Fun with St Ethelreda: some thoughts on the Wilton Life

Toward the end of semester, it was determined that Middle English Reading Group should make forays out of the well-trodden path of romance and into the exciting world of hagiography. Predictably, for any group with me at the head, we began with the Wilton Life of St Ethelreda.

What to say about the Wilton Life? Well, as our most august group member informed us all, it is not a patch on Ælfric’s version, or even Bede’s. It’s also not nearly as much fun as the Anglo-Norman Vie Seinte Audree. But, at least to me, that doesn’t make it entirely unremarkable.

I was immediately enamoured of the composer’s dialect: not terribly difficult to read, but sort of charming. The text is early 15th century, apparently composed at Wilton itself. The scribe and/or author has used he interchangably for ‘he’ and ‘she’ – I assume that’s what happens when you haven’t quite abandoned the Old English heo nor yet caught onto this nifty she term – which made it quite an adventure at times to figure out who was talking about what. I like that the editor, Mary Dockray-Miller, didn’t clean that up, although I take issue with some of her translation choices.*

As an example, consider this description of the fate of King Colwolf (Ceowulf), who by þe Danys was put ouȝt and dedde. (Deposed and killed, according to the translation.) I just like that description. Put out and dead-ed. Straight to the point, and rhyming with redde, two lines above.

Something I like about both this Life and the Anglo-Norman Vie is their interest in recounting Anglo-Saxon history, in making sure we know both from what family Ethelreda is descended, and what the political circumstances were like at the time. I confess I can’t remember if Ælfric’s Life does the same, and obviously Bede’s account is embedded in his Historia Ecclesiastica (and I now have a list of other Lives of Audrey which I have yet to read), but bear with me here.

It seems to be a thing, that lives of Ethelreda have to go with a historical and geographical description of England – and the Wilton author certainly doesn’t have the same source as the Anglo-Norman author.  Dockray-Miller tells us that the Wilton author’s geographical and historical information comes from John Treviea’s English translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, which wasn’t even written at the time that possibly-Marie-de-France composed the Anglo-Norman version; June Hall McCash and Judith Clark Barban tell us that the Anglo-Norman author abbreviated her genealogical information from ‘her source’, which I think but am not quite certain, because their introduction isn’t quite clear, is probably the Liber Eliensis or something like it.

The Anglo-Norman focuses on Audrey’s relatives, with minimal extra political detail, but gives thorough coverage of the religious careers of her female relatives. The Wilton life is fascinated with geography, describing each of the seven kingdom’s of Anglo-Saxon England, where its borders lie, something about its founding, and its political history, before zoning in on East Anglia. Both texts make a link between St Edmund and St Ethelreda, interestingly – the Wilton version privileges him in its overall history of East Anglia before telling us that it was in East Anglia that Ethelreda was born; the Anglo-Norman Vie tells of several co-operative posthumous miracles performed by the two saints.

By and large the geographical descriptions in the Wilton life are straightforward, but can anyone clear this one up for me:

Þe kyndam of Northumbrelondys þe sixste kyndam was,

þe which upon þe Est syde and also upon þe west syde had þe sowthe se.

The kingdom of Northumberland was the sixth kingdom, that which had upon the East side and also upon the West side the south sea.

The south sea. On the east and the west of Northumberland. BECAUSE THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. Anyone happen to be secretly an expert in Middle English geography and want to clear that up for me?

~

* One, replacing the Middle English names for all the characters with their Anglo-Saxon equivalents; two, being apparently unable to distinguish between thyncan and thencan, and thereby rendering many seeming-processes as thinking-processes. I JUST CARE A LOT ABOUT THOSE TWO VERBS, OK.

I went to Ely to visit St Audrey

I lit a candle for her.

But I don’t think she could’ve heard me over the din.

Rave in the nave. I kid you not.¹

I have… complicated feelings about my own hagio-tourism. A lot of it’s historical curiosity and artistic appreciation. But then. I was raised in a really protestant environment. I developed a sense of connection to the past, to traditional liturgy and saints at the same time I was losing my faith. The faith’s gone but I still have a sense of connection to, say, St Audrey, one which doesn’t fit with either my upbringing or my current state of atheism. Maybe it’s just that I wrote an essay on her once. I don’t know.

