Who is the nun from Heidenheim? A study of Hugeburc's Vita Willibaldi

Medium Aevum, Spring, 2002 by Pauline Head

Sometime between 776 and 786, (1) a nun of Anglo-Saxon origin, at the Bavarian double monastery of Heidenheim, composed the Lives of two of her kin, SS Willibald and Wynnebald. As a woman following the conventions of her time, she left the works anonymous, but as an early Carolingian writer, influenced by the teachings of Boniface, she inscribed her name cryptically in a space between her two texts. The nun's secret was long hidden; as recently as 1896, Lina Eckenstein wrote, `Her name is lost, it is as the anonymous nun of Heidenheim that she has come down to posterity.' (2) After almost twelve hundred years of anonymity, her cryptogram was deciphered by Bernhard Bischoff in 1931. Having the name `Hugeburc' to place alongside other self-references in her prefaces, Bischoff entitled the brief article announcing his discovery `Wer ist die Nonne von Heidenheim?' (3) Her name, though, is only a partial answer, and Bischoff's question has implications that extend beyond even an enquiry into the concrete details of her life. (4) Walter Benjamin has written, `traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel'. (5) Through a study of the Vita Willibaldi, this paper considers Hugeburc as a storyteller who leaves traces of herself and her culture in her writing.

Hugeburc's most literal representation of herself in her writing is deliberately obscure. Inserted between her Vita Wynnebaldi abbatis Heidenheimensis and Vita Willibaldi episcopi Eichstetensis, in Codex latinus Monacensis 1086, the oldest surviving manuscript of the biographies, are four, apparently meaningless, lines of text:

   Secdgquar.quin.npri.sprixquar.nter. cpri.nquar.mter.nsecun.hquin.gsecd.
   bquinrc.qarr.dinando.hsecdc.scrter. bsecd.bprim

No editor of the Lives has described or commented on this puzzling intertextual gloss. (6) In 1931, while involved in a palaeographic study of this late eighth-or early ninth-century manuscript, Bernhard Bischoff noticed the inscription and deciphered its code. (7) The abbreviated names of the ordinal numbers `primus' to `quintus' stand in for the corresponding vowels. When replacements have been made, the inscription reads:

   Ego una Saxonica nomine Hugeburc ordinando hec scribebam.

Inscribing her name in secret writing, Hugeburc is following convention, to an extent. Wilhelm Levison places Hugeburc's cryptogram within a Fulda tradition, which seems to have been initiated by the teachings of St Boniface. (8) Although Hugeburc's linguistic puzzle is similar to the examples Levison describes in its general method, its specific way of signifying vowels, through abbreviated references to their order in the alphabet, is distinct--in Levison's opinion it is `unique' (p. 294). Several of Levison's examples illustrate claims to authorship, scribal work, or even repair of a manuscript. These are not overt announcements, but covert expressions of identity and the desire to be recognized and remembered. Cynewulf, writing Old English poetry in the ninth century, (9) scatters the runic letters spelling his name throughout the closing lines of his four poems, asking not only to be remembered but to receive the readers' prayers. Dhuoda, in her ninth-century Liber manualis, (10) although her authorship is openly expressed from the outset, writes a poem in which the first letters of each couplet form the message: `DHUODA DILECTO FILIO VVILHELMO SALUTEM LEGE' (`Dhuoda, to her dear son William. Read.'). Both Cynewulf and Dhuoda, besides their explicit appeals, challenge their readers to find their names and identifies--their presence--in their texts. Hugeburc's cryptogram poses a similar challenge and seems to have a similar goal, although it is inserted between, rather than embedded within, her compositions; in this position, it did not demand attention and managed to be overlooked for twelve centuries. Still, alongside the writing in which she remembers and inscribes in history the achievements of Wynnebald and Willibald, Hugeburc leaves a quiet request that her own not be forgotten.

More overtly, Hugeburc's representation of her role as a Christian historian permeates the biography. In her prologue she explains why she wrote the Life of Willibald, often as a way of apologizing for having done so:

   ego quidem vobis religiosis ac catholicis viris, caelestis bibliothicae
   ministris, ob utilitate memoriae pauca perstringendo paulatim de
   primordiale vitae eius venerandi viri Wilibaldi prochemio disputare
   decreveram. (p. 86, lines 29-32)

   (Yet I had decided to discuss the early beginning of the life of the
   venerable man Willibald, by stringing together, little by little, a few
   words for you religious and orthodox men, keepers of the heavenly library,
   for the sake of remembrance.) (11)

She writes, then, in order that this period of his life be remembered by her audience, those immediately interested in learning of and then recalling Willibald's activities--`religiosi et catholici viri' (earlier referred to as priests, deacons, fathers, and monks). She elaborates on her impulse to write, reiterating her purpose of conveying memory of the Bishop's life: