THE LIFE OF SAINT KATHERINE, BOOK 1: FOOTNOTES

1 Honorable on the battlefield, a peacemaker at home

2 Lines 374-75: If it be studied, there is nothing like / Dialectic for teaching one the difference between right and wrong

3 Lines 391-92: I know no more [geometry] than a cart-maker

4 No moss grew on her, I believe, on account of idleness

5 Once we bound [others]; now we must suffer bonds

6 Lines 554-55: I know this well from Athanasius' account of the foundation

7 Which belong to that family, more than nine or ten

8 Where he agrees [with the old chronicles], I follow him

9 The lineage of heathens does God no honor

10 Lines 893-95: [Without a king] there is no regulation of lords nor of justices: / They arrange the shires, sessions, and the assizes (courts) / Just as it pleases them. Self-interest is disguised as reason

THE LIFE OF SAINT KATHERINE, BOOK 1: NOTES

53-54 Oute of the harde thorn brymbyl-tree / Growyth the fresch rose. "The rose springs from the brier" was a common expression at the time. It was often used to describe saints born of pagan parents. See B. J. Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), R206.

71 keye. Citing Capgrave's usage, the OED ("key," 5) reads,"a place which from the strategic advantages of its position gives its possessor control over the passage into or from a certain district, territory, inland sea, etc."

79-81 hir fredomys . . . grete repayre. Freedoms were the rights and privileges granted to a city. Capgrave is saying that Amalek prospered because it was a good place to conduct business.

100-05 Seynt Mark . . . for to beleve. Eusebius reports Mark's missionary work in Egypt in Book 2 of his Ecclesiastical History.

107-18 Rede Philo . . . I trow not he may. Philo (20 BC-AD 50) was a Jewish exegete who influenced the Alexandrine school of theology. In his De vita contemplativa (On the Contemplative Life), to which Capgrave is probably alluding, Philo describes a large community of contemplative men and women who settled outside Alexandria and who had some of the earmarks of Christian hermits. Eusebius claims these contemplatives were Mark's Christian converts (Ecclesiastical History 2.16-17) - a view that was widely accepted during the Middle Ages. Regardless of whether Philo's ascetics were Christian, Christian monasticism is generally held to have originated in Egypt, when, during the fourth century, men like Katherine's teacher Adrian retreated to the desert to devote themselves to God and wage war against demons through their asceticism. See the prototypical life of St. Anthony, composed by Katherine's putative biographer Athanasius.

127-33 on Pathenus . . . called Stromatum. Pantaenus is the first known head of what would become, under his successors Clement of Alexandria (author of the Stromateis, or Miscellaneous Studies) and Origen, an influential school of theology.

134-47 Thys same Alysaundre . . . mote thei spede. This passage explains why Katherine is known simply as Queen of Alexandria, though her realm encompasses many other cities and lands.

180 fothyr. According to the OED,"used for an enormous quantity, a 'cart-load' of money" (fother, 1c).

182-89 Zacharye and Elysabethe stode . . . in this degré. Capgrave is following the conventional practice of certifying Katherine's holiness by pointing out that her life conforms to familiar Biblical patterns. His allusion is to Luke 1:5-25, 57-59.

201 rose oute of thorne.See note to lines 1.53-54.

213-15 For of that penaunce . . . ful holy men. Christ's mother, Mary, was held to have escaped the normal agonies of childbirth because she was untainted by original sin.

221 Sarcynrye. By Capgrave's day, this and other terms referring to the Muslim faith had come to signify heathendom generally.

227-36 This chyld for to hylle . . . Thus is it kept. Capgrave's attention to the baby Katherine's nurture reflects a widespread interest in childhood during the fifteenth century, when guides on child rearing and stories about children proliferated. For a discussion of the fifteenth century's "fascination with childhood," see Barbara A. Hanawalt, "Narratives of a Nurturing Culture: Parents and Neighbors in Medieval England," in "Of Good and Ill Repute": Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 158-77 (quote on p. 161); and Seth Lerer, "Reading Like a Child: Advisory Aesthetics and Scribal Revision in the Canterbury Tales," in Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 85-116. The contents of one of the MSS containing Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine, British Library MS Arundel 168, evince a particular concern with the education of children. This manuscript includes an alphabet poem, a translation of Benedict Burgh's Distichs of Cato, and two other virgin martyr legends that emphasize the saint's relationship to her parents: William Paris' "Christine" and an anonymous verse life of St. Dorothy. Capgrave evinces his particular interest in nurture in his prose life of St. Augustine, which devotes considerable attention to Monica's troubles raising her unruly son.

246 ff. Thus provyd this princesse. Though more attention was being devoted to women's education in Capgrave's England, the rigorous liberal arts training described below would not have been available to actual women, who were barred from attending such institutions of higher learning as universities. For useful discussions of the education of women in late medieval England, see Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: Hambledon, 1989), pp. 153-75; and Caroline M. Barron, "The Education and Training of Girls in Fifteenth-Century London," in Courts, Counties, and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), pp. 139-53. For a discussion of St. Katherine as a possible model for medieval English girls, see Lewis, "Model Girls?: Virgin-Martyrs and the Training of Young Women in Late Medieval England."

264 as I seyd ere. See Prol., line 144.

270-73 hir play . . . was hir wylle. The saint's aversion to entertainment is a ubiquitous hagiographical convention.

337-64 The kyng dyd make there for hir alone . . . in hir stody thoo. These lines explain why Katherine is so astounded when the hermit Adrian appears in her study in 3.401-06.

379 tawt. MS: tawter

393 astronomye."Astronomy" was in the Middle Ages more like what we would call astrology. The two disciplines were not distinguished in Capgrave's day.

402-27 All the grete clerkys . . . / . . . that there wore. This encounter foreshadows Katherine's debate with the fifty philosophers in Book 4. The pitting of a young woman's intelligence against the craft of clerks occurs also within romance tradition. Compare John Gower's "Tale of the Three Questions," Confessio Amantis 1.3067-3402 and the Tale of Apollonius of Tyre, 8.271-2008. See note to lines 633-35 below. For more on the broader tradition of "disputing women," see Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

441-42 He is logged there with lordys of his kyne / Whech deyd withouten feyth. Medieval theologians generally took a dim view of the fate of a pagan like Costus, who, though a good man, lived after the birth of Christ and, hence, could at least in theory have become a Christian. Gordon Whatley provides a useful survey of medieval views of righteous pagans in "Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in its Legendary Context," Speculum 61 (1986), 330-63.

494 Famagost. Capgrave is translating the city's name as"The fame of Costus," where"Costus" is written with a G instead of a C.

518 no man wyst why. Meliades may be trying to pre-empt an organized opposition to her daughter's ascension. To judge from the laments following Costus' death, many citizens of the realm cannot imagine Katherine as their new monarch (1.454-57).

526 ff. for the kynrode of hir. Technically speaking, the antecedent of "hir" is "the qween" (line 512), Katherine's mother. Hence, it is tempting to see in Capgrave's attention to Meliades's genealogy the same deliberate "focus on women as progenitors of the sacred" that is evident in fifteenth-century representations of the Holy Kinship. See Pamela Sheingorn, "Appropriating the Holy Kinship: Gender and Family History," in Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 169-98 (quote on p. 173). Yet Capgrave's subsequent account of "the kynrode of hir" ends with Costus (line 681)! This inconsistency raises a number of questions: Did Capgrave intend "hir" to mean Katherine all along? Did he merely forget that he had originally intended to rehearse Meliades's genealogy? Does his inconsistency register the same anxieties about issues of family and gender that Sheingorn finds in representations of the Holy Kinship?

619-21 Antiochus . . . Jewes yet him banne. Antiochus' atrocities and ultimate punishment are recorded in 2 Maccabees 4.7-10.9.

633-35 In Appollony of Tyre ye may rede the storye . . . problemes evyn. To avoid losing his daughter/lover, Seleucus devised a riddle for prospective suitors. The man who solved it would win the daughter; those who failed to solve it were executed. For a popular Middle English version of the romance, see Book 8 of Gower's Confessio Amantis.

663 Fortune. See note to lines 1.868-75.

686-93 In this reknyng . . . ordre and degré. A different version of Katherine's genealogy is given in the popular prose Lyf of Seynt Katerine, which shows Katherine's relation through her father to the emperors of Rome. See The Life and Martyrdom of St. Katherine of Alexandria, ed. Henry Hucks Gibbs (London: Nichols, 1884), or "The Life of St. Katherine," trans. Winstead, in Chaste Passions.

701-04 I answere hereto as do Seynt Jerome . . . that was His wylle. See Jerome's Commentary on Matthew (under Matthew 1:1-17).

734 and in halle. Not in MS.

755 Save summe spoke of love. Earthly love is not to anyone's"behove" (line 756) in a saint's legend.

763 puttyng at the ston. A competition to see who could throw a given stone the farthest. Compare"putting the shot" in modern track and field competitions.

788 wit. MS: wyght.

804-12 So was Cornelius . . . thus seye these clerkys. The story of Cornelius is told in Acts 10.

839-40 He may . . . / Make goddes of men. Katherine explains this point in her debate with the philosophers. See 4.2025-32 and my note to line 2032.

868-75 thu blynd Fortune . . . art thou unstable. Fortune was conventionally represented as a lady turning a great wheel set with people (kings, bishops, nobles, etc.), some happily ascending, others losing their crowns as they tumble down. Following Book 2 of Boethius' influential Consolation of Philosophy (AD 524), Christian moralists used Lady Fortune and her wheel to reflect upon the inevitable transience of all earthly pleasures. For a discussion of this theme in fifteenth-century England, see Rosemary Horrox, Introduction, Fifteenth-Century Attitudes, pp. 6-10.

901 To sette the standard the wengys on the syde. A standard is a pole used to display a military emblem. In this case, the sculpted figure of a bird is presumably mounted on the standard and turned so that the enemy can easily see its wings spread. A loose translation would be"And flaunt your battle emblem in the enemy's face."

931-50 that ye wyll have mercye . . . hertys hayle! It might seem that the lords are addressing Meliades in language more appropriate to a courtly lady than to a queen mother. However, rhetoric used in letters addressed to social superiors is suffused with the language of love, as Diane Watt notes in "'No Writing for Writing's Sake': The Language of Service and Household Rhetoric in the Letters of the Paston Women," in Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 126-29.

976-77 To lyve alone in stody, it was nevyr seyn / That ony lady ony tyme dyd so. Though I know of no English examples, a number of Italian women chose to forgo marriage in favor of a life devoted to scholarship. See Margaret L. King, "Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance," Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), pp. 66-90. Many medieval Englishwomen would, however, have appreciated Katherine's reluctance to give up the freedom that a single woman enjoyed. Records from the 1377 poll tax indicate that at least 30% of adult women in England had never been married. See Maryanne Kowaleski, "Singlewomen in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective," in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 46. Moreover, evidence suggests that when working conditions were good for women, they delayed marriage. See P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300-1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 360-61.