I also don’t know why I’m telling the internet at large this.

Speaking of supernatural encounters on church grounds…

~

1. In all fairness, Rave in the Nave seemed like a pretty cool production (it was being rehearsed as I came through). I’m just not sure that there’s any way to hit on more of my religious angst at one time than put up a mass youth event with what looked like a tilt toward the evangelical side, in a church dedicated to St Audrey, on the day I decide to pop in. Wait. I can think of one way, but fortunately, there were no truly vicious atheists around to mock these guys. If you feel like mocking in the comments, keep it gentle, OK? Yes, it’s incongruous and the name is ridiculous, but be gentle, as a favour to me.

A fun story about dead kings!

My favourite kind of story. Over at Heavenfelth, Michele talks about the humble and very much dead King Oswine, who was murdered by King Oswiu after a period of intrigue involving battles that never happened and treasonous retainers. She also talks about the reasons why Bede might have included this story in his history.

What interests me about this story, though, is that Oswiu’s queen, Eanfled, was Oswine’s cousin.  So she demanded weregild from her husband – it was to be paid in the form of the foundation of a monastery at Gilling. Now, as Michelle notes, Oswiu had seriously pissed off the church by killing Oswine, so Eanfled probably had some powerful churchmen backing her demand. But it’s interesting to me that the demand was framed as weregild, not merely as penance; and that a wife could claim weregild from her husband for the death of a cousin. I don’t recall ‘found a monastery’ ever appearing in any of the law codes on weregild that I slogged through, although obviously this is a couple of centuries earlier than said codes. But that still leads me to conclude that this is a very odd social/legal transaction, and all the more interesting for it.

Besides, as Michelle noted in the comments, that means that the monastery of Gilling was founded to pray for both Oswine (murdered) and Oswiu (murderer). There’s a special sense  of narrative coherence to that.

Europe, good grief

Aachen was shiny, as expected. Then we went to Maastricht, to see a bookstore, but it was closed for the day. Most of Maastricht was closed, because we just happened across St Servatius being taken for his seven-yearly jaunt about town.

Nice to see the old boy gets out every now and again.

Still, he interfered with my attempt to buy myself a jar of Speculoospasta, which was mildly annoying. As that site suggests, though, it seems that i can order jars of it directly to my doorstep in Sydney, so I will forgive St Servatius for the inconvenience.

Also, I correctly dated the reliquary as it went past. My supervisor’s lecture on medieval art paid off!

St Audrey gives you the runs!

So, folks, I disappeared from the blogosphere. Again. It happens. It will probably keep happening.

Having dispatched all my marking, reorganised my thesis topic, and attempting to buckle down to a solid two and a bit months of writing my goddamn thesis, I am, of course, procrastinating on the internet.

Let me tell you about something I learned while I was in Cairns on the weekend.* I gave myself a break from the actual thesis and spent my lying-about-dying-from-heat time reading the Vie de seinte Audree instead. I really really like St Audrey/Ethelreda/Æthelthryh. Patron saint of No, let’s not, and with a rather humourous afterlife: she’s absolutely my favourite saint.

I was pleased to discover that she is no less entertaining in Anglo-Norman than in Anglo-Saxon. The Vie de seinte Audree is at once fascinating and somewhat badly organised. It keeps repeating itself in odd ways, and the author, Probably-Marie-de-France, has, in her efforts to pull Audrey’s story around to suit 12th-century marital law and theology, ended up contradicting herself in several places.

The story has also got considerably more fun since Ælfric’s day. Audree and her followers get chased across the countryside by her vengeful second husband! And are saved by a divine flood which strands them on top of a mountain without food or water, until Audree miracles up a spring to drink from! I don’t remember that part being in the Old English version, but perhaps I just forgot to put it in my summary.

Also, there’s a story about poo. And because I am secretly five (actually, I don’t think I liked poo jokes at five. Making up for lost time now, obviously!), I am going to tell you this story about poo! I would quote the original, or the translation, at you, but I left them at home so I couldn’t procrastinate with them. You’ll have to suffer through my retelling instead!

St Audrey, or possibly the Devil, gives you the runs!

So, there are monks busy being monastic on the island of Ely, after the establishment of the Benedictine foundation there. One day, one particular monk gets up, runs out of church, and threatens violence upon the refectory table.

