A book like this would have been almost unimaginable when I was in graduate school, half a century ago. In those days medievalists in English departments confined their attention largely to vernacular poetry, and some eminent critics suggested that even Chaucer’s ‘Second Nun’s Tale’ was hardly worth reading because it was not an original work but a mere translation of a saint’s legend. In those days saints’ legends also tended to be ignored by medieval historians, who distrusted most of them as sources of factual information and had not yet discovered their potential value as mirrors of the particular periods and institutions that produced them. Both literary and historical studies have greatly expanded their horizons since then, coming to appreciate the many ways in which even very conventional religious writings like these can illuminate the reading habits, worldviews, and priorities of the medieval communities that received, disseminated, and reshaped them.

As suggested in the Introduction, the present project began with a simple question about the way the Cecilia legend was retold in Sarum breviaries. When the results for Cecilia proved to be more complicated and interesting than I expected, I added a handful of other legends as test cases, and the project expanded outward from there. Even while my focus remained on the texts of that chosen sample of legends, the research for the Catalogue kept raising new questions and suggesting broader areas of inquiry. How do the texts in the surviving manuscripts differ from those in the early printed editions? What do those differences imply about the origins and relative status of the printed editions? What patterns can be seen among the manuscripts themselves, in terms of the way they are abbreviating and sometimes reinterpreting the various legends? What textual affiliations do the various manuscripts seem to have with each other and with other, non-Sarum sources? My provisional answers to most of those questions, still based primarily on the chosen sample of legends, are suggested in the Catalogue and spelled out more fully in Part 2.A, which also presents suggestions for future research on other legends in particular manuscripts or groups of manuscripts, and in Appendix II.