Edited by OS Pickering FROM BL MS Stowe 949 (1975)
OS Pickering (ed.) The Nativity of Mary and Christ is the original late thirteenth-century Nativity poem of the Southern temporale, the group of poems analysed by Pickering in Anglia, 91 (1973). It is extant in nine manuscripts representing three versions (A, B, C), and is here edited in full from the 814-line A-text in MS Stowe 949 for the first time. The poem served as a source for several other of the temporale narratives, and its composition is closely connected with the contemporary South English Legendary. The bias of the Introduction is textual, but also included are a discussion of the possible Latin sources and the relationship with the SEL, and a full description of MS Stowe. The edited text is accompanied by an apparatus recording all the substantive variants of the other eight manuscripts.