‘Causa vitandi curiositatem verborum’

The text or textual cluster known as The Mirror of Holy Church represents one of the more egregious examples of Paul Zumthor's mouvance – the unregulated proliferation of versions and rewritings endemic to many forms of manuscript culture – found in medieval religious literature. Written in Latin in the early thirteenth century, the work could be regarded as having led a relatively decorous existence for 150 years or so, circulating widely in books that make clear the high regard in which it was held by literate Christians of different backgrounds, were it not for the fact that all twenty-eight full or partial copies that survive from before the second half of the fourteenth century preserve not the original Latin text but an elegantly colloquial translation into French (F). Making no mention that it is rendering a work first composed in Latin, this translation travelled in at least two versions, A and B, as one of the best-known insular French prose texts of the period.

It is largely as a result of this translation that the identity of the work's famous author remained known to medieval (and modern) readers. He was Edmund Rich, the learned, ascetic, and passionately driven eldest son of a well-off devout merchant couple from Abingdon. After periods of study at Oxford and Paris, Edmund became in turn master of arts and doctor of theology at Oxford (c. 1196–1202, c. 1214–22), secular canon, cathedral treasurer, and celebrated preacher at Salisbury (c. 1222–33), an unusually embattled archbishop of Canterbury (1233–40), and finally ‘seynt Edmund de Pounteny’ (as many copies of F call him), a cognomen that identifies him with the Cistercian house of Pontigny in France, where he is buried. The flurry of vitae and other life records written in the period immediately before and after his canonization in 1246 never allude to the work, and most, perhaps all, allusions to his authorship in later copies directly or indirectly derive from F.