The best scholarship on saints’ cults is built upon painstaking primary-source research, and Juliana Dresvina has laid that groundwork for the cult of St. Margaret of Antioch. The Maid with a Dragon provides future scholars with an invaluable handbook to Margaret's widespread cult in England. By cataloguing every known Greek, Latin, English, and Anglo-French life of Margaret, editing previously unedited lives, and providing detailed information on Margaret's liturgical and visual commemoration, The Maid with a Dragon has opened up every facet of Margaret's English cult to further analysis.
The book is broken into three sections, each partly independent of the others. Part 1, “Textual traditions of the legend of St. Margaret,” is a gazetteer of Margaret's vitae and cult. Part 2, “Motifs and iconography of the legend of St. Margaret,” traces the evolution of different themes in Margaret's vitae and provides an overview of Margaret's iconography. The volume's final section contains the appendices. Appendix 1 provides an exhaustive list of Margaret's vitae, and Appendices 2 through 4 provide information on Margaret's iconography (and are supported by forty-six full color figures that fall after page 176).
Part 1 and appendix 1 present an overview each version of Margaret's vita, its relationship to prior versions, and its idiosyncratic features, with some consideration of manuscript context. Part 1 is broken into chapters based on language and shared sources, allowing Dresvina to discuss related texts in a coherent fashion; two interludes consider the spread of Margaret's cult up to the thirteenth century and again in the later Middle Ages. These chapters refer constantly to appendix 1, which lists chronologically every medieval life of Margaret in Greek, Latin, French, and English. The appendix also edits and translates previously unavailable vitae. While information about some lives is already available (for example, for the Old English lives and the Middle English life from the Katherine Group), some is not (as for the earliest Greek and Latin vitae or for understudied prose Middle English lives). Dresvina is to be especially applauded for discussing Margaret's appearance in the liturgy: in monastic calendars, in the lectiones for Margaret's feast day in English breviaries, and in common suffrages for Margaret in Books of Hours. These are the aspects of any cult that literary scholars often ignore, even though they had the most circulation among professional religious and laity.
Part 2 is broken into two sections: three chapters that analyze the stable features of Margaret's cult (her virginity, tortures, and interactions with demons) and a lengthy chapter on Margaret's iconography. In her analysis of Margaret's tortures, Dresvina details the juridical context, Roman and medieval, for the tortures that Margaret undergoes, providing a corrective to scholarship that overemphasizes Margaret's (and other virgin martyrs') tortures. The chapter on demonology considers the origins of the demonology episodes in the earliest Greek and Latin lives and attends to their evolution in the later lives.
The lengthy chapter on Margaret's iconography is supported by the color plates and appendices 2–4. As with the consideration of the Greek and Latin underpinnings of Margaret's vitae in part one, Dresvina examines the Roman (imperial and early Christian) iconographic roots of Margaret's major symbols here. She assesses the evolution of those symbols, the relationship (or lack thereof) between her vitae and medieval images, and the pictorial cycles. Although this section does not provide as comprehensive a survey of Margaret's visual representations, it is thorough, providing evidence from every artistic medium and considering minor motifs as well as major ones.
The volume's strengths lie in the way it marshals so much cultic material, its deft relating of later texts and images to earlier sources, and its publication and assessment of Margaret's lesser-known vitae and images. Some moments of analysis are more suggestive than conclusive. The last section of chapter 12 considers the folkloric motifs in Margaret's life, an intriguing comparison that nevertheless does not provide a better understanding of Margaret's vitae. Similarly, claims that Margaret's cult was more fully developed in England than on the Continent are not well supported in this volume, but they do invite scholars to examine Margaret's cult from the other side of the Channel.
In a book that covers such a broad range of material and organizes voluminous data into usable form, the reader inevitably identifies desiderata. An independent list of sigla for the different versions of Margaret's life would have helped the reader more easily move between the chapters on Margaret's vitae in part 1 and the chronologically arranged information in appendix 1. Sometimes quotations in part 1 are translated into modern English, but usually not; the decision not to provide translations will reduce this volume's utility for one of its major audiences, students.
Finally—a major flaw in an otherwise outstanding study—Dresvina has entirely neglected the Welsh and Irish vitae, both Latin versions from those regions and vernacular lives. Any book that claims exhaustiveness needs to engage the other British vernaculars to ensure a truly holistic understanding of Margaret's insular cult.
These issues notwithstanding, A Maid with a Dragon will open up Margaret's cult to further research, encouraging scholarship on its lesser studied aspects and facilitating nuanced analysis of other virgin martyr saints’ lives, in England and beyond.
