The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England.(Review)

Mary Clayton, The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 26 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xi + 355 pp. ISBN 0-521-58168-0. 45.00 [pounds sterling].

To the average student of Anglo-Saxon England the Virgin Mary is a retiring figure, hardly noticed alongside her vaunting and muscular Son and his heroically steadfast followers. In her important The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (1990), however, Professor Clayton used artistic and literary evidence to affirm Mary's key place in Anglo-Saxon spirituality. In the present volume, which is in effect a sequel to the earlier one and in the same Cambridge series, she focuses on the apocryphal texts by which the cult was nourished. It is a two-part book, the first part a historical account in six chapters of the Marian apocryphal corpus, the second a critical edition, with extensive commentary, of the three main surviving Old English texts, along with an appendix giving illustrative Latin versions.

The Marian apocrypha fall into two groups, those concerned with the birth and infancy of Mary and those describing her death and assumption. Their shared aim is to affirm the perfect purity of Mary: she is conceived, like Christ, in her father's absence, is brought up in the temple, and eventually dies to the accompaniment of divine portents before being resurrected and assumed. The chief vehicle for the birth and infancy legends is the `Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew', a reworking of a Latin version of the second-century Greek Proteuangelium. The history of the death and assumption texts is far more complex. Even the significance of the terminology involved (dormitio, transitus, assumptio) defies easy interpretation, and there is much variation in the detail of events, especially where the fate of Mary's body is concerned: did it go straight to heaven or to paradise? There are more than sixty different apocrypha in nine languages. Clayton concentrates on the Syriac, Greek, Coptic, and Latin and, in two long chapters, does an impressive job of clarifying the main lines of transmission and assessing past scholarship.

There are three major Old English texts: a version of much of ...