Boniface and the Women of the Mission

One of the most distinctive features of Boniface’s mission, and of his letters, is the prominent place of women in it. Anglo-Saxon abbesses and nuns — learned, devout, and capable of governing great monasteries — were among his closest correspondents and his most important co-workers; the greatest of them, Leoba, came from Wessex at his request to lead the women’s houses of the German mission and was honored by him above almost all others. This file reads the women of the mission through the letters and the Life of Leoba: their friendship, their learning, and the real authority the sources accord them.

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

Women in the Bonifatian Letters

The correspondence preserves a remarkable body of letters to and from women — a feature that sets it apart from much of the surviving documentation of the early medieval Church and that testifies to the place women held in the English monastic world and in Boniface’s mission (Levison 1946; Wood 2001; on the broader context, Women in Orthodoxy). These were not deferential notes but letters between equals in religion: requests for prayers and books, expressions of friendship and grief, theological and ascetic counsel.

Among the women correspondents are the abbess Eadburga (likely of Minster-in-Thanet), to whom Boniface wrote his famous request that she copy out the Epistle of Saint Peter “in letters of gold,” and who sent him books and gifts (Tangl 35 / Emerton, Letter 30; trans. Emerton 1940); the abbess Bugga (Eadburga is sometimes identified with her), a learned woman with whom Boniface exchanged letters of spiritual friendship and to whom he gave counsel about a pilgrimage to Rome (Tangl 27, 94 / Emerton, Letters 21, 78; Emerton 1940); and, most importantly, Leoba herself, whose early letter to Boniface — written when she was a young nun at Wimborne, claiming kinship with him, asking his friendship, and shyly submitting a few lines of her own Latin verse for his correction — is one of the most personal and appealing documents in the whole collection (Tangl 29 / Emerton, Letter 21; Emerton 1940; the letter is among the earliest surviving writings by an Englishwoman).

These letters matter as evidence. They show that the English church produced women of real learning — Leoba’s letter displays a command of Latin verse and Scripture — and that Boniface valued such women as colleagues and friends, not merely as supporters. The double-monastery tradition of the English church, in which abbesses governed communities of both men and women and were figures of authority (the tradition of Hilda of Whitby; see St. Hilda of Whitby), had formed women capable of leading the women’s side of the German mission, and Boniface drew on them deliberately.

Leoba

The pre-eminent woman of the mission was Leoba (Leobgytha, Lioba), whose life is known from the Vita Leobae written around 836 by Rudolf of Fulda, a Fulda monk drawing on the testimony of those who had known her (Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae; trans. Talbot 1954). A kinswoman of Boniface, Leoba was educated at the great double monastery of Wimborne in Wessex under the abbess Tetta, in a community famed for its strict discipline (Rudolf, Vita Leobae 6–9; Talbot 1954). At Boniface’s request she came to Germany, and he established her as abbess of Tauberbischofsheim in Franconia, from which she presided over a network of women’s monasteries and trained the nuns who staffed them (Rudolf, Vita Leobae 10–14; Talbot 1954; Wood 2001).

Rudolf’s Life presents Leoba as a figure of genuine authority and learning: deeply versed in Scripture and the Fathers and the canons, prudent in governance, sought out for counsel, and so trusted that — Rudolf reports — she was received at the court of Charlemagne and esteemed by Queen Hildegard, and was the only woman permitted to enter the precincts of the monks’ monastery at Fulda for prayer (Rudolf, Vita Leobae 18–19; Talbot 1954). The Vita Leobae must be read with the same source-critical care as any hagiography — it was written some eighty years after her death to honor a saint, and its portrait is idealized (METHODOLOGY §3.5) — but its substance, that Leoba was a learned and authoritative leader of the mission’s women’s houses, is consistent with the letters and with the standing the English abbatial tradition gave such women (Wood 2001).

The Bond Between Boniface and Leoba

The relationship between Boniface and Leoba is one of the most touching threads in his story. It begins with her youthful letter asking his friendship and kinship (Tangl 29 / Emerton, Letter 21; Emerton 1940); it issues in his summoning her to share his life’s work; and it is sealed, the Vita Leobae reports, by Boniface’s request, made before he set out on his final and fatal journey to Frisia, that when she died she should be buried beside him at Fulda, so that they who had served Christ together might await the resurrection together (Rudolf, Vita Leobae 17; Talbot 1954). The monks of Fulda, the Vita says, were reluctant fully to honor this — burying her near but not within his own tomb — but the wish itself, that the apostle should ask to lie beside the abbess, is an extraordinary testimony to the esteem in which he held her (Rudolf, Vita Leobae 21; Talbot 1954; Wood 2001). Leoba outlived Boniface by nearly three decades, governing her houses and revered as a saint; she is venerated in her own right, with her feast on 28 September.

The Women as Principals

The historical importance of the women of the mission is that they were principals, not auxiliaries. The conversion and Christian formation of a people required the formation of its women, and that work fell largely to the nuns — they founded and governed monasteries, taught, copied books, and built the female religious life of the new church (Wood 2001; Levison 1946). Tauberbischofsheim, Kitzingen, Ochsenfurt, and the other women’s houses were not appendages to the men’s monasteries but institutions in their own right, led by women of learning and authority drawn from the English abbatial tradition. The prominence of women in the Bonifatian letters and in the mission they document is not an incidental curiosity but a structural feature of how the German church was built — and it reflects a moment in the life of the undivided Church when the English double-monastery culture made room for women of remarkable consequence (see Women in Orthodoxy; St. Hilda of Whitby).

To read Boniface’s mission without its women — without Leoba and Eadburga and Bugga and the nuns of Tauberbischofsheim — is to miss a great part of it. The Apostle of the Germans did not work alone, and among his closest and most valued co-workers were the learned women of the English church who crossed the sea, as he had, to give the Germans the faith.

See Also

References

  • 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 education at Wimborne under Tetta, ch. 6–9; her coming to Germany and rule at Tauberbischofsheim, ch. 10–14; her learning and authority, ch. 18–19; Boniface’s request that she be buried beside him, ch. 17, 21.)
  • The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (Leoba’s early letter to Boniface, Letter 21; the request to Eadburga for the Epistle of Peter in gold, Letter 30; letters to and from Bugga.)
  • Tangl, Michael, ed. Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus. MGH Epistolae Selectae 1. Berlin: Weidmann, 1916. (Leoba’s letter, Tangl 29; the women’s correspondence.)
  • Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The women correspondents and the English abbatial tradition.)
  • Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (Leoba and the women of the mission as principals.)