No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2022
The Historia translationis S. Augustini (1098 × 1100), composed by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin as part of a hagiographical cycle for St Augustine’s Abbey, contains several previously overlooked allusions to St Dunstan’s vision of heavenly virgins. I argue that Goscelin drew upon the Dunstan legend to justify Abbot Scotland’s renovation work on St Augustine’s between 1072 and 1087. The article first of all considers how the oratory of the Anglo-Saxon abbey was presented as a locus of divine praise in the first known hagiography of Dunstan. I then show how Dunstan’s eleventh-century hagiographers at Christ Church cathedral responded to the original vision by crafting competing narratives of heavenly choirs. Finally, an analysis of the Historia translationis reveals how Goscelin reappropriated the legend, depicting the oratory, and the crypt that came to replace it, as the abode of celestial spirits whose praise echoed the community’s liturgical devotions.
1 For a discussion of the years leading up to the translations and the significance of the ceremonies, see R. Sharpe, ‘Goscelin’s St Augustine and St Mildreth: Hagiography and Liturgy in Context’, JTS ns 41 (1990), 502–16, and his article, ‘The Setting of St Augustine’s Translation, 1091’, Canterbury and the Norman Conquest: Churches, Saints, and Scholars, 1066–1109, ed. R. Eales and R. Sharpe (London, 1995), pp. 1–13. An analysis of how the 1091 translations affected the development of St Augustine’s cult is provided in P. Lendinara, ‘Forgotten Missionaries: St Augustine of Canterbury in Anglo-Saxon and Post-Conquest England’, Hagiography in Anglo-Saxon England: Adopting and Adapting Saints’ Lives into Old English Prose (c. 950–1150), ed. L. Lazzari, P. Lendinara and C. Di Sciacca, Textes et études du moyen âge 73 (Barcelona, 2014), 365–497, at 458–64.
2 Licence, T., in Herman the Archdeacon and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin: Miracles of St Edmund, ed. and trans. T. Licence with L. Lockyer, OMT (Oxford, 2014), pp. cxv–viCrossRefGoogle Scholar, has suggested that Goscelin was employed at St Augustine’s Abbey for most of the 1090s and left c. 1100. For a full account of Goscelin’s life and work, see Love, R. C., ‘Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Lapidge, M., Blair, J., Keynes, S. and Scragg, D., 2nd ed. (Chichester, 2014), p. 218 Google Scholar, and Lapidge, M. and Love, R. C., ‘England and Wales (600–1550)’, Hagiographies: histoire internationale de la littérature hagiographique latine et vernaculaire, en Occident, des origines à 1500, ed. Philippart, G. (Turnhout, 2001) III, 225–33Google Scholar. A classic but now out-dated biographical sketch is ‘Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and his Works’ (Appendix C) in The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster: Attributed to a Monk of Saint-Bertin, ed. and trans. F. Barlow, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1992), pp. 133–49.
3 Goscelin’s Canterbury hagiographical cycle is found in different forms in London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. xx (St Augustine’s, Canterbury, s. xi/xii) and London, British Library, Harley 105 (St Augustine’s, Canterbury, s. xii med.). The content of the first of these manuscripts is listed in Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 387, p. 314. For a discussion of both manuscripts, see Sharpe, ‘Goscelin’s St Augustine and St Mildreth’, pp. 506–7, and Lendinara, ‘Forgotten Missionaries’, pp. 478–83. London, British Library, Harley 3908 (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss, 439.3, p. 361) contains liturgical materials in honour of St Mildreth, including an Office with music which may have been written by Goscelin. R. Sharpe discussed this source in his ‘Goscelin’s St Augustine and St Mildreth’, pp. 512–15, and ‘Words and Music by Goscelin of Canterbury’, Early Music (1991), 95–7. For a more general consideration of how hagiographers (including Goscelin) may have contributed to the musical life of Canterbury religious communities in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, see D. Hiley, ‘Chant Composition at Canterbury after the Norman Conquest’, Max Lütolf zum 60 Geburtstag: Festschrift, ed. B. Hangartner and U. Fischer (Basel, 1994), pp. 31–46.
4 Goscelin, Historia translationis S. Augustini, ed. D. Papebroch, Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI (1688), cols. 411–43. All references to the text in this article are from this edition unless otherwise stated. The terminus post quem for the text is 1098, as Goscelin mentions in the Prologue (addressed to Anselm) that it has been seven years since Augustine’s translation (col. 411D–E), a point which he restates at the end of the first Book (col. 430C) (see Licence, Miracles of St Edmund, p. cxvi). The terminus ante quem is around 1100. In his article, ‘An Absent Father: Eadmer, Goscelin and the Cult of St Peter, the First Abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury’, JMH 29 (2003), 201–18 at p. 207, P. A. Hayward highlighted that Goscelin writes of a new king in the city of Jerusalem in I.vii.46 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 426C), which may refer either to its first ruler, Godfrey of Bouillon (1099–1100) or its first king, Baldwin I (1100–18). Hayward argued for a late composition date, between 1099 and 1109, Anselm’s year of death. In doing so, however, he overlooked Goscelin’s references to the year in which he was writing (1098).
