Queen Cuthburga: Sinner or Saint?

By Kim Rendfeld

As the training ground of medieval female missionaries, burial place of royalty, and college of secular (nonmonastic) canons, Wimborne Minster in Dorset holds an influential place in history, but little is known about its eighth-century founder, Saint Cuthburga.

Trying to research the woman and her life has raised many more questions than answers, and the variant spellings of her name are the least of our problems. Her birth date is unknown, and she died Aug. 31, perhaps in 725. We know with certainty that she was the sister of King Ine of Wessex, and she was married to Northumbrian King Aldfrith, from whom she separated to join the religious life.

Whether Cuthburga and Aldfrith parted before or after their marriage was consummated depends on whether we believe manuscripts written in the 12th and 14th centuries. In the latter manuscript, whose author took the creative liberties of a historical novelist, Cuthburga wanted Christ as her spouse, and on the night of her nuptials, she quoted Scripture to her husband to extol the virtues of virginity, a higher calling than marriage. Although Aldfrith desired her, he released Cuthburga from her marital vows and even asked her to pray for him.

Medieval wedding nights were not private events. In a state of undress, the bride and groom accepted each other in front of witnesses. So, the 14th century description stretches credibility.

A more plausible possibility is that Cuthburga took the veil after failing to produce an heir. If she was already drawn to a spiritual life, she might even take the lack of a child as a sign from God. As an abbess, she would still have a position of wealth and power – plus the independence of not having a man telling her what to do – while Aldfrith could free himself for another marriage.

Aldfrith had a son, Osred, around 696, but Cuthburga did not act like the boy’s mother. Osred was 8 when his father died around 704. In such cases, the queen mother often was regent until the son came of age. Cuthburga did not play that influential role. In fact, she seemed to have nothing to with Northumbrian politics.

After leaving her husband, Cuthburga went to Barking, perhaps for a yearlong novitiate under Abbess Hildelith. By 705, she founded the double monastery at Wimborne in Wessex and was joined by her sister and later successor Cwenburga. Cuthburga’s time as a princess and queen would have prepared her to lead an abbey, and this one became a center for teaching religious women. Later, Saint Boniface turned to Tetta, one of Cuthburga’s successors, when he needed nuns to serve as missionaries on the Continent.

Wimborne Minster via Wikimedia Commons

If we are to believe Rudolf of Fulda in his 9th century hagiography about Saint Lioba, men and women at Wimborne lived on the grounds in their own houses and did not interact. The only time the women saw a man was when the priest celebrated Mass. Three centuries later, William of Malmesbury calls Cuthburga’s community “a full company of virgins, dead to earthly desires and breathing only aspirations towards heaven.”

The 14th century manuscript has Cuthburga living a saintly life of fasting and prayer and being well loved by her sisters. When she was gravely ill, they prayed for her to be restored to health, but she told them to let her go.

Yet her fate in afterlife is uncertain. According to an eighth-century anonymous monk, the former queen is screaming in a penitential pit with a couple of other aristocrats, having their carnal sins thrown in their faces like boiling mud. Could the monk have meant a different Cuthburga? He mentions her once being a queen but nothing of her being an abbess.

However, she was canonized by the 14th century, and I prefer this entry from a manuscript of that era: “She was buried with fitting honour in the same church which she had built to the holy mother of God, where by her merits very many miracles were wrought and many benefits were bestowed on the sick; the power of walking was restored to the lame, hearing to the deaf, sight to the blind, through the tender mercy of Jesus our Christ, whose majesty and sway remain for ever and ever.”

Sources

A Dictionary of Saintly Women, Volume 1, by Agnes Baillie Cuninghame Dunbar

William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England: From the Earliest Period to the Reign of King Stephen (12th century, 1866 translation)

Hell and Its Afterlife: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Isabel Moreira and Margaret Toscano

Woman under Monasticism: chapters on saint-lore and convent life between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1500, Lina Eckenstein

A Biographical Dictionary of Dark Age Britain: England, Scotland, and Wales, C. 500-c. 1050, Ann Williams, D. P. Kirby

The Collegiate Church of Wimborne Minster, Patricia Helen Coulstock

“The Marriage of St. Cuthburga, who was afterwards Foundress of the Monastery at Winiborne,” by the Rev. Canon J.M.J. Fletcher, Proceedings - Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, Vol. 27

Medieval Sourcebook: Rudolph of Fulda: Life of Leoba

Kim Rendfeld was curious about Cuthburga because Wimborne trained female missionaries who played an influential role in medieval Francia, the setting for her novels,  The Cross and the Dragon (2012, Fireship Press) and The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar (forthcoming, Fireship Press). For more about Kim and her fiction, visit kimrendfeld.com or her blog, Outtakes. You can also connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

Saint Lioba: Trusted Friend of a Martyr

by Kim Rendfeld

Before he became a martyr in Frisia in 754, Saint Boniface had put his affairs at Fulda in order. Part of that was summoning his younger kinswoman Lioba, whom he had installed as abbess at Bischofsheim. He gave Lioba his cowl and instructed the monks of Fulda that they were to treat her with reverence and, when her time came, to place her remains in the same tomb as his.

Photo by Kandschwar, statue of Lioba in Schornsheim

Neither Boniface nor Lioba were young. Boniface likely was in his 70s. Lioba might have been in her mid-40s. Her hagiography gives hints of her struggles at the time, referring to “her weakness.” Boniface also “exhorted her not to abandon the country of her adoption and not to grow weary of the life she had undertaken, but rather to extend the scope of the good work she had begun.”

Those instructions must have worked. Lioba spent the rest of her days in Francia, visiting the royal court, convents, and the monastery at Fulda, where no other woman was allowed to enter.

Given how close Lioba and Boniface were in life, it might not be a surprise that his parting words to her would have such an effect. In a letter to him, she reminds her kinsman that her father died eight years before and her mother was grievously ill. "I am the only daughter of my parents, and unworthy though I be, I wish that I might regard you as a brother; for there is no other man in my kinship in whom I have such confidence as in you."

Most of what we know about the British-born Lioba comes from her hagiography written by the monk Rudolf of Fulda almost 60 years after her death. Like other hagiographies, Lioba’s story includes dreams and miracles, with parallels to biblical characters and events, the accuracy of which I will leave to the reader to decide.

“In appearance she was angelic,” Rudolf wrote, “in word pleasant, dear in mind, great in prudence, Catholic in faith, most patient in hope, universal in her charity. … No one ever heard a bad word from her lips; the sun never went down upon her anger. … So great was her zeal for reading that she discontinued it only for prayer or for the refreshment of her body with food or sleep: the Scriptures were never out of her hands.”

Childhood in the Church

Like Boniface, Lioba (also spelled Leoba) was born in the Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Her parents, Dynne and Aebbe, had given up on having a child, but then Aebbe dreamed that she bore a church bell in her bosom, which rang out merrily when withdrawn. A nurse told Aebbe that she was going to have a daughter and she must dedicate the child to the Church the way Anna offered Samuel to the temple.

Aebbe handed her daughter over to the care of Mother Tetta, abbess of Wimbourne and future saint who believed in the power of mercy and prayer. Wimbourne was a double monastery where men and women did not mix. Women who entered stayed for life unless there was a greater cause.

Growing up, Lioba proved to be serious and pious. A dream she had of an endless purple thread from her mouth, she was told, was a sign that her wise counsel would be felt in other lands.

That dream was fulfilled when Boniface sent for Lioba, who had a reputation for being learned. Boniface was founding abbeys where the practice of Christianity had slipped, and he needed people he could trust to watch over them. Tetta was not happy to let Lioba go but felt like the need was too great for her to refuse.

Life in Francia

Lioba arrived in Bischofsheim (now called Tauberbischofsheim) around 748. She trained other nuns on the principles of monastic life and many of her disciples became abbesses themselves.

Photo by Andreas Praefcke, Lioba (right)
with Saints Walburga and Michael

But Lioba and her sisters faced their own difficulties. In a story that could have come from today’s tragic headlines, a woman discovered a murdered newborn in the river and jumped to the conclusion that one of the nuns - strangers to the area - had borne and killed the child to cover up her sin. Lioba and the nuns were horrified. After a series of prayers and processions, a vision like flames appeared around the guilty party - a crippled girl the nuns had been caring for. (Her hagiography has other miracles of her healing a very sick nun, putting out a fire, and quieting a storm.)

Lioba lived for 25 years after Boniface’s martyrdom. She was often invited to the Frankish court and well received and respected for her wisdom. She was an advisor to Pepin and his sons, Charles and Carloman (who didn‘t get along). After Carloman died, she still was in Charles’s favor and became close to Hildegard. Perhaps, she was even like a second mother to the young queen, who might have been 13 when she married in 772.

But she “detested the life at court like poison,” Rudolf wrote. And so she would return to her work, mainly mentoring nuns.

At some point, her age and failing health caught up with her. Perhaps when she was in her 60s, she must have realized she had little time left. After settling her affairs at the convents under her care, she retired to Scoranesheim. But Queen Hildegard made one final request to see her.

For the sake of her friendship with the queen, Lioba visited her but soon left. Her farewell is an intimate gesture. She kissed Hildegard on the mouth, forehead, and eyes, and called her “most precious half of my soul.”

Lioba died a few days after returning home. The monks remembered Boniface’s request but they were reluctant to break into his tomb. So she was buried nearby and moved to a different location in the church several years later. (After her hagiography was written, she was moved a few more times after that, finally resting in Petersburg Abbey in Fulda.)

Miracles continued to be attributed to Lioba after her death. One involved a man cured of his twitching. When asked what happened, he said he had a vision of an old man in a bishop’s stole accompanied by a young woman in a nun’s habit who took him by the hand, lifted him up, and presented him to the bishop to be blessed.

Sources

The Letters of Saint Boniface, p. 37-38

Medieval Sourcebook: Rudolph of Fulda: Life of Leoba

"Saint Lioba of Bischofsheim" Saints.SQPN.com. 2 April 2013. Web. 8 June 2013.

All images from Wikimedia Commons, permission granted under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.

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Kim Rendfeld is the author of two books set in Carolingian Francia: The Cross and the Dragon, published by Fireship Press, and the yet-to-be published The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar. For more about Kim and her fiction, visit kimrendfeld.com or her blog, Outtakes. You can also connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.