sei me hwi þu forsakest; þi sy ant ti selhðe.
þe weolen ant te wunnen; þe walden awakenen.
ant waxen of þe wedlac; þet ich reade þe to.
hit nis nan eðelich þing; þe refschipe of rome.
ant tu maht ȝef þu wult; beon burhene leafdi.
ant of alle þe londes; þe þerto liggeð.
This has the right swing, and its slightly faulty alliteration could easily be mended, yet Saint Juliana is not verse. In SK, HM, AR, and SW we can observe a gradual and progressive diminution of this borrowed matter, but the verse cadences persist to the end.
[Introduction:] Einenkel, in the preface to his edition of Saint Katherine, claims to have proved that Saint Juliana and Saint Margaret were written by one author, Saint Katherine by another, and Hali Meidenhad by a third. His proof rests largely on the untenable assumption that a Middle English author, whatever the length of his literary career, or the changes in his environment, or the nature of his subject, by reason of his unbending ‘individuality’ did not vary in his vocabulary, phrases, or turns of expression. So if words in sufficient number occur often in one writing and seldom or not at all in another, if the percentage of the foreign element is not similar, if the synonyms for abstract notions like joy and sorrow, luck and mishap are not the same, the compositions must be the work of different authors. Of far other significance are the unity, not uniformity, of style which pervades the whole group in orderly and natural development, the unity of subject, that is, the praise of virginity and its superior virtue over other states of life, the recurrence of a considerable number of characteristic words, phrases, and constructions found seldom or never outside the group, the presence throughout of a pronounced Scandinavian element testifying at least to a common dialect of origin.
As has already (p. 376) been suggested, this literature is best understood as a product of the Gilbertine movement. The lives of the female saints, of whom two resist marriage and the other says of Christ ‘He haueð iweddet him to mi meiðhad,’ were suitable reading for the Gilbertine nuns, and the anchoresses, for whom the Ancrene Wisse was written, had a copy at least of Saint Margaret. Hali Meidenhad was probably occasioned by the affair of the nun at Watton, one of Gilbert’s foundations, which is related by Gilbert’s friend, Ailred of Rievaulx, in what is one of the most extraordinary revelations of the mediaeval clerical mind on the subject of the single life: it shows us the younger nuns of Watton far outdoing in ferocity their exemplar Saint Juliana, and helps to the understanding of the sentiment in Hali Meidenhad, which is so distasteful and even revolting to modern feeling that some have thought it impossible that the author of the mild wisdom of the Ancrene Wisse could have any part in it. But it must be observed that much of the abusive language about the married state in Hali Meidenhad is not original, some of it is as old as S. Jerome, and no one is so likely to have written the treatise as the enthusiastic founder of an order of nuns.
The writer has already used the main idea of the allegory in the Ancrene Wisse (M 172, 271). The parallelism pointed out in the note on l. 82 of Sawles Warde is another indication of common authorship; it is not like a borrowing, nor can it be accounted for by independent use of the curt Latin original. Finally, the passage 125/268-278 in glorification of the ‘feire ferreden of uirgines in heouene,’ SK 2309, which is an addition of the author’s, strikes the dominant note of all his works.