5 R. Emms has suggested that Scotland may have taken charge at St Augustine’s Abbey before Lanfranc officially appointed him in 1071–2. R. Emms, ‘The Historical Traditions of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury’, Canterbury and the Norman Conquest, ed. Eales and Sharpe, pp. 159–68, and Emms, R., ‘The Early History of Saint Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury’, St Augustine and the Conversion of England, ed. Gameson, R. (Stroud, 1999), pp. 410–27Google Scholar, at 423.
6 The seventh-century abbey of St Augustine, Canterbury was the earliest church group in England: it consisted of the main church of SS Peter and Paul (built and dedicated before 619), the oratory of St Mary (built by King Eadbald between 616 and 624) and the church of St Pancras (foundation date unknown). In 978, Dunstan re-dedicated the abbey of SS Peter and Paul to Peter, Paul and Augustine. For a summary of the abbey’s various stages of development, including a discussion of Dunstan’s possible remodelling of the abbey, see Gem, R., ‘Reconstructions of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, in the Anglo-Saxon Period’, Saint Dunstan: His Life, Times, and Cult, ed. Ramsey, N., Sparks, M. and Tatton-Brown, T. (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 57–73Google Scholar. For more information on church groups, and St Augustine’s in particular, see Gittos, H., Liturgy, Architecture, and Sacred Places in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2013), pp. 59–64 and 94–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Æthelberht, Bertha and Luidhard were buried in the south porticus of the church of SS Peter and Paul, which was dedicated to St Martin. The locations of these burials are first given in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica [hereafter HE] ii. 5, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 150–1. See also Goscelin, Transl. Augustini II.iv.23 (cols. 439C–D) for details of these graves and II.iii.21 (col. 438B) for information on the translation of the archbishops. R. U. Potts, ‘The Tombs of the Kings and Archbishops in St Austin’s Abbey’, AC 38 (1926), 97–112, outlines the details of the burials in the main church of SS Peter and Paul and the oratory of St Mary. See Gem, ‘Reconstructions of St Augustine’s Abbey’, for a complete list of the publications of excavation reports and a critical analysis of their content.
8 Goscelin, Transl. Augustini I.i.2 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 413B–C), and II.v.41 (col. 443C), does not provide much detail on Scotland’s building work on the presbytery. For a list of what Scotland built before his death, see H. M. Taylor and J. Taylor, ‘Canterbury, St Augustine’s Abbey’, Anglo-Saxon Architecture, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1965–78) I, 135–42, at 138, and T. Tatton-Brown, Appendix 1, ‘The Buildings and Topography of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury’, JBAA 144 (1991), 61–91, at 82.
9 Sharpe, ‘Goscelin’s St Augustine and St Mildreth’. The question of whether Lanfranc sought to downplay Dunstan’s cult is debated. P. A. Hayward remarked that Dunstan’s feast of Ordination was ‘suppressed’ in ‘Translation-Narratives in Post-Conquest Hagiography and English Resistance to the Norman Conquest’, ANS 21 (1999), 67–93, at 71. His view was informed by Heslop, T. A., ‘The Canterbury Calendars and the Norman Conquest’, Canterbury and the Norman Conquest, ed. Eales, and Sharpe, , pp. 53–85 Google Scholar. Heslop drew attention to the exclusion of twenty-seven saints’ feasts from a Christ Church calendar of the 1120s, which, he argued, was based on an exemplar from Lanfranc’s era. His evidence showed that Dunstan’s Ordination was absent from the Christ Church calendar and was only added in the mid-twelfth century. It is notable, however, that the calendar does include the feast of Dunstan’s Deposition, and there is no compelling evidence to suggest that the Ordination feast was intentionally expunged before being reintroduced. Instead, it seems likely that Dunstan’s Deposition, not his Ordination, held prominence at Christ Church in the century following his death. Indeed, Adelard’s Lectiones, discussed below, were commissioned for the feast of Dunstan’s Deposition by Ælfheah, archbishop of Canterbury between 1006 and 1012.
10 Sharpe, ‘Goscelin’s St Augustine and St Mildreth’, pp. 503–4.
11 Ibid. p. 504.
12 Emms, ‘The Historical Traditions of St Augustine’s Abbey’, p. 162.
13 For a discussion of the location of St Dunstan’s relics in Christ’s Church, see Sharpe, ‘The Setting of St Augustine’s Translation’, p. 9.
14 B., Vita S. Dunstani [hereafter VSD] in The Early Lives of St Dunstan, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom and M. Lapidge, OMT (Oxford, 2012), pp. 1–109.
15 Ibid. ch. 12 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 40–3). The antiphon, ‘Gaudent in caelis animae sanctorum’, is listed in Corpus antiphonalium officii, ed. R. J. Hesbert, 6 vols. (Rome, 1968) III, 234 (no. 2927).
16 B., VSD, ch. 23 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 72–5). Hesbert lists the antiphon in Corpus antiphonalium III, 423 (no. 4448).
17 B., VSD, ch. 29 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 84–9). See esp. n. 257, which explains that the ‘O rex gentium’ antiphon that Dunstan learns in his heavenly vision is similar to, but not identical with, an antiphon listed in Hesbert, Corpus antiphonalium III, 376 (no. 4078).
18 B., VSD, ch. 36 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 100–3).
19 Ibid. ch. 36.1 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 100–1).
20 Ibid.
21 ‘he heard … unfamiliar voices, singing in the church with complex harmony’. Ibid. ch. 36.2 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, p. 101).
