The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Saint Juliana
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| Text name: | Saint Juliana |
| Alternative names: | Life of St. Juliana; Life of St. Juliana in the South English Legendary; Saint Juliana come of high men as we find I-writ; |
| Content: | Juliana secretly becomes a Christian during the time of Christian persecutions in the Roman Empire. A powerful justice wants to marry her, but she refuses to give herself to a heathen. She is thus tortured in an attempt to change her mind. None of the punishments can hurt her by God's grace. While she is imprisoned, the devil, disguised as an angel, visits her. Juliana exposes him and then beats him up severely. Eventually, Juliana is beheaded and her soul ascends to heaven. The evil justice dies in a shipwreck and his washed-up body is torn to pieces by wild animals. |
| Genre/subjects: | saint's life, hagiography, martyrdom, vie |
| Dialect of original composition: | Unknown The original dialect of the text has not been analyzed in detail. Saint Juliana 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). Consequently, an original dialect for the collection is difficult to determine. However, the earliest core materials of the SEL are believed to have been written by a poet or poets who showed dialectal features "of the Southwest Midlands – Southwest, with some forms which are recognizable as Northern" (Boyd 1958: 192), possibly from an abbey in Worcestershire or Gloucestershire (e.g., Horstmann 1887: viii, Adler 2016: 8). If Saint Juliana forms part of this core, its original could have the same authorial characteristics. The original of the text is certainly not Northern. For example, rhymes of Old English long o with Old English long a (þoȝt (from Old English þōht) : noȝt (from Old English nāht), "thought", "not" ll. 139-40) demonstrate an area of composition south of the river Humber, where southern rounding of long a to long o had already occurred. |
| Date of original composition: | 1250-1325 The poem's earliest text witnesses, Cambridge Corpus Christi College 145 (MED a1325) and Bodley Ashmole 43 (MED a1350, used for the parse), both date from the first half of the fourteenth century. This date functions as the terminus ante quem for the composition of the text. Saint Juliana 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 earliest texts of the SEL may stem from the middle of the thirteenth century (archetype date of early thirteenth century implied in Horstmann 1887, Görlach 1974 propses 1270-1285). If Saint Juliana forms part of this earliest core, its composition may have occurred as early as c. 1250. Some conservative (though inconclusive) features in the text that may indicate a relatively early date of Saint Juliana's composition are: preference of then over when-based subordination, examples of unreinforced negation with ne alone, or the swear daþeit 'curses' (l. 202). |
| Suggested date: | 1265 |
| PCMEP period: | 2a (1250-1300) |
| Versification: | couplets, aa The text is written in a septenary metre, with seven stressed syllables per line, subdivided into two half lines in the edition. An example is shown below (stresses shown in boldface): Euer lay þis maide and louȝ ; as hire noþing nere. (line 44) This is the typical stress pattern found in the poems of the South English Legendary. There are many deviations from this norm. |
| Index of ME Verse: | 2951 (IMEV), 2951 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 4653 |
| Wells: | 5.19 (entry for South English Legendary) |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | SLeg.Juliana |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Cockayne, Thomas Oswald. 1872. Þe Liflade of St. Juliana: From two Old English Manuscripts of 1230 A.D. EETS o.s. 51. London: Trübner & Co. 81-87. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 43 (SC 6924), ff. 25r-28r |
| Online manuscript description: | Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 12) Digitzed Manuscript f. 34r, Digital Bodleian Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries Summary catalogue of Western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, no. 6924 |
| Manuscript dialect: | West-Midlands The scribal dialect has been localized to Gloucestershire (McIntosh et al. 1986: 196), specifically "north-west Gloucestershire" (Samson 1986: 186). |
| 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: | M2a.StJuliana |
| ID: | Juliana,x.y.z: x=page, y=line, z=token |
| Word count: | 2529 |
| Token count: | 250 |
| Line count: | 228 |
Other:
| General notes: | 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 Juliana 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 texts 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 Juliana (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 Juliana (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 – Includes Saint Juliana (4) Ashmole 43 (before 1350). Fourth earliest witness. Used for the parsed file. – Includes Saint Juliana |
| Remarks on parses: | The edition indicates half lines with a punctus elevates. This has been replaced with a semicolon in the electronic file. The poem includes quite a lot of direct speech. Inverted commas have been added in square brackets, ["], to indicate speech in the parsed file. The parses are largely unproblematic. |
References
Adler, Gilian. 2016. 'Audience and Authority in the South English Legendary Life of St Katherine.' Journal of Academic Perspectives 9.2. 1-20.
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.
Cockayne, Oswald Thomas. 1872. Þe Liflade of St. Juliana: From two Old English Manuscripts of 1230 A.D. EETS o.s. 51. London: Trübner & Co. (available online)
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)
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. & Benskin, Michael. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
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. 1923. Second Supplement to a Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050-1400. Additions and Modifications to 1923. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Wells, Minnie E. 1936. 'The South English Legendary and its Relation to the Legenda Aurea.' PMLA 51. 337-360.