Recovering the histories of women religious in England in the central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin

Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis

Building upon the efforts made by scholars over the past twenty years to enrich our understanding of the vibrancy and sophistication of literary cultures fostered within English communities of women religious during the central Middle Ages, this article offers evidence of these women keeping their communities’ histories and preserving their saints’ cults through their own writing. This evidence is uncovered through comparative analysis of the two extant versions of the post-mortem miracula of the late Anglo-Saxon saint, Edith of Wilton (c.961–c.984): the vita et translatio Edithe composed by the Flemish hagiographer Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c.1040–d. after 1107) circa 1080 and the early fifteenth-century Middle English Wilton Chronicle. This analysis not only confirms that the Wilton women provided the necessary patronage and oral and written reports for the authoring of their saint’s life and miracles, but also discloses the very histories that these women first recorded.

Journal of Medieval History ISSN: 0304-4181 (Print) 1873-1279 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmed20 Recovering the histories of women religious in England in the central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis To cite this article: Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis (2016): Recovering the histories of women religious in England in the central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, Journal of Medieval History To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2016.1163505 Published online: 08 Apr 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmed20 Download by: [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] Date: 08 April 2016, At: 08:07 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2016.1163505 Recovering the histories of women religious in England in the central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint- Bertin Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis Department of Religious Studies, St Martin’s University, 366 Old Main, 5000 Abbey Way SE, Lacey, Washington 98503, United States of America Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Building upon the efforts made by scholars over the past 20 years to Received 25 May 2015 enrich our understanding of the vibrancy and sophistication of the Accepted 15 August 2015 literary cultures fostered within English communities of women KEYWORDS religious during the central Middle Ages, this article shows that Women religious; these women kept their communities’ histories and preserved monasticism; hagiography; their saints’ cults through their own writing. The evidence for this authorship; literary culture; is uncovered through comparative analysis of the two extant literacy; Anglo-Saxon versions of the post-mortem miracles of the late Anglo-Saxon England; Norman Conquest saint Edith of Wilton (c.961–c.984): the Vita et translatio Edithe, composed c.1080 by the Flemish hagiographer Goscelin of Saint- Bertin (c.1040–d. after 1107), and the early ﬁfteenth-century Middle English Wilton Chronicle. This analysis reveals that the writer of the Chronicle depended on a collection of Edith’s and other Wilton saints’ miracles that was maintained by their consorors throughout the late tenth and eleventh centuries, independently of Goscelin’s account. Over the past 20 years, signiﬁcant scholarly effort has been devoted to reassessing the literacies and intellectual activities of communities of women religious in England throughout the Middle Ages.1 Substantial attention had been, and continues to be, devoted to recovering the literary cultures of early Anglo-Saxon women religious.2 This CONTACT Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis kbugyis@stmartin.edu 1 A comprehensive bibliography detailing this effort can be found in the introduction to Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara and Patricia Stoop, eds., Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: the Hull Dialogue (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), xvi, n. 6. See also the ﬁve essays on English women religious in this volume, as well as the four essays on this topic in Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara and Patricia Stoop, eds., Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: the Kansas City Dialogue (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015). 2 For the most recent work on this topic, which references earlier research, see Sarah Foot, ‘Flores ecclesiae: Women in Early Anglo-Saxon Monasticism’, in Female Vita religiosa between Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages: Structures, Develop- ments, and Spatial Contexts, eds. Gert Melville and Anne Müller (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011), 173–85; the essays contributed by Stephanie Hollis and Lisa M.C. Weston to Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell, eds., Barking Abbey and Med- ieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2012); L.M.C. Weston, ‘Conceiving the Word(s): Habits of Literacy among Earlier Anglo-Saxon Monastic Women’, in Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: the Hull Dialogue, 149–57; Diane Watt, ‘Lost Books: Abbess Hildelith and the Literary Culture of Barking Abbey’, Philological Quarterly 91 (2012): 1–21; eadem, ‘The Earliest Women’s Writing? Anglo-Saxon Literary Cultures and Communities’, Women’s Writing 20 (2013): 537–54; and the essays contributed by Andrew Rabin and Helene Scheck and Virginia Blanton to Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: the Kansas City Dialogue. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 K. ANN-MARIE BUGYIS attention has not been without just cause. Many of their achievements had been neglected by earlier scholars or ascribed to the male contingent joined to or afﬁliated with these abbesses’ communities. Credit certainly needed to be given where credit was due, but this recognition had a profound impact upon the broader historiography on medieval English women religious. The early Anglo-Saxon period was elevated to a relative ‘golden age’ for women religious, against which later periods could only pale in compari- son and, thus, warrant characterisation in terms of decline or, worse, decadence and cor- ruption.3 These characterisations have now been called into question. Discoveries of new manuscript and documentary evidence, together with critical re-readings of more well- known sources, have revealed that, though there may not have been a ‘continuous’ tra- dition of literary culture in communities of women religious from the early Anglo- Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 Saxon period to the dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s, it was recurrently ‘renewed and reinvented’ throughout the Middle Ages, as Stephanie Hollis has observed.4 The evidence demonstrates that women religious in later periods were active collabor- ators in their communities’ literary cultures, as magistrae of monastic schools that edu- cated fellow members and the daughters of royalty and high nobility; as readers, scribes, patrons, owners of books in Latin, English and French, as well as bequeathing and inheriting them; and as patrons and authors of original compositions in all three languages, in verse and in prose.5 For the central Middle Ages, the period considered in this article, extant letters, chronicles and saints’ lives attest to the presence of schools at Barking, Nunnaminster (Winchester), Romsey, Shaftesbury and Wilton, and to the high levels of literacy attained by the women who received instruction there.6 Letters from Baudri of Bourgueil (c.1046–1130), Hildebert of Le Mans (c.1055–1133) and Serlo of Bayeux (c.1050–1113×1122) even laud the talents of a certain poet at Wilton named Muriel.7 Several surviving manuscripts preserve the scribal activities and, in some cases, the authorial compositions of women religious from Barking, Leominster, Nunnaminster, 3 Such characterisation gained considerable currency with the publication of Eileen Power’s Medieval English Nunneries c.1275–1535 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922); it was subsequently promoted by Christine Fell, Cecily Clark and Elizabeth Williams, Women in Anglo-Saxon England and the Impact of 1066 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984); Dagmar Schneider, ‘Anglo-Saxon Women in the Religious Life: a Study of the Status and Position of Women in an Early Medieval Society’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1985); Sally Thompson, ‘Why English Nunneries Had No History: a Study of the Problems of the English Nunneries Founded after the Conquest’, in Distant Echoes: Medieval Women 1, eds. John Nichols and Lillian Shank (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984), 131–49; eadem, Women Reli- gious: the Founding of English Nunneries after the Norman Conquest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Janemarie Luecke, ‘The Unique Experience of Anglo-Saxon Nuns’, in Peaceweavers: Medieval Women 2, eds. Lillian Shank and John Nichols (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987), 55–65; and Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, ‘Women’s Monastic Com- munities, 500–1100: Patterns of Expansion and Decline’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1989): 275–82. 4 S. Hollis, ‘The Literary Culture of the Anglo-Saxon Royal Nunneries: Romsey and London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 436′, in Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: the Hull Dialogue, 176. 5 See n. 1 above. 6 See the essays by Stephanie Hollis and Thomas O’Donnell in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture, as well as S. Hollis, ‘Wilton as a Centre of Learning’, in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s ‘Legend of Edith’ and ‘Liber confortator- ius’, eds. S. Hollis and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 307–38; eadem, ‘Literary Culture’. 7 A. Boutemy, ‘Muriel: note sur deux poèmes de Baudri de Bourgueil et de Serlon de Bayeux’, Le Moyen Âge, 3rd series, 6 (1935): 241–51; André Wilmart, ‘L’élégie d’Hildebert pour Muriel’, Revue Bénédictine 49 (1937): 376–80; and Karlheinz Hilbert, ed., Baldricus Burgulianus Carmina (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979), 137, 189–90. For a helpful review of the surviving evidence for Muriel’s poetic activities, but less than generous assessment of her presumed abilities, see J.S.P. Tatlock, ‘Muriel: the Earliest English Poetess’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 48 (1933): 317–21. For a more insightful assessment, see Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 124; eadem, ‘Anglo-Latin Women Poets’, in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, eds. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Andy Orchard. 2 vols. (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005), 2: 86–107. JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 3 Shaftesbury and Wherwell. Most are liturgical or pedagogical in nature: psalters, prayer books, a gospel book and a collection of homiletic and didactic readings for collation – the scribe of the last manuscript, which was copied in the early twelfth century at Nunna- minster, explicitly identiﬁes herself as a ‘scriptrix’ in the colophon.8 The mortuary rolls commemorating the deaths of Matilda, abbess of La Trinité, Caen (d. 1113), and of Vitalis, abbot of Savigny (d. 1122), bear the scribal additions and poetic creations of women religious from different monastic houses in England and in France.9 The death notices heading the mortuary rolls for Amphelisa, prioress of Lillechurch (or Higham) in Kent (d. 1208×1221),10 and for Lucy, founder and ﬁrst prioress of Castle Hedingham in Essex (d. 1225×1230),11 indicate that the production and circulation of these rotuli were directed by these leaders’ successors, if not undertaken by scriptrices in their commu- Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 nities, too. Compelling arguments have also been made in favour of assigning the 11 elegiac couplets in honour of Matilda de Bailleul, abbess of Wherwell (d. 1212), copied on the ﬁnal folios of a liturgical calendar, to one of her consorors, perhaps her niece and successor, Euphemia de Walliers (d. 1257).12 And the authorship of four saints’ lives has been attributed to women religious; most were composed in the mid to late twelfth century in Anglo-Norman verse and are innovative translations of their Latin 8 For extensive paleographical, codicological and textual analyses of all these manuscripts, see Katie Bugyis, ‘Ministers of Christ: Benedictine Women Religious in Central Medieval England’ (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2015). See also Pamela Robinson, ‘A Twelfth-Century Scriptrix from Nunnaminster’, in Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, their Scribes and Readers: Essays Presented to M.B. Parkes, eds. P. Robinson and Rivkah Zim (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 77– 93; Michelle Brown, ‘Mercian Manuscripts? The “Tiberius” Group and its Historical Context’, in Mercia and the Making of England, ed. Ian Walker (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2000), 281–91; eadem, ‘Female Book-Ownership and Pro- duction in Anglo-Saxon England: the Evidence of the Ninth-Century Prayerbooks’, in Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies presented to Jane Roberts, eds. Christian Kay and Louise Sylvester (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 45–67; and Thomas N. Hall, ‘Preaching at Winchester in the Early Twelfth Century’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 104 (2005): 189–218. David N. Bell included most of these manuscripts in his lists of books owned by various communities of women religious in What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publi- cations, 1995), but not all of them. For a more complete list, with corrections to some of the provenances informed by the latest scholarship, see Bugyis, ‘Ministers of Christ’. 9 Jean Dufour, ed., Recueil des rouleaux des morts (VIIIe siècle–vers 1536). 4 vols. (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 2005), nos. 114 and 122. These additions have been defended as the productions of female scribes and poets by Hugh Feiss, ‘The Poet Abbess from Notre-Dame de Saintes’, Magistra 1 (1995): 39–54; Daniel Sheerin, ‘Sisters in the Literary Agon: Texts from Communities of Women on the Mortuary Roll of the Abbess Matilda of La Trinité, Caen’, in Women Writing Latin: From Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe, eds. Phyllis Brown, Laurie Churchill and Jane Jeffrey. 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 2: 93–132; Jane Stevenson, ‘Anglo-Latin Women Poets’, 95–7; and Teresa Leslie, ‘“Orate pro nobis”: the Mortuary Roll Ritual and its Texts’ (PhD diss., Emory University, 2005). 10 Cambridge, St John’s College, MS N.31 (271); Dufour, ed., Recueil des rouleaux des morts, no. 172; C.E. Sayle, ‘The Mortuary Roll of the Abbess of Lillechurch, Kent’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 10 (1901–4): 383–409. St John’s College Library possesses a copy of Sayle’s article with signiﬁcant corrections by Sally Thompson. Pamela Robinson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c.737–1600 in Cambridge Libraries. 2 vols. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1988), 1: 90, no. 316; 2: pls. 103‒4; and Richard Beadle, ‘Dated and Datable Manuscripts in Cambridge Libraries’, English Manu- script Studies 1100–1700 3 (1992): 243. 11 London, British Library, MS Egerton 2849; Dufour, ed., Recueil des rouleaux des morts, no. 178; Andrew Watson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts, c.700–1600 in the Department of Manuscripts, the British Library. 2 vols. (London: British Library, 1979), 1: no. 613; Nigel Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 4. 2 vols. (London: Harvey Miller, 1988), 1: no. 56, pl. 202; and Justin Clegg, The Medieval Church in Manuscripts (London: British Library, 2003), 32, pl. 26. 12 The calendar was produced at St Albans Abbey in the middle of the twelfth century and then transmitted to Wherwell by the century’s end. This calendar is now found in St Petersburg, Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library, MS Lat. Q.v.I.62; Rodney Thomson, Manuscripts from St Albans Abbey, 1066–1235. 2 vols. (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1982), 1: 37–8. For a transcription of these couplets, see Antonio Staerk, Les manuscrits latins du Ve au XIIIe siècle conservés à la Bibliothèque impériale de Saint-Pétersbourg. 2 vols. (St Petersburg: à l’Imprimérie artistique ‒ Franz Krois, 1910), 1: 274–5. Alexandra Barratt discusses these couplets in ‘Small Latin? The Post-Conquest Learning of English Women Religious’, in Anglo-Latin and its Heritage: Essays in Honour of A.G. Rigg on his 64th Birthday, eds. S. Echard and G.R. Wieland (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 63–4. 4 K. ANN-MARIE BUGYIS sources – La vie de sainte Catherine d’Alexandrie and perhaps even La vie d’Édouard le confesseur by Clemence of Barking,13 and La vie seinte Audrée by a certain Marie, possibly Marie de France or a woman religious at Chatteris14 – but the writing of the Latin Life of Edward the Martyr (c.962–78) in the 1080s may also owe to the labours of a woman reli- gious, a nun at Shaftesbury.15 If indeed the Vita Edwardi was written by a Shaftesbury nun, it is a rare artefact of the efforts made by English women religious during the central Middle Ages to memorialise their communities’ patron saints through their own textual productions. For the extant evidence from this period suggests that communities of women religious more often than not outsourced the composition of the texts needed to promote their saints’ cults – vitae, translationes, miracula and lectiones – to resident or visiting male clerics Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 who possessed the requisite literary and musical talents. The prevalence of such commis- sions has led some scholars to conclude that women religious were unable to preserve their communities’ histories on their own because of their inferior or deﬁcient literacies and, thus, depended entirely on the skills of male clerics in their employ.16 The scholarship on the literary cultures of medieval English women religious from the past 20 years, however, has challenged these earlier conclusions, demonstrating instead that the very communities that outsourced their hagiographical compositions did have members who possessed the requisite skills, but opted not to engage them for strategic reasons. During the post-Conquest period, when such commissions were especially popular, com- munities of both men and women religious felt pressure to repackage the Lives of their Anglo-Saxon saints to suit the tastes of potential Norman patrons and to allay the con- cerns of scrutinising Norman ecclesiastics. Enlisting the expertise of a writer trained in a style acceptable to this new clientele was critical to a community’s continued survival.17 13 The author of La vie d’Édouard identiﬁes herself as a nun at Barking in the text, but does not reveal her name. O. Södergård, ed., La vie d’Edouard le confesseur: poème anglo-normand du XIIe siècle (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells boktr., 1948), l. 5308. Delbert Russell has strengthened the arguments made in favour of crediting Clemence of Barking with the text’s authorship in ‘“Sun num n’i vult dire a ore”: Identity Matters at Barking Abbey’, in Barking Abbey and Med- ieval Literary Culture, eds. Brown and Bussell, 117–34. See also the essays by Thelma Fenster, Jennifer N. Brown, Diane Auslander and Donna Alfano Bussell in this volume for the most recent scholarship on La vie d’Édouard and La vie de sainte Catherine. 14 The identiﬁcation of the Marie who wrote La vie seinte Audrée has been much debated. A persuasive argument has been made for Marie de France by June Hall McCash, ‘La vie seinte Audrée: a Fourth Text by Marie de France?’, Speculum 77 (2002): 744–77; J.H. McCash and Judith Clark Barban, eds. and trans., The Life of Saint Audrey: a Text by Marie de France (London: McFarland and Company, 2006). M. Dominica Legge and Philippe Ménard, however, have argued against Marie de France’s authorship; M.D. Legge, Anglo-Norman in the Cloisters: the Inﬂuence of the Orders upon Anglo-Norman Litera- ture (Edinburgh: University Press, 1950), 75; P. Ménard, Les lais de Marie de France: contes d’amour et d’aventure du moyen âge (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1979), 16. Legge and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne have attributed the Vie’s author- ship to a woman religious at Chatteris instead; M.D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1963), 264; J. Wogan-Browne, ‘Rerouting the Dower: the Anglo-Norman Life of St Audrey by Marie (of Chatteris?)’, in Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, eds. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 31. 15 Christine E. Fell, ed., Edward, King and Martyr. Leeds Texts and Monographs, new series 3 (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1971), xx. Paul Hayward also entertains the possibility that this vita was composed by a nun at Shaftesbury in ‘Trans- lation-Narratives in Post-Conquest Hagiography and English Resistance to the Norman Conquest’, Anglo-Norman Studies 21 (1998): 85–8. Susan Ridyard, in Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England: a Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 48–50, surmises instead that Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, who will be discussed at length in what follows, was the author behind this vita. 16 See especially Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 237–8; Thompson, ‘Why English Nunneries Had No History’; eadem, Women Religious, 7–15. 17 Georges Whalen, ‘Patronage Engendered: How Goscelin Allayed the Concerns of Nuns’ Discriminatory Publics’, in Women, the Book and the Godly: Selected Proceedings of the St Hilda’s Conference, 1993, eds. Lesley Smith and Jane H.M. Taylor. 2 vols. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), 1: 123–35; Stephanie Hollis, ‘Barking’s Monastic School, Late Seventh to Twelfth Century: History, Saint-Making and Literary Culture’, in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 5 Many of the writers whose expertise was enlisted often did not start from scratch when they set to work on the Lives of communities’ saints; rather they searched out and drew upon the oral and written sources maintained by their patrons. Several writers candidly admitted to their reliance upon ‘native’ sources in their texts, and a few even acknowledged their female witnesses. These acknowledgments have encouraged scholars to return to these male-authored sources to see if underlying female-authored substrata can be exca- vated through close textual analysis.18 Stephanie Hollis has insisted that the seeming scar- city of hagiographical works authored by women religious, particularly from the late Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest periods, need not necessarily imply their ‘failure to write them’.19 Their writings may just survive in a different form, hidden under a surface of male ‘overwriting’, as Diane Watt has claimed.20 Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 This article contributes to the recent efforts that have been made to enrich our under- standing of the vibrancy and sophistication of the literary cultures encouraged within English communities of women religious during the central Middle Ages. It shows that these women kept their communities’ histories and preserved their saints’ cults through their own writing. The evidence for this will be uncovered through comparative analysis of the two extant versions of the post-mortem miracula of the late Anglo-Saxon saint, Edith of Wilton (c.961–c.984): the Vita et translatio Edithe, composed c.1080 by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c.1040–d. after 1107), and the early ﬁfteenth-century Wilton Chronicle. This analysis reveals that the writer of the Chronicle consulted a collection of Edith’s and other Wilton saints’ miracles that was maintained by their consorors throughout the late tenth and eleventh centuries, independently of Goscelin’s account. The article reviews Goscelin’s itinerary and bibliography as a hagiographer of English saints, focusing especially on his relationships with and writings for the Wilton women. Goscelin has been counted among the few post-Conquest hagiographers who unreservedly acknowledged the many women who offered essential testimonies for their writings. His admission of these female history-makers into his texts was more than just a rhetorical ploy aimed at self- legitimation; it was an act of genuine respect for the female authors, scribes and witnesses on whose knowledge he depended. More importantly, his admission raises the possibility that he ‘overwrote’ his female-authored sources, and that they are awaiting excavation. Sources as living witnesses Little is known of Goscelin’s life prior to his arrival in England in the early 1060s.21 He was born around 1040 and entered the religious life at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Bertin in Culture, 50; eadem, ‘Literary Culture’, 170. See also Susan Ridyard, ‘Condigna veneratio: Post-Conquest Attitudes to the Saints of the Anglo-Saxons’, Anglo-Norman Studies 9 (1987): 179–206; Paul Hayward, ‘Translation-Narratives in Post- Conquest Hagiography’. 18 Such textual analysis has been utilised to fruitful effect by Diane Watt, ‘Literature in Pieces: Female Sanctity and the Relics of Early Women’s Writing (500–1150)’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare Lees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 357–80; and by Stephanie Hollis, ‘Literary Culture’, 179–83. 19 Hollis, ‘Literary Culture’, 169. 20 Watt, ‘Literature in Pieces’, 364. 21 For Goscelin’s biography, see Thomas Hamilton, ‘Goscelin of Canterbury: a Critical Study of his Life, Works, and Accom- plishments’ (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1974); Rosalind Love, ed. and trans., Three Eleventh-Century Anglo-Latin Saints’ Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), xl–xliv; Ridyard, Royal Saints, 38–9, 48–9; Frank Barlow, ed. and trans., The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster. 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 133–49; Michael Lapidge and Rosalind Love, ‘The Latin Hagiography of England and Wales (600–1550)’, in Hagiographies, vol. 3, ed. Guy Philippart (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 228–30; Michael Lapidge, The Cult of St Swithun (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 613–22; 6 K. ANN-MARIE BUGYIS Saint-Omer in Flanders. He left his monastic home to join the household of Hermann, bishop of Ramsbury and Sherborne (1059–75), then of Salisbury (1075–8), after receiving permission to move his see at the Council of London in 1075. When Hermann died in 1078, Goscelin was forced out of his employ by Hermann’s successor, Osmund (d. 1099). In search of new patrons, Goscelin travelled around England for over a decade as a peripatetic hagiographer, roaming from abbey to abbey, writing the vitae of numerous English saints. The inspiration for much of his hagiographical output can be attributed, in part, to the gratitude that he wished to express (or to the debt that he felt obliged to repay) to the various monastic communities that extended hospitality to him. Though the precise chronology and extent of both his itinerary and writings have yet to be established deﬁnitively, it is certain that he visited at least the abbeys at Wilton, Win- Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 chester, Peterborough, Barking, Ely and Ramsey, before settling at St Augustine’s, Canter- bury. Over 30 hagiographical, polemical and didactic works have been attributed to him with varying degrees of certitude, and roughly a dozen of his vitae feature female saints.22 Goscelin’s ‘exiles’ from both Saint-Bertin and the bishop of Salisbury’s household made him ever a guest, and never a full community member, at the abbeys he visited, though it is possible that, once he settled at St. Augustine’s in the 1090s, he served as precentor there. Certainly he was chieﬂy responsible for rewriting the vitae of the early archbishop-saints of Canterbury upon their translations in 1091, and the high praise that he received for his literary and musical talents from Reginald, a fellow monk at Canterbury (d. after 1109),23 from William of Malmesbury (c.1090–d. after 1142),24 and from the twelfth- century chronicle of Ely, the Liber Eliensis,25 raises the likelihood that Goscelin exercised a cantor-like role not only at St Augustine’s but also at many of the abbeys he visited. Goscelin enjoyed close associations with communities of women religious, too.26 When he was a member of Bishop Hermann’s household, he was on very familiar terms with the Rosalind Love, ed. and trans., Goscelin of St Bertin: the Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), xix–xxi; Frank Barlow, ‘Goscelin (b. c.1035, d. in or after 1107)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11105 (Accessed 10 December 2014); Rosalind Love, ‘Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’, in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo- Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and others. 2nd edn. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 218. 22 Barlow, ed., Life of King Edward, 145–9; Hamilton, ‘Goscelin of Canterbury’, 1: 123–4, 2: 83; Whalen, ‘Patronage Engen- dered’; Richard Sharpe, A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540. Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 151–4; and Stephanie Hollis, ‘Goscelin’s Writings and the Wilton Women’, in Writing the Wilton Women, eds. S. Hollis and others, 217. 23 For the two poems Reginald dedicated to Goscelin, both of which praise his literary and musical talents, see F. Liebermann, ‘Reginald von Canterbury’, Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für Ältere Deutsche Geschichtskunde 13 (1887): 542–6, nos. 15 and 16. See also Barlow, ed., Life of King Edward, 141–2. 24 William of Malmesbury, in his Gesta regum Anglorum, commends both Goscelin’s written praise of the English saints, ranking him only second to Bede, and his musical abilities, ranking him just after Osbern, precentor at Christ Church, Can- terbury. William highlights the fact that Goscelin not only wrote many vitae of English saints, but also travelled to many dioceses and abbeys in order to do so: Gesta regum Anglorum: the History of the English Kings, eds. R.A.B. Mynors, R.M. Thomson and Michael Winterbottom. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 1: 590–2. William mentions Goscelin in passing at the opening of his Gesta pontiﬁcum Anglorum, referencing Goscelin’s miracle-accounts of the early archbishop saints of Canterbury: Gesta pontiﬁcum Anglorum: the History of the English Bishops, eds. Michael Winterbottom and R.M. Thomson. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1: 4–6. 25 The Liber Eliensis brieﬂy recounts Goscelin’s stay at Ely, during which time he composed a sequence, ‘prosam’, in honour of the abbey’s patron saint, Æthelthryth (d. 679). Like William’s Gesta regum, the Liber Eliensis also mentions that Goscelin was a ‘monachus [ … ] disertissimus’, who composed ‘per Angliam vitas, miracula, gesta sanctorum sanctarumque in his- toriis, in prosiis’. E.O. Blake, ed., Liber Eliensis. Camden, 3rd series, 92 (London: Ofﬁces of the Royal Historical Society, 1962), 215–16. 