Translating the Legenda aurea in Early Modern England

To its admirers, the Legenda aurea is a powerful expression of medieval belief. To the evangelical pamphleteers of early modern England, it was a symbol of all the failings of unreformed religion. For historians, it is a convenient shorthand for popular hagiography before the Reformation. These readings, however, understate the Legenda's often ambiguous place in early modern devotional life. This article seeks to complicate the Legenda's history in late medieval and early modern England. It argues that the concept and the act of translation rendered Jacobus's text more complex than the historiographical shorthand allows. Translation contributed to the Legenda's power as a devotional work, was a means by which it found its use, impact and wide audience, and was central to how reformers remembered both the text itself and its author. The translated Legenda was not the exception to the narrative of the long Reformation, but an emblem of it.