Happy birthday to me

Today is St Eadburh's day. She was a saint of Winchester, daughter of King Edward the Elder, who at the age of three was given the choice between a nun's habit and a princess's robe, and chose the habit. Her life went on from there in similar vein. The same tale is told of St Edith, who made the choice at age two, and I'm afraid Eadburh has always seemed to me like one of those saints about whom not much was known, and who therefore attracted pale copies of other people's stories. (I edited the life of another one, St Cuthburh, an echo of St Æthelthryth, for my M.Phil.) Not that there's anything wrong with shared stories. In the anonymous Life of Gregory the Great written at Whitby, probably by a nun, there's an excellent bit where the author says that if she has attributed anything to Gregory which was actually done by another saint it doesn't matter because we are all members together of the body of Christ.

It's also St Vitus's day, he of the spasmodic dance of death.

I've got the portiforium of St Wulfstan out, one of my favourite books of all time. According to a fourteenth-century inscription it was the portiforium of St Oswald, but it was obviously written after Oswald's death, besides containing hymns to St Oswald, which would be unholily arrogant of him to have carried around with him... The fact that it is now associated with the more plausible St Wulfstan instead says a lot about the human tendency to anchor objects to well-known figures, and see the past in terms of people. (I don't think there's so very much wrong with that either.) St Wulfstan is another lovable saint. He was bishop of Worcester and by far the longest-lasting Anglo-Saxon bishop after the Conquest -- famous to palaeographers is the 1080-something Canterbury profession where all the bishops write their names in small crabbed Norman hands except for Wulfstan with his beautiful round Anglo-Caroline minuscule. He was also a bit of a loony. Fond as he was of King Harold II, he saw the Norman Conquest as a judgement on the English nobility for wearing their hair too long. He used to carry a small pair of scissors around with him and cut the hair of young men who he felt needed it. (He'd cut off one lock, confident that they would then get the rest trimmed to match.) The Normans with their pudding-basin haircuts obviously deserved to inherit the land. (This is disturbingly like Rimmer's theory on warfare in Red Dwarf.) But he took his pastoral roles very seriously, and rode around the countryside preaching to ordinary people, baptising, and doing other stuff than sitting about eating in his palace. When they built the great Norman cathedral at Worcester, Wulfstan is said to have cried -- he said, we are tearing down the house of saints to replace it with our own works.

His portiforium is great, whether or not it's really his. The calendar contains his obit, added on the 20th January; Obitus pie memorie domni Wlstani episcopi. The script is wonderful late static Anglo-Caroline, and the ruling is a complete mess. Whoever went through removing the word "pope" as required by the Reformation-era Act for the Suppression of Superstitious Books and Monuments, did so rather carelessly. All in all my favourite sort of book.