Anglo-Jewish Women and Modern Scholarship

Medieval Anglo-Jewish women were a constant presence in law courts. There are whole generations of women who survive in the records of the extraordinary bureaucracy of thirteenth-century England, most notably in the seventy-two extant rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews for the dates 1219–1290, but also in marriage contracts, close rolls, letters, tallages, and shetarot (i.e., starrs, bonds of debt or acquittance written in Hebrew and according to Jewish custom), among other miscellaneous documents. Michael Adler in 1934 proclaimed the Anglo-Jewess, for the vital role she played in the English economy and courts, “unequalled in those days in any country.” Barrie Dobson maintained that the Anglo-Jewish woman was “a more influential and even formidable figure than her Christian counterpart.” Victoria Hoyle's work on moneylending between Anglo-Jewish and Christian women documents “641 references to 310 distinct and individual Jewish women…in the published plea rolls” of the Jewish Exchequer, not counting cases of ambiguity. Hannah Meyer, in her impressive 2009 Cambridge dissertation, concluded that “using gender as a primary tool of analysis” for the available records means “the inescapable visibility of Jewish [female] uniqueness.”

In the thirteenth century, several major Anglo-Jewish financiers were women. Licoricia of Winchester, about whom Suzanne Bartlet wrote a posthumously published book, is only the wealthiest and most famous among them. Others include Henna of York, Mirabelle of Gloucester, Belia of Bedford, Chera of Winchester, and Abigail of London. These are women for whom we can track full careers, who travelled and appeared in court independently, owned properties, and lent mostly to men of various social and ecclesiastical stations. They and lesser figures appear startlingly frequently in national records, and it appears that they were literate and leading figures in Jewish– Christian business relations. In attempts to understand and reconstruct their lives, literacies, and agency, there is a glut of archival material to explore – “a gigantic lucky dip,” as Dobson called it.

And yet these women receive relatively little scholarly attention. They are caught between academic disciplines and between deep scholarly histories that say there is little Jewish material to study from medieval England or that Jewish women are simply not much depicted in the medieval sources of the dominant Christian culture.

A Note on the Manuscripts

There are more than fifty extant manuscripts of the South English Legendary. Its earliest form dates c.1270–1285, and the earliest example (in Bodleian, MS Laud Misc. 108) is not much later. The number of items in a full Legendary varies considerably, but the majority (excluding fragments) includes a series of six Miracles of the Virgin, which are appended to the ‘Life of Theophilus’ (see Chapter 3). The story of the founding of the Conception is separate from these, extant in only four late examples, all of which date between the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth century. These are: Bodleian Library MS Bodley 779, fols 244v–245v (hereafter ‘B’); Lambeth Palace Library MS 223, fols 31v–33r (hereafter ‘L’); British Library MS Stowe 949, fols 100v–102r (hereafter ‘S’); and Bodleian Library MS Eng. Poet. a. 1, fols 6v–7r (the Vernon Manuscript, hereafter ‘V’). I have had the opportunity to examine B and S in situ, and L and V in facsimile. The Conception legend comprises a prologue to apocryphal narratives of the Virgin Mary's birth and life in all but S, where it concludes the apocryphal story. I print S here, however, since the most significant variants tend to be different from each other or take the form of additions to S, which appears to be the earliest of the four. I amend in S only obvious errors, and I note only additions or variants that may change meaning or emphasis; I have not noted orthographic variants, minor changes in word order or (added or omitted but not grammatically influential) pronouns, nor have I noted substitutions of very common synonyms. Abbreviations are silently expanded and punctuation and capitalization altered for ease of reading.

