[1564] Lydgate’s Temple of Glas, ed. J. Schick (E.E.T.S. 1891), p. 8.
[1565] The Kingis Quair in Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. G. Eyre-Todd (1892), p. 47.
[1566] Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits, by Sir David Lyndesay, ed. Small, Hall and Murray (E.E.T.S., 2nd ed., 1883), p. 514.
“And seis thou now yone multitude, on rawe
Standing behynd yon trauerse of delyte?
Sum bene of thayme that haldin were full lawe
And take by frendis, nothing thay to wyte,
In youth from bye into the cloistre quite;
And for that cause are cummyn, recounsilit,
On thame to pleyne that so thame had begilit.”
[1567] An Alphabet of Tales, ed. M. M. Banks (E.E.T.S.). No. CCCCLXVIII, pp. 319-20. (In this and the following quotations from this work in this chapter I have modernised the spelling.) This version is translated from Caesarius of Heisterbach. Dial. Mirac., ed. Strange, II, pp. 42-3, which is the original version of all the widespread legends on this theme. From Caesarius it found its way into many other collections of miracles, in prose and in verse, in Latin, French, Spanish, German, Icelandic, Dutch and English. Perhaps the most beautiful is the Dutch poem (c. 1320) published by W. J. A. Jenckbloet, Beatriij (Amsterdam, 1846-59) and re-edited with a grammatical introduction and notes in English by A. J. Barnouw (Pub. of Philol. Soc. III, 1914). An edition with illustrations by Ch. Doudelet accompanied by a translation into French by H. de Marez was published in Antwerp (1901) and was also issued with an English translation by A. W. Sanders vaz Loo. The best English translations are those in prose by L. Simons and L. Housman in The Pageant, ed. C. H. Shannon and J. W. Gleeson White (1896) pp. 95-116 and in verse by H. de Wolf Fuller (Harvard Coop. Soc., Cambridge, U.S.A. 1910). Modern writers have retold the tale almost as often as their medieval forebears; see for example Maeterlinck’s play, Sœur Béatrice, John Davidson’s poem, The Ballad of a Nun, one of Villier de l’Isle-Adam’s Contes Cruels (Sœur Natalia), one of Charles Nodier’s Contes de la Veillée (La Légende de Sœur Béatrice), and one of Gottfried Keller’s Sieben Legenden (Die Jungfrau und die Nonne). For a study of the Beatrice story see Heinrich Watenphul, Die Geschichte der Marienlegende von Beatrix der Küsterin (Neuwied, 1904); also P. Toldo, Die Sakristanin (with bibliography by J. Bolte) in Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde (1905), J. van der Elst, Bijdrage tot de Geschiedenis der Legende van Beatrijs in Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Taal- en Letterkunde, XXXII, pp. 51 ff., and Mussafia, Studien zu den Mittelalterlichen Marienlegenden (Vienna, 1887), I, p. 73. See also A. Cotarelo y Valledor, Una Cantiga celebre del Rey Sabio, fuentes y desarollo de la leyenda de sor Beatriz, principalmente en la literatura española (1914). For other variants of the Nonne Enlevée see below, [Note J].
[1568] Chambers and Sidgwick, Early English Lyrics (1907), No. XC, p. 163. But perhaps the most beautiful of medieval English poems which moralise on this theme is the Luue Ron which Thomas of Hales wrote in the thirteenth century for a nun:
“Hwer is Paris and Heleyne
That weren so bryght and feyre on bleo?
Amadas, Tristram and Dideyne,
Yseude and alle theo,
Ector with his scharpe meyne,
And Cesar riche of worldes feo?
Heo beoth iglyden ut of the reyne,
So the scheft is of the cleo,”
—they have passed away as a shaft from the bowstring. It is as if they had never lived. All their heat is turned to cold. (An Old English Miscellany, ed. R. Morris (E.E.T.S. 1872), p. 95.) This catalogue of the lovely dead was a favourite device, immortalised later by “ung povre petit escollier, qui fust nommé Francoys Villon” (who certainly was not a moralist) in his Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis.
[1569] For an entertaining and stimulating account of the popular cult of the Virgin see Henry Adams, Mont St Michel and Chartres (1913), especially chs. VI and XIII.
[1570] Modern poets who have written upon the same theme have drawn this moral more overtly than the medieval authors. Maeterlinck’s Virgin in Sœur Béatrice sings: