Beginning in the years following the Norman Conquest, a new desideratum increasingly directed the agendas of many English monastic houses: obtaining the papal privilege of full exemption from the sacramental and juridical control of their local diocesan bishop.Footnote 1 Several notable Continental houses had secured this privilege earlier—first Fleury in 997, then Cluny in 998 and, completely, in 1024—and they undoubtedly served as models for subsequent bids for independence made in England.Footnote 2 Like Fleury and Cluny, the English houses that sought exemption already had enjoyed a certain degree of freedom from external lay and episcopal interference through the receipt of earlier immunities from secular rulers and bishops. But with the expansion and diversification of the juridical and liturgical roles of bishops in the Western church in the tenth and eleventh centuries,Footnote 3 and with the encroachment of some newly implanted Norman bishops on the independence of wealthy abbeys in England after the Conquest, many houses increasingly turned to the papacy over against their diocesan bishop for protection and to secure the privilege of exemption. The first English abbey to seek papal intervention in its claims to independence was Bury St. Edmunds; it achieved full, exempt status in 1071, but over the course of the twelfth century six others followed suit—St. Albans, St. Augustine's, Battle, Evesham, Glastonbury, and Malmesbury. Essential to a successful campaign for exemption were making frequent trips to Rome, enlisting powerful allies at the papal court, presenting documents witnessing to ancient rights, and offering gifts and other material incentives. But another important component, which tends to be neglected or undervalued in the scholarship on monastic exemption, was demonstrating an abbey's venerability and spiritual excellence, particularly through the cult of its patron saint. An abbey had to prove that it was a sacred site worth protecting and defending from all external intrusion, hence the concern to elevate its saint through building new churches and shrines in his or her honor, translating relics, and engaging in a variety of scriptorial productions, like writing and refashioning uitae and miracle collections.
When St. Albans made its first bid for papal privileges in 1122 before Calixtus II (1119–1124), the tack it took closely followed those of communities on the Continent and in England that had succeeded earlier. The abbey made its claims to independence under the aegis of its patron saint, who was widely regarded as venerable. St. Alban was hailed as “the glorious protomartyr of the English [gloriosi Anglorum prothomartyris]” in both bulls issued to the abbey, Ad hoc nos and Religione ac pietate.Footnote 4 But St. Albans' initial campaign ultimately was not a complete success. As generous as Calixtus's bulls were in confirming the liberties that the abbey had received from earlier royal charters, they did not grant exemption from the abbey's diocesan, the bishop of Lincoln. As a result, during the 1120s, the abbot at the time, Geoffrey de Gorron (1119–1146), redoubled the abbey's efforts to enhance its prestige, which included constructing a new shrine to St. Alban and translating his relics in 1129. But, as I will detail in this article, certain events transpired at the abbey in the 1130s that motivated Geoffrey to rethink the abbey's campaign for exemption through the patronage of St. Alban alone. Over the course of this period, a close friendship developed between Geoffrey and a local holy woman, Christina of Markyate (ca. 1095-ca. 1155). As their friendship deepened, Geoffrey became more convinced by and dependent upon Christina's visionary and intercessory powers; he entrusted her with the direction of his own spiritual advancement, often conferred with her about the management of the abbey's affairs, and increasingly envisioned her as a saintly advocate for the abbey, in consort with its first patron, St. Alban. In an effort to authorize and promote her sanctity both within and outside of the abbey, Geoffrey commissioned one of his monks to write an account of her life while she was still alive, likely in the early 1140s, according to Rachel Koopmans.Footnote 5
Much of the scholarship on Christina's Life has concentrated on the various rhetorical strategies employed by its writer to fashion and champion Christina as a saint.Footnote 6 Yet to be studied fully within the context of the Life's hagiographical intent is its account of a vision that she had in which three heaven-sent messengers crowned her in the likeness of a bishop's miter. This vision occurs in the final third of the Life, at the time when Christina was considering official consecration as a virgin. According to the Life, the significance of this vision for Christina was that it offered the divine confirmation of her purity that she needed prior to seeking consecration from the bishop of Lincoln. Certainly the crown that she received is evocative of the torques, or circlet, that a bishop was to bestow on a virgin at her consecration according to the rubrics and prayers for the rite found in the Romano-Germanic Pontifical.Footnote 7 But in the writer's description of Christina's crown, he is clear that it was comparable to a bishop's miter because of the two white fillets that hung down from it. So described by her writer, Christina's crowning appears to be invested with a significance beyond that which the visionary herself ascribed to it.
Seeking to understand what significance this vision held for the writer and the commissioner(s) of Christina's Life, this article will show that reading it within the context of St. Albans' attempts to secure full, episcopal exemption helps to shed light on why Christina seems to have been figured in a distinctly episcopal cast. Given Abbot Geoffrey's initiatory role in the abbey's campaign for exemption and his close friendship with Christina, the history of his abbacy will receive special consideration. For if Geoffrey was chiefly responsible for commissioning Christina's textual commemoration and set one of his monks to this task in the early 1140s, then it is possible that the Life's record of Christina's visions was shaped by Geoffrey's dreams for the abbey's independence. Whether the composition of Christina's visions was influenced, in part, by Geoffrey's ongoing campaign for St. Albans' exemption will be under investigation in what follows.
After contextualizing the Life within the history of St. Albans' struggles for independence, this article will then situate the vision of Christina's miter-like crowning alongside liturgical and iconographical developments of the bishop's miter, as well as concurrent bids made by other English abbots to secure the exemption of their communities and the privilege of wearing episcopal vestments and insignia, especially the miter—a potent and demonstrable confirmation of an abbot's ecclesiastical authority and independence. The campaign launched by Bury St. Edmunds will be of particular interest, because in a miniature cycle of the passion and miracles of St. Edmund produced by the abbey in the late 1120s, seemingly in an effort to provide further confirmation of its exempt status, the saint was visually adorned with a miter-like crown. Significantly, this figuration of Edmund as a mitered saint may have served as a direct exemplar for the vision of Christina's crowning. Finally, this article will set Christina's Life in parallel with the mid-twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Life of St. Osyth, written by and/or for the canons in the priory dedicated to her at Chich in Essex, in order to demonstrate that if Geoffrey sought to textually reconstruct Christina as an ally in his campaign for St. Albans' exemption, his choice of a female saint would not have been unique. But his choice of a living one would have been unusual and risky, too. Sufficient time would not have yet passed to test Christina's effectiveness as an advocate for St. Albans, or to ensure her endorsement from the rest of the abbey's monks, or to guarantee her own willingness to cooperate with Geoffrey's campaign. So for reasons that will be explored in this article's conclusion, her Life may have been suppressed by its detractors or abandoned by its supporters.
I. State of the Life
Before recounting the history of St. Albans' bids for episcopal exemption, it is first necessary to trace the complex, textual tradition of the original, twelfth-century Life of Christina. Presently, there are no extant, contemporary manuscript copies of it. The closest witnesses that we have are preserved in two fourteenth-century manuscripts. The longer version, which was first edited by C. H. Talbot in 1959, was appended to the end of the earliest known copy of John of Tynemouth's Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae, et Hiberniae.Footnote 8 John was a monk at St. Albans, active in the first half of the fourteenth century, when he was collecting the lives of native saints.Footnote 9 Additionally, Thomas Walsingham, a late fourteenth-century monk at St. Albans, interpolated extracts of the Life into his continuation of the abbey's chronicle, the Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani, first written by Matthew Paris in the 1240s.Footnote 10 Rachel Koopmans, in her seminal article on the textual remains of Christina's Life, demonstrated that the extracts found in Walsingham's continuation of the Gesta did not derive from the version of the Life found in John's Sanctilogium.Footnote 11 Rather they seem to have been taken from another copy of the Life, one that may have been preserved at the Benedictine priory that Christina had founded at Markyate, for the Gesta itself twice attests to the existence of a copy there.Footnote 12
Neither fourteenth-century version of Christina's Life provides a complete witness to the twelfth-century original. The Tiberius version offers the fullest narrative account: it details her birth; her spiritual advancement and initial vow of virginity; the attempts made by her parents, various clerics, and suitors to ensnare her in marriage; her years of hiding out at two local hermitages, including Markyate; her official consecration as a virgin; and her increasingly intimate relations with St. Albans, particularly with its abbot, Geoffrey. But this version breaks off well before her death and before the founding of Markyate as a priory in 1145. It ends suddenly in the middle of one of its descriptions of Christina's solicitous care for Geoffrey in prayer, just after its account of her miraculous ability to witness a conversation that her sister, Matilda, and her husband had in their bed.Footnote 13 Codicological analysis of the Tiberius manuscript indicates that at least one leaf is missing from the text of Christina's Life, probably as a result of the damage that the manuscript sustained from the fire at the Ashburnham House in 1731, where this manuscript, along with other items in the Cotton collection, was kept.Footnote 14 Proof that likely only one leaf is missing from the Tiberius version is provided by the early seventeenth-century antiquarian, Nicholas Roscarrock, who viewed the manuscript prior to its being fire-damaged. In his digest of the Tiberius version of Christina's Life, the final events that he recorded do not extend far beyond where the text presently ends; he notes Christina's vision of her sister and “soe Concluding abruptlye with noting howe shee tolde her Abbot of som thoughtes that he had Contrarie to that which she had advised him.”Footnote 15 Detecting this abrupt conclusion led Roscarrock to wonder: “whether theyre bee anie perfitt Coppie, or whither the writer dyed before he perfitted it; or whither shee removed to anie other place, where the writer had noe intelligence of her.”Footnote 16 Notably, as Koopmans observed, Roscarrock did not mention that the manuscript containing the base text of his digest was damaged, nor did Thomas Smith, the late seventeenth-century cataloguer of the Cotton collection.Footnote 17 Thus the version of Christina's Life found in the Tiberius manuscript is nearly complete, which fact led Koopmans to wonder whether the original, twelfth-century Life was left unfinished.
On the basis of her interrogation of both fourteenth-century versions of Christina's Life, as well as the other sources that preserve the history of St. Albans and Markyate in the 1140s, Koopmans concluded that the writer of the original Life did not finish his work. The Life likely was suppressed by the monks of St. Albans, who were opposed to Geoffrey's close friendship with Christina and his financial support of her community.Footnote 18 Since its publication, Koopmans's explanation for the Life's incomplete state has gained widespread, scholarly acceptance.Footnote 19 The evidence that I will set forth in this article seeks, in part, to further the conclusions that Koopmans has drawn, for if one of the motivations behind the writing of Christina's Life was to bolster St. Albans' campaign for episcopal exemption, this strategy may not have been endorsed by all the monks at the abbey, nor by Christina herself. One or both parties may have been behind the Life's “Concluding abruptlye.”
II. St. Albans' Bids for Exemption
When Geoffrey de Gorron was elected abbot in 1119, he found that whatever independence St. Albans might want to claim from the bishop of Lincoln had been severely compromised by the actions of his predecessor, Richard d'Aubigny (1097–1119). During the abbacy of Paul of Caen (1077–1093), Richard's predecessor, St. Albans experienced relative freedom under the protection of the archbishop of Canterbury, who, at the time, was Lanfranc (1070–1089), Paul's uncle.Footnote 20 As Julia Crick has noted, a statement made by Henry of Huntingdon in his Historia Anglorum may confirm that St. Albans enjoyed de facto exemption from episcopal jurisdiction in the first generations after the Conquest.Footnote 21 In the ninth book of Henry's Historia, which he finished in 1138, he states: “For the sake of the most holy protomartyr Alban, this church [St. Albans] is arrayed with such honor that it alone is quit of the apostolic custom that is called ‘Romescot,’ from which no king or earl, archbishop or bishop, abbot or anyone is immune. The abbot of the same place has always exercised the privilege of episcopal right over the priests as well as the laity in its possession.”Footnote 22 Henry's claim that the abbots of St. Albans always had the privilege of exemption from its diocesan as regards its lands with their priests and peoples is no doubt exaggerated,Footnote 23 but the fact that Henry would insist upon the abbey's independence, even though he was an archdeacon in the diocese of Lincoln, suggests that there may be some truth to his claim. In Henry's day, from the perspective of a relative outsider, St. Albans may have indeed seemed to be independent from diocesan control, but from St. Albans' perspective, its independence was not yet fully secured, and worse, the actions of Abbot Richard had seriously jeopardized what independence it did possess.
