South English legendaries are compilations of versified saints' lives written in southern dialects of Middle English from the late 13th to 15th centuries. At least fifty of these manuscripts survive, preserving nearly three hundred hagiographic works.

Manuscripts

A legendary is any hagiographic collection. Earlier scholarship attempted to identify a unitary work known as the South English Legendary (SEL) that varied between different copies but still had an identifiable point of origin, similar to The Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman. More recent work understands 'South English legendaries' as a category of manuscripts that flourished in the later Middle Ages. The Bodleian Library houses the oldest manuscript (MS. Laud Misc. 108), written in the late thirteenth century. It is likely that the texts this manuscripts contains predate the compilation. Manuscripts containing versified saints' lives in Middle English include:

Compilation and audience

Manfred Görlach concluded that the first collection of versified saints' lives identifiable as a legendary written in southern Middle English was created c. 1270–85. This has largely been supported by subsequent scholarship. Dialectal evidence suggests that most of the texts were composed in the South-West or West Midlands of England.

Editions

Scholarship