Chapter 7 - Vernacular Epitomes and Encyclopedias: Southern Legendaries and the Metrical Life of St Cuthbert, 1270–1500

Summary

With the exception of the South English Legendary, vernacular versions of Cuthbert’s life and miracles are slow to emerge, and it is not until the fifteenth century that we encounter a series of large and small-scale shifts into Middle English. The small-scale epitomes, written in the midlands and south in the course of compiling vernacular legendaries, afford us the opportunity of seeing how Cuthbert is treated from a ‘non-northern’ perspective, when set alongside universal and allied native saints. What is judged his quintessence when his life is epitomized in just a few hundred words? Alternatively, in Cuthbert’s Durham heartland, the shift into the vernacular also sees an urge towards the large-scale compilation, drawing together the different versions of Cuthbert’s life, miracles and church history, into an encyclopedic composite offering its vernacular reader access to the entirety of the preceding textual tradition. The anonymous Metrical Life of St Cuthbert, an example of this impulse, is analysed to explore how the restatements of episodes from many earlier Cuthbertine texts speak to the anxieties and ambitions of the fifteenth-century Benedictine corporation at Durham.