22 ‘[and] bands of virgins were wheeling around in a dance, singing as they moved the hymn of Sedulius that begins: “Let us sing, friends, to the Lord”, and what follows. He also noticed that after each verse they alternately repeated, as mortal girls might have done, and as though in harmony with their circling dance, the first couplet of the hymn: “Let us sing, friends, to the Lord His honour; let the sweet love of Christ resound from devout mouths”, and the rest’. Ibid. ch. 36.2–3 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 100–1). All translations of VSD are taken from Winterbottom and Lapidge’s Early Lives. The Sedulius hymn is edited by J. Huemer in Seduli opera omnia, CSEL 10 (Vienna, 1885), 155–62. For a recent translation of the whole hymn, see Sedulius: the Paschal Songs and Hymns, trans. C. P. E. Springer (Ann Arbor, MI, 2013), pp. 184–94.
23 VSD, ch. 36.3 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 102–3).
24 In Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s version of this vision, he comments that Dunstan ‘nocturnis psallebat horis cum quodam puerulo more pii Benedicti’, that is, ‘he used to chant the night offices in the company of a young boy, in the manner of St Benedict’; Byrhtferth of Ramsey, Vita S. Oswaldi [hereafter BR, VSO] v. 7, in Byrhtferth of Ramsey: the Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine, ed. and trans. M. Lapidge, OMT (Oxford, 2009), pp. 162–3. In n. 78, Lapidge explains this phrase with reference to the Dialogi of Gregory the Great, in which St Benedict is shown to pray throughout the night with the child oblate, Placidus. J. Billett has suggested that ‘more pii Benedicti’ may alternatively suggest that Dunstan was performing the Divine Office as set out in the Regula S Benedicti. See his Divine Office in Anglo-Saxon England, 597–c. 1000 (London, 2014), pp. 170–1.
25 For a discussion of what the vita angelica meant in the context of tenth- and eleventh-century monasticism, see McLaughlin, M., Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 228–9Google Scholar.
26 VSD, ch. 29.2 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 86–7 and 31, pp. 90–1).
27 Ibid. ch. 29.6 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 88–9). B. does not indicate when this vision took place, and therefore it is unclear whether these monks and clerics belonged to Christ Church, Canterbury, or to Glastonbury, where Dunstan served as abbot during the reign of King Edmund until around 956.
28 Winterbottom and Lapidge identify the poetic form in n. 286 to ch. 36, Early Lives, p. 101. Springer notes the typological relationship between the first and second line of each couplet in Sedulius: the Paschal Songs and Hymns, p. 191.
29 Springer, Sedulius, Hymn 1, lines 27–8, pp. 184–5 and 192.
30 Page, C., ‘The Carol in Anglo-Saxon Canterbury?’, Essays on the History of English Music in honour of John Caldwell: Sources, Style, Performance, Historiography, ed. Hornby, E. and Maw, D. (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 259–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 268. Ex. 15: 20–1 may be translated, ‘Let us sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously magnified [and] the horse and his rider he hath thrown into the sea.’ Citation from Biblia Sacra Vulgata, ed. R. Weber and R. Gryson, 5th ed. (Stuttgart, 2007), p. 98. The English translation is from the Douay-Rheims version. All future references to the Bible will be to these editions.
31 Athanasius, First Letter to Virgins, ch. 11 and ch. 12, trans. D. Brakke in Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford, 1995), p. 277; Ambrose, De Virginibus II.ii.16–17, PL 16, cols. 211A–B; Jerome, Epistola 22.41, ed. I. Hilberg, Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Epistolae, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1910–18) I, 209.
32 Apoc. 14: 4. ‘These are they who were not defiled with women.’
33 Bede, HE iv. 20 (18) (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 400–1).
34 Glastonbury was in fact the only monastery to be dedicated to Mary in the eighth century. See M. Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England, CSASE 2 (Cambridge, 1990), 127 and 130.
35 ‘by many miraculous and supernatural happenings’. VSD, ch. 3.3 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 12–13).
36 Byrhtferth, Vita S. Ecgwini ii. 11 (ed. Lapidge, Byrhtferth of Ramsey, pp. 248–9).
37 Æthelwulf, De abbatibus, ed. A. Campbell (Oxford, 1967). Æthelwulf never states the name of the monastic house that is the subject of the poem, but the text implies that it is associated with Lindisfarne. D. A. Howlett suggested Bywell in ‘The Provenance, Date, and Structure of De abbatibus’, AAe 3 (1975), 121–4. H. Appleton discusses the reasons underlying the cell’s erroneous identification as Lindisfarne in one manuscript in ‘“Æðele Geferes”: Northern Saints in a Durham Manuscript’, Saints of North-East England, 600–1500, ed. M. Coombe, A. Mouron and C. Whitehead (Turnhout, 2017), pp. 153–76, at 159–60.
38 Æthelwulf, De abbatibus 14, pp. 34–5.
39 ‘All the saints haunt the midmost floor of the church, and occupy it at all times, mustering in countless troops.’ Ibid. pp. 36–7.
40 Taylor, H.M., ‘The Architectural Interest of Æthelwulf’s De abbatibus ’, ASE 3 (1974), 163–73Google Scholar, at 168, and Thacker, A. T., ‘The Saint in his Setting: the Physical Environment of Shrines in Northern Britain before 850’, Saints of North-East England, ed. Coombe, M., Mouron, A. and Whitehead, C., pp. 41–68 Google Scholar, at 59.
41 ‘come down like snow when summoned to … the prayers of pious men’. Æthelwulf, De abbatibus 14, pp. 36–7. The author also describes a vision of a heavenly choir in the church of St Peter in De abbatibus 21, pp. 52–5.
42 Æthelwulf, De abbatibus 6, pp. 16–17.
43 In Transl. Augustini II.ii.9–10 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, cols. 434D–435A), Goscelin informs us that the oratory contained the relics of previous abbots of St Augustine’s, as well as the bodies of four kings, including Eadbald. Following the destruction of the oratory, the bodies from the oratory were temporarily placed before the altar of St Mary in the western tower of the abbey (Transl. Augustini, II.ii.14, col. 435F). Gem suggests that the oratory may have been designed as a funerary church in his Book of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury (London, 1997), p. 105. In her Liturgy, Architecture and Sacred Places, pp. 62–4, H. Gittos draws comparisons between the alignment of the churches at St Augustine’s Abbey and continental axial arrangements, highlighting the Probus chapel at Rome, a mausoleum next to Old St Peter’s, as a ‘possible inspiration’ for the oratory of St Mary at Canterbury.
44 Gittos, Liturgy, Architecture and Sacred Places, pp. 111–12.
45 Ibid. pp. 113–14. The manuscript was written at the end of the tenth century, probably at Christ Church (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 879, p. 633). It has been edited by M. A. Conn in ‘The Dunstan and Brodie (Anderson) Pontificals: an Edition and Study’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. of Notre Dame, 1993). A new edition by B. Ebersberger is in preparation.
46 Conn, ‘The Dunstan and Brodie (Anderson) Pontificals’, pp. 169–72.
47 Gittos, Liturgy, Architecture and Sacred Places, p. 115.
48 VSD, ch. 8.1 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 28–9).
49 Ibid. 30.3 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 88–9). B. is careful to maintain the distinction between the church as Christ’s Bride and as his mother. In the first part of his exegesis on Dunstan’s dream-vision, B. conflates the Church, ‘which like a mother brought about [Dunstan’s] and many others’ re-birth in the spiritual womb of holy baptism’ with the Bride of the Song of Songs. He then suggests that the mother in Dunstan’s dream may represent the church in Dunstan’s diocese, which is given to him as Mary is given to John.
50 Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, pp. 104–5. Cambridge, Trinity College B. 14. 3 was copied at Christ Church at the end of the tenth century or beginning of the eleventh (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 175, p. 151). Cambridge, Trinity College, O. 1. 18 was written in the second part of the tenth century or early eleventh century at either St Augustine’s or Glastonbury (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 188, p. 161).
51 M. Lapidge, ‘B. and the Vita S. Dunstani’, Saint Dunstan: His Life, Times, and Cult, ed. Ramsay, Sparks and Tatton-Brown, pp. 247–59. In this article, Lapidge commented on the lack of solid biographical information in this section, suggesting that B. was stationed at the monastery of St Martin in Liège at the time of Dunstan’s archbishopric, and so simply did not know what happened in England during those years. In ‘The Earliest Life of St Dunstan’, Scripta Classica Israelica 19 (2000), 163–79, M. Winterbottom proposes a different reason for the supposed generalities surrounding the Canterbury portion of Dunstan’s life; he argues that B. discusses miracles merely to avoid the politically complicated business of writing about the murder of King Edward, allegedly at the instigation of his wicked stepmother whose son, Æthelred the Unready, lived, and reigned intermittently, until 1016. Lapidge revises his theory to accommodate Winterbottom’s comments (see below) in Early Lives, pp. lxiv–lxxviii (esp. pp. lxxiii and lxxvii).
52 See BR, VSO v. 7 (ed. Lapidge, pp. 162–3).
53 Ibid.
54 Heslop, ‘The Canterbury Calendars’, notes that Dunstan is the only one of the cathedral’s saints to receive a proper Mass in a late-eleventh-century missal from St Augustine’s Abbey, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 270 (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 76, p. 94), and he shows that Dunstan also appears in Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, 231, a litany of saints from the abbey, composed around 1100 (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 920, p. 665).
55 Thacker, A., ‘Cults at Canterbury: Relics and Reform under Dunstan and his Successors’, St Dunstan: His Life, Times, and Cult, ed. Ramsay, Sparks and Tatton-Brown, , pp. 221–45Google Scholar, at 238, has suggested that Dunstan might have harboured a certain ‘coolness’ towards Christ Church, and he interprets the setting of his vision of the virgins as one of the ‘hints’ that Dunstan preferred St Augustine’s Abbey. The vision, however, does not offer strong evidence to support this argument. B. states that Dunstan was on a nightly round of prayer and psalmody – by setting the vision in St Augustine’s Abbey, B. shows that Dunstan took his peregrinations even outside the city walls.
