
Digital Index of ME Verse: 4598
Wells: 5.19 (part of South English Legendary)
MEC HyperBibliography: not indexed


About the edition and manuscript base:
Edition: Reames, Sherry L. 2003. Middle English Legends of Women Saints. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications.
Manuscript used for edition: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 43 (SC 6924), ff. 155v - 157v
Online manuscript description: Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 61)
Summary catalogue of Western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, no. 6924
Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries
Manuscript dialect: West-Midlands
The scribal dialect has been localized to Gloucestershire (McIntosh et al. 1986: 196).
Manuscript date: s. xiv-in
The manuscript was written in the early fourteenth century (Thompson 2003: 142).
The manuscript comes from the "second quarter of the fourteenth century" (D'Evelyn & Mill 1959: 5).
The manuscript has been dated to c. 1310 (Boyd 1958: 190).
The online version of the Middle English dictionary dates the manuscript a1350 (previously c1300 in print version).


About the file:
File name: M2b.Frideswide
ID: Frideswide,y.z: y=token, z=line
Word count: 1,884
Token count: 141
Line count: 188


Other:
General notes: There is a shorter and a longer version of this Saint's life, which are independent of each other and both based, respectively, on two Latin versions (Latin Life A, and Latin Life B) (Blair 1987). The longer version of the legend of Frideswide, used here, is found in four manuscripts, of which Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 43 (c. 1300-30) is the earliest and usually the most reliable (Reames 2003: introduction). The Index of Middle English Verse groups both versions together and thus lists six extant manuscripts containing the poem.

About the South English Legendary
The South English Legendary (SEL) is the name customarily given to a collection of Middle English verse saint's lives. The SEL should not be thought of as a singular coherent text, but rather a composite of miscellaneous texts or groups of texts with their own history. Saint Frideswide forms a part of the collection.
The SEL likely originated roughly around the middle of the thirteenth century as a project initiated by scribes in an abbey, possibly in the South West Midlands (Gloucester), with the aim of creating a so-called liber festivalis, a cycle of rhymed saint's lives for the saint's festivals of the year combined with a temporale for the festivals of Christ (Christmas, Easter etc.), ordered according to the church calendar (e.g., Horstmann 1887, Wells 1936, Boyd 1958). At the time, this was a massive undertaking, involving either collecting pre-existing poems or composing new ones, and could not be finished in one foul swoop. "Merely to collect the materials, the Vitæ, which had to be brought together from different places, as no library of the present type then existed, transcended the power of one man. The Collection grew slowly, and expanded by degrees" (Horstmann 1887: viii).
It is possible that there exists a core of the SEL, the nucleus of the oldest poems which were first brought together and around which the collection grew. It might make sense to assume an "original" date for this core of the SEL of the middle to third quarter of the thirteenth century. "[T]he original [...]has been dated with varying degrees of assurance between 1260 and 1288" (Samson 1986: 185, citing Brown 1927: xi, Görlach 1974: 37, Heffernan 1979: 345). One must keep in mind, however, that the notion of an original composition for the SEL becomes murky on account of its complex ontogeny. For example, Brown (1927: xi-xii) finds a reference in the text Saint Edmund of Abingdon to deceased King Henry III, who died in 1272, suggesting the composition occurred after that date. This argument only works for the specific text, not for the SEL as a whole. "Clearly, the cited line from St. Edmund of Abingdon was written after 1272, as probably was all of the vita. [...] But, other than St. Edmund, we cannot be certain that any of the individual texts [the SEL] contains [...] were composed after that date" (Liszka 2011: 43).
After the initiation of the project to create the SEL, it continued to evolve through accumulation of suitable, available material, reorganization and possibly omission of texts, as well as revisions according to local customs. The many modifications of the SEL could even lead to the point of fundamentally different redactions (e.g., Manuscript Egerton 1993 changes the metre from septenaries to Alexandrines). This process results in a complex present-day situation with some 45 surviving manuscripts of the SEL with overlapping contexts and partially variable organization. We "discover again and again material in the same style appearing in one and not in another [manuscript], according to no evident principle of selection" (Boyd 1958: 191).

The most important manuscripts of the SEL are the following. The list also indicates if the manuscript includes Saint Juliana:
(1) Laud 108 (before 1300). Earliest witness in disordered condition. – Does not include Saint Frideswide
(2) Harley 2277 (c. 1300). Second earliest witness, independent of and larger than Laud 108, with saint's lives now ordered in calendar form. – Does not include Saint Frideswide
(3) Corpus Christi 145, Egerton 2891 (both c. 1310-20). Third earliest witnesses, most likely from the same scriptorium. There are two additional fragments, Leicester City Museum 18 D 59 and Nottingham University Mi LM7/1, most likely from the same time and place – Does not include Saint Frideswide
(4) Ashmole 43 (before 1350). Fourth earliest witness. Used for the parsed file. – Includes Saint Frideswide
Since it is not found in the earliest manuscript witnesses, The Legend of Frideswide may be a relatively peripheral and late component of the SEL.
Remarks on parses: The edition follows the METS style guidelines. This means in particular that Middle English characters such as thorn or yogh have been modernized.
The line breaks follow the rhyming scheme as in Reames' (2003) edition.
The parses are largely unproblematic.


References

Blair, John. 1987. 'Saint Frideswide Reconsidered.' Oxoniensia 52. 71-127. (available online)
Boyd, Beverly. 1958. 'New Light on the South English Legendary.' Texas Studies in English 37. 187-194. (available online)
Brown, Beatrice D. 1927. The Southern Passion. EETS o.s. 10. London: Oxford University Press.
D'Evelyn, Charlotte & Mill, Anna J. 1959. The South English Legendary: Edited from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 145 and British Museum MS. Harley 2277, with Variants from Bodley MS. Ashmole 43 and British Museum MS. Cotton Julius D.IX. Volume 3. Introduction and Glossary. EETS o.s. 244. London: Oxford University Press.
Görlach, Manfred. 1974. The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary. Leeds Texts and Monographs, n. s. 6. Leeds: University of Leeds.
Heffernan, Thomas, J. 1979. 'Additional Evidence for a more Precise Date of the South English Legendary.' Traditio 35. 345-351. (available online)
Horstmann, Carl. 1887. The Early South English Legendary or Lives of Saints. Volume 1. EETS o.s. 87 London: Trübner & Co. (available online)
Liszka, Thomas R. 2011. 'Talk in the Camps: On the Dating of the South English Legendary, Havelok the Dane, and King Horn in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108.' In: Bell, Kimberly & Nelson Couch, Julie (eds.) The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative. Leiden: Brill. 31-50.
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Reames, Sherry L. 2003. Middle English Legends of Women Saints. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications. (available online)
Samson, Annie. 1986. 'The South English Legendary: Constructing a Context. ' In: Coss, Peter R. & Lloyd, Simon D. (eds.) Thirteenth Century England I: Proceedings of the Newcastle Upon Tyne Conference 1985. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. 185-195.
Thompson, Anne B. 2003. Everyday Saints and the Art of Narrative in the South English Legendary. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Wells, John E. 1916. Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. (available online)
Wells, Minnie E. 1936. 'The South English Legendary and its Relation to the Legenda Aurea.' PMLA 51. 337-360.