When Anselm wrote his influential prayers to the Virgin Mary, he was not yet in England. Anselm of Bec could not have known, in the decades before William Rufus made him Archbishop of Canterbury, what importance he would have for England, for the growth of medieval private devotion, and for the development of Marian devotion in particular. Anselm's personal and conversational appeal to Mary, and especially his consciousness of Mary's doubleness – the simultaneity of her mercy and judgment, and the sinner's inability to know which he may provoke – anticipated what R. W. Southern called the ‘caprice’ of later medieval Marian literature, wherein Mary could intervene with cure or curse for ‘the just and the unjust alike’. When Southern commented that ‘[o]f all Anselm's prayers there can be no doubt that the most important and original are those to St Mary’, he surely had in mind his earlier work on the English origins of the Miracles of the Virgin.

St Anselm's indirect influence is everywhere evident in Southern's arguments concerning the earliest Latin collections of tales of Mary's miraculous intervention. It is St Anselm's nephew, the younger Anselm, who is responsible for the earliest gathering of such stories, and, according to Southern, the nephew's endeavor was in great part due to ‘his long association with St. Anselm and his friends’ and his resulting ‘enthusiasm … [for] the propagation of the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary in all its branches’. The younger Anselm was a Norman, educated in Chiusa, and later Abbot of Bury St Edmunds, where he compiled his collection of Marian miracles. He had traveled frequently with his uncle in the early years of the twelfth century, and he, along with Eadmer of Canterbury, was among the earliest public proponents of the celebration of the feast of the Conception of Mary in the West.

As the Protestant Reformation reached England – bringing with it the rejection of the cult of saints and attacks, rhetorical and real, on shrines, pilgrimage, and associated miraculous events or items – belief in the kinds of Marian intercession described in Miracles of the Virgin could epitomize Catholic ‘superstition’. As Ælfric had insisted centuries earlier, the glut of Marian apocrypha that had developed independently of scripture had to be suppressed in favor of biblical accounts (in which Mary features only minimally), since false or unverifiable narratives posed a threat to the honor due to God alone. Marian feasts with apocryphal bases, which had been so central to early English devotion, were to be invalidated. Visual depictions of Mary shifted to meeker and softer representations of Luke's acquiescent maiden. Images and sculptures associated with long-popular shrines and miracles were attacked with words, hammers, and flames.

While I have been advocating for a view of English Marian miracles – particularly the Middle English corpus – that embraces their miscellaneity as representative and thereby reveals visible developments of sets and subsets of miracle narratives like the ones explored in this book, I cannot deny that the complex history of reform attitudes toward Mary and the equally complex history of the English Reformation seem to create a basic evidentiary problem for me. Could it be that the English corpus looks the way it does because the sixteenth-century eradication of ‘superstitious’ texts and images means that the genre is now so badly represented that any traces of development, whether in the whole or in thematically related subsets, are accidental?

The legend of Theophilus ‘circulated in both the East and West for a long time before the beginning of the twelfth century’, but it is so emblematic of English Miracles of the Virgin that the earliest groupings of Marian miracle stories in England, whether Latin or vernacular, are addenda to the Theophilus story. Though it did not originate in England, it was prominently positioned in two of the early Anglo-Latin collections that were important to R. W. Southern, and its long popularity in England played a significant role in the creation of the Marian miracle genre. It is the story of a sixthcentury vicedominus (Theophilus) who contracts his soul to the Devil with the help of a Jewish sorcerer, and then successfully prays for Mary's help to undo the contract. Theophilus is the archetypal sinner of Marian literature, and Mary is, in this story, a powerful legal advocate with particular power over the written word, and with a special ability to intercede where Jews are concerned.

The usual summary of the origins and dissemination of the legend says that it was written in Greek in the sixth century; that it was first recorded by one Eutychian, who claimed to be a member of Theophilus's household and an eyewitness to the events; that it was translated into Latin in the ninth century by Paul, a deacon of Naples; and that Paul's translation became the basis for all later Western versions of the story. There is good evidence for this summary, but it is also true that the repetition of these basic elements has obscured the case and its implications. Though the legend is certainly of Byzantine origin, the authorship and dating of the original composition are not really discernible, and the Greek text survives in only three medieval manuscripts, two dating roughly to the eleventh century and one to the fifteenth.

In 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.