According to St. Albans' Gesta abbatum, in the section detailing Abbot Richard's negligence, he effectively took St. Albans out from under the protection of the archbishop of Canterbury and placed it under the control of the bishop of Lincoln by making a profession of canonical obedience to Bishop Robert Bloet (1093–1123) in 1097.Footnote 24 Also, once construction on the new church at St. Albans that Abbot Paul had commissioned was finished in 1115, Richard invited Bishop Robert to preside over the dedication ceremony, without the presence of Ralph d'Escures, archbishop of Canterbury (1114–1122).Footnote 25 Richard's decisions regarding both his consecration as abbot and the dedication of St. Albans' church signaled the abbey's dependence on the bishop of Lincoln for the administration of episcopal sacraments, such as the ordinations of St. Albans' monks, and likely also its obligation to pay the bishop for chrism, synodal fees, and other dues.Footnote 26
Though Christina's Life makes no mention of Richard's negligence, it does portray Robert Bloet very unfavorably as a corrupt judge and persecutor of virgins. When the case of Christina's alleged betrothal was brought before the bishop, he initially ruled in her favor, honoring her prior vow of virginity to God.Footnote 27 But ultimately he was persuaded to rule against her. In the writer's account of the events that transpired after the initial ruling, he details at length a conversation that Autti, Christina's father, had with Robert, the dean of Huntingdon. Robert asked Autti: “Do you not know about his [Robert Bloet's] greed and incontinence?” to which Robert added: “Avarice will persuade him to overturn his judgments, and incontinence to begrudge the chastity of others.”Footnote 28 Thus informed of the bishop's corruption, Autti paid Robert Bloet the necessary bribes to ensure that he would overturn his ruling. When Christina and her betrothed, Burthred, were next brought before Robert Bloet, he placed her back in the care of the plaintiff. Fortunately, Christina successfully evaded her parents' and Burthred's subsequent attempts to trap her in marriage. She even received the support of Archbishop Ralph d'Escures through the intercession of a local hermit named Eadwin.Footnote 29 But according to her writer, it was not until Robert Bloet died that she finally was able to live her vow of virginity freely: “Around the same time the bishop of Lincoln, Christina's most bitter persecutor, died. Having endured long-lasting vengeance, he ended his life with a sudden death, and by his example, he deterred others from pursuing the virgins of Christ.”Footnote 30 It was about this same time, circa 1123, that Geoffrey first met Christina.
When Geoffrey became abbot in 1119, he found himself in a difficult position given the course of action that his predecessor, Richard d'Aubigny, had chosen. Richard had established a pattern of relations with the bishop of Lincoln that would have been difficult to break. Moreover, as the Gesta abbatum reports, Richard had called Geoffrey to be the master of the school at St. Albans when he was still a secular cleric in Le Mans.Footnote 31 Though this plan fell through because Geoffrey delayed his travels to England, when he finally did make his profession as a monk at St. Albans, he still may have felt indebted, even beholden, to Richard for his initial invitation to the abbey, and this feeling may have persisted into the early years of Geoffrey's abbacy.Footnote 32 The Gesta also admits that he professed obedience to Bishop Robert Bloet, just as his predecessor had done.Footnote 33
But Geoffrey ultimately did break from the pattern established by Richard. A few years after his consecration as abbot, in 1122, he traveled to Rome, seeking papal privileges for the abbey. His mission was, in many respects, a success. Calixtus II issued two bulls, Ad hoc nos and Religione ac pietate. The latter granted an indulgence of twelve days to those who visited the abbey within the octave of the feast of St. Alban.Footnote 34 The former placed the abbey under papal protection and confirmed its ancient liberties granted by Kings Offa (757–796), Ecgfrith (d. 796), and Æthelred (978–1013, 1014–1016). It did not, however, grant the abbey full, episcopal exemption; rather, it stipulated: “All pontifical rights of the churches of St. Albans should depend on the arrangement and judgment of the abbot of the same church, except episcopal sacraments are to be performed according to the ancient custom of this church, with the right and reverence of the holy Roman church undoubtedly preserved in all things.”Footnote 35 Thus Ad hoc nos mandated St. Albans' dependence on its diocesan for episcopal sacraments, so when Geoffrey translated the relics of St. Alban to their new shrine in 1129, Robert Bloet's successor, Alexander (1123–1148), had to be present.Footnote 36
David Knowles claimed that Bishop Alexander sought the establishment of his episcopal see at St. Albans, just as his uncle, Roger, bishop of Salisbury (1102–1139), had established his see at Malmesbury from 1117 to 1139.Footnote 37 Such designs on English abbeys by Norman bishops were by no means unusual, as we soon will see in the case of Bury St. Edmunds.Footnote 38 But evidence for Alexander's designs, beyond the model set by his uncle, is wanting. Neither the Gesta abbatum nor Christina's Life intimates such machinations. Remarkably, unlike his predecessor, Alexander is scarcely present in the Life, even though in 1145 he would dedicate the church at Markyate priory, Christina's community.Footnote 39 He only makes an appearance at Christina's official consecration as a virgin, circa 1131, and when King Stephen (1135–1154) unjustly imprisoned his uncle and him in 1139.Footnote 40 In the writer's account of the latter event, he does little to fill out Alexander's character beyond briefly stating the cause of his incarceration: “he [King Stephen] suspected them [Roger and Alexander] of being fortified by prudence, castles, wealth, and relatives.”Footnote 41 Given that Alexander was still alive when the Life was written, his near absence is telling: the writer was able to say more through silence (or omission) than through overt assertion. By circa 1140, when the Life was written, Robert Bloet had long been dead, so any aspersions cast against his character probably would have incited little offense from the episcopal seat, but any outright attack against Alexander would not have been countenanced. Such attacks, however, would have been unnecessary, because Alexander's relative absence from the Life still would have communicated St. Albans' vision for episcopal independence.
For the years between the translation of St. Alban's relics in 1129 and the writing of Christina's Life in the 1140s, there is no record of any attempt made by Geoffrey to secure further privileges for the abbey from the papacy. The death of Honorius II in 1130 and the ensuing accession of two rival claimants to the papal throne—Innocent II and Anacletus II—may have foiled any bid for exemption that Geoffrey had hoped to make. Likely he had to wait until the death of Anacletus in 1138 before he could begin planning his next journey to Rome; certainly he would have been in no hurry to do so between 1130 and 1138.Footnote 42 In this intervening time, he may have begun to worry that whatever elevation in status that the abbey had achieved through the translation of St. Alban's relics would not be sufficient to secure exemption; another patron, promoted in tandem with St. Alban, would be needed, especially one who could (or did) envision the abbey's desire for independence.
