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The Legend Of St. Katherine Of Alexandria
The Legend Of St Katherine Of Alexandria Author:James Morton THE LEGAND OF ST. KATHERINE OF ALEXANDRIA. -- PREFACE . THE following poetic Legend, now first printed, is contained in JIS. Bibl. Cotton. Titus D. xviii. a small quarto volunle in Gothic characters up011 vellum. Among other contemporaneous works Fourid up with it in the same volume are two hon ilies, and a copy, wanti tgh e hr ginning, of Insti... more »tutiones Monialium Ordinis Stl Jacobi, veteri lingua Anglicana from another copy of which, Nero A. xiv. passages illu-trating the present work are quoted ill the Notes and Glossary. Thr various readings are from PIIS. Bibl. Iteg. 17. A. xxvii. a srnnll quarto volume in Roman characters in wliicl a re also tlle Legend of St. JIargaret, and that of St. Juliana, both of which are quoted in tlic Note. and Glossary, and, if we may judge from the repeated usc of tlie snnlc ex jressions and similar turns of thought in each, seem not unlikely to have been written by the author of the present work. Who the author was, the Editor has not been able to discover. language is apparently that of the reign of Stephe11 or Henry 11, ant1 may be termed Semi-Saxon, as exhibiting the intermetliate state of the English, when passing out of the pure Anglo-Saxon into the more mixed fonn in which it appears, two hundred and fifty years later, in the writings of Gower and Chaucer. The RfS. in both copies is written continuously as prose, without any graphic marks to distinguish it as a poetical composition that such is, however, its character, is sufficiently manifest from the style, and the almost constant use of alliteration. The latter is, indeed, in many places very imperfect the work being evidently remodelled from an Anglo-Saxon . original, at a period when the ancient mode of versification was beginning to be laid aside, and to give way to the fashion of rhyming, introduced by the Norman minstrels. The substitution of words the same in sense, but dissimilar in sound, for such as had become obsolete, would break the regularity of the verse, which appears to have been further defaced by interpolation and periphrasis...« less