The Appendices

Summary

Appendix 1 and Appendix 2 contain transcriptions of two previously unpublished narratives concerning St Helena. The first is a long Latin prose vita of St Helena by Jocelin of Furness, the early-thirteenth-century writer of a well known Vita sancti Patricii and other hagiographies. The second transcribed text is a short, anonymous poetic treatment of her biography from three manuscripts of the South English Legendary, a thirteenth-century collection of versified saints' lives in Middle English. These texts are made available here both as witnesses of the popularity and diversity of legendary accounts of Helena in the central Middle Ages, and also to demonstrate the degree to which her story became bound up with those of her son, Constantine, and his legendary baptizer, Pope Silvester. Because their prime value in this context is their existence and their narrative content, the following transcriptions are conservative. Editorial emendation has been kept to a minimum to reproduce as close as possible the way the texts read in the original manuscripts.