26 This article focuses on Goscelin’s connection to Wilton Abbey and the hagiographical writings that he composed for this community, but it should be noted that he was also closely afﬁliated with the women religious at Barking in the 1080s. He composed vitae and translationes for their three abbess-saints – Æthelburh (c.666–c.693), Hildelith (c.693–c.720) and JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 7 women at Wilton Abbey. So intimate was his knowledge of this community that many scholars claim that he had been a resident there, even a chaplain or tutor.27 The depth of the spiritual friendships that he formed with the Wilton women was communicated most poignantly in his Liber confortatorius, an epistolary guide for the anchoritic life that he wrote for Eve, a former woman religious at Wilton.28 Interwoven throughout Gos- celin’s effusive laments over Eve’s unexpected departure for an anchorhold attached to the church of Saint-Laurent in Angers are details of their former rapport: he knew her parents, witnessed her monastic profession, received gifts of books from her, and must have been charged with her instruction at Wilton in some capacity, because in his letter he still expresses responsibility for her continued spiritual and intellectual formation. Given that the Liber confortatorius is the only extant work from Goscelin’s corpus that is a per- Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 sonal missive to a woman religious, it is difﬁcult to assess the uniqueness of his friendship with Eve. Yet it is clear from some of his vitae of female saints that close afﬁliations with other women religious often did inspire his writing.29 Goscelin’s Vita et translatio of the late tenth-century saint, Edith of Wilton, though dedicated to Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury (1070–89), and completed c.1080 at the urging of Bishop Hermann, were undertaken in response to the requests of the matres of Wilton.30 Comparison of the surviving manuscript copies of Goscelin’s Vita of Edith, as André Wilmart and Stephanie Hollis have shown, reveals that he wrote at least two recensions of it: one for Lanfranc and the other for the Wilton women.31 In Wulfhild (d. after 996). They were dedicated to Maurice, bishop of London (1086–1107), but evidently were written on the occasion of the translations of these saints’ relics around 1086, during the abbacy of Ælfgifu. See M.L. Colker, ‘Texts of Jocelyn of Canterbury which relate to the history of Barking Abbey’, Studia Monastica 7 (1965): 483–60. Goscelin’s afﬁlia- tion with Barking has been detailed recently in the essays by Stephanie Hollis, Kay Slocum and Thomas O’Donnell in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture. 27 Barlow, ed., Life of King Edward, 135–9; Ridyard, Royal Saints, 39; and Hollis, ‘Goscelin’s Writings’, 220. 28 The Liber confortatorius survives in a single mid twelfth-century manuscript copy, London, British Library, MS Sloane 3103, ff. 1r–114v, from the Abbey of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in Normandy. For a critical edition of this text, see C.H. Talbot, ‘The Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint Bertin’, Studia Anselmiana 37 / Analecta Monastica, 3rd series 37 (1955): 2–117. The nature of Goscelin and Eve’s friendship has been much discussed; see H.M. Canatella, ‘Long-Distance Love: the Ideology of Male-Female Spiritual Friendship in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Liber confortatorius’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 19 (2010): 35–53; Dyan Elliott, ‘Alternative Intimacies: Men, Women, and Spiritual Direction in the Twelfth Century’, in Christina of Markyate: a Twelfth-Century Holy Woman, eds. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (New York: Routledge, 2005), 160–83 (172–6); the essays on Eve and Goscelin by Rebecca Hayward and Stephanie Hollis in Writing the Wilton Women, ed. Hollis; S. Hollis, ‘Strategies of Emplacement and Displacement: St Edith and the Wilton Community in Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius’, in A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes, eds. Clare Lees and Gillian Overing (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 150–69; Mari Hughes-Edwards, ‘The Role of the Anchorite Guidance Writer: Goscelin of St Bertin’, in Anchoritism in the Middle Ages: Texts and Traditions, eds. Catherine Innes-Parker and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 31– 45; Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Goscelin and the Consecration of Eve’, Anglo-Saxon England 35 (2006): 251–70; eadem, Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 210–45; Monika Otter, ‘Inclusae exclusus: Desire, Identiﬁcation and Gender in the Liber Confortatorius’, in The Book of Encouragement and Consolation [Liber Confortatorius]: the Letter of Goscelin to the Recluse Eva, trans. M. Otter (Cam- bridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 151–67; André Wilmart, ‘Ève et Goscelin’, Revue Bénédictine 46 (1934): 414–38; idem, ‘Ève et Goscelin (II)’, Revue Bénédictine 50 (1938): 42–83. 29 See n. 26 above. 30 André Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin’, Analecta Bollandiana 56 (1938): 37–8: ‘Ipse etiam Wiltoniensis pontifex et pie recordationis pater Hermannus, cui adherebamus, nostram parvitatem ad hec scribenda paterna benignitate est deprecatus, ipsis affatim conprecantibus matribus’. Translations of Goscelin’s Vita et translatio Edithe are my own, but the translation of these texts found in Writing the Wilton Women, ed. Hollis, by Michael Wright and Kathleen Loncar was a helpful resource. 31 The earliest manuscript witness to the recension dedicated to Lanfranc is found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlin- son C. 938, ff. 1r–29r, a thirteenth-century manuscript of unknown English provenance. This recension, with a few sig- niﬁcant variant readings and minus Goscelin’s metrical compositions, is also found in Gotha, Landesbibliothek, MS I.81, ff. 188v–203r, a collection of English saints’ lives written in the late fourteenth century by an English scribe. The other 8 K. ANN-MARIE BUGYIS certain passages, these recensions differ markedly in their presentation of Edith’s sanctity. Most notably, the Wilton recension offers more concrete details from Edith’s life than Lanfranc’s does, such as the manual of devotions that she copied for her personal use, the menagerie of animals that she kept at the abbey, and the alb that she embroidered for herself when she was appointed abbess over Barking, Nunnaminster and Wilton.32 The inclusion of such details reveals Goscelin’s ﬁrst-hand knowledge of some of the relics and landmarks that still survived from Edith’s life, as well as his close ties to members of the Wilton community and his dependency on their testimonies, even if he did, at times, embellish, amend or omit features of their reports. In his prologue to the Vita Edithe, Goscelin extols at length the testimonies that he received from the Wilton women about the deeds of their saint. He mentions that he Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 recorded the accounts of the present abbess, Godgifu (c.1067–90), and of other senior members, both ‘those very things that they saw with their eyes’, as well as ‘with other suit- able witnesses those things that they heard from the venerable mothers, who both saw the holy virgin [Edith] herself and most faithfully obeyed her, whose parentage and religious lives are known to have no less credibility than books’.33 Goscelin proceeds to defend the legitimacy of their accounts against those who might discredit them on the basis of their sex: And certainly this sex is not to be refuted from the testimony of truth, which [sex] carried the word of God, convicted the unbelief of the apostles by its faith, and preached the Lord’s res- urrection with the angelic embassy. Finally, both handmaids of the Lord and male servants prophesy and speak in tongues in the same grace of the Holy Spirit.34 Like their biblical foremothers – the Virgin Mary, the women who ﬁrst encountered the risen Christ and proclaimed the good news, and all the women in the Early Church inspired by the Spirit – the Wilton women were capable of offering testimony to the events that they had witnessed, indeed of bearing the very truth of God as Word; they might even show the right way in faith to those male hearers of theirs who resisted believing. Goscelin’s opening defence of his reliance upon female sources gives, on the face of it, a very non-textual cast to these witnesses: they are conduits of earlier oral reports; like the biblical ﬁgures to whom they are compared, they did not offer written testimonies. Even recension is found in Cardiff, Public Library, MS I.381, ff. 102v–120r, an early twelfth-century collection of saints’ lives, likely of Barking provenance, as it also includes Goscelin’s Vita Æthelburge and Lectiones Hildelithe. Wilmart was the ﬁrst to argue that the recension of the vita found in the Cardiff manuscript was a revision of the one dedicated to Lan- franc. Hollis furthered Wilmart’s argument to demonstrate, I think persuasively, that Goscelin made this revision for the Wilton community. Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 24–31; and Hollis, ‘Goscelin’s Writings’, 236–44. 32 Hollis, ‘Goscelin’s Writings’, 239–40. 33 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 36–7: ‘Illustrissima vero monasterii sui primiceria domna Godyva, que ab eius digne memorie genitrice nunc habetur quinta, cetereque presentes matres, tam ﬁdeles quam generose, inter reliqua que ipse oculis conspexere, afﬁrmant conﬁdenter cum aliis idoneis testibus ea que ab his venerabilibus matribus audire, que ipsam sanctam virginem et videre, et devotissime sunt obsequute; quarum et parentele et religiose vite non minorem ﬁdem quam libris noscuntur habere.’ 34 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 37: ‘Neque vero is sexus a testimonio veritatis refellendus erit, qui Domini verbum portavit, qui sua ﬁde apostolorum incredulitatem arguit et angelica legatione dominicam resurrectionem predicavit. Post- remo tam ancille Domini prophetant quam servi, et linguis loquuntur in eadem gratia Spiritus Sancti.’ Cf. Matt. 28:10; John 20:18; and Acts 2:17–18. Goscelin makes a similar defence of his use of female sources in his prologue to the Vita of Wulfhild, the late tenth-century abbess of Barking. See Colker, ‘Texts of Jocelyn of Canterbury’, 418. This defence has been analysed by Thomas O’Donnell, ‘“The Ladies Have Made Me Quite Fat”: Authors and Patrons at Barking Abbey’, in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture, 99–100. See also Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 51–2. JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 9 the appraisal that he makes between the credibility of the lives of these women and that of books seems to emphasise their non-textuality. But later in the prologue and in his account of Edith’s post-mortem miracles, he acknowledges his dependence on earlier written sources and hints that the Wilton women may have composed some of them. Near the prologue’s end, he writes: ‘I have so conﬁdently set forth a few things from the many which I learned from the testimony of faithful people or from native books [patriis libris] that, in place of the proclamation of history, we may instead be eager to rhapsodise the wedding song’.35 Patriis libris seems to be translated most accurately as ‘native books’, given Goscelin’s other use of this expression to designate the written sources used for Edith’s Life. It is found at the end of the account of the saint’s miraculous healing of an epileptic dancer from Colebeck (Colebecci). Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 These things were declared in the presence of Abbess Brihtgifu of precious memory and com- mitted to native writings [patriis litteris]. But since we have poured out these things more freely on account of their importance and novelty, let us be succinct in relating those things that remain.36 Here, Goscelin reveals that there was an earlier account of this miracle, possibly written in the vernacular c.1060 at the behest of the reigning abbess, Brihtgifu (c.1040–65).37 He also reiterates how he drew upon these ‘native writings’ for his own work: he was selective in what he chose to relate and may even have abridged the narratives of certain events. Though his use of the adjective patriis may allude to the male authorship of the litteris that he used, such an interpretation should not be unquestioningly assumed. ‘Native’, ‘local’ or even ‘vernacular’ seems to be a more ﬁtting translation of patriis, as they acknow- ledge Goscelin’s great facility in the English language,38 and capture more fully the vibrant intellectual culture at Wilton in the late Anglo-Saxon period, thereby leaving open the possibility of female authorship.39 Stephanie Hollis has offered extensive evidence to support the claim that Wilton func- tioned from the beginning of the tenth century to at least the end of the eleventh as ‘an upper-class boarding school’, educating the daughters of royalty and high nobility, most notably Edith (d. 1075), the eldest daughter of Earl Godwine (d. 1053) and Gytha (ﬂ. c.1022–68) and the future wife of Edward the Confessor (1003×5–1066); Gunhild (1055–97), the eldest daughter of Harold Godwineson (1022/3?–1066) and Ealdgyth (ﬂ. c.1057–66); and Edith-Matilda (1080–1118), the daughter of Malcolm III (d. 1093) and 35 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 39: ‘Pauca autem de multis que ﬁdelium testimonio vel patriis libris didicimus tam ﬁducialiter exponimus, ut pro hystorie notitia pocius epithalamium odizare gestiamus.’ 36 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 292: ‘Hec in presencia memorate abbatisse Brihtgive declarata et patriis litteris sunt mandata. Sed, his pro magnitudine sua ac novitate effusis liberius, cetera que restant succingamus.’ 37 Abbess Brihtgifu was third in succession after Edith’s mother, Wulfthryth. 38 Goscelin took a certain pride in his knowledge of the English language. In many of his vitae, he acknowledges that he could read English, which enabled him to incorporate native sources into his accounts. Though he was Flemish by birth, his knowledge of English is not surprising, because, as he himself admits in his Liber confortatorius, Flemish and English are both members of the same Germanic language family. See Talbot, ‘Liber confortatorius’, 86–7. Concerning Goscelin’s knowledge of English, see Elisabeth van Houts, ‘The Flemish Contribution to Biographical Writing in England in the Ele- venth Century’, in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, eds. David Bates, Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 122; eadem, ‘Contrasts and Interaction: Neighbours of Nascent Dutch Writing: the English, Normans, and Flemish (c.1000–c.1200)’, Queeste 13 (2006): 5–6. Van Houts cites the work of L.J.R. Milis, Religion, Culture, and Mentalities in the Medieval Low Countries: Selected Essays, ed. J. Deploige (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 353–68. 39 Stephanie Hollis also contends that patriis libris refers ‘to locally written books or vernacular sources’; Hollis, ‘St Edith and the Wilton Community’, in Writing the Wilton Women, ed. Hollis, 278–9. See also Hollis, ‘Barking’s Monastic School’, 50–1. 10 K. ANN-MARIE BUGYIS Margaret (d. 1093) of Scotland and the future wife of Henry I (1068/9–1135).40 During this time, and continuing into the twelfth century, there were also known auctrices and scriptrices at Wilton, who would have possessed the requisite literacy to maintain written accounts of Edith’s life and miracles – before, during and after Goscelin’s rewriting of them.41 In their sisters’ keeping The Life of Edith of Wilton offers a particularly amenable site for excavating the textual layers of the male-authored historical record for the written words of English women reli- gious from the central Middle Ages, because two versions of her post-mortem miracula are Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 extant: Goscelin’s late eleventh-century Vita et translatio and the early ﬁfteenth-century Wilton Chronicle. Comparison of the number of miracles recounted and narrative details provided in each source reveals that the Wilton Chronicle depended on a collection of the saint’s miracles that was kept independently of Goscelin’s, most likely by the Wilton women themselves. As mentioned earlier, Goscelin wrote two recensions of the Vita of Edith: the ﬁrst for Archbishop Lanfranc and the second for Wilton. The sole surviving manuscript copy of the former – Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 938, ff. 16r–29r – also contains Goscelin’s account of the translation of Edith’s relics c.997, during the reign of her half-brother, Æthelred II (c.966×8–1016), and of the miracles that subsequently took place. A translatio was not included in the sole surviving manu- script copy of the recension of the Vita of Edith that Goscelin wrote for Wilton – Cardiff, Public Library, MS I.381, ff. 102v–120r. This fact introduces the possibility that he did not write a translatio for Wilton, because the community already possessed their own collection of Edith’s miracula. An account of Edith’s life, translation and miracles also appears in the Wilton Chron- icle, which was written c.1420 in Middle English, mostly in quatrains of varying length, and survives in one manuscript copy, London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B III, ff. 194r–259v.42 The author of the Chronicle is presently unknown. William 40 Hollis, ‘St Edith and the Wilton Community’, 245. See also Hollis, ‘Barking’s Monastic School’, 41–2, 47. For Edith God- wineson’s connections to Wilton, see Barlow, ed., Life of King Edward, 22–4, 36, 70–2. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe has undertaken the most focused studies of the lives of Gunhild and Edith-Matilda; see ‘Edith’s Choice’, in Latin Learning and English Lore, 2: 253–74; and ‘Leaving Wilton: Gunhild and the Phantoms of Agency’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106 (2007): 203–23. Both essays reappear in O’Brien O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience, 151–84, 185–209, respect- ively. In his Gesta regum Anglorum, William of Malmesbury mentions that Edith-Matilda ‘had been brought up from her tender years among the nuns at Wilton and Romsey and also trained her womanly mind in letters’ (‘a teneris annis inter sanctimoniales apud Wiltoniam et Rumesium educata, litteris quoque femineum pectus exercuit’): Gesta regum Anglorum, eds. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 1: 754. 41 See the earlier discussion of the poetess Muriel at n. 7, as well as the elegiac poem included in Wilton’s titulus for the mortuary roll of Vitalis, abbot of Savigny. See Dufour, ed., Recueil des rouleaux des morts, 1: 571, no. 122.153 and n. 9 above. 42 There is general scholarly agreement on the dating of the Chronicle, because Henry V (r. 1413–22) was the last king included in the list of the royal ‘founders’ of Wilton, copied on ff. 258v–259r. The manuscript also dates to roughly the same time as the Chronicle’s composition. For the manuscript’s dating, see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Outdoing the Daughters of Syon? Edith of Wilton and the Representation of Female Community in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Med- ieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays in Honour of Felicity Riddy, eds. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 393–409. In the manuscript, the Chronicle is followed by a shorter poem narrating the Life of Æthelthryth of Ely (ff. 260r–274v). For the most recent edition of the Chronicle, see Mary Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth: Princesses, Miracle Workers, and Their Late Medieval Audience: the Wilton Chronicle and the Wilton Life of St Æthelthryth (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). The Chronicle consists of 4977 lines and, save six lines, was written in quatrains; couplets mark the beginning of the poem (lines 1–4) and the end of the section devoted to Edith’s life (lines 2381–2). All citations from the Chronicle are taken from Dockray-Miller’s edition. JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 11 Black, Carl Horstmann, Stephanie Hollis and Jocelyn Wogan-Brown have independently suggested that a chaplain or attendant priest at Wilton likely served as the author,43 but Mary Dockray-Miller has argued that women religious at Wilton could just as likely have written and/or copied it.44 For on the basis of neither internal nor external evidence can the gender of the author (or even the copyist of the manuscript) be determined positively. On the ﬁnal folios of the Chronicle in the Faustina manuscript, a list of Wilton’s royal ‘founders’ – the kings of England from Alfred (848/9–899) to Henry V (1386–1422) – and of the sources used by the chronicler was included. Cited ﬁrst among the chronicler’s sources is the ‘legenda sancte Edithe virginis’.45 This reference to Edith’s Legenda does not specify whether Goscelin was its author. Certainly the close textual parallels Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 between his Vita et translatio Edithe and most of the Chronicle (lines 1023–4977) seem to indicate the chronicler’s dependence on the Flemish hagiographer’s account, even her/his familiarity with details of Edith’s life found only in the Wilton recension of the Vita.46 Additionally, in the epilogue, the chronicler mentions that s/he was writing 340 years after the original (unnamed) writer of Edith’s life and miracles. If the chronicler was writing c.1420, then the original author was writing c.1080, which roughly dates to when Goscelin authored the vita.47 But the chronicler’s account of Edith’s posthumous miracles