A Note on the Manuscripts

There are more than fifty extant manuscripts of the South English Legendary. Its earliest form dates c.1270–1285, and the earliest example (in Bodleian, MS Laud Misc. 108) is not much later. The number of items in a full Legendary varies considerably, but the majority (excluding fragments) includes a series of six Miracles of the Virgin, which are appended to the ‘Life of Theophilus’ (see Chapter 3). The story of the founding of the Conception is separate from these, extant in only four late examples, all of which date between the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth century. These are: Bodleian Library MS Bodley 779, fols 244v–245v (hereafter ‘B’); Lambeth Palace Library MS 223, fols 31v–33r (hereafter ‘L’); British Library MS Stowe 949, fols 100v–102r (hereafter ‘S’); and Bodleian Library MS Eng. Poet. a. 1, fols 6v–7r (the Vernon Manuscript, hereafter ‘V’). I have had the opportunity to examine B and S in situ, and L and V in facsimile. The Conception legend comprises a prologue to apocryphal narratives of the Virgin Mary's birth and life in all but S, where it concludes the apocryphal story. I print S here, however, since the most significant variants tend to be different from each other or take the form of additions to S, which appears to be the earliest of the four. I amend in S only obvious errors, and I note only additions or variants that may change meaning or emphasis; I have not noted orthographic variants, minor changes in word order or (added or omitted but not grammatically influential) pronouns, nor have I noted substitutions of very common synonyms. Abbreviations are silently expanded and punctuation and capitalization altered for ease of reading.