A Legend of Holy Women.

I have tried to keep track of some of the many resources for women's studies in the Christian tradition that appear with such regularity. A Legend of' Holy Women is a fifteenth-century work by an Augustinian friar, Osbern Bokenham. The book was written originally in a Middle English dialect in poetry; Delany provides us with a prose translation.

Bokenham rummaged through extant hagiographical sources (especially the wildly popular Golden Legend of Jacopus of Voragine) to produce a volume outlining the lives of then popular women saints ranging from Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin, to Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. Most of the lives of the martyred saints followed an almost set formula: young virgin, converted to Christianity, refuses marriage because of a vow of virginity, and, in turn, suffers horrible tortures (feminists rightly raise an eyebrow at the glee with which the hagiographers describe such torture), is martyred, and becomes a powerful intercessor.

A little of this kind of material goes a long way (Bokenham, in fact, makes lot quite tedious reading) but he is not without interest. Apart from the fact that it is an all-female hagiography (indeed, one of the earliest of the genre), the more important fact is that Bokenham was an older contemporary of Margery Kempe and Dame Julian of Norwich and may well have known them, or, certainly, knew of them. His work gives us a small window into the contemporary popular piety of the time. Julian, for instance, tells of hearing the story of Saint Cecilia's bungled execution by beheading from a "man of the church." Julian allegorizes the three blows of the executioner. Bokenham tells the same story, without any allegory, but probably got it, as did Julian's narrator, from the Golden Legend.

Who would find this work interesting? Students, to be sure, especially those interested in the story of women in the history of Christianity. Bokenham seemed less inclined toward the misogyny then so common. It would also be useful for lovers of medieval and renaissance art: While reading Bokenham on Ursula and the thousands of martyred virgins, I had, in my mind, Carpaccio's vivid paintings of the same story.

Delany could have made her work a bit more user-friendly by asterisking words in the text she would annotate in the notes in the back. She also cited, in her introduction, line numbers for verses in the Middle English edition but, irritatingly, did not give corresponding citations for her own prose translation. This work is the first volume of the series Medieval Studies: Sources and Appraisals from the Notre Dame Press. It marks a modest but auspicious beginning.