contains many events and narrative details not found in Goscelin’s, at least as his Translatio survives in the Rawlinson manuscript. The additions and expansions found in the Chronicle may derive from another recension of Edith’s Translatio authored by Goscelin that does not presently survive in manuscript form, perhaps one authored for the Wilton community, or they may derive from another source entirely. Close comparative analysis of the extant texts indicates the existence of a twelfth- century source written for and/or by the women religious at Wilton. Two of the miracula included in the Chronicle are not found in Goscelin’s Translatio, because they occurred during the twelfth and thirteenth years of the reign of William Rufus (1087–1100), nearly two decades after Goscelin is believed to have ﬁnished writing the Vita et translatio Edithe. The miracula recall the saint’s release of two men who had been imprisoned by the king for hunting violations.48 In addition to relating these two miracles, the chronicler also admits that Edith delivered many other men out of prison, but s/he chose to include only two to exemplify the others. If one wishes to learn about the other miracles, they can be found in another written source at Wilton: ‘And mony men weron delyverde ouȝt of preson also, / By þe grace of Seynt Ede as ȝe mowe in story rede’.49 Both the addition of two miracula not found in Goscelin’s Translatio and the admission that another source contained more miracles similar in occurrence suggest that some member or 43 G.H. Black, ed., Chronicon Vilodunense; sive de vita et miraculis Sanctae Edithae regis Edgari ﬁliae carmen vetus Anglicum, e codice unico Cottoniano in Museo Britannico asservato nunc demum in lucem editum (London: Typis Nicholsianis, 1830), viii, n. 1; C. Horstmann, ed., S. Editha sive Chronicon Vilodunense; im Wiltshire Dialekt aus Ms. Cotton Faustina B III (Heilbronn: Gebr. Henninger, 1883); Hollis, ‘Literary Culture’, 175; and Wogan-Browne, ‘Outdoing the Daughters of Syon?’ 44 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, 9. 45 London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B III, f. 259r. 46 Hollis, ‘Goscelin’s Writings’, 242. 47 The chronicler writes: ‘All þuse meracles God wrouȝt for lov of Seynt Ede, / þe whiche ychave ywrytone in þis boke here, / and well mony mo þen y ever dude wryte or rede, / For thus weron wryton here byfore CCC and fourty ȝere’: Dockray- Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 4958–61. 48 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 4442–81 and 4482–513, respectively. 49 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 4440–1. 12 K. ANN-MARIE BUGYIS afﬁliate of the Wilton community continued recording Edith’s miracula after Goscelin had completed his account. Yet there are additional narrative details scattered throughout the Chronicle’s record of the miracles performed at Wilton which suggest that the chronicler (or the author of the twelfth-century expansion of Goscelin’s Translatio) consulted another collection written prior to and independently of Goscelin’s, which kept an account of the miracles that took place at the saint’s shrine during the late tenth and eleventh centuries. The literary artiﬁce of the chronicler alone cannot explain many of these additions, for they include concrete details that imbue the narratives of the miracula with a sense of immediacy that could have been expressed only by someone with close, intimate knowledge of the events. Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 In the chronicler’s account of the miraculous release of a prisoner during the reign of William the Conqueror (1066–87), many details are found that do not appear in Gosce- lin’s Translatio. First, the chronicler tells us that the miracle took place in 1078, during the twelfth year of William’s reign.50 Then, s/he reports that the man imprisoned had been a member of William’s household.51 The location of the man’s imprisonment is also dis- closed: the great castle in Salisbury.52 And where Goscelin only brieﬂy describes the shat- tering of the man’s shackles upon his arrival at Wilton’s church, the chronicler vividly recounts the man’s escape to Wilton, the pursuit of his gaolers, and the happy coincidence of the breaking of the man’s bonds with the arrival of his gaolers in Wilton’s church.53 According to the chronicler, after the gaolers witnessed the prisoner’s release, they immediately went to William to report the miracle.54 Hearing the news, the king acknow- ledged that Edith had performed other great miracles, and not wishing to anger one so beloved by God, he allowed his prisoner to remain at Wilton.55 The man spent the rest of his life in service to the saint, and the pieces of his fetters were welded together and hung from Edith’s shrine as a permanent, tangible testimony to the miracle.56 In Gosce- lin’s account, William makes no appearance, nor is mention made of the freed man’s life- long service at Wilton. Goscelin relates the miracle with great economy, focusing on the moment when the prisoner was loosed from his bonds and how they were displayed at the saint’s shrine.57 Set in parallel with the chronicler’s version, Goscelin’s appears to be a redaction of a written source he consulted; many narrative details are wanting, like how an imprisoned, shackled man escaped to Wilton in the ﬁrst place. These details are found in the chronicler’s version, and they help not only to situate the miracle chronologi- cally and geographically, but also to ﬁll out and enrich the narrative arc, transforming the miraculum into a performable text, one that could have been read aloud in a communal monastic setting, like matins, collation or the refectory, to great effect. These details were not recorded in any other extant source that preserves Wilton’s history, but their 50 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, l. 4381: ‘þe twolft ȝere of his regnynge’. 51 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, l. 4382: ‘In þe kynges house a worthy mon þer was.’ 52 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 4388–9: ‘and cast doun in to þe deppust putte / of þe gret castllys of Salisbury dunchone’. 53 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 4394–412. 54 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 4413–17. 55 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 4418–21. 56 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 4422–9. 57 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 293, Chapter 18. JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 13 speciﬁcity suggests that they originated from a source written nearly contemporaneously with the event of the miracle, most likely in a collection initiated and maintained by the Wilton women prior to Goscelin’s writing of the Vita et translatio. The miracles worked both in life and after death by Wulfthryth, Edith’s abbess and biological mother (d. c.1000), also receive more sustained attention in the Chron- icle. The chronicler’s version of the ﬁrst miracle to take place at Edith’s shrine, which concerns the theft and miraculous recovery of a richly embroidered cloth that covered her tomb, makes clear that this cloth had originally been placed there by her mother: Hurre blessud moder, Seynt Wultrude, toke a twaylle of ryȝt gode aray, Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 and upon þat virgenys tombe hit layde, to hong þere both nyȝt and day.58 Goscelin’s version does not reveal the identity of the cloth’s donor; he simply states: ‘a votive cloth brightened her light-bearing tomb’.59 Perhaps Wulfthryth’s connection to the cloth was the chronicler’s invention. In terms of narratival ﬁttingness, making Wulf- thryth the agent of the cloth’s placement accords well with her role as the abbess of Wilton and as the saint’s mother, but when this detail is read alongside related ones found in the Chronicle’s accounts of other miracles, it appears more likely to have been original to the chronicler’s source-text, not a confection of her/his imagination. In the account of Wulfthryth’s successful intercession on behalf of a thief who had escaped prison and ﬂed to Wilton during her abbacy, the chronicler not only relates, as Goscelin does, how her prayers for the thief’s protection resulted in the sudden blindness of his gaolers, who threatened to break down the doors of the church in order to reclaim their prisoner,60 but s/he also describes how Wulfthryth prayed for the gaolers’ healing after she had obtained the thief’s ofﬁcial pardon from King Æthelred, how the gaolers fully repented of their actions and how the abbess’ prayers ultimately were answered.61 Differently, and much more succinctly – roughly four sentences – Goscelin reports that the gaolers were condemned to perpetual blindness.62 The dramatic discrepancies between the two accounts’ endings are not easily explained, but given the fact that it takes the chronicler 56 lines to recount how the gaolers begged Wulfthryth for forgiveness and then were healed by her, it seems likely that Goscelin chose an alternate ending that would result in a more economical telling of the miracle. Credibility is given to this explanation of the different endings when Goscelin’s account of Wulfthryth’s post-mortem healing of a blind and lame infant is read beside the chroni- cler’s. Goscelin writes: Also an infant, disabled in eyes and feet, as if out of his mind, crying out for his mother, was rolling about here and there before her [Wulfthryth’s] tomb, when, behold, as the sisters 58 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 2265–8. 59 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 100: ‘Tumbam eius luciferam votivum candidabat linteum.’ 60 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 272–3, Chapter 5. 61 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 2907–62. 62 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 273, Chapter 5: ‘Lumina sanguinem querentia vox increpuit continua, ut nec se nec alium viderent quo auferrent, nec aliquem perderent, dum ipsi sibi perissent.’ 