Introduction

According to a tradition that can be traced back to the sixth century, Mary of Egypt lived a dissolute life in Alexandria before repenting in front of an icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Jerusalem. She spent the rest of her life as a hermit in the desert, telling her story to a monk named Zosimus before she died. The setting for her story is the fifth or sixth century and she is said to have died on a Good Friday, on the first or second of April (Stevenson 1996a: 21 and ibid. n15). Her feast-day is celebrated on the fifth Sunday in Lent or 1 April in the East, and, in the West, usually on 2 April (or on 3, 9 or 10 April) (ODCC⁴ 1055; Kouli 1996: 68). Her story, originally written in Greek, became popular in Europe and in eastern Mediterranean lands in the Middle Ages and there are many versions in languages including Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Slavonic, Latin, French, Anglo-Norman, German, Dutch, Norse, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as Welsh, English, Scots and Irish (Kouli 1996: 67–8; Poppe and Ross 1996: passim; Magennis 2002: 12). Mary of Egypt seems sometimes to have been associated with or confused with Mary Magdalene, in consequence of the similarity both in their names and in certain elements in the traditions surrounding them (Cartwright 2008: 129–30).

The story of Mary of Egypt seems to have originated in an episode from the sixth-century Life of Kyriakos, attributed to Cyril of Scythopolis; this Life’s Mary was a harpist (psaltria) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, but she became instead a prostitute from Alexandria when the story was adapted to create the Greek Life of Mary of Egypt, probably in the late-sixth or seventh century (Stevenson 1996a: 20–1; Kouli 1996: 65–6; for an edition and translation of Mary’s Greek Life, see Migne 1857–67: col. 3697–726; Kouli 1996).The attribution of this Life to Sophronius of Jerusalem (c.560–638) is not widely accepted in recent scholarship, but for the sake of convenience his name is still used to refer to it (Kouli 1996: 66; Magennis 2002: 3). The ‘Sophronian’ Life of Mary of Egypt is much more detailed than the original brief episode and gives great prominence to Zosimus, who replaces the earlier text’s ‘abba John’ (a disciple of Kyriakos) as the monk who encounters Mary in the desert and to whom she relates her story (Stevenson 1996a: 20–40). The name ‘Zosimus’ may derive from Pratum Spirituale (the ‘Spiritual Meadow’), a collection of stories concerning the holy men and women of Palestine by John Moschus, and this text may also have been a source for other elements in the Life (Stevenson 1996a: 30–3; Kouli 1996: 65–6). Other sources that appear to have influenced the ‘Sophronian’ Life of Mary of Egypt are Ezekiel 23.2–3, St Jerome’s Vita Pauli and Apopthegmata Patrum, a collection of stories about, and sayings by, the Desert Fathers (Stevenson 1996a: 21, 24, 29, 33–4).

The Greek Life of Mary of Egypt proved popular and a number of translations were made; amongst the Latin versions, the ninth-century Vita Sanctae Mariae Egyptiacae of Paul, a deacon of Naples, was particularly influential, providing the direct or indirect source of many later versions of the Life (Magennis 2002: 3, 10–12; for an edited text and translation, see ibid. 139–209; also Stevenson 1996b). Amongst these is an anonymous Old English version, closely based on Paul’s Vita and probably dating from the tenth century (Magennis 2002: 3, 12, 23; an edition and modern English rendering is presented ibid. 57–121). Mary of Egypt’s cult may have been brought to England much earlier, however, by the Greek archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus (602–90) (Magennis 2002: 12). Her feast-day is noted in almost half of the surviving calendars from Anglo-Saxon England, and it appears that her cult was particularly strong in the south-west (Lavery 1996a: 113). There is also evidence that her feast-day was commemorated in Northumbria, perhaps as early as the late seventh century (ibid.).

In the first half of the twelfth century a brief, simplified version of the Life of Mary of Egypt, deriving from Paul of Naples’s Vita, was composed by Dominic, a monk and prior from Evesham, Worcestershire, as part of a book of miracles concerning the Virgin Mary (Stevenson 1996a: 46–7). Dominic’s Latin text provided the source for the Welsh Life of Mary of Egypt (see below) and was consulted by the twelfth-century English historian William of Malmesbury as he composed his own, more detailed version of Mary of Egypt’s Life, also drawing directly upon a version of Paul of Naples’s earlier Vita (Stevenson 1996a: 47–8; Thomson and Winterbottom 2015: 108). It seems a verse version of the Life by Hildebert of Lavardin (bishop of Le Mans and archbishop of Tours, d. 1133; see ODCC⁴ 774–5) was well known in England in this period as well (Stevenson 1996a: 42 and ibid. n112). In the second half of the thirteenth century Jacobus de Voragine inc