The first English translation of the earliest Latin poems about miracles performed by the Virgin Mary, composed in twelfth-century Canterbury by a Benedictine monk who inspired Chaucer.

Nigel (ca. 1135–1198), a Benedictine monk at Christ Church in Canterbury, is best known for The Mirror of Fools—a popular satire whose hero Burnellus the Ass is referenced in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Nigel’s oeuvre also includes other important poems and hagiography.

The Miracles of the Virgin is the oldest Latin poem about miracles performed by Mary. This collection features seventeen lively tales in which the Virgin rescues a disappointed administrator from a pact with the devil, has a Roman emperor killed by a long-dead martyr, saves a Jewish boy from being burned alive, and shields an abbess from the shame of pregnancy. Each story illustrates the boundlessness of Mary’s mercy. In the Tract on Abuses, a letter that resembles a religious pamphlet, Nigel rails against ecclesiastical corruption and worldly entanglements.

Alongside authoritative editions of the Latin texts, this volume offers the first translations of both works into English.

Composed in Germany by a monastic poet steeped in classical lore and letters, the Satires of Amarcius (Sextus Amarcius Gallus Piosistratus) unrelentingly attack both secular vices and ecclesiastical abuses of the late eleventh century. The verses echo Horace and Prudentius, are laced with proverbs and polemic, and portray vividly aspects of contemporary life—the foppery of young nobles, the vainglory of the nouveaux riches, the fastidiousness of debauched gluttons. This is the first English translation of the Satires.

The Eupolemius is a late-eleventh-century Latin epic that recasts salvation history, from Lucifer’s fall through Christ’s resurrection. The poem fuses Greek and Hebrew components within a uniquely medieval framework. At once biblical, heroic, and allegorical, it complements the so-called Bible epics in Latin from late antiquity and the refashionings of biblical narrative in Old English verse. It emulates classical Latin epics by Virgil, Lucan, and Statius and responds creatively to the foundational personification allegory by the Christian poet Prudentius. The poem was composed by an anonymous German monk, possibly the author who used the pseudonym Amarcius. Although it focuses on events of both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, it is also rooted in its own momentous times.