14 K. ANN-MARIE BUGYIS witnessed in the choir, he was healed in both sight and step. The ring of her pastoral faith also often proﬁted those suffering in their eyes, when it was looked upon with faith.63 By Goscelin’s account, there is no explicit connection between the restoration of the infant’s visual and motor abilities and the healing properties of Wulfthryth’s ring. Indeed it is not entirely clear why Goscelin would mention her ring at all, as this detail seems inessential to the story. Only when the chronicler’s version of this miraculum is read is the rupture in Goscelin’s account rendered intelligible. The chronicler reports that when the infant was brought to Wulfthryth’s tomb, the women religious who were singing in the choir caught sight of the infant, who had been left by the shrine, ‘and tokon Seynt Wultrude profession rynge, / and abouȝt his nekke þey hongedone hit Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 þo’.64 Then, the women said their prayers, whereupon the infant was miraculously healed. The application of Wulfthryth’s ring, combined with the women’s prayers, effected the infant’s healing, but we would not have known this by reading Goscelin’s account alone. However, the fact that he mentions the curative properties of the ring in the same chapter as the healing of the infant suggests that his original source-text did describe the ring’s role in the miracle. His reasons for omitting this detail are not immediately apparent, but after studying his treatment of Wulfthryth’s other miracles, it is evident that Goscelin did his best to relate them as brieﬂy as possible, so that his text would focus primarily on Edith, not her mother. Stephanie Hollis has argued that in his Vita et translatio Edithe, Goscelin’s aim was, in part, to downplay the signiﬁcance of Wulfthryth’s cult to the Wilton women in order to elevate Edith as the patron saint of the community.65 The textual strategies he deployed, from providing Edith’s post-mortem cult with an unbroken lineage to abbreviating Wulf- thryth’s miracula, were mostly successful in relegating Wulfthryth to an ancillary role in Wilton’s late eleventh-century community of saints; however, they could not completely erase the memory of the venerable status that she once enjoyed. As the foregoing analysis has revealed, there was another, likely earlier, written account of the miracles performed at Wilton, and Goscelin was in constant negotiation with this source. He had to decide what should be incorporated and what could be excised. No doubt there were limits to the extent to which he could renarrate Wilton’s past, for he was bounded by both this written source and the memories of the chief patrons of his text – the Wilton women themselves. But as we have seen in his versions of some of Wulfthryth’s miracula, these boundaries still permitted him considerable liberties. Fortunately, the Chronicle ‘embedded’ a richly detailed Life of Wulfthryth alongside her daughter’s within its history of the abbey, as Wiesje Emons-Nijenhuis has observed.66 It allows us to 63 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 277, Chapter 11: ‘Infans etiam oculis et pedibus obtusus coram ipsius tumulo quasi amens huc et illuc, matrem inclamitans, rotabatur, cum ecce, videntibus sororibus in choro, et visu et gressu reparatur. Sed et eius pastoralis ﬁdei anulus sepe profuit oculis dolentibus, cum ﬁde inspectus.’ 64 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 3209–10. 65 Hollis, ‘St Edith and the Wilton Community’, 255, 269–80. 66 W. Emons-Nijenhuis, ‘The Embedded Saint, the Wilton Chronicle’s Life of St. Wulfthryth’, Revue Bénédictine 119 (2009): 86– 120. On the basis of his careful comparative analysis of the Chronicle and Goscelin’s Vita et translatio Edithe, Emons-Nijenhuis speculates that the chronicler ‘may have had a better use of the sources than Goscelin did or he had access to sources unknown to Goscelin. He may have given a different interpretation to the sources that were vague or minimal’ (108). But he does not conclude that the chronicler must have consulted a miracle collection main- tained by the Wilton women during the late tenth and eleventh centuries, as this article argues. JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 15 reconstruct, even if only partially, Goscelin’s source-text, and, more importantly, it may even help us to identify the author(s) behind it. In the chronicler’s accounts of four different miracles, s/he includes the personal names of the individuals featured in them, details which are not found in Goscelin’s Translatio. First, in the chronicler’s version of Edith’s healing of a man whose entire body, save his head, was underdeveloped and childlike in appearance, the saint speaks the man’s name, ‘Huchyn’, in a vision that he received while he was sleeping before her shrine.67 Second, and similar to the ﬁrst, according to the chronicler’s telling of Wulfthryth’s healing of a blind man from Germany, the former Wilton priest, Benno, addresses the man three times by name, ‘Beteric’.68 The chronicler also gives Beteric further character- isation by recalling his age, marital status, social rank, the duration of his blindness and the Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 location of the church that he frequented in his native country.69 In the third instance, in the course of relating Edith’s punishment of the thief, Brihtric, a violator of the abbey’s property, the chronicler refers seven times to the name of Brihtric’s cousin, ‘Elburwe’, who was a woman religious at Wilton and sent by her community to encourage Brihtric to amend his ways.70 Goscelin, though he includes Brihtric’s name, identiﬁes his cousin only by more general referents: consanguinea, sanctimonialis soror and propinqua carissima.71 Setting Goscelin’s and the chronicler’s versions of the miracu- lum in parallel reveals that, save the detail of Elburwe’s name, they are remarkably similar in their accounts, both with respect to narrative progression and detail. Their close corres- pondence begs the question of why Goscelin did not refer to Elburwe by name. For if indeed the Chronicle offers the closest witness to the original source on which Goscelin’s Translatio depended, then Goscelin must have gone to great lengths to substitute Elburwe’s name with more indeﬁnite designations because, according to the Chronicle, her name is inextricably interwoven into the very narrative of the miraculum. Elburwe’s name likely held special signiﬁcance to the Wilton women, given that the original founder of the community bore the same name. The chronicler refers to the ﬁrst Elburwe repeatedly in her/his account of Wilton’s foundation;72 thus, the frequent invocation of the later Elburwe’s name is ﬁtting in view of its historical resonances. The attempt to foreground nominal continuity in Wilton’s history may have motivated the writer of the original record of this miracle to include Elburwe’s name, though, depending on when this source was written and who wrote it, the inclusion of her name may have held more personal signiﬁcance to the writer. Elburwe may have recounted the miracle directly to the writer, or the writer may have been present on the night when Brihtric’s ghost appeared at Wilton, terrifying the women with his desperate pleas for prayers;73 the writer may even have been a member of the Wilton community, perhaps Elburwe’s spiritual sister. Greater credibility is given to the identiﬁcation of the writer of the original miracle-account as a woman religious at Wilton when the fourth appearance of a personal name, not found in Goscelin’s Translatio, is examined in detail. 67 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, l. 4346; cf. Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 293, Chapter 18. 68 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 2761, 2781, 2783. 69 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 2724–7; cf. Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 271–2, Chapter 3. 70 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 3938, 3946, 3950, 3965, 3980, 4006, 4018. 71 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 283–4, Chapter 15. 72 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 138, 340, 352, 613, 794. 73 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 4010–28. 16 K. ANN-MARIE BUGYIS This name – Elbright – was included in the chronicler’s account of a miracle that occurred during Wulfthryth’s abbacy, when this woman, a nun at Wilton, attempted to steal an ornamental cloth that had been placed on Edith’s corpse.74 The woman had desired to cut off a piece of this cloth for her own keeping, but when she tried to do so, the saint suddenly lifted her head and gave the woman a disapproving look. So chastised, the woman immediately repented of her attempt to deﬁle Edith’s body and begged her for forgiveness. For the rest of the woman’s life: Mekelyche he levede after þe gospelleslore, and plesede God ever wyth all hurre myȝt in penaunce doyng, and wyth almys dede, and in gode preyeres bothe day and nyȝt, and thongede ever God for hurre douȝter Ede.75 Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 The woman became a model of virtuous living for the entire Wilton community. So pleased was Edith by the woman’s lifelong commitment to good works that, at the end of her life, the saint prophesied the date of the woman’s death and then appeared on that day at her bedside in the company of angels to bear her soul to heaven. In the passage relating the woman’s angelic translation, the chronicler ﬁnally gives her name: ‘Þis lady, for þe whyche þuse myraclus weron wrouȝt, / Elbryȝt was þat ladyes name, y wys’.76 Curiously, in a marginal note two verses prior to these, the chronicler (or the scribe of the Faustina manuscript) provided the source-text for this passage: ‘Marianus Scotus’.77 The chronicle of Marianus Scottus (1028–82), a Benedictine monk at Moville, Down, in Ireland, then a monk at St Martin’s in Cologne, and ﬁnally a hermit at Fulda, was indeed listed among the books consulted by the Wilton chronicler,78 but the episode credited to Marianus does not appear in any of the extant recensions of his Chron- icon.79 A tidy explanation for the marginal addition of Marianus’ name to the Wilton Chronicle is not readily forthcoming, especially given that Wilton’s copy of his Chronicon is no longer extant. Perhaps the original scribe of or later corrector to Wilton’s copy of the Chronicon added the event of Elbright’s hallowed death to Marianus’ history, and the chronicler (or the Faustina scribe) thought that the record of this event was original to Marianus. More likely, the chronicler (or the Faustina scribe) supplied Marianus’ name in order to lend greater veracity to this portion of the miraculum. The latter explanation accords well with Mary Dockray-Miller’s observation in the introduction to her edition of the Chronicle: ‘[t]he [poet’s] source lists and references [especially to Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon and to Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica], whether accurate or not, serve to legit- imise further the literary, historical, and religious importance of Saints Edith and Æthel- thryth, their abbeys and their celebratory poems’.80 The chronicler (or the Faustina scribe) may have thought that the section of the narrative detailing Elbright’s conversion, life of good works, blessed death, and name required such additional legitimation, because s/he could not ﬁnd these details in Goscelin’s Translatio – he only reports an unnamed 74 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 2647–716. 