Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

field. 60 Without adequate defence measures, be they human or celestial, monasteries
could find themselves at the mercy of external depredations.
The Frankish landscape of dedicated life thus varied immensely. There is very
little evidence of any kind, for any description of dedicated life in the south. Poitiers
remained in good health (despite the Vikings) although the situation of St John in Arles is
less certain. In the north, there is more evidence for foundations continuing to be made.
Yet turning away from the histories of individual foundations, and towards legislative
sources, the impression of a much more vibrant atmosphere of dedication is given.
Clearly, the capitularies and councils discussing these matters were in the north, and so to
a large extent only serve to reinforce the picture already gleaned. Beyond this, however,
the acts of this legislation reveal a continuing diversity of forms of dedicated life. This
must support the assertion of the previous chapter that the religious women of the eighth
century were turning more to ideological texts, which were suitable for a more informal
style of dedicated life, over prescriptive regulae that had a natural home in monasteries.
Eighth-century reform endeavours: Boniface
Of course, a great proportion of this legislation was intended to govern and even
eliminate such informal practices of devotion. At the helm of much of it was the figure of
Boniface, who came from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex as a missionary to
Bavaria, and ultimately attempted to direct the reform of the entire Frankish church.
Below, Boniface’s involvement in legislation forms the focus for a discussion of the
degree to which this kind of directive emanating from the court could ever hope to
control the behaviour of women (and their families) who desired to live a dedicated life
in a way that answered all of their needs. Before that, however, and to contextualize
much of what Boniface set forth as the path for dedicated women in Francia to follow,
there exists a further body of source material to explore. This collection is composed of
the letters written between Boniface and several consecrated women, who wrote to him
60 Ibid., at 68.
186