ABSTRACT
The storyteller takes what he tells from experience - his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.1
In the last chapter I argued that the poet's representation of women reflected not just the wellworn misogynistic attitudes of the clergy, but a more generous attitude influenced in part by the new teachings of the church on marriage and in part also by what he might have seen of the ordinary lives of women around him. Although I cannot offer anything like a complete analysis of the social and cultural practices affecting the production of SEL texts, in this final chapter I want to suggest, as examples of where that analysis might begin, the possible further impact of the personal, the political, and the scientific as contexts for understanding the collection as a whole. Manfred Gorlach is surely right to claim that the style of the different manuscripts is insufficiently distinctive to allow the identification of an historical author.2 Nevertheless, it is possible to draw some conclusions, as Klaus Jankofsky has done, about the social context and personal circumstances shaping the vision reflected in the text:
The collection's purpose was obviously the instruction of the laity in matters of the faith, mainly through straightforward stories that could be understood at first hearing. ... Its singularity consists in the new tone and mood of compassion and warm human empathy for the lives and deaths of its protagonists and in the pedagogic care and pastoral concern for its intended original audience, which seems to have consisted at one time of unlettered listeners.3