Over the course of the 1130s, Geoffrey's relationship with Christina of Markyate deepened. According to the Life, he repeatedly sought out her spiritual intercession and counsel during this time, because “he venerated the virgin [Christina], and something divine surrounded her beyond what is customary.”Footnote 43 Many of the visions that she received and her ability to see into Geoffrey's very thoughts aided her instruction of the abbot on the right course of action, preserving him from physical danger and spiritual temptation.Footnote 44 And through her prayers, on four different occasions, the Life claims that she even successfully freed him from his obligations to travel on important royal and ecclesiastical business: (1) to Rome to obtain confirmation of King Stephen's election from Innocent II in 1136, (2) to Rome to attend the Second Lateran Council in 1139, (3) to Rome in the same year to defend the rights of the English churches against the injustices of the king, and (4) to Winchester to appear at the royal court at the king's summons.Footnote 45 In Geoffrey's eyes, Christina possessed an undeniable spiritual charisma, a power that was not to be contravened: “he felt that before God, the purity of the virgin was more powerful than the factious or skilled cunning of the powerful men of the age.”Footnote 46 Such displays of divine favor may have convinced Geoffrey that Christina should not just be his “probata patrona,”Footnote 47 but a new patron for St. Albans, for surely he would succeed in securing the abbey's exemption under her aegis. But her Life would have to be written in order to prove her saintly status to others.
III. Mitering Christina
According to the historical chronology established by Christina's Life, circa 1131, nearly two decades after her initial, private self-profession of virginity as a young girl, she chose to make her formal vows to Bishop Alexander of Lincoln in the presence of Abbot Geoffrey and the monks of St. Albans. The writer of the Life twice recounts her consecration as a virgin. In one, he describes her profession at St. Albans and her consecration by Bishop Alexander on the feast of St. Matthew.Footnote 48 In the other, which temporally and narratively precedes the former, he relates the vision that Christina had on the seventh day of the octave of the feast of the Assumption, in which she was crowned by three heaven-sent youths.Footnote 49 According to the writer, the fact that Christina had received this vision prior to her consecration by Bishop Alexander is profoundly significant. As he declares, she already had decided to commit herself to St. Albans, but lingering doubts about her own purity delayed her profession: she needed “licencia” from God.Footnote 50
Thus she turned to the Virgin Mary and prayed for her intercession. Christina initially thought that she would receive confirmation during the feast of the Assumption, but the first days of the octave passed with no response. Her zeal in prayer, however, did not wane: “no indeed, her devotion and hope grew continually.”Footnote 51 On the seventh day, shortly after the hour of Matins, she stood before her bed, perplexed, because she had found all the women under her care at Markyate asleep, “contrary to custom [contra solitum].”Footnote 52 In fact, all the earth seemed to be submerged “in deep silence [alto silencio].”Footnote 53 As she stood in wonderment, “youths of exceptional beauty gathered around her. There were many, but she was only able to make out three.”Footnote 54 The heavenly visitors hailed her—“aue uirgo Christi”—not unlike how the angel Gabriel greeted Mary at the Annunciation.Footnote 55 They came bearing a gift from Christ, “a crown [coronam],” which, they told her, was to signify that she was “from his own [de suis propriis].”Footnote 56 The beauty of the crown was marvelous, nearly indescribable; it was whiter than snow and more resplendent than the sun.Footnote 57 So exceedingly beautiful was the crown that she could not find any created material with which to liken it properly. However, she did say that “from the back part of the crown hung two white fillets [albe due uitte], like a bishop's miter [instar episcopalis mitre], descending all the way to her waist.”Footnote 58 So crowned, Christina stood among the angelic host until daybreak, at which time her visitors departed. Even after their departure, she remained resolute in the knowledge that her crowning had bestowed: “Christ always had preserved her in mind and body as a virgin.”Footnote 59 She was made “sound [sanam],” freed from all doubts, and prepared to receive her earthly consecration.Footnote 60
The writer's account of Christina's consecration by Bishop Alexander pales in comparison with that of her vision. He does not dramatically restage it in his narrative, but simply states: “And so, on the feast day of St. Matthew, who is described as the first consecrator of virgins, the virgin was consecrated to Christ by Alexander, bishop of Lincoln.”Footnote 61 The writer, it seems, intentionally reconstructs Christina's “official” consecration briefly and without ornamentation, for so recounted, it compels the reader to look back to the account of her heavenly consecration to fill in the lack of narrative detail. By including both consecration accounts, and by recounting one in greater detail than the other, the writer seems to invite the reader not only to view these two accounts palimpsestically, but also to allow the one to guide or augment the viewing of the other. Reading Christina's consecration by Bishop Alexander through the hermeneutical lens of her vision of being crowned in the likeness of a bishop's miter refigures her consecration so that it can be seen as more than simply the consecration of a virgin: she appears to be invested with one of the external markers of a bishop's authority.