The Middle Ages saw the rise of Mary mediatrix. As Jaroslav Pelikan has summarized it, ‘the systematic clarification of the title Mediatrix was the principal objective expression of Mariology and the chief theological contribution to Christian teaching about Mary during this period’, but this was sometimes in tension with the dominant ‘literary form and devotional motif of the Mater Dolorosa’. Nevertheless, both the human suffering of mother Mary and her superhuman (often aggressive) intercession and advocacy were internationally recognized. Eastern theologians often addressed her as ‘Mediatrix of law and of grace’, and this title, as it was reflected in medieval Marian devotion, was in some ways very logical: ‘If Christ is both judge and mediator, then modest and anxious human sinners may well look for an advocate who will mediate with Him.’ Indeed, the whole legal apparatus of saintly intercession cannot be called unpredictable within a wide view of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which always saw the relationship with God as a matter of covenant. What Richard Firth Green has called ‘bargains with God’ or the ‘need to believe in a deus pactor’ is not only common in popular medieval hagiography – an expression of a potent ‘covenantal theology’ – but also transcends temporal and cultural divides. Still, such bargains were ‘particularly common in England’, and where other saints might broker agreements based on symbolic gestures of ‘trothplight’, such as ‘bowed groats’ or token rings or monetary payment, the Virgin Mary was very often entrenched in documentary modes. She showed special attention to agreements that were expressed in charters or that included written conveyances.

The collective label ‘Miracles of the Virgin’ implies an easily gathered body of work, but it is unclear whether it was ever such a thing for readers of English. Paul Strohm has claimed that, by the late Middle Ages, the English term ‘miracle’ probably suggested not miracle stories generally but writings on the Virgin specifically: ‘We learn to expect that a miraculum of the early Middle Ages will probably involve miraculous cures at the tomb of a saint and that a miracle of the fourteenth century will more likely involve the Virgin.’ But he readily admits that it is difficult to tell whether this had generic force, for it is rarely clear whether the term refers to the miraculous event or to the narrative. There was an acknowledged category: Marian legends inserted into sermons or found among religious miscellanies often begin with phrases like ‘i rede in þe myraculs of oure lady’, and, in a series of tales, a phrase like ‘also in þe same boke’ might be repeated. The authors who claimed this great source volume recognized some corpus of appropriate stories, and they expected their audiences to do so as well. These narratives do tend to fit a certain mold – a character performs some special devotion but later commits some horrendous sin, or falls in with horrendous sinners, and Mary intercedes, often in extremis – but a search for any book to which authors advert yields no sure results. While numerous Latin collections of Marian miracles and copious compendia of general Marian materials were circulating in England, no surviving collection or grouping seems definitely linked to another, and attempts to trace the sources of Middle English versions of individual tales are often futile. Any story of Mary's intercession – heard or read, old or new – could fit into the notional book.

A Note on the Manuscript and Related Texts

The text printed below comes from Bodleian Library MS e Museo 180, a late fifteenth-century manuscript that contains a full de tempore sermon cycle, including some material from John Mirk's Festial. It can be found on fols 62v–64r, where it concludes a sermon on penitence designated for the third Sunday after Pentecost (sancte trinitatis). The codex is closely related to three others, all of which record very nearly the same sequence of homilies, two of which are written entirely in the same hand. The sermon that precedes this exemplum also appears in Gloucester Cathedral Library MS 22 (in the second binding), and Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 50. I have been unable to examine these, however, and so cannot verify whether the exemplum (or the same version of it) is appended in these cases.

The e Museo 180 version appears really to be a combination of two common Marian miracle stories, catalogued in the MWME XXIV as ‘Blood on the Penitent Woman's Hand’ and ‘Woman who Committed Incest’. The first type features Christ as the direct intercessor (the blood comes from the wound in his side rather than a murdered infant) and not the Virgin Mary. Analogues of this type can be found twice in both British Library MS Royal 18 B. XXIII and John Mirk's Festial, and in the Gesta Romanorum. One of the versions in Royal 18 B. XXIII is the only analogue I have seen that has the blood on the woman's hand turning into Latin text (or text at all), though the Latin is significantly different and no vernacular translation is provided. The second type, in which the Virgin Mary intercedes to save an incestuous woman from a devil, can be found in British Library MS Additional 39996, the Alphabet of Tales, and Jacob's Well. Only in the latter two has the woman slain a newborn – though Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian analogues of this type do include the slaying of the child – and none of this type mentions blood on the hand or miraculous text.

