This essay explores the specific relevance of hagiography for female readers engaged with the ideals and circumstances of pious lay life. Whitehead demonstrates that the accounts of Hilda, Æthelburga, and Æthelthryth in Bedeߣs Historia are strikingly supplemented by the depictions of female sanctity and powerful female agency in works connected with the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon mission to the Germanic peoples, while sophisticated literary skill is demonstrated by Hrotsvitha, canoness of Gandersheim. The essay demonstrates the long textual life of Bedeߣs abbesses, along with more recent examples of sanctity. Whitehead explores secular and religious contexts, contrasting the Vie seint Audrée, probably written for a courtly audience, with the writings of the anonymous ߢNunߣ and Clemence of Barking and the early Middle English Lives of the virgin martyrs in the Katherine Group, designed for a well-born group of anchoresses in the west Midlands. The essay shows that the lives of women saints continued to be popular reading in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in both lay and religious contexts, including in Benedictine compilations.

In my 2003 book, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory, I explored a long-running patristic and scholastic tradition of architectural allegory, and traced the way that biblical architectures such as the temple, tabernacle, and ark were systematically allegorized as the body of Christ, that is, as the Christian church, in commentaries and treatises such as Gregory the Great's Homiliae in Ezechielem, Bede's De Templo and De Tabernaculo, Richard of Saint-Victor's Benjamin Major (an allegorization of the Ark of the Covenant), Hugh of Saint-Victor's De Arca Noe Morali and De Arca Noe Mystica, and Robert Grosseteste's De Templum Dei. Typically, in these exegeses, the length of the temple was equated with the dimension of time and with the progression of the church through salvation history, the breadth with the sum of believers, and the height with the volumes of scripture. The Old Testament building became an imaginative diagram summing up Christian doctrine and all who lived in accordance with it, through God's temporality. It was a closed, intact, unambiguous figure. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a very similar allegorical process was applied to the contemporary church edifice by a series of high-ranking ecclesiastics: Honorius Augustodunensis (1080–ca.1140), John Beleth (fl. 1182?), Sicardus of Cremona (1155–1215), Pope Innocent III (1161–1216), and most famously Durandus, bishop of Mende (1230–96). In their liturgical and eucharistic manuals, the walls, roof, columns, pavement, and portals of the church were interpreted as symbols of the people and beliefs that made up the Christian ideology. Hence, the portal was Christ, the door into Christian belief, while the internal columns of the church were its bishops who supported the superstructure of the faith. In addition, extensive allegorical attention was given to the offices enacted in the church and the furnishings it contained: its altars, candlesticks, images, sanctuary spaces, and the priest's vestments. The aim of these manuals was to explain the inner significance of liturgical performance and practice to the clergy, and also to deepen the mystery of the mass. The contemporary church building became a kind of scripture in and of itself: subjected to the same four-fold process of exegesis as the scriptural text and as scriptural architecture.

This chapter explores two texts produced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the Exortacio ad contemplacionem, and the Meditaciones of the Monk of Farne. It argues that the Exortacio retains thematic ties with the topographical interests of Geoffrey’s Vita Bartholomaei, but exchanges its earlier assertions of heroic presence for a contemporary stance of abjection and deprivation. There is no efficacious saint in this poem, only the unremitting hostility of the natural elements. By contrast, the Meditaciones disregards the physical environment altogether. Turning rapturously to Christ and his prophets and apostles in their bibical milieu, it advances Cuthbertine asceticism to previously unscaled heights, comprising one of the most overlooked landmarks in late medieval contemplative composition. Nonetheless, the text’s approach to the Anglo-Saxon saint who has given Farne its contemplative potential remains uneasy, and the chapter demonstrates that Cuthbert is substantially delimited in force in favour of a pantheon of biblical saints.

