Eve of Wilton

Building upon the efforts made by scholars over the past twenty years to enrich our understanding of the vibrancy and sophistication of literary cultures fostered within English communities of women religious during the central Middle Ages, this article offers evidence of these women keeping their communities’ histories and preserving their saints’ cults through their own writing. This evidence is uncovered through comparative analysis of the two extant versions of the post-mortem miracula of the late Anglo-Saxon saint, Edith of Wilton (c.961–c.984): the vita et translatio Edithe composed by the Flemish hagiographer Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c.1040–d. after 1107) circa 1080 and the early fifteenth-century Middle English Wilton Chronicle. This analysis not only confirms that the Wilton women provided the necessary patronage and oral and written reports for the authoring of their saint’s life and miracles, but also discloses the very histories that these women first recorded.

Alison Altstatt, University of Northern Iowa
“Re-membering the Wilton Processional”
Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association  v. 72, no. 4 (June 2016), 690-732.
PDF available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/616937

This study identifies thirty-four leaves of a lost manuscript processional from Wilton Abbey, a Benedictine convent and the premiere center of noble women’s education in medieval England. The manuscript was copied circa 1860 by Paul Jausions of the Abbey of Solesmes, which later played a central role in the development of chant scholarship, the restoration of liturgical chant practice, and the creation of modern performing editions. While the original manuscript subsequently disappeared, Jausions’s copy has been preserved as Abbaye St-Pierre-de-Solesmes, Atelier de Paléographie musicale no° 596, where it is known as the “Rollington Processional.”
I show that the processional was dismembered and sold by American manuscript dealer Otto F. Ege circa 1948. Ege included leaves of the manuscript as example no. 8 in copies of the portfolio Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts, Western Europe, XII-XVI Century and sold the remaining leaves individually. Focusing on selected leaves, including one previously undocumented example at the University of Iowa, I describe distinctive characteristics of the manuscript’s physical layout, text, music, and the elements that localize its provenance to Wilton Abbey. The recovery of the processional’s leaves provides direct primary evidence of the poetic, ritual and musical culture of Wilton Abbey, and allows insight into Jausion’s principles of transcription, rendering his copy a more useful surrogate for those leaves still missing. It furthermore reintegrates the two ways in which the manuscript was transmitted, received, and studied, allowing for a more complete consideration of the book as both text and material object.

What changed in the course of the twelfth century from the standpoint of women as readers, writers, and participants in literate culture? This article offers three interrelated answers: (1) the emergence of the anchoress as a figure of idealized interiority, and thus an ideal reader; (2) the development of new styles of relationship between religious men and women, along with new literary genres to express them; and (3) the transition from an older monastic humanism to a new culture of vernacular mysticism and prophecy. Liminality, or "standing on the threshold," serves as a crucial metaphor because enclosure, the marking and sealing of boundaries, was such a vital symbolic practice in women's religious life.