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The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England. By Mary Clayton. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xii + 355 pp. $69.95 cloth.
This book consists primarily of critical editions of three Old English texts, presented together with English translations and commentary. The first of these is the Old English version of the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew, while the others are both homilies for the feast of the Assumption, from manuscripts dated to around the eleventh to twelfth centuries. Although each of these texts has been edited previously, Clayton explains the need for her re-edition on the basis that two of these editions were made in the nineteenth century and therefore do not include all of the now available manuscript witnesses. Two appendices supply Latin texts of the Protevangelium of James and the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew, as well as two early Latin Dormition narratives, the Transitus of pseudo-Melito and an abbreviated version of the so-called Transitus W, which are provided for comparison with the Old English versions. The volume begins, however, with a substantial introduction, much of which surveys the scholarship on early Marian apocrypha, and on the Dormition traditions in particular. My expertise being more in the latter area than in the intricacies of Old English philology (of which I am innocent), I will direct my comments primarily to this segment of Clayton's work.
In the roughly one hundred pages of this study that focus on the early Marian apocrypha, Clayton presents one of the better introductions to these traditions presently available. Although there is...