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

Medium Aevum, Spring, 2002 by Pauline Head

Compelled (`coacta') to compose a record of the devout lives of her kin, urged on by a recognition of responsibility, the model to which Hugeburc turned was hagiography. In going beyond the tradition of the memorial book, however, Hugeburc was going beyond the conventional form of women's remembrances. She wrote the Life of Willibald sometime between 776, when he told her of his travels, and 786, the year of his death. Models that would have been available to her included Sulpicius Severus' Life of Martin, the writings of Venantius Fortunatus, (26) and the recently composed Life of Boniface. This latter text, written by a priest named Willibald in 768 or 769, was addressed to several bishops including Willibald of Eichstatt, subject of Hugeburc's Life; Ian Wood argues that Hugeburc `[drew] directly on Willibald's Life of Boniface'. (27) All of these authors and most of their subjects (Fortunatus' Life of Radegund being the exception) were men. Composition of saints' Lives was part of the eighth-and ninth-century missionary endeavour in Europe east of the Rhine; hagiographers wrote of the men, their near contemporaries, who led the missions and, in so doing, the authors worked to `establish tradition, authority, and history'. (28) They cast the missionary leaders in the images of earlier male saints and wrote for an audience of priests and deacons, `religiosi et catholici viri'. These writings circulated and were preserved. Willibald's Life of Boniface served as an exemplary text not just in its content and style, but in the kind of life it described, its purpose, and its audience; Eigel's Life of Sturm, Liudger's Life of Gregory of Utrecht, Altfrid's Life of Liudger, several Lives of Boniface, and Alcuin's Vita Willibrordi fell within the tradition. (29)

Hugeburc followed the convention, opening her story of Willibald by saying that he `sollerter sub sacre legis moderamine alma priorum exempla sanctorum militando, serviendo, mente et moribus sectando inherebat' (p. 88, lines 8-10) (`wisely, under the direction of holy precept, adhered to the nourishing examples of earlier saints in his battles and his service, following [them] in mind and manner'). Yet, through her writing, she intervened in a tradition from which women were absent, for the most part, as both writers and subjects. If women religious--devout, well educated in the appropriate' literature, highly literate themselves, and having excellent skills as scribes (30)--wrote saints' Lives in the Carolingian period, their biographies have not survived. Stephanie Hollis speculates that, if women wrote the Lives of women, their manuscripts were neither valued nor preserved:

   the lack of early female saints' Lives written by women is not a reflection
   of the general level of their literary skill; rather, even if female
   religious did not believe that an abbess worthy of written commemoration
   was, by definition, one whose Life was written by a man, interest in the
   Lives written by women was insufficient to generate enough copies to ensure
   their survival. (31)