Augustine and Monica in the Abbotsford Legenda Aurea

Abstract

The following piece will represent the first in-depth evaluation of the lives of Saint Augustine and his mother Monica in the as-yet unpublished Abbotsford manuscript, Bokenham’s long-lost translation of the Legenda Aurea, a text which survives in a single manuscript, purchased by Sir Walter Scott at Sotheby’s in 1809, which had remained unattributed and unstudied until it was brought to the attention of Simon Horobin by the Faculty of Advocates in 2004 (Horobin 2008: 135). As a celebration of the remarkable piety of a wife and mother (as opposed to a virgin martyr), it is a highly unusual hagiographic text and would have presented a particularly accessible model of spirituality to the network of powerful lay female patrons by whom we know Bokenham to have been employed. I will argue that Bokenham’s vita espouses an incarnational Augustinian poetics which is at odds with the more ascetic, eremitical vision of the original Legenda Aurea.Keywords: Osbern Bokenham; Abbotsford Legenda Aurea; Augustine; Monica; hagiography