56 Adelard, Lectiones in depositione S. Dunstani, in The Early Lives of St Dunstan, ed. and trans. M Winterbottom and M. Lapidge (Oxford, 2012), pp. 111–45. For a discussion of the Lectiones as a liturgical Vita, see Heffernan, T. J., ‘The Liturgy and the Literature of Saints’ Lives’, The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Heffernan, T. J. and Matter, E. A. (Kalamazoo, MI, 2001), pp. 73–105 Google Scholar, at 99–100.
57 Winterbottom and Lapidge, Early Lives, p. cxxvii.
58 Winterbottom and Lapidge identify B.’s text as the main source for the Lectiones in Early Lives, p. xiii.
59 Adelard, Lectiones, ch. 10 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 138–9). The angelic performance of the thrice-holy alludes to the chanting of the four beasts around the throne of God in Apoc. IV.8.
60 Ibid. ch. 11 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 140–1).
61 Ibid. ch. 12 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 144–5).
62 D. Hiley has discussed the interplay between the text of the Lectiones and the chants accompanying it in his article on the Historia of Dunstan as found in the Worcester antiphoner, ‘What St. Dunstan Heard the Angels Sing: Notes on a Pre-Conquest Historia’, Laborare fratres in unum: Festschrift László Dobszay zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. J. Szendrei and D. Hiley (Zurich, 1995), pp. 105–15.
63 Osbern, Vita S. Dunstani and Miracula S. Dunstani, ed. W. Stubbs, Memorials of St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, RS (London, 1874), pp. 69–161. J. Rubenstein, ‘The Life and Writings of Osbern of Canterbury’, Canterbury and the Norman Conquest, ed. Eales and Sharpe, pp. 27–41, at 38, dated Osbern’s Vita and Miracula of Dunstan between 1089, the year of Archbishop Lanfranc’s death, and 1093, the year of Anselm’s appointment as the next archbishop of Canterbury.
64 In his Preface to the Vita S. Dunstani (ed. Stubbs, p. 70), Osbern explains that he used English translations of the Latin sources, as the original Latin texts were destroyed in the fire at Christ Church (which took place in 1067). However, these Old English sources are now lost to us. Whether his source material was in English or Latin, Osbern was indebted to the two earliest known authors of Dunstan’s hagiography; Winterbottom and Lapidge commented that he ‘drew freely’ on B. and Adelard’s Latin texts in Early Lives, p. clii. For a detailed analysis of Osbern’s authorial methods and one of his major contributions to the Dunstan narrative (the saint’s attack on the devil with a pair of blacksmith’s tongs), see Powell, H., ‘Demonic Daydreams: Mind-wandering and Mental Imagery in the Medieval Hagiography of St Dunstan’, New Medieval Literature 18 (2018), 44–74CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
65 Osbern, Vita S. Dunstani, ch. 40 (ed. Stubbs, pp. 118–19). Lines 6 and 7 (in the third and fourth couplet) contain variations on Sedulius’s version.
66 ‘mother of the Lord Saviour, queen of the world, lady of the angels’. Ibid. p. 118. All translations from Osbern’s text are my own.
67 ‘with the most acute power of bodily sight transformed into the power of spiritual sight’. Ibid.
68 Osbern’s task was more difficult than that of Adelard, however, as he endeavoured to show a community of mixed ethnicity – French and English – united under Anglo-Norman governance. See K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Writing Community: Osbern and the Negotiations of Identity in the Miracula S. Dunstani’, Latinity and Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. R. Stephenson and E. Thornbury (Toronto, 2016), pp. 202–18.
69 The miracle is recorded in Osbern, Miracula S. Dunstani, ch. 25 (ed. Stubbs, pp. 158–9). Rubenstein, ‘Life and Writings’, pp. 32, 33 and 40, hypothesized that the conflict in question took place in 1089, involved Prior Henry of Christ Church and concerned the resting-place of Mildreth’s relics.
70 Hesbert no. 2205.
71 Osbern, Miracula S. Dunstani, ch. 25 (ed. Stubbs, p. 159). See also ch. 16, p. 142, in which the cathedral burns down as a result of the withdrawal of Dunstan’s protective presence. See O’Brien O’Keeffe’s discussion of Osbern’s treatment of the fire in ‘Writing Community’, p. 203.
72 The text reflects the belief that, although Dunstan’s soul has been taken to heaven, his presence manifests at the site of his relics. Abbo of Fleury expresses a similar idea in Passio S. Eadmundi in Memorials of St Edmunds Abbey, ed. Thomas Arnold, 2 vols. (London, 1890) I, 86.
73 Osbern, Miracula S. Dunstani, ch. 10 (ed. Stubbs, p. 136).
74 Rubenstein claims that Osbern held the positions of subprior and precentor by the time he wrote the Vita S. Dunstani (‘Life and Writings’, p. 31). In ‘Chant Composition’, p. 41, Hiley names Osbern as a ‘likely candidate’ for the composer of sequences and ordinary Mass chants found in a late-eleventh or early-twelfth-century gradual from Christ Church, Canterbury: Durham, University Library, Cosin V. v .6 (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 251, p. 198).
75 Eadmer, Vita S. Dunstani and Miracula S. Dunstani, in Eadmer of Canterbury: Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan and Oswald, ed. and trans. A. J. Turner and B. J. Muir, OMT (Oxford, 2006), pp. 44–211. On pp. lxvii–lxix, the editors give the terminus ad quem as 1116 and suggest that the works might have been written during one of Eadmer’s periods of exile from England (1097–1100 and 1103–6).
