The Old English "Life of St Mary of Egypt"

The Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt is a prose hagiographical text of some 11,000 words bringing to a vernacular English audience the story of a saint who retreats from the world to dwell as a hermit in the desert after she has lived a life of sexual depravity for many years. The rigours of her harsh existence in the desert but also the excesses of her scandalous earlier career are described in considerable detail. The Old English version is a close but artful translation of the influential ninth-century Latin Vita Sanctae Mariae Egyptiacae, itself a translation of a Greek original. The fervency of the inherited narration is captured eloquently by the Anglo-Saxon translator, who employs heightened rhetoric throughout to convey emotional intensity. The identity of the translator is unknown but the translation probably dates from the second half of the tenth century (there is no evidence for knowledge of the Latin Vita in England before the mid-tenth century), either contemporary with Ælfric or slightly earlier.

            The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt is unusual among Old English saints’ lives in the luridness of its some of its subject matter. It is also unusual in its narrative structure, as it has in effect a double narrative, with two protagonists and a story within a story – the story of Saint Mary of Egypt, of course, told in her own words, but also that of Zosimus, a monk seeking spiritual perfection (and finding it in Mary), narrated in the third person. It is through Zosimus and his encounter with her in the desert that Mary’s remarkable biography comes to be known. Her account of her life is embedded in Zosimus’s story, amounting to something over a quarter of it, and for Zosimus this account and his own interaction with its narrator become a life-changing revelation.

            At the beginning of the Life Zosimus leaves his own monastery in Palestine to join one near the River Jordan, desiring to learn from its admired spiritual practices and to advance in perfection. One such practice is that each monk must cross the Jordan at the beginning of Lent and spend the season alone in the Syrian desert. It is while carrying out this custom in the wilderness that Zosimus comes across the aged weatherbeaten figure that turns out to be Mary. Here is the passage in which he first encounters her (to listen to a recording of this passage, click here):

  Ða eac witodlice se ende his gebedes wæs gefylled, he þa his eagan bewende and þær soðlice man geseah westweardes on þæt westen efstan, and witodlice þæt wæs wifman þæt þær gesewen wæs. Swiðe sweartes lichaman heo wæs for þære sunnan hæto, and þa loccas hire heafdes wæron swa hwite swa wull and þa na siddran þonne oþ þone swuran.

Ða wisan Zosimus georne behealdende wæs and, for þære gewilnedan swetnysse þære wuldorfæstan gesihðe he fægen gefremed, ofstlice arn on þa healfe þe he efstan geseah þæt him þær æteowde. Ne geseah he witodlice on eallum þam dagum ær nane mennisclice gesihðe ne nanre nytena oþþe fugela oððe wildeora hiw, and he forðy arn geornlice and gewilnode to oncnaw­enne hwæt þæt wildeora wære þe him æteowde.

[When he got to the end of his prayer, he turned his eyes and really did see someone there hurrying westward in the desert, and in fact it was a woman that he could see there. Her body was very black because of the heat of the sun, and the hair of her head was as white as wool and reached no further than down to her neck.

Zosimus kept gazing eagerly at this thing and, filled with joy at the compelling goodness of that glorious sight, he ran quickly in the direction in which he saw whatever it was that had appeared to him there hurrying off. Truly, in all the days before he had not caught sight of a human being or of any animals or birds or wild beasts, and for that reason he ran eagerly and desired to know what kind of wild beast it was that had appeared to him.] (ed. and trans. Kramer, Magennis and Norris, pp. 392–395)

She startles him by calling him by his name and recognising that he is a priest, while bitterly bewailing her own sinfulness, and as she prays before him her body becomes elevated above the ground. After much reluctance she is persuaded by Zosimus to explain how she has come to be there.

            Mary tells the story of her life, from the time she ran away from home in Alexandria at the age of twelve, through her seventeen years of promiscuity, to her conversion and repentance and her continuing sojourn in the desert. She is particularly frank about her lustful conduct of her sinful years:

ic me sylfe unblinnendlice on þam adale þæs manfullan forligeres besylede, and þæt me wæs to myrcðe

[I ceaselessly defiled myself in the filth of wicked promiscuity, and I enjoyed it] (ed. and trans. Kramer, Magennis and Norris, pp. 402–405).

Mary’s conversion comes at Jerusalem (where she has gone for immoral purposes), inspired by a statue of the Virgin Mary. She receives the eucharist at the Jordan and crosses over the river to the barren desert, where she has lived the harshest of lives ever since, praying and fighting against continuing temptation, strengthened by her devotion to the Virgin. By the time Zosimus encounters her she has lived in solitude for forty-seven years.

Zosimus returns to Jordan the following year, as requested by Mary, who comes across the river to meet him by walking on the water. He has brought with him the sacrament of the eucharist and some food, of which Mary eats very little. She asks him come again the year after to the place where they first met and when he does so he finds her lifeless body and a note marked out on the ground (though she has never learned to read or write) giving her name (at last) and the date of her death and requesting him to bury her. He succeeds in burying her with the help of a tame lion before returning to his monastery glorifying God, where he reveals the wonder of Mary’s story.

