The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS) has published some extraordinary works for professors and students of medieval literature. The Middle English Texts series is part of this contribution, and provides modern editions and translations of little known yet important works in Middle English which would otherwise not be translated and available for use in the classroom. John Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine is one such work.
This hagiography exemplifies the virgin martyr legend, which by the late fifteenth century was extremely popular reading. The editor provides a brief yet insightful introduction to the Katherine legend, and gives a short history of this hagiographical story. Information on Capgrave and his milieu follows, which details his Augustinian background, his prolific career as an author, and the influences of East Anglian culture on his writing style. Being the longest and most complex Katherine legend which survives from the Middle Ages, this work is an important text in the study of medieval narrative writing.
Capgrave's Katherine survives in four fifteenth-century manuscripts. The editor has based this edition on the Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poet. 118 manuscript, which is the best preserved of the four. Several missing leaves from this manuscript have been filled in from one of the other three, British Library MS Arundel 396. Capgrave divides the legend into five books, which total about 8,000 lines of rhyme-royal verse. It is one of the longest saint's lives written. Since Capgrave geared his writing style towards women readers, he specifically develops those aspects of the saint's relationship that were understandable to his audience: anxiety concerning safety of the household and property; longing for her spiritual spouse; portrayals of Katherine's mother, the Virgin Mary, and Maxentius' wife; and the struggles of widows in medieval society.
Preceded by a short prologue which introduces the history of the Katherine legend, Capgrave then launches into Book 1, which recounts Katherine's birth, education, ancestry, and coronation. Book 2 focuses on the marriage parliament, which portrays in thirty-four chapters a long debate on a woman's fitness to rule. Issues regarding government, tradition, and gender are discussed, but no clear-cut answer is provided by the debaters. Book 3 contains Katherine's conversion and her mystical marriage to Christ, in twenty-seven chapters. In Book 4, Katherine challenges Maxentius and debates the fifty philosophers. These thirty-five chapters are parallel to the thirty-four chapter debate presented in Book 2, and frame the central subject of Katherine's conversion given in Book 3. Finally, Book 5 is a presentation of the martyrdom of the fifty philosophers, whom Katherine converted, as well as of Katherine herself. The thirty-four chapters in this final book use many hagiographical conventions to described the martyrdom, which would have been familiar to the educated audience for whom Capgrave was writing.
Winstead has followed modern conventions in punctuation and capitalization of words, and indicates her reasons for specific spelling conventions in her introduction. Her comments on Capgrave's use of language and audience to engage ordinary readers in the complex social and philosophical issues of their time are especially elucidating, and the text itself is wonderfully presented. This edition is especially needed, as the only other edition of Capgrave's Katherine in the late nineteenth century was actually done using the wrong manuscript (see p. 8, Introduction). The straightforward presentation of the text, along with accompanying notes and glossary, makes this an excellent addition to the Middle English Texts series.