So imaged by her writer, Christina is positioned at the forefront of liturgical innovation. Miters did not appear among episcopal vestments in the textual, iconographical, or material remains of the Western church before the eleventh century, and they were not common in England until well into the twelfth century.Footnote 62 A pontifical from Christ Church, Canterbury, produced during the second half of the twelfth century, contains the first surviving English witness to the mitering of a bishop in a consecration ordo.Footnote 63 The first instance of a mitered bishop among extant illuminated manuscripts of English provenance occurs in a manuscript containing Gregory the Great's Dialogi, which dates to the second quarter of the eleventh century and was likely produced at Worcester.Footnote 64 But such an image does not appear again until the end of the eleventh century in a copy of Augustine's Confessiones from Canterbury or Rochester,Footnote 65 and not again until the second quarter of the twelfth century in Oxford—in a copy of John of Worcester's Chronicon from Worcester Cathedral Priory.Footnote 66 In manuscripts produced in the second half of the twelfth century, the instance of bishops wearing miters in illuminations increases dramatically.Footnote 67 Mitered bishops also begin to appear with greater frequency on the seals of English archbishops and bishops during the twelfth century. The first extant witness is the seal of Ralph d'Escures, archbishop of Canterbury,Footnote 68 and for the see of Lincoln, the pontificate of Alexander, the diocesan in Geoffrey and Christina's day, provides the earliest attestation.Footnote 69
As formative as the increased proliferation of bishops' miters in liturgical vestments, manuscript illuminations, and episcopal seals may have been to the account of Christina's crowning vision, no exact exemplar exists for it if one only searches among the images of mitered bishops. But it must be remembered that she was not, strictly speaking, invested with a miter in her vision: she was crowned “instar episcopalis mitre.” Remarkably, this miter-like crown does have a near perfect, iconographical precedent, one that was significant to the claims to episcopal exemption made by Bury St. Edmunds, and one with which Christina's writer was likely familiar.Footnote 70 In the first third of the twelfth century, an artist, the so-called Alexis Master, was active in St. Albans' scriptorium. Among his most notable illuminations are those found in the St. Albans Psalter, a deluxe codex produced at St. Albans circa 1123 and subsequently adapted for Christina's devotional use.Footnote 71 During this same period, the Alexis Master was also connected to Bury's scriptorium; circa 1125–1130, he executed the underdrawings for a full-page miniature cycle of the passion and miracles of St. Edmund.Footnote 72 It is not clear whether he made these drawings at St. Albans' scriptorium or at Bury's; regardless, it is still possible that the writer of Christina's Life was familiar with this miniature cycle, especially given the striking similarities between his textual representation of Christina and the Alexis Master's iconography. In the miniature of St. Edmund's apotheosis, the Alexis Master depicted the saint being crowned with a gold crown that has two fillets hanging down on either side of his face.Footnote 73 Although his fillets and vestments are red, likely symbolic of his martyr-status, the style of his crown, from the blue, dew-like gems that adorn it to the cross found at its top, is identical to the one worn by Christina and the pilgrim-Christ in her Life, as we soon will see.Footnote 74 Given the high status of St. Edmund's feast day not only at Bury, but also at Ramsey Abbey, for whom Abbo of Fleury (ca. 945–1004) wrote the first account of the saint's life, the Passio Sancti Edmundi, in the 980s,Footnote 75 the life of this Anglo-Saxon king may have been significant to Christina. Entries in the Ramsey cartulary suggest that her family had ties to the abbey,Footnote 76 and the liturgical calendar that opens the St. Albans Psalter may have originally been produced at Ramsey.Footnote 77 Irrespective of Christina's personal connections to Ramsey or of her possible devotion to St. Edmund, it seems apparent that her writer intended her crowning vision to replicate St. Edmund's apotheosis in order to legitimate her sanctity and patronal authority further. Both Christina and St. Edmund, albeit differently, were inscribed as bold witnesses to and proclaimers of Christ's life: both were authorized in their perfect imitatio Christi. (Figure 1)
The Apotheosis of St. Edmund. Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1927. New York, The Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.736, f. 22v.
More importantly, the construction of St. Edmund's crown in the depiction of his apotheosis, though likely influenced by the design of Ottonian imperial crowns,Footnote 78 seems to intend a signification beyond his royal status, as the representation of his crown elsewhere in the miniature cycle does not display two fillets.Footnote 79 In the final, climatic illumination in the cycle, the saint appears crowned with one of the distinctive features of a bishop's miter. The Alexis Master effectively merged Edmund's royal identity with a heavenly-ordained, ecclesiastical one, thus creating a saint who could powerfully serve as the protector and guarantor of Bury's privileges, particularly of the confirmation of its privilege of exemption from its diocesan, the bishop of Norwich, granted in 1123 by Calixtus II in his bull Diuinis preceptis.Footnote 80
Bury had long struggled for independence from its diocesan, beginning with Herfast, bishop of Elmham (d. 1085), who sought to establish his see at Bury in 1071, but had to settle for Thetford after Pope Alexander II (1061–1073), Archbishop Lanfranc, and King William I (1066–1087) intervened in the case.Footnote 81 The peace that the resolution of this case established was a fleeting one, because Herbert Losinga, bishop of Thetford (ca. 1090-1095), then of Norwich (1095–1119), twice tried to encroach upon Bury's independence in order to establish his see there, but ultimately failed on both counts and ceased to disrupt the abbey's affairs after 1101. In the wake of the privileges confirmed and granted by Alexander II, Abbot Baldwin (1065–1097) attempted to buttress the abbey's written proofs of independence with visible signs of its venerability and power by rebuilding its church and translating the relics of St. Edmund. In 1095, upon the church's completion, Baldwin exercised the abbey's privilege of exemption from its diocesan by inviting Walkelin, bishop of Winchester (1070-1098), to preside over the dedication and translation ceremonies.Footnote 82 The miracles that subsequently were performed and recorded at St. Edmund's new shrine provided validation of the heavenly and earthly protection that the abbey enjoyed. The creation of the miniature cycle of St. Edmund's passion and miracles circa 1125 seems to stand in direct continuity with this earlier campaign to claim exemption for Bury; it would have served as yet another lavish, visible memorial to the abbey's prestige and independence.
Bury's campaign for episcopal exemption likely offered to other English abbeys a powerful model of how a monastic house could assert its independence through various liturgical and scriptorial productions. The iconic vision of Christina's crowning may be a dramatic witness to just how exemplary Bury's campaign was viewed at St. Albans. Yet St. Albans' investment of Christina, a living holy woman, with a miter-like crown, instead of its male patron saint, Alban, was a significant departure from Bury's example. More remarkably, Christina's Life reconfigures her in the likeness of the abbey's patron saint, effectively making her his heir apparent, a new Alban. Hints of the textual alignment between Alban's Life and Christina's own are found early in her Life. As Samuel Fanous has noted, Christina's change of name from Theodora to Christina bears a striking similarity to Alban's declaration before his judge and persecutor: “Know that I am already a Christian [Christianum iam me esse . . . cognosce].”Footnote 83 Concerning the fittingness of the new name that she assumed, her writer declares, “There is no doubt that in this moment, she merited to be signed with the name of her creator, by which afterwards she was called, namely, ‘Christina’ . . . following Christ she strained determinedly to fulfill his will alone.”Footnote 84 It was Alban's and Christina's “rebaptisms” in Christ's own name that explicitly proclaimed their practice of radical Christoformitas; they were willing to follow Christ even to the point of self-sacrifice.
