06 — The Letters
Boniface is unusual among early missionaries in leaving a large collection of his own letters — to popes, kings, bishops, abbots, and abbesses, in England and on the Continent — which survive and form one of the richest first-person sources for the eighth-century Church. This section reads that correspondence as a historical source and theological self-portrait, and then turns to one of its most distinctive features: the prominent place of women in Boniface’s mission and his letters, above all the abbess Leoba and the network of Anglo-Saxon nuns who came to Germany.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)
Where most early medieval saints are known only through the filter of a hagiographer, Boniface speaks in his own voice. The collection preserved chiefly through the labor of his successor Lull contains his requests to Rome, his complaints about disorder, his appeals to England for prayers and books, his counsel and his grief — and the replies of his correspondents, including the warm and learned letters of Anglo-Saxon women. The correspondence corroborates and complicates the Vita; it also reveals a feature of the mission too easily overlooked: the centrality of women to it. These two files read the letters as a whole and then attend specifically to the women of the mission.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Correspondence | The surviving letter-collection — its preservation, its range (popes, kings, bishops, the English church), and its value as a historical and personal source; what the letters show that the Vita does not. |
| Boniface and the Women of the Mission | The women correspondents and co-workers, above all Leoba; the role of the English nuns in the mission; the friendship, learning, and authority the letters reveal. |
See Also
- Monk and Scholar at Nursling — the scholar whose bibliophily fills the letters
- Fulda and the Monastic Network — the network the nuns staffed
- The Frankish Councils — the reform documented in the letters
- Women in Orthodoxy — the broader context of women’s roles in the Church
References
- The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940.
- Rudolf of Fulda. The Life of Saint Leoba. Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954.
- Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946.
- Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001.