St Patrick’s Purgatory

Containing four texts, this volume collates all the major Middle English accounts of otherworld visions seen at St Patrick’s Purgatory. It presents a rare edition of Owayne Miles from the Auchinleck manuscript, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19.2.1., and the couplet version from BL Ms Cotton Caligula A ii and Yale University Library, MS 365 The Book of Brome . It also includes the first parallel-text edition of the two extant manuscripts of the early 15th-century prose Vision of William of Stranton, from BL MSS Royal 17 B xliii and Additional 34193. The long version of the late 12th-century Latin prose Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii is edited in full from three of the earliest manuscripts: Lambeth Palace Library MS 51, BL MS Royal 13 B viii, and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, MS 50. It includes an introduction, commentary on all the texts, and a full Middle English glossary.