Fortunately, one of his fellow monks stands up for the table’s right to continue its existence unmolested. It is concluded that our unexpectedly violent monk has been possessed by the Devil (who clearly has a grudge against furniture). His brothers gather around him, drag him back into the church, and pray to St Audrey for his salvation.

Possessed!monk falls asleep in front of the altar.

When he wakes up, his brothers are standing around, staring at him, waiting to see what the Devil’s going to do next.

Possessed!monk announces that he wishes to empty his bowels. Off he goes into the courtyard outside, and everyone follows him, still wanting to find out if he’s been de-possessed or not.

The poor chap proceeds to fill the courtyard with such spectacularly stinky excrement that everyone understands that he has, in fact, been relieved of demonic possession: St Audrey pushed the Devil down from his stomach, so that he had to come out through the backside!**

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a bout of diarrohea proves that St Audrey is watching over her followers! And also how you get a poo story and a nice religious message all in one go.

I feel for that poor monk, I really do. Everyone staring at you speculating about the devil while you’re trying to have a tummy bug in peace. And I wonder about his “runs out of church, threatens to strike the table” episode – was he running a fever? Hallucinating? Was he actually running out to attend to his tummy bug, and the story’s been expanded in the telling? No way of knowing, of course, but it can’t have been any fun for him.

~

* I learned many things in Cairns, such as: for the love of glod, don’t go to Cairns in December! And: people who do intensive physical training in Cairns in December are mad! And: how to rollerskate, and more importantly, how to stop rollerskating, and how to fall without getting yourself run over by other rollerskaters. Also: feeding dinner to small children is no task for the weak!

** I am charmed by the term used here in the original: fundament, or possibly fondament, I can’t recall the spelling with any certainty.

In Which Highly Indulges in Hagio-Tourism

Did you know that St John’s Cathedral Brisbane has all the windows in its south chapel dedicated to founding Anglo-Saxon, Irish and Welsh saints? I didn’t, but now I do and they were very lovely.

I went up to St John’s yesterday on the recommendation of assorted fellow-conference-goers at AEMA. On the Wednesday of the conference, before my flight got in, there had been a trip down to The Cathedral of St Stephen, the Catholic cathedral, for a demonstration and lecture on medieval organ music, which I’m rather sorry I missed. At any rate, St Stephens was declared to be nice, but not up to exacting medievalist standards in architecture, and so an excursion was made on the Thursday, by several attendees, up to St John’s.

Rear view of St Johns from Adelaide St, 1910. Photo from Wikipedia Commons.

St John’s is the Anglican (Episcopal, C of E) Cathedral of Brisbane, and will be the last Gothic cathedral ever built. The initial planning began in 1885; the nave was only finished last year, and the final of the three towers is yet to be erected. It is beautiful. I’ve never set foot in a more stunning building- although that just tells you I’ve never been to Europe.

So let’s talk about some of the outstanding features of St Johns. First of all, from the front, it looks a children’s birthday cake. The outer cladding is in shades of grey and pink, and having gone there expecting a neo-gothic marvel, my heart sank a little.

Front view of St Johns before the two front towers were erected. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons- released into the public domain by the photographer. Presumably that is him or his friend in the picture.

Happily, as soon as you step under the west porch, you look up into an intricate web of vaulting, made from sandstone, cut small and fine. WikiCommons has a slightly blurry image of the vaulting in the quire (although actually i think it’s the apse).

Inside, everything is long and thin and delicately curved, as a good gothic cathedral ought to be. The only odd thing about it is that the final bay of the nave- completed only recently- is of noticeably different stone to the rest of it.

The nave of St Johns, looking toward the west door.

I was struck by the overwhelming emphasis on verticality- this photo is taken facing the wrong way, so it doesn’t quite capture the effect. You walk in and your eyes are drawn up before they look along. The ornamentation at the top of the columns is minimal, and the lines are kept clean and vertical on the second tier of arches as well (can someone give me the technical term for that second tier?). Compare, for example, to the interior of Salisbury Cathedral (Below left, courtesy of WikiCommons), an early example of English Gothic:

English Gothic, I am told by Wikipedia and also by a book whose title I have forgotten, is characterised by emphasis on length and horizontality which is equal to or greater than the emphasis on height and verticality.