The text of the Life of Saint Mary of Egypt is preserved in the very early eleventh-century British Library manuscript Cotton Julius E. vii, the unique manuscript of Ælfric’s Lives of Saints as a unified collection, with substantial fragments also surviving in two other witnesses, British Library, MS Cotton Otho B. x (first half of the eleventh century) and Gloucester, Cathedral Library, MS 35 (mid-eleventh century). There are two significant lacunae in the Cotton Julius text but, with the exception of 144 words of the Latin original which have no Old English equivalent, the missing material can be made up from the other two manuscripts.

Although it appears in the Lives of Saints collection, Life of Saint Mary of Egypt is clearly not by Ælfric. It differs from Ælfric’s work in its approach to translation, its literary style and its language, some features of which suggest that it was originally written in the Anglian dialect area rather than in the West Saxon with which Ælfric is associated. It is one of four non-Ælfrician items in the collection (the others being the lives of Saint Euphrosyne, Saint Eustace and the Seven Sleepers), the presence of which reflects heterogeneity in hagiographical practice in late Anglo-Saxon England, heterogeneity somewhat overlooked perhaps in light of scholarly emphasis on the prolific output of Ælfric.

The Life presents an inspiring image of sanctity to its Anglo-Saxon readership but also an unsettling one in some respects for church authorities of the time, as represented not least in the writings of Ælfric. The emphasis on veneration of the Virgin Mary in the Life would be welcome to such authorities, but Mary of Egypt is a female figure who shows a worrying amount of autonomous power throughout her life, and in her relationship with Zosimus she occupies the dominant position: the male monk and priest learns humbly from a woman, who is a (priest-like) participant in inner mysteries, and he receives her blessing. She is certainly not the kind of model of female sanctity that Ælfric celebrates in his lives (these are mostly young virgin martyrs), and he would not advocate the extreme forms of monastic life lauded in the Life. All things considered, it seems ironic that this text ended up being interpolated into his Lives of Saints. We should be glad that it did, since the Life of Saint Mary of Egypt must be seen as one of the most interesting prose saints’ lives surviving in Old English.

Bibliography

Manuscripts

Gloucester, Cathedral Library, MS 35 (‘Gloucester Fragments’)

London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius E. vii.

London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho B. x.

Editions

Kramer, Johanna, Hugh Magennis and Robin Norris, ed. and trans., Anonymous Old English Lives of Saints, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 63 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2020), pp. 380–439.

Magennis, Hugh, ed. and trans., The Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002) [this also contains an edition and translation of the Latin source text, pp. 139–209].

Skeat, Walter W., ed. and trans., Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, EETS O.S. 76, 82, 94, 114 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1881–1900; reprinted as 2 vols, 1966), II, 2–53.

Secondary Literature

Cantara, Linda, ‘Saint Mary of Egypt in British Library, MS Cotton Otho B. x’, in Anonymous Interpolations in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints’, ed. Robin Norris, Old English Newsletter Subsidia 35 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2011), pp. 29–69.

Magennis, Hugh, ‘On the Sources of the non-Ælfrician Lives in the Old English Lives of Saints, with Reference to the Cotton-Corpus Legendary’, Notes and Queries ns 32 (1985), 292–299.

Magennis, Hugh, ‘Contrasting Features in the non-Ælfrician Lives in the Old English Lives of Saints’, Anglia 104 (1986), 316–348.

Magennis, Hugh, ‘St Mary of Egypt and Ælfric: Unlikely Bedfellows in Cotton Julius E. vii?’, in The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. Erich Poppe and Bianca Ross (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), pp. 99–112.

Hugh Magennis, ‘Conversion in Old English Saints’ Lives’, in Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Related Themes in Memory of Lynne Grundy, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson, King’s College London Medieval Studies 17 (London: King’s College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2000), pp.  287–310, at pp. 301–310.

Magennis, Hugh, ‘Synonyms and Lexical Substitutions in Texts of the Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt’, English Studies 101 (2020), 802–814.

Magennis, Hugh, ‘The Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt and London, British Library, Cotton Julius E. vii: A Textual Study’, Anglia 139 (2021), 374–399.

Scheil, Andrew P., ‘Bodies and Boundaries in the Old English Life of St. Mary of Egypt’, Neophilologus 84 (2000), 137–156.

Scragg, Donald, ed, The Old English Life of Mary of Egypt, Old English Newsletter Subsidia 33 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2005): Catherine Brown Tkacz, ‘Byzantine Theology in the Old English De Transitu Mariae Ægyptiace’, pp. 9–29; Andy Orchard, ‘Rhetoric and Style in the Old English Mary of Egypt’, pp. 31–55; Clare A. Lees, ‘Vision and Place in the Old English Mary of Egypt’, pp. 57–78; Robin Norris, ‘Vitas Matrum: Mary of Egypt as Female Confessor’, pp. 79–109.

Hugh Magennis h.magennis@qub.ac.uk is Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published widely on Old English and related literature, specialising particularly in saints’ lives, translation and poetic tradition. He is currently co-editing a series of volumes for Brill on the four elements in the Middle Ages (with Marilina Cesario and Elisa Ramazzina).