But in Christina's Life, her transformation into another Alban is not effected fully until just before she received the vision of her crowning. Here, her writer explains why she ultimately chose to make her profession at St. Albans rather than at one of the other monasteries in England and on the Continent that had courted her.Footnote 85 Her reasons were three: it was the resting place of the celebrated martyr, Alban; Roger, the hermit who had sheltered her and entrusted his cell at Markyate to her keeping, was also buried there; and, Geoffrey, the pastor whom she revered above all others, as well as other monks at the abbey, were too dear to her to part from.Footnote 86 Yet more significantly, Alban himself had divinely elected her: “And it is to be understood that our most favorable patron St. Alban chose her from the Lord. He held her as his cooperator [cooperatricem] on earth for improving and carrying his community, and afterwards as his companion [consortem] in the heaven of eternal happiness.”Footnote 87 This assimilation of Christina's patronage, even identity into Alban's appears to be consummated in the vision of her crowning. For, according to the Gesta abbatum, when members of the abbey examined Alban's relics during their translation in 1129, they discovered that the golden circlet that King Offa had placed around the saint's skull was still intact, bearing the following inscription: “This is the head of St. Alban, protomartyr of the English.”Footnote 88 The writer's confirmation of Christina as Alban's cooperatrix and consors immediately prior to his account of her crowning vision may have sought to encourage readers, particularly those who had witnessed the translation of Alban's relics, to link the saints' crowns mnemonically and to see Christina as another Alban. Certainly the miraculous means by which both crowns were preserved or bestowed provided clear signs of the divine favor that the abbey enjoyed. But if the Gesta's description of Alban's crown bears any resemblance to how it actually had appeared during its translation, then there were marked differences in the designs of the two crowns, and these differences set Christina apart from her saintly forefather, seemingly making her the chief patron of the abbey's campaign for exemption. Her crown was not only more elaborate in its ornamentation, but it was also closer in likeness to a bishop's miter and, as we will now see, identical to Christ's own.
Christina's writer reveals the full significance of the crown that she had received in the penultimate vision recorded in the Life. At the hour of Matins on the Christmas Vigil, Christina was miraculously transported to the lectern in the church of St. Albans from her bed at Markyate, where she had been lying ill. The writer makes clear that she ascended the lectern just when the hymn Te Deum laudamus was sung, the precise moment in the liturgy when the abbot was to read the gospel lection according to the Rule of St. Benedict.Footnote 89 From the lectern, she saw in the monks' choir the figure of an unknown pilgrim, whom she had encountered on two prior occasions, but whose identity was never fully revealed to her (though the writer repeatedly and not-too-subtly hints that this pilgrim was Christ). In his third appearance, the pilgrim-Christ wore a crown of superlative craftsmanship: “He bore on his head a golden crown with shining gems set in it. Its appearance excelled whatever is fashioned by human skill. Also, on the top of the crown there was a cross of wondrous craft. It was gold, made less by human means than by divine. Two fillets [due uitte] were hanging from either side of his face. They were thin and attached to the crown. Pellucid sparkles, as if drops of dew, were seen from below on the tops of the gems.”Footnote 90 The writer's description of the crown nearly exactly recalls his earlier description of Christina's. Drawing attention to the “due uitte” that hung from Christ's crown creates a significant parallel between the two crowns, and staging Christ's appearance when Christina was fulfilling one of the abbot's prescribed liturgical roles seems to confirm that she faithfully had assumed the “uices Christi in monasterio,” just as the Rule of St. Benedict requires of the abbot.Footnote 91 More importantly, the place that both Christ and Christina held at St. Albans is given an episcopal cast: they appear not merely as abbots, but as mitered abbots.
The privilege to become a mitered abbot—in addition to wearing some or all of the other episcopal vestments and insignia—was one that was highly prized and increasingly sought by English monasteries after 1050.Footnote 92 The first abbot ever to be granted the papal privilege of wearing a miter was Egelsin of St. Augustine's, Canterbury (1059–1070). In 1063, Pope Alexander II conceded to him the use of the miter and sandals.Footnote 93 The next abbot to receive this privilege was Hugh of Cluny (1049-1109) in 1095 by his former confrère and prior, Pope Urban II (1088–1099).Footnote 94 In 1071, Baldwin of Bury St. Edmunds was the next English abbot to be granted the use of any of the pontificalia, but he only received the pastoral staff and ring.Footnote 95 The abbots of Bury did not receive the added privilege of wearing the miter until around 1182.Footnote 96 St. Albans was the first English monastery to receive the privilege of wearing all seven episcopal vestments and insignia, but, as we will see, this privilege was not granted until 1156, when Pope Adrian IV (1154–1159) issued the bull Religiosam uitam during the abbacy of Robert de Gorron (1151–1166), Geoffrey's nephew.Footnote 97 The significance of the privilege to become a mitered abbot cannot be emphasized enough, for beyond the physical evidence of the papal bulls themselves, this privilege provided a visible witness to a monastery's independence from its diocesan that could be worn by an abbot and displayed on his personal seal. It was his inalienable sign that no one, save the pope, had temporal or spiritual headship over him.
It is not clear from the Life whether the writer and Geoffrey intended the abbatial role ultimately scripted for Christina to be taken figuratively or literally. The passing references to Marcigny and Fontevrault in the list of monastic houses that courted Christina's profession suggest that the writer and Geoffrey were familiar with various Continental models of “double” monastic organization, and possibly even interested in replicating such a model by joining Markyate to St. Albans.Footnote 98 Both Marcigny and Fontevrault received significant papal privileges in the course of their foundations' histories. Marcigny enjoyed the same privileges that Cluny did by virtue of its being a daughter house,Footnote 99 and Fontevrault, though not episcopally exempt like Cluny, was specially placed under the protection of the apostolic see.Footnote 100 But the fact that Fontevrault, a “double” house overseen by an abbess, was not able to achieve full, episcopal exemption prior to the writing of Christina's Life, likely militates against a literal reading of her figuration as a mitered abbot. The founding of a “double” house at St. Albans with Christina as head would not have been a sure course to the independence that the abbey desired.Footnote 101 But even if Christina's figuration was never intended to be implemented institutionally, its figurative significance is by no means diminished. By investing Christina with a miter-like crown, and then textually paralleling her crown with Christ's at the precise moment when she was to fulfill one of the liturgical duties incumbent on a Benedictine abbot, the Life effectively establishes Christina as a powerful metonymy of the abbatial office at St. Albans, thereby making the abbot and, by extension, the abbey the rightful beneficiaries of whatever privileged status Christ bestowed on her.
