Most of all, our early modern reader(s) seem interested in the good, hard stuff of names and dates. Throughout, dates are supplied for key events if they are not given in the main text (for example, in reference to the death of William the Conqueror: ‘Anno 1087′). Dates given in Roman numerals in the main text are also helpfully converted into Arabic numbers. There are prolific glosses relating in particular to figures of Anglo-Saxon history – for example, Aethelflaed, ‘Lady of the Mercians’, or King Edgar – and evidence of a specific interest in Anglo-Saxon royal genealogy. At the beginning of the book, opposite the second woodcut, we have a carefully-written list of key figures in Anglo-Saxon history (from ‘Hengistus’ and ‘R(ex) Vortygerne’ onwards) and, next to it, an even longer list of Anglo-Saxon saintly women, including ‘L(ady) Werburga’ and ‘Lady Hilda’.

In her fascinating study, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England, Catherine Sanok envisages a female audience for Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge. She explores both the nationalist project of the text with its presentation of Werburgh as a saint for both Chester and all of England, and also its construction of Werburgh as a timeless exemplar for virtuous female behaviour. It’s not possible to do justice to all of Sanok’s very subtle and detailed arguments in a short blog entry. But, in brief summary, she sees the text as ‘providing a bridge between the mythic past and the ethical present in the figure of the feminine audience repeatedly instructed to imitate Werburge’ (p. 115). Sanok is right to be cautious in making assertions about the actual audience of the text, and is deliberately circumspect in her reference to the ‘figure’ of the feminine audience as textual trope rather than (necessarily) its real readership.

The marginal notes in the British Library copy fo the Pynson have made me return to these questions of audience and reception. Of course, we can’t know for sure the gender of all the early modern readers of this book (though the identifiable names inscribed on the frontispiece are male). But clearly the late sixteenth-century readers who left their marks in this book read the text with specific interests and concerns. The list of Anglo-Saxon saintly women does suggest an attention to feminine spirituality and female exemplars. But this ’catalogue’ approach resonates less with the moral teachings of hagiography and more with the interests suggested by the annotations as a whole – in genealogy, names, dates and in placing the key figures and moments within their proper place in Anglo-Saxon history. Bradshaw’s text seems to have been used less as an exploration of saintly virtue and spiritual patronage, and more as a source (or repository) for the hard facts of Anglo-Saxon history. Of course, there are interesting things to say about how this attitude fits within the emergent scholarly interest in Anglo-Saxon history (and vernacular language) in the early modern period, and how it might reflect the readers’ sense of heritage, identity, and ‘Englishness’. I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who knows more about these notes, or the earliest owners / readers of this book than I do.

On reflection, perhaps my favourite set of annotations come very near the end of Book II, where Bradshaw gives a brief re-cap of the miracles performed by Werburgh. As Bradshaw gives his summary of these acts of divine grace, the early modern reader has helpfully numbered a running tally in the left-hand margin, counting up to a grand total of ’13′. Was the reader in the midst of a ‘Top Trumps’-style comparison between the saints of medieval England? Sadly, we’ll never know – but marginal notes like this offer fascinating clues about how medieval texts were actually read.