The Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt: An Edition of the Old English Text with Modern English Parallel-Text Translation. By Hugh Magennis. Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 260. $22.95.

St. Mary of Egypt (BHL 5415–5421) and her medieval Western hagiography have attracted a great deal more attention in recent years than previously. A new anthology of essays, The Legend of Mary of Egypt in Medieval Insular Hagiography, ed. E. Poppe and B. Ross (Blackrock, 1996), examined the dimensions of the saint's literary cult in Irish, Old English, Old Norse, Middle Welsh, Middle English, and Anglo-Norman contexts, and a raft of separate articles have more recently concentrated on literary interpretations and individual motifs of this tradition. Among these shorter studies is Hugh Magennis's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven: Humorous Incongruity in Old English Saints' Lives," in Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. J. Wilcox (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 137–57, in a slim volume attempting to trace whatever sense of humor there is in the work of Anglo-Saxon authors and translators.

Christine Rauer
University of St. Andrews