For the latest in Brepols’ series of medieval texts by and about women, Dockray-Miller (English, Lesley University) has edited and translated two Middle English saint’s lives composed at Wilton
Abbey around the year 1420. The women commemorated are the Anglo-Saxon princesses, Edith and Æthelthryth, both of whom fled the court to enter monastic life. Dockray-Miller’s introduction puts
the lives in the double perspective of the pre-conquest time in which the women lived and the fifteenth century, the time in which they were written, when England was reaching back to its
pre-Norman Conquest roots to create a national identity. In the translations she has wisely refrained from over-editing, letting the redundancies and oddities of speech remain, thus giving the
modern reader more of a sense of the original. A glossary is provided along with a critical bibliography. Distributed in North America by the David Brown Book Co. Annotation ©2010 Book News,
Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