On the other hand, St Johns has in common with Salisbury a slim light feeling to the columns which the vertically-oriented French cathredals don’t seem to have. St Johns has less clustered columns per actual upright that does Salisbury (only three), but compare to the heavy columns of St Denis (Below, courtesy of WikiCommons):

Where St Johns falls down, in my humble opinion, is in the matter of windows. Look at St Denis here- you can see the light pouring in through these upper windows. Salisbury has the same second teir of arches going on that St Johns does, but you can still see that light floods in from the apse and from the sides. The windows at St Johns are exclusively thin, individual English Lancet Windows. If you look back up at the interior view of the west front, you’ll see that there are just three windows- long, thin, and spaced apart. Compare this to the west facade of York Minster:

(York Minister, courtesy of WikiComons)

York Minster, I presume (having never been there) is completely flooded in the afternoons by light from these windows, which are composed of individual lancet windows combined into one. Now consider Truro Cathedral, Cornwall, which was designed by John Loughborough Pearson, the same architect who designed St Johns Brisbane:

(Truro Cathedral, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

That big rose window, which is typical of French Gothic cathedrals, as well as the four lancet windows on either side of it, would do a wonderful job of lighting the nave.

No one seems to have pictures of apse windows, but logic tells me that if you need electric footlights at the base of the columns in your apse (which St Johns does), or hanging lights in your quire, then there is only one thing to say: Gothic Architecture: UR DOIN IT RONG.

~

Leaving the architecture alone for a bit, the other reason I went up there was the cushions, about which I heard much praise over Thursday night’s conference dinner. All the pews have cushions on them, each cushion being donated by and dedicated to a different Anglican parish in Australia. When the cushions are properly arranged (and it looks like someone in the congregation enjoys mixing them up), each pew has four cushions which, when placed side by side, form one long machine-embroidered picture. There are some lovely landscapes, and some striking sets depicting Australian water-birds.

(Lady Chapel, St John’s Brisbane, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.)

In the Lady Chapel on the north side, however, is a set of eight four-cushion depictions of the life of Mary in ‘modern times’. For some reason the medievalists who told me about this were half-cringing, but it’s not like medieval iconography was free of anachronisms, is it? Granted, the sight of Mary and Joseph peering at a parking meter which said ‘no spaces’ made me cringe a little too, but the Madonna and Child depiction is particularly lovely. How many cathedrals have a depiction of the Virgin Mary naked? Not many, I’ll bet. She has not long given birth, and is holding the infant Christ to her breast. The newborn Christ does not mysteriously look nine months old, as many of them do. He’s not quite the wrinkly red alien most newborns are, but he does have the ridiculously oversized head and hair all stuck down to his scalp. And no halos in sight. Joseph is peering over Mary’s shoulder with an expression of mixed concern and confusion, which seems about right for a first-time father.

I do want to know how the heavily pregant Mother of Christ found time- while travelling, too- to shave her legs and underarms and keep her pubic region neatly trimmed, though. I wonder if the cushion designer even thought about how bloody difficult it would be to depilate when nine months pregnant?

~

And now, as promised, the bit about Anglo-Saxon saints! The south chapel has all its windows dedicated to founding saints / patron saints of important British cathedrals. Along the east wall you will find St Alban, St Augustine, St Oswald (twice. or are there two St Oswalds?), and someone else whose name I have aggravatingly forgotten. On the south wall, there are St Patrick, St Ninian, St David and another Welshman whom I have likewise forgotten. And then right at the west end of the chapel, but still on the south wall, there is St AEthelthryth, under the name of Etheldreda.

The iconography seems to be heavily based on this image from the Benedictional of St AEthelwold, which I have abused in the interests of icon-making (right), but in much brighter colours. She wears blue, with a blue halo and gold crown; her neck-coverings are white; she carries something green and leafy in her left hand, as in the Benedictional, and but the book in her other hand is red and is accompanied by another long piece of foliage topped by what looks like it might be white Australian flannel flowers, but could as well be any other white flower for all I know about botany. There’s a red, green and blue background behind her, and a red ribbon with the words ‘Ely Cathedral’ in gold (as with one of the St Oswalds and the other bloke whose name I’ve forgotten, who were accompanied by their cathedral titles. I wonder if they were all cathedrals associated with the Benedictine reform?). I have a feeling I’ve seen another window or picture somewhere which is closer to this than is the Benedictional, but google images isn’t turning up anything helpful.