IV. Making a Living, Female Saint
Geoffrey's attempt to enhance St. Albans' claims to episcopal independence through Christina's textual commemoration as the abbey's patron saint may seem unusual, even misguided, especially given that St. Albans already had a patron saint whose sanctity was widely venerated, and that other abbeys like Bury had relied on male saints in their bids for exemption. But such a bid would be made in the mid-twelfth century by the canons at the not-too-distant St. Osyth's Priory at Chich in Essex through their early Anglo-Saxon female patron saint.Footnote 102 During Robert de Sigello's reign as the bishop of London between 1141 and 1150, he granted churches to St. Paul's, London that had been given to St. Osyth's by his earlier predecessor, Richard I de Belmeis (1108–1127). And between 1154 and 1159, Robert's successor, Richard II de Belmeis (1152–1162), tried to confirm this grant. Not surprisingly, these attempts to divest St. Osyth's of its property by the bishops of London elicited the outrage of its prior, Abel (d. 1184), and even of John of Salisbury (ca. 1115–1180), who wrote to Adrian IV on the priory's behalf.Footnote 103 Jane Zatta argued that the Anglo-Norman rewriting of Osyth's life, the Vie Seinte Osith, was composed at some point during these turbulent years in the priory's history.Footnote 104
Remarkably, in Osyth's Vie, as opposed to the other Latin Lives that were written for her in the twelfth century, she was refigured in the image of a bishop, just as Christina had been. According to her Anglo-Norman writer, she performed three “episcopal” acts: veiling herself as a consecrated virgin when local bishops refused to do so; “writing” a kind of foundation charter for her church by marking its door with her bloodied hand and then placing her severed head on the altar, thereby confirming the church's consecration and her own; and miraculously paralyzing Bishop Richard I de Belmeis as punishment for unjustly dispossessing the canons of certain properties.Footnote 105 Zatta rightly claimed in her analysis of the second act: “By marking the door, Osyth writes the church's history on the church itself, which becomes in effect a document of its special privileges and exemption.”Footnote 106 And Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, in her annotations to Zatta's translation of the Vie, associated Osyth's marking of the church door with Christina's scratching a cross into the church door of St. Albans with her fingernail when she was taken there for the first time as a young girl.Footnote 107 Wogan-Browne did not make further connections between the strategies employed by the writers of Osyth's and Christina's Lives, but parallel analyses of the two texts demonstrate that both saints were refashioned in service to the agendas of the male monastic communities that claimed them as their own.
Even though the settlement that was ultimately reached between St. Osyth's and St. Paul's through the mediation of Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London (1163–1167), did not fully restore all the churches of which St. Osyth's had been dispossessed,Footnote 108 the Vie's confident expectation that their patron saint would always ensure that justice was served to the community suggests that its writer and the canons who patronized its authoring had no doubt that St. Osyth was the most fitting advocate and guarantor of its possessions. In fact, the Vie offers the example of the canons who despaired of St. Osyth's concern to avenge the community's misfortunes under Richard I de Belmeis as a warning to those in the community who might question her intercessory powers in their present predicament.Footnote 109 In the end, she would vanquish any episcopal authority that threatened her community's liberty.
So too the writer of Christina's Life expresses steadfast conviction in the saint's loyal patronage of St. Albans and goes to great lengths to challenge any past, present, or future detractor of her physical purity and spiritual powers.Footnote 110 But for as many correspondences as there seem to be between the campaigns launched by St. Osyth's and St. Albans under the aegis of their female saints to secure their independence from external encroachment, one fundamental difference makes their strategies dramatically distinct: Christina's writer had to transform a living holy woman into the abbey's patron saint. This difference is significant for two reasons, both of which may explain the abrupt ending to Christina's Life.
First, unlike Osyth's venerability, Christina's had not been proven by the passage of time, nor had it been widely accepted outside of the St. Albans community (despite the evidence her writer mounts to the contrary)Footnote 111 or even among all the monks at St. Albans. As Rachel Koopmans observed, the Gesta abbatum confirms that some St. Albans monks numbered among Christina's detractors: they grumbled against Geoffrey's generous benefaction of Markyate without the entire chapter's consent, likely fearing that such benefaction would undermine the abbey's claims to independence from its diocesan.Footnote 112 The land that Markyate was built on belonged not to St. Albans, but to the canons of St. Paul's, London,Footnote 113 and it fell under the jurisdiction of the very ecclesiastical figure that St. Albans wished to be free from—the bishop of Lincoln. Even the act of Christina's consecration by Bishop Alexander may have served as yet another bitter reminder that St. Albans was not in control of selecting the bishop that administered their episcopal sacraments. Thus, if Geoffrey was indeed planning to make the next bid for the abbey's exemption through the elevation of Christina as its new patron saint, and if her Life was to be the means by which he would claim and wield her saintly status, many in his community may have thought that his plan was ill-advised, even reckless, and decided to put a stop to it, thus cutting the Life off before its intended end.
Christina herself presented the second difficulty to her writer's making her into a living saint. Koopmans remarked that Christina often proved to be a very incompliant source for her writer and listed all the passages in the Life that speak to her recalcitrance.Footnote 114 On such occasions, the writer may have depended upon the testimony of Christina's sister, Margaret, as the resident expert on and likely first chronicler of the would-be saint's holy deeds.Footnote 115 Christina's recalcitrance during the writer's interviews begs an explanation, because elsewhere in her Life, she is shown to be in favor of her textual memorialization.Footnote 116 Perhaps she feared that her life would not be faithfully recorded, but instead co-opted for the abbey's own purposes. It is evident that from the moment of Christina's heavenly crowning on, her writer reconfigured the historical sequence of the events of her life, particularly the visions that color them, most likely so that they would follow more closely the agenda proposed for her Life. What is more, it is difficult to determine the extent to which Christina's visions are in fact entirely her own. Are they the imaginative re-workings or even creations of her writer and Geoffrey? Or, were they prompted by the many conversations that Geoffrey and Christina had shared? And in the case of Christina's crowning specifically, did the writer remake the crown that she had received in her vision into the likeness of a bishop's miter? Or, had Geoffrey's dreams for his community so fully penetrated Christina's visions that she could not but envision what he desired—a mitered abbot at St. Albans? Definite answers to these questions are not supplied either by the Life or the other sources that preserve Christina's history. What is known is that on May 27, 1145, her community at Markyate was dedicated by Bishop Alexander as a Benedictine priory, independent of St. Albans,Footnote 117 presumably at her own initiative given that the charter confirming St. Paul's land grant also stipulates the free election of Markyate's future prioresses and its freedom from any cleric's or monk's external imposition on its way of life.Footnote 118
Geoffrey appears as a witness on both charters, which fact strongly suggests that he and Christina were on good terms when Markyate was founded, or even that he had helped to secure St. Paul's support of her foundation. Though the location and nature of Markyate's foundation effectively placed it outside of St. Albans' jurisdiction, Geoffrey may have still felt obligated to ensure the material well-being of Christina and her community. For Christina's part, her decision to found an independent priory may have been motivated by increased hostilities toward her presence at St. Albans, or her unwillingness to cooperate fully in the abbey's campaign for exemption either by allowing her life to be refashioned into the Life of its new patron saint or by moving her community under its auspices, like the neighboring priory of women religious at Sopwell.Footnote 119 Thus whether at the monks' instigation or Christina's, either scenario may have resulted in the Life's suppression or abandonment. Christina was not a long-dead saint like St. Osyth, easily spoken for in service to a male religious community's agenda: she would have been able to have the final say over her life and its depiction.
V. Conclusion
Without the added claim to St. Albans' independence envisioned in Christina's Life, Geoffrey made his final bid for the abbey's exemption before Innocent II in 1143, three years before the abbot's death. Innocent's bull Officii nostri nos confirmed Calixtus II's Ad hoc nos, and it extended the abbey's privileges by prohibiting: all external interference in abbatial elections; the celebration of public masses, synods, or ordinations by a bishop without the abbot's permission; and the establishment of an episcopal see at the abbey. It also declared that the abbot alone had the right to place or remove members of his community.Footnote 120 As significant as the bestowal of these privileges was to the preservation and advancement of St. Albans' liberty, the privilege declaring the abbey's full exemption from its diocesan was not granted. St. Albans was still to depend on the bishop of Lincoln for the receipt of chrism and holy oil and for the performance of all consecrations and ordinations.
St. Albans' campaign for full exemption would not achieve its desired end until the abbey's own “loyal son,” Nicholas Breakspear, became Adrian IV, the first and only English pope, in 1154.Footnote 121 Though Adrian was never a monk at St. Albans (in fact, his application to the novitiate had been rejected),Footnote 122 his father, Richard, had become a monk there and was probably still alive when his son was elevated to the papacy.Footnote 123 The abbot at the time, Robert de Gorron, capitalized on Adrian's accession by organizing two embassies to Rome in 1156 and 1157 to secure additional privileges for the abbey.Footnote 124 Both campaigns succeeded in acquiring a series of privileges, the two most important of which were Incomprehensibilis (1156) and Religiosam uitam (1157).Footnote 125 The former bull granted the abbey exemption from its diocesan, and the latter bestowed on the abbots of St. Albans the privilege of wearing all the pontificalia, including the miter, as well as making them first in dignity among the abbots of England. So successful were Robert's missions on the abbey's behalf that according to the Gesta abbatum, he was called “the reformer of the liberties of the church of St. Alban [reformator libertatum Ecclesiae Sancti Albani].”Footnote 126
Thus, during Robert's abbacy, Geoffrey's vision of an independent, mitered abbot at St. Albans was finally realized, and remarkably, Christina of Markyate is, in part, to be credited for the abbey's success. According to the Gesta's account of Robert's first embassy, “the abbot [Robert] offered to the Lord Pope gold and silver of no little weight and other precious gifts, as well as three miters and sandals of wondrous craft [operis mirifici], which Lady Christina, prioress of Markyate, had most carefully made.”Footnote 127 Apparently, Adrian approved of all the gifts that were presented to him, but only accepted the miters and sandals that Christina had made, “because they were of remarkable craft [quia admirabilis operis].”Footnote 128 Christina's gifts to Adrian and his welcoming acceptance of only her gifts suggest three possibilities. First, as a native of the environs of St. Albans, Adrian may have heard of Christina's fama or even been captivated by her charisma through personal acquaintance. In receiving the vestments that she had embroidered, he may have hoped to (re-)establish a spiritual connection with her, and in wearing them, he may have sought to make her physically proximate to him through tangible signs of her memoria.Footnote 129
Second, Christina's gifts attest to her continued contact with St. Albans after the foundation of Markyate and the death of Geoffrey. No doubt she still had friends within the community of St. Albans, one of whom may have been Geoffrey's nephew and subsequent abbatial successor, Robert, the very envoy of her gifts to Adrian. Robert served in the office of secretarius during his uncle's abbacy;Footnote 130 by virtue of his office and the ties of kinship, he likely was intimately familiar with Geoffrey's affairs, including his uncle's relationship with Christina. His scribal handiwork even may be behind the writing of Christina's Life. If Robert had and still maintained close ties with Christina, his decision to employ her offerings of miters and sandals in service to his own bid for the abbey's exemption becomes more intelligible. Like his uncle, he may have believed in the efficacy of her spiritual powers and sought to channel them toward the abbey's promotion, but instead of envisioning her as St. Albans' mitered, patron saint, he made use of her material gifts to endear his cause to the pope. This course of action was probably endorsed more readily by the monks of St. Albans and Christina herself.
Finally, for Christina's part, when she made her gifts in support of St. Albans' new campaign, she did so from the secure position of her independent priory; thus she may have felt that she could now safely advance the abbey's agenda on her own terms, without the record of her own life at stake. She may have indeed envisioned St. Albans' hopes for independence, but whatever visions she had, they would always be secondary to those that she had for Markyate. For given the choice of all the places in the world, as her Life itself tells us, this was the place that she desired as her own.Footnote 131
