A Legend of Holy Women: A Translation of Osbern Bokenham's "Legends of Holy Women."

Osbern Bokenham's Legends of Holy Women is comprised of thirteen vitae of women saints. Sheila Delany notes that Bokenham's achievement goes beyond merely translating his major source, the Legenda Aurea of Jacob of Voragine, into English: "Everywhere Bokenham reworks the material, reshaping it according to his own vision." The colophon of the single extant manuscript indicates 1447 as the terminus ad quem of the work, and suggests its limited circulation (the sole manuscript having been created by someone within Bokenham's circle) and its assumed relevance to the religious lives of nuns.

Delany discusses Bokenham's circle of patronage and friendship, embedding his work in contemporary politics. Bokenham was a Cambridge-educated Augustinian friar, who by 1427 settled at the distinguished Clare Priory in Suffolk. Delany portrays a complex life, one shaped by travel to Spain and Italy and by the stresses of Lollard persecution, urban partisan politics, and vying claims to the throne of England. She argues that Bokenham's Legends, with its "gallery of powerful, articulate women," was a modest but explicit contribution to Yorkist aspirations based on a lineage that descended at several points through women. She also argues that the work is modeled on Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. The second argument in particular is open to question; it is unclear that Bokenham's work can even be seen as an integral text. Delany argues for an "evolution toward coherency," like that detectable in The Canterbury Tales. Despite this theory, Bokenham's Legends still reads like a compilation of discrete stories, with what Delany presents as a "Prologue" to the work being simply a prologue to the first story. It is debatable whether the transformation of these stories into "the first all-female hagiography" is the work of Bokenham, of Thomas Burgh, who transcribed the single extant manuscript which transmits the stories as a collection, or of Delany herself.

Delany offers a very readable translation of the Legends, opting wisely for rendering Bokenham's verse forms into prose. Her goal was "conservative": to produce a text that retained much of Bokenham's vocabulary and imagery while modifying the complex sentence structure that sometimes marked his latinate style. The translation is annotated, although occasionally the annotations are puzzling. For example, one note states that the "torturers of Asia Minor and Egypt were considered particularly sadistic." Considered by whom? By Bokenham, who fills his stories with tales of torture and doesn't, to my eyes, seem to distinguish degree of horror by region? By Jacob of Voragine? By most people living in England? This question points to another issue: despite her affirmation that Bokenham reworked his material, Delany does not consistently indicate where Bokenham diverges from his sources. Mary Serjeantson, who produced the EETS edition, claims that his translations keep close to the originals (O.S. 26, xxiv). Delany's sensitivity to Bokenham's originality, discussed in two examples in her introduction, alerts readers to an important issue, but it is not something that can be understood simply by reading this volume.

The major contribution of Delany's work is, of course, making available to a wide audience a very interesting text. Delany hints at some of its significance in exploring the religious world of late medieval England. Her interpretation of this text as "prowoman" deserves serious consideration. Why did Bokenham focus almost exclusively on women of the early church, women whose virtue was constituted by their unflinching acceptance of torture? Delany suggests that "the sadistic sexual politics of hagiography . . . is met by the affirmative sexual politics of moral strength and spiritual victory." It is Delany's achievement to facilitate the exploration of this problem by producing this fine translation of Bokenham's work.

Anne L. Clark UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT