The Life of English in the Mid-Twelfth Century: Ralph D’Escures’ Homily on the Virgin Mary Elaine Treharne Throughout the post-Conquest period, manuscripts written in English continued to be produced, 1 usually at monastic centres, in much the same way as they had been during the Anglo-Saxon period. The preponderance of surviving material based on Old English exemplars that was copied and adapted from c. 1100-1200 is homiletic and hagiographic in nature. Its recontextualization in the twelfth century provides opportunities for investigating textual transmission and dissemination, for codicological and palaeographical analyses, for assessing the uses of English texts, and for determining the characteristics and aims of the native literate elite. A particular manuscript of note that is representative of the trends in English textual production in this period is London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. xiv. Compiled in the mid-twelfth century, probably at Christ Church, Canterbury, this extensive codex contains fifty-two English texts, including homilies written by the Old English author, Ælfric, a unique Life of St Neot, a version of the Dicts of Cato, and two twelfth-century translations—excerpts from Honorius Augustodunensis’ Elucidarium, and a homily on the Virgin Mary by Ralph D’Escures. 2 1 As Mary Swan has amply demonstrated in the preceding essay. 2 All the texts are edited by R.-N. Warner, Early English Homilies from the Twelfth-Century MS. Vesp. D. XIV, Early English Text Society o.s. 152 (London: Oxford University Press, 1917 for 1915). For the contents and description, see N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957; repr. with supplement 1990), item 209; and Jonathan Wilcox, Wulfstan Texts and Other Homiletic Materials, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile 8 (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Tempe: Arizona, 2000), pp. 53-64. For the Dicts of Cato, see E. M. Treharne, ‘The Form and Function of the Old English Dicts of Cato’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 102.4 (September 2003), pp. 65-85. On the possible origins and purposes of the manuscript, see Mary P. Richards, ‘On the Date and Provenance of the MS Cotton Vespasian D.XIV, ff. 4-169’, Manuscripta 17 (1973), pp. 31-35, which argues for a Rochester origin; Rima Handley, ‘British Museum MS. Cotton Vespasian D. xiv’, Notes and Queries 219 (1974), pp. 243-50, which argues for a Christ Church, Canterbury origin; and Elaine Treharne, ‘The Dates and Origins of Three