Furthermore, to my great delight, as I was buying postcards, the lady in the shop told me their Etheldreda postcard (the only postcard with a saint’s window shown on it) was the most popular card .

~

To finish up, and speaking of postcards: having tacked three to my wall and put aside various ones for friends, I have two left over. First two people to comment and then send an email to nakedphilologist AT gmail DOT com with their postal address can have a postcard from the last gothic cathedral ever to be built! One is of the apse and the high altar, and one is a view of the Genesis Window from the side, under an arch.

The High Altar, St John’s Brisbane. (Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.) Note the slim three-part colums, and bemoan the fact that down in the ambulatory, there are footlights lighting up the base of each column from the rear.

And the moral of today’s lecture is: when in Australia, visit St John’s Brisbane .

Dear Google

Just to be clear on this:

none of AElric’s Saint’s Lives deal with Homosexual saints. Most of AElfric’s saints are stridently celibate, so at best you could call them anti-sexual. I doubt AElfric had any idea about ‘Homosexuality’ as an umbrella identity, although he certainly knew some people commited acts of Sodomy. Just not his saints.

We here at Helpful Industries suggest you look elsewhere for legends about homosexual saints (I believe you will find relevant, more recent, accretions to ledgends like that of St Sebastian).

The Humourous Later Life of St Aethelthryth

So, my attempt to make Arthurian fudge cookies isn’t going so well. When the recipe says ‘refrigerate for an hour’, but your fridge is full, covering the mixture and putting it outside for a while will only be a suitable substitute if you live somewhere where winter is actually COLD.

And on with the later life of St Aethelthryth! If you recall, we left her two weeks ago, newly proffessed as a nun at Coldingham. One week ago, we looked at her image in the Benedictional of St Aethelwold, in which she appears the right holy sourpuss.

After only a year as a nun, Aethelthryth was appointed abbess at Ely, which, if I recall correctly, was a new foundation at the time. Aelfric tells us she was a mother to many nuns- Mecthild Gretsch, in her book ‘Aelfric and the Cult of Saints’, writes as if everyone knew that Ely in Aethelthryth’s day was a double monastery, but how everyone comes by this information I’m not sure. (It could be Aelfric’s use of the term ‘mynstre’, but I don’t know what the word for convent would be if it were a distinct term…) I also read a theory once- and this was back before I had any idea how to spot a crackpot Anglo-Saxon theory when I saw it- that Ely before Aethelwold refounded it was never a ‘real’ monastery, but a house where Aethelthryth and her sisters and their women retired to live chastely (not unlike the ‘nunnan’, not nuns but consecrated widows, a distinction Sarah Foot makes in her several-volume work, ‘Veiled Women’).

Regardless of the formal arrangements at Ely, Aethelthryth continued to be on her best saintly behavior. She fasted, eating only one meal a day, except for feast days; she prayed alone; she wore woollen clothes. She took a bath only on high feast days, and then only after first bathing everyone else in the convent with her own hands.

Eight years on, she grew a ‘swelling’ under her jaw- variously accounted for as a tumour, swollen glands, and a leftover plague buboe. As you do, if you’re a saint, Aethelthryth thanked God for sending her an ‘affliction in her neck’, concluding that it was punishment for having worn necklaces adorning said neck in her youth. ‘And now’, she said, ‘me thinketh that God’s justice may cleanse my guilt, since I now whave this swelling, which shineth instead of gold, and this scorching heat instead of sparkling gems.’ (Trans. in Skeat, which is not, as it turns out, by Skeat, but by Skeat, Gunning and Wilkinson, the two latter ladies having done all the grunt work and Skeat the revision.)

A leech was called to ‘shoot’ the swelling, and shoot it he did, ‘and there came out matter’. In spite of this helpful leech, Aethelthryth ‘gloriously departed to God’ on the third day after his ministrations.

Strangely, dying of a tumour qualifies her for an entry in Bede’s Martyrology- the only Anglo-Saxon saint therein, in fact-, which interesting piece of information I found via Michelle of Heavenfield.

