A Note on the Manuscript

British Library MS Additional 37049 is a mid- to late fifteenth-century religious miscellany of Carthusian English (probably northern) provenance. All of its texts are in English, with occasional macaronic verses and prayers, and it is heavily illustrated with colorful and amateurish (though not unbeautiful) drawings in a style indicative ‘of informal rather than liturgical devotion’. Both its texts and illustrations, which must be read together, are primarily concerned with the suffering of Christ, the fate of the body and soul after death, and the role of the Virgin Mary in Christian salvation. Douglas Gray has called it ‘an English vernacular example of a “spiritual encyclopedia of the later Middle Ages”’, and Jessica Brantley has published a very learned book on the entire codex, though discussion of the Marian miracles printed here are not a part of it (for which see my analysis in Chapter 4). Plates of its illustrations are now widely accessible, both in Brantley's book and in James Hogg's work, but many of its shorter texts remain unedited.

The texts printed here are: a group of three brief notices on the face and name of the Virgin Mary (fol. 21r–v), including a ‘Note on the Beauty of the Virgin’ (fol. 21r), a ‘Rhapsody on the Name of Mary’ (fol. 21v), and the ‘Tale of the Lazy Servant of St Anselm’ (fol. 21v); a ‘Marian Miracle of a Clerk’ (fol. 27r); and seven Miracles of the Virgin that appear together near the end of the manuscript (fols 94r–95v). The ‘Marian Miracle of a Clerk’, which concerns a clerk who questions the quality of an icon painted by St Luke, appears also in Wynkyn de Worde's late fifteenth-century collection Myracles of Oure Lady and has been edited by Peter Whiteford in that context, but there are notable differences between that version and the one here.

The final seven consecutive prose Marian miracles form a unit that I call the Charter Group.