This chapter examines two Cuthbertine miracle collections produced respectively in the third quarter and the end of the twelfth century: Reginald of Durham’s Libellus de admirandis beati Cuthberti virtutibus, and the anonymous De mirabilibus Dei modernis temporibus in Farne insula declaratis. Reginald’s De admirandis offers a geographically expansive representation of Cuthbert’s wonder-working, incorporating north-west England, Galloway and Lothian, re-engaging with Farne Island and extending into the North Sea. It also positions him within a British map of competing sanctities, negotiating his power and sphere of jurisdiction in relation to Scottish, southern English and local cults. De mirabilibus, by contrast, remains tightly focused on Farne Island. This textual re-engagement with Farne Island returns Cuthbert’s ascetic sanctity to the fore. Animal and bird miracles make a significant comeback, and are used to determine the parameters of a series of small-scale jurisdictions of immunity throughout Cuthbert’s spiritual geography, debarred to Anglo-Norman secular and religious elites.

This chapter sets the early vitae of Cuthbert in their historical and compositional contexts, and focuses upon his eremitic construction within them. It unpicks their Irish and Gregorian sources, demonstrating the importance of Gregory’s life of St Benedict, but argues that whereas the Anonymous Vita promotes a more heroic and individualistic understanding of Cuthbert’s asceticism, Bede uses Cuthbert’s Farne years to demonstrate the close links between the solitary vocation and the coenobium, and to illustrate monastic ideals of stability, pastoral edification and labour. Turning to Cuthbert’s depiction in the Historia ecclesiastica, it argues that Cuthbert’s eremiticism is placed centre stage there, and used to negotiate Northumbria’s relation with other polities and ecclesiastical rivals, suggesting that Bede’s ambitions for Cuthbert as a saint for the gens Angli are specifically eremitic ones.

Attention to eremitic place is one way by which the ascetic dimensions of Cuthbert’s sanctity are returned to the fore by Durham priory in the late twelfth century. The other way, much more animated and contemporary, is through the creation of modern-day hermits in Cuthbert’s image. This chapter examines Reginald of Durham’s vita of the faintly dubious Benedictine hermit, Godric of Finchale; Geoffrey of Durham’s vita of Bartholomew of Farne and his associate, Thomas, more safely and consistently Benedictine; and finally, the anonymous new ‘Irish’ vita of none other than Cuthbert himself, the Libellus de ortu Sancti Cuthberti, substantially recreated to further a Cistercian and eremitic agenda.

With the exception of the South English Legendary, vernacular versions of Cuthbert’s life and miracles are slow to emerge, and it is not until the fifteenth century that we encounter a series of large and small-scale shifts into Middle English. The small-scale epitomes, written in the midlands and south in the course of compiling vernacular legendaries, afford us the opportunity of seeing how Cuthbert is treated from a ‘non-northern’ perspective, when set alongside universal and allied native saints. What is judged his quintessence when his life is epitomized in just a few hundred words? Alternatively, in Cuthbert’s Durham heartland, the shift into the vernacular also sees an urge towards the large-scale compilation, drawing together the different versions of Cuthbert’s life, miracles and church history, into an encyclopedic composite offering its vernacular reader access to the entirety of the preceding textual tradition. The anonymous Metrical Life of St Cuthbert, an example of this impulse, is analysed to explore how the restatements of episodes from many earlier Cuthbertine texts speak to the anxieties and ambitions of the fifteenth-century Benedictine corporation at Durham.

This chapter examines the most apparently troubled episode in the history of Cuthbert’s community – its intermittent perambulations around northern England in the ninth and tenth centuries – through the lenses of its earliest historical record, the anonymous Historia de Sancto Cuthberto. Noting the irrelevance of Cuthbert’s asceticism to this narrative, it argues that his life and posthumous miracles are used as vehicles to authorize the land claims of the Lindisfarne/Chester-le-Street community during this period of prolonged insecurity. In the course of consolidating and adding to these landholdings, Cuthbert demonstrates a readiness to work flexibly with the Danish elite where necessary – respect for land trumps ethnic difference. Where crossed, however, he is mercilessly retributive, a far cry from Bede’s pastoral and ecological saint. In addition to these local negotiations, the chapter explores how the Historia ambitiously sets Cuthbert to work as a kingmaker on a national level, insinuating him into the West Saxon narrative of hereditary English monarchy, while the West Saxons manifest a devotional interest towards him in turn to help strengthen their foothold in the north.