Having carked it, Aethethryth was buried in a wooden coffin and remained quiet for sixteen years. After sixteen years, her sister Sexburh, now abbess, decided Aethelthryth belonged inside the church itself, and ordered the brethren- (ah, that’s where the double monastery thing comes in)- off into the fens to look for a nice big stone to make a sargophagus out of. Off they went, rowing their way to Grantchesteter, where they found a coffin-ready made, standing against a wall, made out of white marble. The brethren nicked off with the coffin, declaring it a miracle. This explanation seems to have been acceptable, and no one asked who the coffin might have belonged to in the first place.

Next stop: the graveyard. They pitched a tent over Aethelthryth’s grave and dug her up, singing hymns all the while. Lo and behold, she lay there as if asleep. The leech who had tended her was there, and gave assurance that she looked exactly as she did the day they buried her, save that the wound he had made was healed, and all her clothes were freshly pressed and laundered. Despite this last fact, Sexburh took out the body, had it bathed and dressed in new clothes, and interred in the church, where, conveniently, the new marble coffin was found to fit her body exactly and to have a hollow in the pillow just the right size for her head. Aethelthryth’s shrine, her first shroud and her first coffin all went on to be mighty potent in the way of healing miracles, and it was generally agreed that between the incorrupt body and the miracles, we had definite proof she had been a lifelong virgin.

Ely Cathedral- which did not exist in Aethelthryth’s day but is neverthless very pretty.

Aelfric doesn’t go into any great detail about Aethelthryth’s posthumous miracles, as he did with St Edmund. Instead, he goes on to a little appendix, beginning ‘In like manner have laymen also, as books tell us, preserved often their chastity in the marriage-state, for the love of Christ’, and proceeding with a short story adapted from the Vita Patrum, about an upstanding citizen who lived with his wife in ‘claenysse’ (chastity, purity, continence- the same word Aelfric uses for the virgin Aethelthryth, but not limited to absolute abstinence), had three kids and then abstained, lived a virtuous life and finally entered a monastery. There have been all kinds of speculations about this appendix- a good summary of which you can find in Peter Jackson (not the director)’s article in Anglo-Saxon England for the year 2000, entitled ‘Aelfric and the purpose of Christian marriage’. Suffice it to say, Aelfric seems to have had nearly as much trouble with Aethelthryth’s obstinate abstinence has he did with Judith, who used her sexual attractiveness to manipulate men. (Aelfric wrote a homily/letter on Judith, which can be found in an eddition by Assman or in an online edition by Lee.) In the case of Judith, he carefully wrote out all hints of sex from the narrative, but it’s not really possible to rewrite Aethelthryth as a good wife and queen, when her whole sanctity rests on her virginity. Instead, throughout the Life Aelfric refers back to Bede and his judgement of Aethelthryth; he also shifts power off Aethelthryth and onto God, as he does with Judith; and finally he appends this example of marital ‘claennysse’ appropriate to the layity. In my humble opinion, it’s the word eac (also) which is crucial here. Laymen also have often preserved their chastity, Aelfric announces, implicitly setting Aethelthryth appart from the laity even though she lived most of her life as a laywoman. Aelfric certainly didn’t like sex much, or want anyone to enjoy it, but he did understand that the laity had to marry and reproduce; if anyone, male of female, was going to neglect their conjugal duties in imitation of Aethelthryth, he, Aelfric, wasn’t going to be responsible for it.

So that’s St Aethelthryth for you. Next week… who knows? Maybe something really odd, like the Seven Sleepers.

St AEthelthryth: Some entertaining pictures

AEthelthryth’s amusing afterlife will have to wait for next week, I think. I’m still settling into Awesome’s house, where I’m cat-sitting for a few weeks, and I was going to make a quick post with some images, inspired by the exciting discovery of a facsimile Benedictional of St AEthelwold on her bookshelf, before knuckling down to work:

St AEthelthryth, bearing a flower, which refers to Bede’s hymn in her honour, which is full of floral imagery. AEthelthryth is the only Anglo-Saxon woman in the Choir of Virgins, depicted in the opening folios of the Benedictional- she and St Swithun, I think, are the only Anglo-Saxon saints in the whole thing.
She doesn’t look too happy, really. You’d think, having got what she wanted (a habit), she’d look a little more serene. Joyful in the lord, and all that. But apparently not. Can anyone tell me who the preachy lookin’ fellow on the page opposite her is? And what he’s carrying?

