The Old English Life of St Margaret in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii: Sources and Relationships

This essay deals with the rendition of the most sensational scene of St Margaret’s legend – the one where the imprisoned saint has two subsequent encounters with the devil, first in the shape of a dragon and, secondly, of a small black demon – in the Old English version of the Life of St Margaret attested in ms. London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii, ff. 2-173 (s. ximed, Canterbury, CC). Within the vast Anglo-Saxon tradition of St Margaret’s legend, the Tiberius Life is the one that best preserves the emphasis on the saint’s conflict with the devil and ultimately conveys a vision of sanctity in which the devil plays a defining role as ‘saint-maker’. More specifically, the Tiberius text is the only one among the Old English renditions of the Life of St Margaret that retains the most iconic feature of the saint’s legend, i.e. the swallowing of the saint by her first demonic contender, the dragon. Previous scholarship has been investigating the imagery of St Margaret’s dragon for nearly a century, pointing out both general and specific analogues in a vast corpus of early apocryphal literature of Eastern origin. This paper will put forward a possible ultimate source-text in yet another Eastern apocryphon, the so-called Seven Heavens Apocryphon, thereby hoping to contribute to an ever more detailed mapping of the cultural milieu of St Margaret’s legend and to a better understanding of its Anglo-Saxon elaborations. Also, it will be brought more sharply into focus a defining element of this legend (and perhaps one of the main reasons for its appeal in early medieval England), namely the combination of apocryphal eschatology and demonology, on the one hand, and some of the most iconic narrative and demonological topoi of the hagiographies of the Desert Fathers, on the other. An analysis of the manuscript context of the Tiberius Life of St Margaret will show that, contrary to the familiar narrative of the Benedictine Reform, a sensational, apocrypha-imbued hagiography such as St Margaret’s was fully integral to the reformers’ pastoral programme as well as to their restorative, retrospective drive to restate the most crucial values of monastic spirituality and Christian sanctity by appropriating the legacy of the Desert Fathers.