75 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 2706–10. 76 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ll. 2695–6. 77 London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B III, f. 227v. 78 MS Cotton Faustina B III, f. 259r. 79 Cf. Marianus Scottus, Chronicon, ed. G. Waitz, in Annales et chronica aevi Salici, ed. G.H. Pertz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 5 (Hanover: Hahn, 1844), 481–564. 80 Dockray-Miller, Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, 16. JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 17 woman’s attempted theft and Edith’s look of admonishment.81 Whence the Wilton chronicler derived these details is unknown, but they certainly were not taken from Mar- ianus’ original Chronicon. The intimate portrait of a woman religious at Wilton that these details provide, from the virtuous life she led to the holy death she enjoyed, suggests that the original writer of this miraculum was well acquainted with Elbright’s story and possibly even a witness to Edith’s ‘bodylyche’ appearance at the woman’s deathbed.82 The care given to providing a written testimony to Elbright’s life in a record that was devoted primarily to recounting the miracula of Wilton’s more renowned saints – Edith and Wulfthryth – may reveal the work of a woman religious in the community, who, when opportunity per- mitted, sought to memorialise the saintly deeds of her lesser known sisters; she made sure that their names would be written into Wilton’s history for posterity. Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 Conclusion The internal clues in Goscelin’s Vita et translatio Edithe indicate that his accounts, at least in part, depended on vernacular or local sources. These references, read together with his spirited defence of the worthiness of the testimonies that he received from the Wilton women, raised the possibility that these women offered both oral and written records in service to his writing. In the late tenth through to the twelfth centuries, Wilton was richly endowed with many well-educated women and a number of writers and scribes, fully capable of writing accounts of the abbey’s miracles. They did not require a monk or chaplain to keep their written records, as André Wilmart and Wiesje Emons-Nijenhuis have surmised.83 The analysis of Goscelin’s Translatio and the Wilton Chronicle has sought to recover the written source(s) on which both works depended and to determine whether the Wilton women ﬁrst began and continued the writing of this source. Evidently the legenda referenced by the chronicler were not the work of Goscelin alone. The chroni- cler’s inclusion of two miracles not found in Goscelin’s Translatio suggests that a written record of Wilton’s miracles was maintained after the Flemish hagiographer’s term as the community’s historian. Moreover, the additional narrative details and personal names that the chronicler provides for the lives of Abbess Wulfthryth and of less notable Wilton women indicate that the author(s) of the legenda was fully engaged in the life of the com- munity, likely as a fellow sister. Recording the miracles of a saint after the translation of his or her body or relics – usually to a more prominent and accessible location within a community’s church – was of vital importance not only to promoting a shrine that was attractive to pilgrims and patrons – especially to newly arrived Normans during the post-Conquest period – but also to preserving the very memories that a community most treasured. The historia fashioned through such a record was not intended to be an inert text, but a dynamic script, expanded when new miracles occurred, edited when certain miracles were remembered differently, read aloud in liturgical commemorations and other communal gatherings, 81 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 271, Chapter 2. 82 Dockray-Miller, ed., Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, l. 2694. 83 Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 19, n. 4; and Emons-Nijenhuis, ‘Embedded Saint’, 94–6. Wilmart suggested that an eleventh- or twelfth-century monk continued Goscelin’s Translatio by adding miracles to it; differently, Emons-Nijenhuis has entertained the possibility that ‘the 11th-/12th-century monk used original sources and Goscelin’s Vita to compose a new tale, perhaps the forerunner of the Wilton Chronicle, and decided to improve, and in some cases alter, the chron- ology’: ‘Embedded Saint’, 95. Neither Wilmart nor Emons-Nijenhuis considered the possibility of female authorship. 18 K. ANN-MARIE BUGYIS meditated upon in private devotions, imitated in the pursuit of a virtuous life, ever reshap- ing a community around its shared past, its common identity.84 For all these commem- orative purposes and, no doubt, more, Wilton’s miracle collection was likely ﬁrst created after Edith’s Translation c.997 and subsequently maintained throughout the ele- venth century. Henry of Huntingdon (c.1088–c.1157), in his account of the miracles of the English, found in the ninth book of his Historia Anglorum, reports that even in his day, c.1138, the miracula of Edith were still read at Wilton.85 Though we have no names, beyond Goscelin’s, for the Wilton writers who recorded their saints’ miracles for communal remembrance, we should not be too quick to assume that the women them- selves did not take an active hand in the writing of that history. Indeed the Wilton Chron- icle seems to invite us to continue searching for the remains of their efforts to keep the Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 memoriae of their sisters. Scholarship on the literary cultures of women religious’ communities in medieval England over the past 20 years has completely transformed our understanding of their intellectual lives as teachers, readers, writers, scribes, artists and patrons of a variety of textual and other highly literate productions. This scholarship was particularly revolution- ary to those interested in the histories of women religious during the late Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest periods, because it established the necessary preconditions for questioning what had become an entrenched historiographical claim: these women had ‘no history’. At one time, this claim seemed entirely justiﬁable: women religious scarcely appear in the extant records from these periods, whether in chronicles, saints’ lives, charters, episcopal acta, papal bulls or royal pipe and charter rolls, and when they do, male, often clerical, authors are to be credited for their writing and preservation. But, as recent scholarship has shown, such a reading of the historical record only skims its surface. Some male chroniclers and hagiographers did collaborate with women religious in the writing of their communities’ accounts; a few male writers even admit to their dependence on the oral and written testimonies of women religious, suggesting that these witnesses possessed the levels of literacy necessary for keeping their own histories, and that their histories ulti- mately were ‘overwritten’ by their male collaborators. Such admissions are invitations to re-examining these male-authored histories, to ask whether there is more to them than ﬁrst meets the eye, whether their textual layers can be penetrated so as to uncover under- lying substrata of female-authored histories. Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s writings for Wilton Abbey proved particularly welcoming to such an excavation, but more texts await future digs. Acknowledgements A debt of gratitude is owed to the medievalists at the University of Puget Sound, especially to Denise Despres, Kriszta Kotsis, Katherine Smith and David Tinsley, who provided invaluable feedback 84 Thomas O’Donnell ascribes similar motives to Barking’s enlistment of Goscelin’s services to write translationes of its three abbess-saints in ‘The Ladies Have Made Me Quite Fat’, 104. The intended community-shaping effect of such textual pro- ductions is discussed by several of the contributors in Katie Bugyis, Margot Fassler and A.B. Kraebel, eds., Medieval Cantors and their Craft: Music, Liturgy, and the Shaping of History (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, forthcoming). See also Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 85 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: the History of the English People, ed. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 694: ‘Sancta Edgitha ﬁlia Regis Edgari Wiltonie pausat, et ibidem virginis splendida leguntur miracula.’ JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 19 after a lecture delivered there on this material. Thanks must also be given to Eric Bugyis, Margot Fassler, Peter Jeffery, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and John Van Engen who commented on an earlier draft of this article, and to the anonymous reviewers who offered helpful suggestions for improvement. Funding This work was supported by the Advanced Council of Learned Sciences under a Mellon‒ACLS Dis- sertation Completion Fellowship and by the Graduate School at the University of Notre Dame under a Notebaert Premier Fellowship. Notes on contributor Downloaded by [O'Grady Library, SMU], [Katie Bugyis] at 08:07 08 April 2016 Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis studied at the University of Notre Dame, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, where she completed a PhD in 2015, writing a dissertation on the liturgical practices of women religious in central medieval England. She is now an Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at St Martin’s University.

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"Recovering the Histories of Women Religious in England in the Central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin," Journal of Medieval History 42:3 (2016): 1-19

"Recovering the Histories of Women Religious in England in the Central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin," Journal of Medieval History 42:3 (2016): 1-19

"Recovering the Histories of Women Religious in England in the Central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin," Journal of Medieval History 42:3 (2016): 1-19

"Recovering the Histories of Women Religious in England in the Central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin," Journal of Medieval History 42:3 (2016): 1-19

"Recovering the Histories of Women Religious in England in the Central Middle Ages: Wilton Abbey and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin," Journal of Medieval History 42:3 (2016): 1-19

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