My intention to do some work was defeated by the possibilities of humourous hagiographical icons. Some teasers:

Plus a few more in my LJ.

AElfric: quite a tricksy fellow

*Scratches head* I swear, I will never understand the ways of AElfric. In my quest to put together an essay about the importance of books in the Life of St Edmund, I happily stumbled across a synopsis of his source text, the Passio Sancti Eadmundi of Abbo of Fleury. Abbo, who had made a tactical retreat from the monastic politics of Fleury and buggered off to England to advise the Benedictines there, wrote the Passio based on the testimony of St Dunstan, who had his information from Eadmund’s sword-bearer, who either had it from the unnamed observer who saw the martyrdom, or was himself said observer.

Looking at this synopsis, I can see that AElfric made a few particular changes: he shortened Abbo’s introduction; he twiddled with the representation of Eadmund a little, presumably to make him as heroic as possible under the circumstances; he altered Bishop Theodred’s penance; and he left out a final moralising on the value of virginity.

The alteration of the penance is fortuitous for my purposes. In the passio, Theodred hangs the thieves and the next day regrets it. There is no mention of books in this synopsis, although I’ll have to chase down a proper translation. ¹As penance, he begs to wash, clothe and re-coffinate the body of St Eadmund.

By the time AElfric gets his hands on the story, however, books are explicitly the catalyst for his penitence; and he asks the nation to join him in a three-day fast. I reckons I can argue that this change universalises the relevance of canon law and canon law books and invests the laity with an interest in their contents and use.

So that’s happy.

On the other hand, AELfric cuts out the passage at the end which attributes his incorrupt body to his virginity, while in the same book he insists that AEthelthyth’s incorruptibility is testament to her virginity. Abbo, a bigshot Benedictine reformer, used the end of Edmund’s life, and his apparent virginity to appeal to those who served him to follow in his chaste footsteps. Why on earth would AElfric, himself a staunch second-generation Benedictine reformer and opponent of clerical marriage, leave out this interpretation? I dinnae understand it, I don’t think it’s crucial for this essay, but it’s sitting there and niggling at me and driving me batty.

I was reading Peter Jackson (not the director)’s article ‘AElfric and the purpose of Christian marriage’ (ASE 29) the other day, in which he discussed AElfric’s addition of an exemplar from the Desert Fathers, a fellow who had three kids with his wife before embarking on thirty years of married abstention, and then buggering off into a monastery. In the first part of the article, he talks about AELfric’s habit of singling out the virtue of chastity above all other virtues attributed to a given figure, particularly when using Desert Fathers material. With St Eadmund, meanwhile, he deliberately avoids talking about virginity, even though it was in his otherwise authoritative source. Very, very strange.

My only thought here is that perhaps lifelong chastity is not something AElfric regards as conventionally appropriate for the laity. As the Jackson article- not mention AElfric himself, constantly propping up his authority by reference to Bede- shows, AElfric had terrible trouble with AEthelthryth, a ‘strong willed, sexually autonomous woman’. It’s not really the Done Thing as Queen of anywhere to refuse sexual congress (and therefore procreation) with your husband. The exemplar at the end functions as a sort of balance, an example of proper marital chastity, a co-operative effort between husband and wife. It also provides a model of chastity which enables marriage to fulfil its proper function: the creation of children, after which abstention shall commence by mutual agreement.

Maybe AElfric doesn’t want to hold up Edmund as an example of virginity, because Edmund is a member of the laity- and a king, at that. You really do want your kings to produce sons, particularly when you have Vikings swarming around trying to conquer your kingdom.

On the other hand, maybe AElfric is just frustrating and weird.

~

1. Anyone know if there’s a translation of Abbo’s Passio out there somewhere? It looks as though there might be one in Winterbottom’s Lives of Three English Saints, from the Fisher Catalogue, but that book has a long list of holds on it. A keyword search for ‘Abbo of Fleury’ only brings up four books, though. Does he go by another name? Anyone know the title of his collection of saint’s lives?