The Unidentifed Birgittine Borrowing in the Meditaciones Domini Nostri

The Meditaciones Domini Nostri, or The Lyf of Oure Lord and the Virgyn Mary, hence MDN, is an early fifteenth-century Middle English prose meditation on the life of Christ. 1 As is typical of devotional compilations indebted to the pseudo-Bonaventuran tradition, it primarily consists of excerpts from apocryphal, patristic, and contemporary works rearranged into a cohesive narrative. 2MDN is of interest to scholars due to its dependence on the works of Birgitta of Sweden (d.1373), from which it borrows more frequently and extensively than any other source. 3 All but one of these twenty-five borrowings, which constitute approximately 12 per cent of the total text, were identified by Elisabeth Blom-Smith in her