76 Eadmer, Vita S. Dunstani, Prologus (ed. Turner and Muir, pp. 44–7).
77 Eadmer, Vita S. Dunstani, ch. 53 (ed. Turner and Muir, pp. 132–3).
78 Ibid. ch. 54 (ed. Turner and Muir, pp. 132–3).
79 See The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, ed. and trans. D. Knowles, rev. ed. C. N. L. Brooke (Oxford, 2002). There are various similarities between the virgins’ ritual in Dunstan’s vision and liturgical custom at Christ Church as detailed in the Constitutiones. For instance, ch. 55 instructs how, on Rogation Days, the brethren were to move in a procession to the church which marked their destination, and, once there, the cantor was to chant the antiphon or responsory of the saint to whom the church was dedicated (pp. 74–5). Also, two brethren were appointed to sing responsories during Mass on the vigil of principal festivals, including the Assumption of Mary (pp. 84–5), and on the day before the feasts of other festivals, including the Purification and Nativity of Mary (pp. 88–91). Eadmer has been identified as one of the scribes of a manuscript containing Lanfranc’s Constitutiones: Durham, Cathedral Library, B. IV. 24, fols. 47–71 (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 248, p. 197). See the segment of the introduction written by Brooke in Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, p. xliv.
80 Eadmer, Miracula S. Dunstani, ch. 18 (ed. Turner and Muir, pp. 180–1). Osbern and Eadmer’s portrait of Scotland is not a particularly flattering one. Both hagiographers record Scotland’s obstinate reluctance to pardon two knights who killed his nephew (Osbern, Miracula S. Dunstani, ch. 17 (ed. Stubbs, pp. 142–3); Eadmer, Miracula, ch. 17 (ed. Turner and Muir, pp. 178–9)).
81 ‘[t]ruly our loving father Dunstan comes now to his own festival, wishing to be present at the show of reverence which his sons are about to perform for God and him on this night’. Eadmer, Miracula, ch. 18, pp. 180–1.
82 ‘sensed his sacred presence among them’. Ibid.
83 See Osbern, Vita S. Dunstani, ch. 8 (ed. Stubbs, p. 78) and Eadmer, Vita S. Dunstani, ch. 7 (ed. Turner and Muir, pp. 58–61). M. Fassler comments on how Dunstan’s musical persona was shaped in the Lives by Osbern, Eader and William of Malmesbury in ‘Shaping the Historical Dunstan: Many Lives and a Musical Office’, Medieval Cantors and their Craft: Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History, 800–1500, ed. Bugyis, K. A., Kraebel, A. B. and Fassler, M. E., Writing Hist. in the Middle Ages 3 (Woodbridge, 2017), 125–50Google Scholar.
84 Hayward has suggested that Eadmer and Goscelin were engaged in an ‘ongoing dialogue’ regarding the abbey’s claim to relics (‘Absent Father’, p. 203). Although Hayward asserts that is it not possible to prove whether Eadmer’s Vita Petri was a response to Goscelin’s Transl. Augustini or vice versa, the evidence that Goscelin’s text was written between 1098 and 1100 (see n. 4 above) makes it more likely that Eadmer was responding to Goscelin’s portrayal of Peter in his hagiographical cycle.
85 ‘covers with its great porches that whole area to the east formerly occupied by the oratory of the holy mother of God, most distinguished by its everlasting holiness and signs of heavenly power’. Goscelin, Transl. Augustini I.i.2 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 413B). All translations from this text are my own.
86 The north porticus of SS Peter and Paul (dedicated to St Gregory) contained the tombs of the following Gregorian missionaries and first archbishops of Canterbury from Augustine (d. c. 604) to Deusdedit (d. 664). Additionally, Nothelm (d. 739) was buried under the altar of St Gregory. To the north of the porticus lay Bishop Hadrian (d. c. 710) and, from c. 1049, St Mildreth of Thanet (d. c. 730). The early-twentieth-century archaeological evidence of the burials in the north porticus is set out in W. St John Hope, ‘Recent Discoveries at St Austin’s Abbey, Canterbury’, AC 31 (1915), 294–6, and ‘Recent Discoveries in the Abbey Church of St Austin at Canterbury’.
87 ‘Therefore, what may Abbot Scotland, devoted author of the building work, do? [Scotland] neither presumes to move that sacred sanctuary, which had lain untouched for such a long time, nor is he able to advance the work he has started unless he removes the obstacles, especially since his predecessor [Wulfric], who broke up the aforementioned church of the mother of God, paid with his life’. Goscelin, Transl. Augustini I.i.2 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 413C).
88 Goscelin, Transl. Augustini, II.i.3–4 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, cols. 433A–B).
89 Gem, ‘Reconstructions of St Augustine’s Abbey’, p. 67.
90 See St John Hope, ‘Recent Discoveries at St Austin’s Abbey’ and ‘Recent Discoveries in the Abbey Church of St Austin at Canterbury’ for details of the first excavations and Gem, ‘Reconstructions of St Augustine’s Abbey’, pp. 69–71, for a summary of later research.
91 Goscelin, Transl. Augustini II.i.4 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 433C).
92 Ibid.
93 ‘the bosom and womb of many saints’. Ibid. II.i.5 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 433C).
