Abstract Amongst the Latin narratives on the dormition and assumption of the Virgin, the Transitus beatae Mariae Virginis pseudo-epigraphically ascribed to Joseph of Arimathea has provoked much debate among scholars, who advanced the most diverse dates of composition, ranging from the fifth to the thirteenth century. The present study attempts to reconstruct a first reliable history of the Latin text that is solidly based on manuscript material, as well as on literary and historical sources underlying or revolving around the Latin text. I first investigate the place held by the Pseudo-Joseph Transitus Mariae within the constellations of Latin and Greek Dormition narratives (see Appendices 1-2), before presenting its manuscript transmission and filiation based on a new census of its surviving witnesses (see Appendix 3). I then examine the relation of PseudoJoseph with three Anglo-Norman homilies on the Conception of the Virgin that precede Pseudo-Joseph in the oldest manuscript of the tradition: Milan, Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana, Triv. 430 (Lombardy, c . 12001250 Census 6). An edition and English translation of the three Latin homilies is provided at the end of the essay (see Appendix 4). Finally, I propose new identifications of some of its immediate sources, namely verbatim quotations or formulae derived from foreign literature that cannot be traced back to any of the Greek or the Latin dormition narratives. As I demonstrate, manuscript and documentary evidence seem to concurrently point towards a mid-twelfth-century Anglo-Norman origin, as well as to a northern Italian – most notably Lombard – early reception and irradiation of the Latin text at the hands of Norman and Burgundian monks of the Cistercian order, who were being installed in the sister abbeys of northwestern Italy throughout the second half of the twelfth century.
Dario Bullitta (Mon,) studied this question.