The Legend of Marie of Oignies and its Early Dissemination in the North

Marie of Oignies (Maria Oigniacensis) was a mulier religiosa who lived in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in the southern Low Countries. Upon her death, she was immortalised by the cleric Jacques of Vitry, who wrote the Vita beatae Mariae Oigniacensis in c. 1215. Her Vita became rather well known and would also reach the North, where manuscripts containing abridged Old Norse translations of the text can be found. The oldest of these is believed to be the fourteenth-century fragment AM 240 fol. IV, which can be traced back to Iceland. This study places the vernacular vita of Marie of Oignies within a tradition of Maríu sögur and the practices of the North Icelandic Benedictine school during the golden age of manuscript production. For the first time, it identifies Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale as a source for the Old Norse translation of Marie’s life. Thus, the article furthers our understanding of both the dissemination of Marie of Oignies’s life and the religious literary milieu of fourteenth-century Iceland.