Battling the devil: St Margaret in the Early Middle English Seinte Margarete

Abstract

St Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular female saints in medieval England and a considerable number of both Latin and vernacular versions of her legend originated or circulated in England from the Old English Martyrology up to Caxton’s Golden Legend. The most salient feature of St Margaret’s life has been pinpointed in the scene in which the imprisoned saint has two subsequent encounters with the devil, first in the shape of a dragon, secondly in the shape of a small black demon. This paper will focus on the crucial scene of the dragon’s swallowing of the saint in Seinte Margarete, an early 13th-century alliterative prose life from the Katherine Group. Seinte Margarete re-enacts the familiar narrative of the virgin martyr in a pronounced emotional way, in that, while the narrative follows quite closely the Latin antecedent, the sensorial and impressionistic elements of the source-text are emphasised. By a close contrastive analysis of the Middle English text, its putative Latin antecedents, and the two Old English versions of the Life of St Margaret, this essay proposes to highlight the dynamic tension between conservation and innovation in the (self-)representation of the saint as well as outlining the emergence of new paradigms of sanctity in Anglo-Norman England.