Middle English Legends of Women Saints

Book excerpt: Middle English Legends of Women Saints presents a collection of saints' Lives intended to suggest the diversity of possibilities beneath the supposedly fixed and predictable surfaces of the legends, using multiple retellings of the same legend to illustrate that medieval readers and listeners did not just passively receive saints' legends but continually and actively appropriated them. The collection opens with legends about two royal (or supposedly royal) women, Frideswide and Mary Magdelen, and continues with those of three popular virgin martyrs, Margaret of Antioch, Christina of Tyre, and Katherine of Alexandria. The final portion of the collection is devoted to St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary. The collection includes a number of relatively unknown texts that have not appeared in print since Horstmann's transcriptions in the nineteenth century and a few that have never before been published.