The Correspondence

Among the treasures Boniface left is something rare for an eighth-century figure: a large collection of his own letters, and letters addressed to him, preserved through the care of his successor Lull and surviving to this day. They run to popes and kings, bishops and abbots, abbesses and old friends in England, and they let us hear Boniface in his own voice — anxious, learned, demanding, devout. This file examines the collection: how it was preserved, what it contains, and why it is one of the most valuable first-person sources for the early medieval Church, corroborating and complicating the picture the Vita gives.

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

A Rare Survival

Most of what we know of early medieval saints comes filtered through hagiographers writing after their deaths. Boniface is a striking exception: roughly 150 letters survive in the Bonifatian correspondence — written by him, addressed to him, or otherwise connected to his circle — preserving his own words and those of his correspondents (Levison 1946; the standard edition is Tangl, Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, MGH Epist. Sel. 1, 1916; English translation Emerton 1940). The collection owes its survival chiefly to Lull, Boniface’s Anglo-Saxon assistant and successor at Mainz, who gathered and preserved the letters; they were copied and transmitted through the Mainz and Fulda archives (Levison 1946; Wood 2001). That an eighth-century missionary’s working correspondence should survive at all is remarkable; that so much of it should survive makes Boniface one of the best-documented persons of his century.

The Range of the Letters

The correspondence is wide in its reach, and its range is itself a portrait of Boniface’s world. He writes to and receives letters from:

  • The popes — Gregory II, Gregory III, and Zacharias — on the foundation of sees, the discipline of clergy, doubtful questions of canon law and practice, the suppression of heretics, and the privileges of his monasteries (e.g., the commission of 719, Tangl 12 / Emerton, Letter 12; the questions to Zacharias, Tangl 50–51 / Emerton, Letters 45, 50). These letters are a major source for the relations between Rome and the eighth-century Western church (see The Commission from Rome).
  • Frankish rulers and magnates — including the exchange of obligations with Charles Martel and his sons; the letters frankly acknowledge the mission’s dependence on Frankish protection (Tangl 63 / Emerton, Letter 63).
  • The English church — bishops, abbots, abbesses, and kings of his homeland, from whom he requests prayers, books, personnel, and counsel, and to whom he sends warnings and exhortations, including the celebrated letter rebuking King Æthelbald of Mercia for his immorality (Tangl 73 / Emerton, Letter 57; Emerton 1940) and the famous appeal to the whole English people to pray for the conversion of the continental Saxons, “for they are of one blood and one bone with us” (Tangl 46 / Emerton, Letter 36; Emerton 1940).
  • Fellow missionaries, disciples, and friends — including the women of the mission, treated in their own file (see Boniface and the Women of the Mission).

What the Letters Reveal

The letters give us things the Vita cannot. They reveal a man under strain: anxious about the validity of ordinations and baptisms performed by irregular clergy, worried about heretics like Aldebert and Clement, frustrated by the slowness of Frankish reform, weighed down in old age by the burden of a church not yet ordered as he wished (Tangl 57, 59, 60 / Emerton, Letters 50, 52, 51; Emerton 1940). They reveal a scholar who never stopped needing books: again and again he asks his English correspondents to copy and send him manuscripts — the works of Bede, commentaries on Scripture, treatises he cannot obtain — and to send them well-corrected (Tangl 75–76, 91 / Emerton, Letters 62, 75–76; Emerton 1940; see Monk and Scholar at Nursling). They reveal a pastor of deep feeling: the famous request to the abbess Eadburga to write out the Epistle of Saint Peter in gold, “to do honor and reverence to the Holy Scriptures before the eyes of the heathen,” is at once practical and tender (Tangl 35 / Emerton, Letter 30; Emerton 1940).

Above all they reveal the texture of an early medieval mission as no hagiography does: the logistics of recruiting helpers and securing books, the canonical perplexities of a missionary far from the centers of learning, the politics of dealing with popes and princes, the network of prayer and friendship binding the German mission to the English church across the sea. The correspondence is, in James Palmer’s phrase and that of others, a window into the lived practice of conversion and church-building (Palmer 2009; Wood 2001).

A Source to Be Read Critically

The letters are a primary source of the highest value, but they are not transparent. They are documents written for purposes — to persuade, to request, to rebuke, to justify — and Boniface’s self-presentation in them is shaped by those purposes (Wood 2001). His account of the disorder of the Frankish church, for instance, is the brief of a reformer and is colored accordingly (see The Frankish Councils). The collection as preserved is also a selection — what Lull and the later archivists chose to keep — and its silences (the letters do not, for example, mention the felling of Donar’s Oak) are as telling as its contents (Wood 2001; see The Felling of Donar’s Oak). Read critically, against the Vita and against each other, the letters are the indispensable control on the legend — the place where the historical Boniface, with his anxieties and his bibliophily and his unfinished reforms, can be heard most directly.

A Corrective to the Vita

The relation between the letters and the Vita Bonifatii is the methodological heart of this collection. Willibald’s Life gives us the shape of the career and the great scenes — the oak, the martyrdom — but it is hagiography, written to edify. The letters give us the man at work, and where the two can be compared, the letters discipline the Vita: they confirm the broad outline of the career, they supply the institutional and political detail the Vita passes over, and they occasionally show a Boniface more harassed and less triumphant than the hagiographer’s hero (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009; see The Life by Willibald). To read Boniface well is to read the two together, each correcting the other’s characteristic distortions — the Vita‘s tendency to smooth into triumph, the letters’ tendency to the partial and the self-justifying. Between them they give us one of the most fully knowable figures of the early medieval West.

See Also

References

  • The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (The full English collection; the commission, Letter 12; the appeal to the English to pray for the Saxons, Letter 36; the request to Eadburga for the Epistle of Peter in gold, Letter 30; the rebuke of Æthelbald, Letter 57; the necessity of Frankish protection, Letter 63; requests for books, Letters 62, 75–76; the questions to Zacharias, Letters 45, 50.)
  • Tangl, Michael, ed. Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus. MGH Epistolae Selectae 1. Berlin: Weidmann, 1916. (The critical edition; letters cited by Tangl number.)
  • Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The preservation and transmission of the collection; Lull’s role.)
  • Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The letters as a critically-read source; their relation to the Vita.)
  • Palmer, James T. Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. (The correspondence as a window into missionary practice.)