THIS CHAPTER WILL examine a text from London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian D. xiv, using it as a test-case for how scholars understand anonymity and authorship, originality and dependency, and translation and adaptation in this period. It is common to privilege literature of known authors; to privilege original texts, rather than later instantiations; and texts that are faithfully rendered through translation rather than adaptation. The homily by Ralph D’Escures for the Virgin Mary was a contemporary text for the compiler of Vespasian D. xiv in his mid-twelfth-century Christ Church manuscript and was included in a newly made English translation. It is edited in full at the end of this chapter, and it clearly unsettles the categories of literary production that are most favoured in the modern academy by being simultaneously ordinary yet startling; new but old; and dependent yet thoroughly different by virtue of its specific manuscript context and physical manifestation. Its audiences may have been varied, too; certainly, the manuscript made its way from Christ Church Canterbury into female ownership later in the twelfth century.

Original versus Copy

Each version of a medieval text, whether it was originally composed in the late tenth century or composed in English following an English exemplar in the late eleventh century, or composed as a translation from Latin into English in the twelfth, is a witness to a deliberate creative act specific to its own place and time. Numerous representations of anonymous sermons or homilies of the late Old English writer Wulfstan I, Archbishop of York, and the monastic author Ælfric are incorporated into post-Conquest manuscripts, and usually shown only through the critical apparatus at the foot of the page of scholarly editions. In this presentation, these texts are fragmented into variants—selected spelling differences or lexical differences in the later texts as compared with earlier versions of that text.