Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Idea of English Miracles of the Virgin
- 2 The Theophilus Legend in England: Mary the Advocate, Mary the Jew
- 3 The Theophilus Legend in England, Again: From the Devil’s Charter to a Marian Paradigm
- 4 The Virgin and the Law in Middle English Contexts
- 5 The Fate of English Miracles of the Virgin
- Afterword
- Appendix 1 ‘The Founding of the Feast of the Conception’ in the South English Legendary
- Appendix 2 ‘Blood on the Penitent Woman’s Hand’ (Bodleian Library MS e Museo 180)
- Appendix 3 The Charter Group Miracles and Other Short Texts from British Library MS Additional 37049
- Appendix 4 An Index of Miracles of the Virgin Collated with Existing Lists
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The Theophilus Legend in England, Again: From the Devil’s Charter to a Marian Paradigm
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Idea of English Miracles of the Virgin
- 2 The Theophilus Legend in England: Mary the Advocate, Mary the Jew
- 3 The Theophilus Legend in England, Again: From the Devil’s Charter to a Marian Paradigm
- 4 The Virgin and the Law in Middle English Contexts
- 5 The Fate of English Miracles of the Virgin
- Afterword
- Appendix 1 ‘The Founding of the Feast of the Conception’ in the South English Legendary
- Appendix 2 ‘Blood on the Penitent Woman’s Hand’ (Bodleian Library MS e Museo 180)
- Appendix 3 The Charter Group Miracles and Other Short Texts from British Library MS Additional 37049
- Appendix 4 An Index of Miracles of the Virgin Collated with Existing Lists
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
But now we are loosed from the law of death wherein we were detained; so that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.
The Epistle of St Paul to the Romans 7:6In the first known Book of Hours, designed and illuminated by the Oxford Dominican William de Brailes sometime around 1240, illustrations of the ‘Legend of Theophilus’ complement the Hours of the Little Office of the Virgin. William ‘writes’ the story in ten historiated initials that run across half of the devotional day, adorning psalms and prayers for prime and terce. The written narrative of the legend is not present, but short Anglo-Norman notations accompany the images. Below an illustration of Theophilus's contractual agreement with the Devil, de Brailes writes, ‘Theofle fet humage au deable e lui escrit chartre de sen propre sanc’ (Theophilus does homage to the Devil and writes for him a charter in his own blood); a tonsured Theophilus kneels before the hook-nosed Devil, and they grasp between them a charter that bears a cartoonishly large seal and an inscription, in clear capitals, ‘CARTA TEOFOLI’ (see Plate 1). Claire Donovan has emphasized in her discussion of the de Brailes images that ‘[t]he importance of the written charter in this transaction, the necessity of the written word to establish the unbreakable nature of this contract, shows how literate and legalistic the world of the thirteenth century was becoming’. It shows also how literate and legalistic the English cult of the Virgin Mary was becoming.
William de Brailes illustrated the Theophilus story twice. He also used it as part of an illustration of fortune and the ‘Ages of Man’ (in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 330), perhaps because of the story's emphasis on wealth and poverty and associated contractual disputes. William himself was very much a part of the burgeoning thirteenth-century world of profes- sional book culture and written law. His many contributions (direct and indirect) to Oxford illuminated manuscripts are well known, and he appears in surviving documents as a witness to several property transfers, as the owner of an Oxford tenement, and as a considerable influence in at least one land dispute.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval EnglandLaw and Jewishness in Marian Legends, pp. 75 - 103Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010