Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

pressing cares of monastic rule in your desire for a life of contemplation, still more
insistent and weighty troubles have come upon you’. Boniface's answer is ‘a brotherly
letter of comfort and exhortation.’ 98 Possibly the women with whom Boniface
corresponded were a self-selecting group of women confident in their spiritual abilities,
but the desire to transform a life as abbess into a new life as recluse or pilgrim seems to
be a fairly common motif in these letters. These were women who felt that the nature of
their dedication could change as their spiritual growth suggested. For them, life in a
monastery and adherence to a rule were not necessarily permanently binding.
One of the most striking aspects of the Anglo-Saxon nuns’ letters to Boniface is
their evident desire to go on pilgrimage to Rome. Boniface's attitude to dedicated women
going on pilgrimage to Rome has typically been described as forbidding, with reference
to his letter to Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury in 747. He suggests that
…it would be well and favourable for the honour and purity of your church,
and provide a certain shield against vice, if your synod and your princes
would forbid matrons and veiled women to make these frequent journeys
back and forth to Rome. A great part of them perish and few keep their
virtue. There are very few towns in Lombardy or Francia or Gaul where
there is not a courtesan or a harlot of English stock. It is a scandal and a
disgrace to your whole church. 99
However, his early letters seem to indicate rather a wish that if a pilgrimage is to be
performed, it should not be undertaken lightly or without careful planning. His letter to
Bugga goes so far as to disclaim any ability to form a ‘policy’ on the matter: ‘I dare
neither forbid your pilgrimage on my own responsibility nor rashly persuade you to it. I
will only say how the matter appears to me.’ 100 At all events, dedicated women were
themselves aware of the restrictions on such travel. In the letter of 719-722 which
98 Epist. 94, MGH Epp. III, 282-3, tr. Emerton, The Letters of Saint Boniface, 170-2, at 171.
99 Epist. 78, MGH Epp. III, 350-6; tr. Emerton, The Letters of Saint Boniface, 136-141. I have amended his
translation to use the given Latin word Francia rather than the anglicised ‘Frankland’.
100 Epist. 27, MGH Epp. III, 277-8, tr. Emerton, The Letters of Saint Boniface, 56-7.
197