94 ‘Here, as will be seen in what follows, the concert of angels and the organa of virgins [were] heard, and here the power of miracles was felt constantly’. Ibid. (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, cols. 433C–D).
95 Ibid. II.i.5 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, cols. 433D–E).
96 Emms, ‘The Early History of Saint Augustine’s Abbey’, p. 422.
97 Goscelin, Transl. Augustini II.ii.7 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 434A).
98 ‘he feared the judgement of the mother of God concerning the destruction of her church in the case of the previous Abbot; he feared that the old monastery, which had long been consumed by rot, would fall into ruin’. Ibid.
99 Ibid. II.ii.8 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 434B).
100 ‘The surviving part of the oratory of the high Virgin Mary, which was hindering his attack, also breaks the flow of our oration for a moment. There occurred heavenly praises in this shrine and miracles in its womb of saints lying nearby. Here, that lofty Parent of the Most High was often seen, and is known to have been heard with a sweet chorus of virgins [singing] in the ineffable sweetness of celestial harmony. It is well known that the most blessed Dunstan, the angel of the armies of the Lord, and, after Augustine and his consorts, the brightest glory of angels, was present in the midst of this dazzling company intimately and frequently; and like the thirsting deer to the fountain of water, Dunstan, captivated by the sweetness of supernal song, tirelessly sought this paradise of saints’. Ibid. (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 434C). BL, Vespasian B. xx, 128v, contains an annotation reading ‘nota bene’ in the margins next to the words ‘virginum choro’. There are also traces of a manicule.
101 Eadmer, Vita S. Dunstani, ch. 53 and ch. 54 (ed. Turner and Muir, pp. 132–3).
102 ‘Many years later, Dunstan, [Augustine’s] most holy coheir, often used to come here at night, like a deer to a fountain of water, and frequently experience his customary visions and hymns of heavenly citizens’. Ibid. II.iv.27 (cols. 440E–F). Once again, a reader of Vespasian B. xx has highlighted the importance of this passage with a pen sketch of a bishop, whose hand is pointing to the words, ‘nota bene sanctitate huius monasterii’, 137v. The hand is similar to the manicule on 128v, suggesting that the same reader (a monk of St Augustine’s) made the annotations.
103 S. P. Millinger suggested that the double purpose of liturgical devotion was ‘to praise God on earth, and in so doing, to strive to join the choirs of the blessed in heaven’ in ‘Liturgical Devotion in the Vita Oswaldi’, Saints, Scholars and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in honour of Charles W. Jones, ed. M. H. King and W. M. Stevens, 2 vols. (Collegeville, MN, 1979) II, 239–64, at 247.
104 D. Hiley refers to this audition in ‘Chant Composition at Canterbury after the Norman Conquest’, p. 31, but he stops short of exploring how it was interwoven with Goscelin’s construction of the abbey’s status and architecture.
105 ‘On a certain night, before nocturnal vigils had aroused him from sleep, as he was lying in a room of the church next to the oratory, a sweet-sounding chorus, as if composed of men and boys, was miraculously heard singing psalms, one side alternating with the other, rendering the most graceful of consonances, an octave. While they sang together in this manner through all the intervals, the boys responded to the men with different intervals in organum’. Goscelin, Transl. Augustini II.ii.8 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 434C).
106 I am grateful to C. Bower (email, 21 June 2014) and S. Rankin (email, 2 June 2014) for discussing this passage with me and providing a gloss on the terms.
107 Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis, trans. R. Erickson, and ed. C. V. Palisca (New Haven, CT, 1995).
108 See the introduction to the above-cited edition of Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis (pp. xxii, xxvi, xxxiii) and also Musica enchiriadis, ch. 13, p. 37.
109 The Winchester Troper: Facsimile Edition and Introduction, ed. S. Rankin (London, 2007), p. 62. Rankin mentions two manuscripts containing the Musica and Scolica enchiriadis that were copied at Canterbury: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 260 was written at Christ Church, Canterbury, at the end of the tenth century (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 72, p. 91) and Cambridge, University Library, Gg. 5. 35 was copied at St Augustine’s in the mid-eleventh century (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 12, p. 25).
110 Rankin, Winchester Troper, pp. 61–73.
111 Ibid. p. 63.
112 Osbern, Vita S. Dunstani, ch. 40 (ed. Stubbs, pp. 117–18. See Fassler, ‘Shaping the Historical Dunstan’, p. 141, for how this passage came to shape the Dunstan office in Worcester, Cathedral Library, F. 160 (Worcester, c. 1230).
113 Hiley, ‘Chant Composition’, p. 31.
114 B., Vita S. Dunstani, ch. 36.2 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, p. 101).
115 ‘he understood immediately along with all those who heard, that truly the celestial company gathered in that place, and genuine marvels that had often been related became clear to him in light of his experience, and heavenly citizens truly inhabited these dwellings’. Goscelin, Transl. Augustini II.ii.8 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 434D).
116 Emms, ‘The Historical Traditions of St Augustine’s Abbey’, p. 163.
117 ‘he overturns the bedroom of the Blessed [saints] with a strong battering ram, and overpowers all the princes of the heavenly kingdom who were sleeping in a long-lasting peace, his hastiness in virtue being the only excuse for his negligence’. Goscelin, Transl. Augustini I.i.2 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 413C).