St Cuthbert still commands a devotion in the north of England. Every year in the warmer months, pilgrim walkers take their shoes off to cross the tidal causeway from the mainland, south of Berwick, to Lindisfarne, following a rough path across the wet sands from post to post and passing the raised wooden refuge designed to shelter anyone caught out by the rising tides. When they arrive, they can visit the remains of the medieval priory, see a small exhibition about the monastery’s Anglo-Saxon foundation and enter the parish church built from a sandstone so pockmarked by the wind and salt that it has become a sort of honeycomb. Two monumental wood sculptures of Cuthbert by the contemporary sculptor Fenwick Lawson – the saint seated in meditation, in the ruined cloister, and his coffin borne by six bearers, in the parish church – extend the experience of sanctity into the present day. Artists and devotional writers are still making marks and forming representations of the saint, just as they always have done.

This chapter examines three early twelfth-century texts produced at Durham: an ecclesiastical history, a short vernacular poem and a Cuthbertine miracle collection, that propose a new phase in the history of Cuthbert’s cult. These texts applaud the restoration of monastic attendance at the shrine, and interpret Cuthbert’s ceremonial translation into the new cathedral as a replay of his late seventh-century translation on Lindisfarne. Bede’s sanctity is given a prominent role alongside Cuthbert’s as the textual driver behind northern church reform. These Cuthbertine texts emerge as sites of forceful criticism, both towards Anglo-Saxon and Norman secular elites who attempt to coerce the cult, and also, more surprisingly, towards some of the bishops of Durham. Cuthbert’s interest in defining and monitoring jurisdictional spaces is carried over from the Historia, but rendered with greater ambition. On the one hand, the saint devotes much of his power to promoting the diocese as his independent lordship, free from financial and judicial incursion; on the other, he uses retributive miracles to define a distinctively masculine monastic jurisdiction debarred to women.

This book offers its readers a textual tradition, in the sense of identifying a coherent lineage of texts relating one to the other, re-addressing an idea that has not always found favour in scholarly circles. Late twentieth-century critics reacted against the textual closure and teleological assumptions of earlier accounts of tradition, which conventionally plotted an origin, heyday and moment of decay. Rather than returning to this narrative, I join with other new proponents of ‘tradition’ in identifying a set of relationships between texts which is neither progressive nor regressive, but simply ‘diachronically non-directed’. I also resist the idea of treating my texts as interlocutors within a closed and sealed textual system, placing them instead in an ongoing dialectic with historical events perceived at an institutional, regional and national register.

This essay offers the first large-scale investigation of the cult of St Aebbe of Coldingham, focused upon its textual outputs from the seventh up until the early sixteenth centuries. It presents a nuanced picture of Aebbe's changing representations through these centuries, directed in particular toward her malleable geo-political identities (Northumbrian, Berwickshire, English and Scottish), and the ways in which she alternately upholds and disrupts conventions of saintly gender and sexuality. In addition to staging a close reading of Aebbe's twelfth-century Latin Vita, the essay is the first to pay attention to her presence in a number of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Latin legendaries of native saints, turning the spotlight upon these unjustly neglected compilations, and demonstrating their value as forms of historical evidence capable of refracting inter-regional rivalries and questions of regional versus national allegiance, and presenting those tensions in a new light.

The fourth book of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, tracing England's Christianization by means of its missionaries and saints, is often known as his book of abbesses. In it, Bede commemorates the lives of the female founders of the some of the earliest English monasteries dating from the second half of the seventh century: St Aethelburga of Barking, St Aethelthryth of Ely, and St Hilda of Whitby. All three are eulogized for their personal virtue and judicious governance, while the monasteries that they preside over are extolled as centres of exemplary piety and learning. However, there is also a tainted institution appended to this utopian monastic landscape, an anti-example as it were, designed to warn readers about the particular dangers and temptations associated with the monastic way of life. Immediately following the life of St Hilda of Whitby, Bede turns his focus to the double monastery of Coldingham, a northern outpost of the seventh-century kingdom of Northumbria, and describes how it is burnt to the ground by divine fire as a consequence of the wickedness of the inhabitants. Earlier in Book Four, Bede has already referred briefly to the foundation of Coldingham by Aebbe (615–83), the daughter of King Aethelfrith of Northumbria, and sister of Kings Oswald and Oswui, who appears to have shared her brothers’ childhood exile in south-west Scotland and is known to have received the veil from Bishop Finan of Lindisfarne after her return.