08 — East and West
Hilda set within the one undivided Church of her age: the double monastery she ruled was not a peculiarity of the Celtic fringe but a form with deep roots in the Christian East as well as the Frankish West, and the holy women who governed such houses have their counterparts in the Eastern tradition. These files place Hilda’s institution in that wider frame and set out the Orthodox reception of a saint who died four centuries before the Schism.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic-Roman; abbess of Whitby)
The double monastery — a community of men and women under a single superior — is sometimes treated as a quaint insular oddity, but it belongs to a broad early-Christian pattern attested from the fourth century in Egypt, Asia Minor, and Constantinople, and revived in the Byzantine and later periods. Hilda’s Whitby is thus a Western instance of something the East knew well, and the abbess’s authority over such a house finds parallels in figures such as Macrina. Because Hilda lived and died in the undivided Church, she is venerated as a saint by Orthodox Christians today, her feast kept on 17/19 November. These files draw the comparison and set out the reception.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Double Monastery and the Eastern Tradition | Double monasteries East and West — their roots in Egyptian, Cappadocian, and Constantinopolitan monasticism; the place of holy women who governed mixed or paired communities; Hilda’s Whitby in that frame. |
| The Orthodox Reception | Hilda as a pre-Schism saint of the undivided Church; her commemoration in the Orthodox calendar (feast 17/19 November); the modern Orthodox recovery of the Western pre-Schism saints. |
See Also
- The Rule and the Life — the institution here compared East and West
- A Woman of Authority — the leadership of holy women in both traditions
- St. Macrina the Younger — the Cappadocian foundress, an Eastern parallel
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church Hilda belonged to
- The Church Calendar — the liturgical commemoration of the saints
References
- Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
- Stramara, Daniel F. “Double Monasticism in the Greek East, Fourth through Eighth Centuries.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6, no. 2 (1998): 269–312.
- Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.