A Note on Titles and Catalogues

The breadth of international scholarship on Miracles of the Virgin over the last century or so (beginning with Adolfo Mussafia's work in 1886–98) has put into use a frustrating variety of editorial titles for individual miracles. As is often the case with exemplary literature, the number of analogues or related narratives associated with a given tale increases the confusion. Many scholars writing on Marian miracles will use titles eclectically, and some knowledge of existing catalogues is necessary for comparative work and source studies. For the most part, I have titled miracles in accordance with either the MWME XXIV or Peter Whiteford's catalogue of Middle English miracles (in The Myracles of Oure Lady). Whenever generally accepted titles misrepresent the content of an English version of a common tale or gloss over important distinctions between versions, however, I have made small adjustments or omitted titles altogether, and some collation with available lists is therefore of interest.

To facilitate further research, I index here all Miracles of the Virgin discussed in this book, collated wherever possible with three important reference works that will, in turn, provide further bibliographical information. Albert Poncelet compiled almost 1,800 Latin incipits in his ‘Index miraculorum B. V. Mariae quae saec. VI–XV latine conscripta sunt’, Analecta Bollandiana 21 (1902), pp. 242–360, and these are now available online as the Electronic Poncelet, maintained through Oxford's CSMD. The Oxford database, which was launched in 2005 and continues to evolve, is an important new resource for scholars interested in Marian legends. Though its focus is the large thirteenth-century Galician-Portuguese verse collection of the Castilian King Alfonso X, it incorporates user-friendly cross-references, bibliographies, summaries, keyword links, and manuscript and analogue information that are wide-ranging and searchable. MWME XXIV catalogues information specific to extant Middle English miracles and includes content summaries and bibliographies keyed to individual miracles (as endnotes).

In what follows, miracles are ordered alphabetically, according to the titles I habitually use or (when I have not used a title) according to a CSMD or MWME XXIV heading.

There are many desiderata at the conclusion of this study. From some angles it seems as if all paths of inquiry lead to these texts. But any reader attuned to a single miracle or group of miracles, or to a particular century or language or genre, will be struck by what has not been said. There is important work to be done on the possibility of Marian miracles in English drama, on gender issues within and around these tales, on associated reading habits and patronage of royalty, on further source work and continental comparisons, on the relationships between local and general miracles, on the many English illustrations of Marian miracles, and especially on the Anglo-Norman collections. I have focused on what struck me many years ago as some conspicuous organizing features of the supposedly disorganized English examples, and on one through-line of development traceable from the earliest iterations of the Theophilus legend in England and down to the end of the Middle Ages. But there is much more that might be said, and I hope that it will be said.

The presence in the medieval consciousness, however, of a Marian figure of ferocity and learnedness and usefully ambiguous Jewish-Christian religious identity is an important corrective to the often too-easily accepted notion that the object of Marian devotion was either consistently gentle and maternal or somehow (simply) all-meaningful. I do not think that Mary could be all things to all people. Rather, surviving Miracles of the Virgin show that she could fulfill very specific functions in the English imagination, and that those functions could shift with regional and temporal conditions. The sign ‘Mary’ had a range of possible meanings, yes, but these are the kinds of texts that hold up mirrors. Mary's legal and Jewish embodiments in these miracles are a performance of English and Christian law, made flexible and accessible. Her unstable and potentially infinite performances mark her as a flashpoint, a creative and paradoxical sign, in some of the most familiar medieval English literary and theological negotiations. The figure that stands out at the end of this study – the figure of Mary legislatrix – is also a figure of English desire and identity.