118 ‘Frequently that Queen of the world deigned to show herself not only with such miracles of healing, but also with manifest revelations, and the sweet concerts of heavenly citizens, with an odour of inestimable sweetness, no less in this crypt than in the previous oratory that had stood in the same place.’ Ibid. II.iii.20 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 437F).
119 Ibid. II.iii.16 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 437B), and II.iii.19 (col. 437D).
120 Ibid. II.iii.16 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 437B), II.iii.18 (col. 437C), II.iii.19 (col. 437E). Goscelin does not refer to the sense of touch directly in these examples – rather, the whole body is presented as the sense organ. For an exploration of touch in the hierarchy of the senses, and the difficulty medieval thinkers had with locating it in a specific body part, see K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Hands and eyes, sight and touch: appraising the senses in Anglo-Saxon England’, ASE 45 (2016), 105–40.
121 Goscelin, Transl. Augustini II.iii.20 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 437F) and II.iii.20 (col. 438B).
122 The enchanting effect of sweet-sounding music is discussed briefly by M. Carruthers in ‘Sweetness’, Speculum 81:4 (2006), 999–1013, at 1001–2.
123 ‘with a most bright and splendid choir of innumerable virgins’. Ibid. II.iii.20 (col. 437F).
124 ‘persistently encircling the most excellent and benign Leader, sang the sweet praise of heavenly songs’. Ibid.
125 B., VSD, ch. 36.2–3 (ed. Winterbottom and Lapidge, pp. 100–1).
126 ‘not enclosed within a vestal chorus, but surrounded by a virginal crown’. Osbern, Vita S. Dunstani, ch. 40, (ed. Stubbs, p. 118).
127 ‘the wonderful melody of heavenly harmony’. Goscelin, Transl. Augustini II.iii.20 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, cols. 437F–438A).
128 ‘the sweetness of the song (such as he had never heard before) stunned him’. Ibid. (col. 438A).
129 ‘he had heard a celestial concert while men were sleeping.’ Ibid.
130 Ibid.
131 In 1087 or 1088, the recently founded college of secular canons, St Gregory’s Priory, began to claim that they possessed the relics of St Mildreth. See Sharpe, ‘Setting of St Augustine’s Translation’, p. 4; Sharpe, ‘Goscelin’s St Augustine and St Mildreth’, p. 503; and Rollason, D., The Mildrith Legend (Leicester, 1982), p. 21 Google Scholar.
132 Goscelin, Translatio S. Mildrethae, ch. 35, ed. D. W. Rollason, ‘Goscelin of Canterbury’s Account of the Translation and Miracles of St Mildrith: an Edition with Notes’, MS 48 (1986), 139–210, at 204–6.
133 Goscelin, Translatio S. Mildrethae, ch. 35, Rollason, ‘Goscelin’, p. 205.
134 Ibid. p. 206. In ‘Goscelin’s St Augustine and St Mildrith’, pp. 514–15, Sharpe put forward the suggestion that Goscelin wrote the words and may have written the music of the antiphons and responsories found in the Historia de S. Mildretha in London, British Library, Harley 3908. The manuscript was written at St Augustine’s at the end of the eleventh century or beginning of the twelfth century (Gneuss-Lapidge, ASMss 439.3, p. 361). Sharpe further developed his argument in ‘Words and Music’.
135 ‘that [Mildreth] is seen to come with heavenly company along with the song of her arrival, and to go to the storehouse of her rest when this song has finished’. Goscelin, Translatio S. Mildrethae, ch. 35, Rollason, ‘Goscelin’, p. 206. Translation mine. ‘Apotheca’ also carries a sense of ‘reliquary’, thereby suggesting that Mildreth’s presence can be felt alongside her physical remains.
136 Brown, P., The Cult of Saints: its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, IL, 1981), p. 78 Google Scholar.
137 ‘in the sight of God and his angels’. The Rule of St Benedict: the Abingdon Copy, ch. 19, ed. J. Chamberlain, Toronto Med. Latin Texts 13 (Toronto, 1982), 39.
138 ‘Therefore, let us believe (as the psalmist teaches) that when we sing to God in the sight of the angels, the angelic citizens do not disdain to praise God alongside the devoted servants’. Goscelin, Translatio S. Mildrethae, ch. 35, Rollason, ‘Goscelin’, pp. 205–6.
139 Goscelin, Transl. Augustini I.ii.14 (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 415C).
140 ‘Let us also see in faith that which [the priest] in seeing perhaps did not understand: angelic citizens lovingly descended via that ladder to the sweet cast-offs of the soul of their companion, Augustine, and warmed again his famous relics in this most generous of visits, and they also showed that they rejoiced in his glory along with the people of the earth’. Ibid. (Acta Sanctorum, Maii, VI, col. 415D).
141 The Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 7, p. 28.
142 Hayward, ‘Translation-Narratives’, p. 89.
143 A short version of this paper was presented as part of a panel at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in 2015. I would like to thank my fellow panellists, R. C. Love and K. Maude, for their questions and comments. T. Licence, who first introduced me to the text and guided me through its tricky Latin passages, has been of great help during the writing process. Finally, I would like to thank the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments.