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

Medium Aevum, Spring, 2002 by Pauline Head

A nun might write the Life of her abbess, but typically it would not be read outside her community.

One notable exception within the preponderance of biographies of male missionaries is Rudolph of Fulda's Vita Leobae abbatissae, written c.836-8. Like Hugeburc, Leoba, her near contemporary (c.700-780), was a participant in the Bonifacian mission. The Carolingian biography of the Anglo-Saxon abbess and missionary was written at the request of Rudolph's abbot, Hrabanus Maurus. It was probably written in response to the presence of Leoba's remains at Fulda, a physical presence difficult to account for in a period of increasingly strict segregation of male and female religious. (32) The audience for Rudolph's biography of Leoba included the Fulda community (33) and also Hadamout, Abbess of Bischofsheim and spiritual daughter of Leoba, who was to `read it with pleasure and imitate it with profit'. (34) As I have argued elsewhere, `[e]xamples, in the Vita, implicitly function to ensure the delineation and continuation of distinctly female virtues'. (35) The representation of gender in Rudolph's Life of Leoba reinforces the segregation that was being imposed through Carolingian reforms. (36)

Hagiographic authorial conventions of this period--men writing of men, and perhaps women of women (37)--fall within the practice of segregation. Hugeburc wrote her Life of Willibald at a transitional moment and place, between the relatively egalitarian interactions among Anglo-Saxon female and male religious evidenced by the Boniface correspondence, (38) and the institution of Carolingian reforms. The subject matter was available to her because, at the double monastery of Heidenheim, she was able to talk to her kinsman, in the presence of several deacons, about his experiences. Her writing was instigated, then, in a manner that did not conform with growing segregation. (39)

In the process of telling the story of Willibald, Hugeburc sometimes segregates herself from her subject by emphasizing the distinction of their genders, but at other times associates with him, hinting at their common desires, motivations, and interests. At the outset, by the fact of her writing and the nature of her audience, she faces and poses a contradiction and must break with the conventions of gender. In many ways, though, Hugeburc's representation of gender follows the traditions of her period; she writes what we have come to expect of a medieval woman. In her prologue, Hugeburc describes herself with the adjectives `indigna' and `ignara', explaining to her audience of priests (who are `venerandi', `praeclari', `in Christo carissimi') that she is an `idiota'. Like the priests and absolutely unlike herself, Willibald is `venerandus'. She represents herself as

   feminea et fragilique sexus, inbecillitate corruptibilia, nulla prerogativa
   sapientiae suffultus aut magnarum virium industria elata (p. 86, lines
   32-4)

   (feminine and corruptible by the weakness of the fragile sex, neither
   supported by the privilege of wisdom, nor raised up by aspiration to great
   virtues)