Fulda and the Monastic Network

If the bishoprics were the skeleton of Boniface’s German church, the monasteries were its living tissue — and the greatest of them was Fulda, founded in 744 in a remote Hessian wilderness under his disciple Sturm, organized on the Benedictine pattern, and destined to become the spiritual heart of the mission and Boniface’s own burial place. This file traces the foundation of Fulda and the wider monastic network, and the remarkable company of Anglo-Saxon monks and nuns — Sturm, Lull, Leoba, and others — whom Boniface drew from England to staff and sustain the work.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)

The Monastery as the Engine of Mission

Boniface had learned in England that the monastery was the institution that made Christianity permanent, learned, and self-renewing (see Monk and Scholar at Nursling). The Anglo-Saxon church that formed him was a church of great monasteries — schools, scriptoria, centers of liturgy and learning — and he transplanted that model wholesale to Germany. Monasteries trained the clergy the new dioceses needed, kept the books and the chant, served the surrounding population, and gave the church an economic and spiritual base independent of the fortunes of any single bishop. The monastic network was not an adjunct to Boniface’s mission; it was its engine (Wood 2001; on the monastic tradition, Monasticism).

The Foundation of Fulda

The crown of this network was the monastery of Fulda, founded in 744. Its story is told in the Vita Sturmi, the Life of Sturm written by Eigil, one of Sturm’s successors as abbot (Eigil, Vita Sturmi; trans. Talbot 1954). Sturm, a Bavarian by birth, had been given as a boy into Boniface’s care and trained at the monastery of Ohrdruf in Thuringia (Eigil, Vita Sturmi 2; Talbot 1954). At Boniface’s direction Sturm went out to seek a place in the wilderness for a monastery — a true desert, remote from the world, in the old monastic ideal — and after long searching through the forested uplands he found a site on the river Fulda in a deserted region of Hesse (Eigil, Vita Sturmi 4–7; Talbot 1954). There, in 744, with land granted by Carloman and the blessing of Boniface, the monastery was founded; Sturm became its first abbot (Eigil, Vita Sturmi 12–14; Talbot 1954; Wood 2001).

Boniface cherished Fulda above all his foundations. He secured for it, by his own petition, a special privilege from Pope Zacharias placing it directly under the protection of the apostolic see and exempting it from episcopal interference — an early instance of monastic exemption that gave Fulda an exceptional standing (Tangl 86–89, the Fulda privilege; Emerton, Letters 79–80; Levison 1946; Wood 2001). Sturm was sent for a time to Italy, including Monte Cassino, to study the Benedictine observance at its source, so that Fulda might be organized on the authentic Rule of Saint Benedict (Eigil, Vita Sturmi 14; Talbot 1954; on the Rule, see St. Benedict of Nursia). Fulda thus became a center of Benedictine monasticism in Germany, a school and scriptorium of the first rank, and — by Boniface’s own wish — the place of his burial (see Fulda and the Relics).

The Anglo-Saxon Helpers

Boniface did not staff his network with strangers; he summoned his own people. One of the most striking features of his mission is the company of Anglo-Saxon monks and nuns who crossed the sea to join him — a transfer of personnel from the English church to the German that the letters document in moving detail (Levison 1946; Wood 2001). They came as a network of kin, former pupils, and fellow-religious, bound to Boniface by ties of blood, formation, and shared vocation, and they became the bishops, abbots, abbesses, and teachers of the new church.

Among the men, Lull (Lullus) was the most important: an Anglo-Saxon who became Boniface’s closest assistant in his later years, was consecrated by him, and succeeded him as bishop of Mainz, carrying on his work and his correspondence after the martyrdom (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 8; Talbot 1954; Levison 1946). Sturm, though Bavarian-born, was Boniface’s spiritual son and the founder-abbot of Fulda. Wigbert governed Fritzlar; Burchard became bishop of Würzburg; Willibald and Wynnebald, kinsmen of Boniface, came from England (by way of pilgrimage and Monte Cassino) to serve in the mission, Willibald as bishop of Eichstätt (Hugeburc, Vita Willibaldi; Levison 1946; Wood 2001).

The Women of Fulda’s World: Leoba and the Nuns

Equally remarkable, and historically more unusual, was the company of Anglo-Saxon nuns Boniface drew to Germany to found and lead women’s monasteries — for the conversion of a people required the formation of Christian women, and the double-monastery tradition of the English church (the tradition of Hilda of Whitby) supplied women capable of leading great houses (see St. Hilda of Whitby; on women in the Church, Women in Orthodoxy). The greatest of them was Leoba (Leobgytha), a kinswoman of Boniface, who came from the monastery of Wimborne in Wessex at his request and became abbess of the convent of Tauberbischofsheim, ruling a network of women’s houses and serving as a leader of the mission in her own right (Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae; trans. Talbot 1954; Wood 2001). Boniface’s regard for Leoba was such that he is said to have asked that she be buried beside him at Fulda — an extraordinary mark of esteem, treated more fully in its own file (see Boniface and the Women of the Mission).

The nuns were not auxiliaries but principals. They founded and ruled monasteries, taught, copied books, and formed the Christian womanhood of the new church; the Vita Leobae presents Leoba as a learned and authoritative figure consulted even by Boniface himself (Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae; Talbot 1954). The monastic network Boniface built was, by the standard of its age, strikingly a network of both men and women, and its women were among its most consequential members.

The Network as a Whole

By the time of Boniface’s death the monastic network stretched across Hesse, Thuringia, Franconia, and Bavaria: Fulda at its center, Fritzlar, Amöneburg, Ohrdruf, the women’s houses of Tauberbischofsheim, Kitzingen, and Ochsenfurt, and others, bound together by the common Benedictine observance, by personal ties to Boniface, and by their shared origin in the Anglo-Saxon church (Levison 1946; Wood 2001). These houses outlived their founder by centuries; Fulda in particular became one of the great cultural centers of the Carolingian renaissance, its scriptorium and school feeding the revival of learning under Charlemagne and his successors. The monastic network was Boniface’s most durable bequest to Europe — the institutional means by which the faith he preached was kept, taught, and handed on long after the missionary himself had fallen at Dokkum.

References

Eigil. The Life of Saint Sturm (Vita Sturmi). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (Sturm’s training, the search for the site, and the foundation of Fulda in 744 at ch. 2–14.)
Rudolf of Fulda. The Life of Saint Leoba (Vita Leobae). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (Leoba’s coming from Wimborne, her rule at Tauberbischofsheim, and her standing in the mission.)
Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface (Vita Bonifatii). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (Lull as assistant and successor at ch. 8.)
The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (The Fulda privilege from Zacharias, Letters 79–80.)
Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The Anglo-Saxon helpers; the monastic network; the Fulda exemption.)
Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (Fulda, Sturm, Leoba, and the network as the engine of the mission.)