A Note on the Manuscript and Related Texts

The text printed below comes from Bodleian Library MS e Museo 180, a late fifteenth-century manuscript that contains a full de tempore sermon cycle, including some material from John Mirk's Festial. It can be found on fols 62v–64r, where it concludes a sermon on penitence designated for the third Sunday after Pentecost (sancte trinitatis). The codex is closely related to three others, all of which record very nearly the same sequence of homilies, two of which are written entirely in the same hand. The sermon that precedes this exemplum also appears in Gloucester Cathedral Library MS 22 (in the second binding), and Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 50. I have been unable to examine these, however, and so cannot verify whether the exemplum (or the same version of it) is appended in these cases.

The e Museo 180 version appears really to be a combination of two common Marian miracle stories, catalogued in the MWME XXIV as ‘Blood on the Penitent Woman's Hand’ and ‘Woman who Committed Incest’. The first type features Christ as the direct intercessor (the blood comes from the wound in his side rather than a murdered infant) and not the Virgin Mary. Analogues of this type can be found twice in both British Library MS Royal 18 B. XXIII and John Mirk's Festial, and in the Gesta Romanorum. One of the versions in Royal 18 B. XXIII is the only analogue I have seen that has the blood on the woman's hand turning into Latin text (or text at all), though the Latin is significantly different and no vernacular translation is provided. The second type, in which the Virgin Mary intercedes to save an incestuous woman from a devil, can be found in British Library MS Additional 39996, the Alphabet of Tales, and Jacob's Well. Only in the latter two has the woman slain a newborn – though Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian analogues of this type do include the slaying of the child – and none of this type mentions blood on the hand or miraculous text.