Lindsay Rudge PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

instigation of her successor Celsa. 104 It offers a snapshot of the monastery and its rule
almost a hundred and fifty years after the foundation of the monastery and the writing of
the rule. It also provides a far greater chance than does the Regula virginum itself to
assess the way in which the use of a normative text played out against the external events
that could affect a monastery. In that sense, it contributes immensely to any consideration
of the divergences between directive and practice. As a young girl, Rusticula seems to
have been something of a prize, perhaps because the early deaths of her clarissimus
father and brother had left her a considerable heiress. At the age of only five, she was
abducted by a nobleman named Ceraonius, who took her to his home to be raised by his
mother. Liliola, the third abbess of St John, intervened, asking Syagrius of Autun to help
her approach king Guntram. Guntram duly ruled that the girl should be sent to St John:
the pleas of Rusticula’s mother were ignored. The entry of such a wealthy child would, of
course, boost the fortunes of the monastery. It may be that Liliola was in a position to
request such a favour from the king, as she had agreed to house the former queen
Theudechild, Charibert’s widow. 105 A monastery vowed to perpetual enclosure could
have a useful dual function as an aristocratic prison. 106
The entry of Rusticula at the age of five or six (she is described as in rudimentis
infantiae, which would suggest an age still below the age of reason of seven) contravenes
Caesarius’ regulations. 107 These prohibit the entry of children below the age of seven, on
the grounds that they are too young to learn either behaviour or letters. 108 At the age of
only eighteen, Rusticula was chosen as abbess on the death of Liliola. The vita suggests
104 Vitae Rusticulae, Krusch ed. MGH SSRM 4:337-51. Krusch believed the text to be a Carolingian
forgery, modelled on an incident from the vita Caesarii, based on his opinion that the style is too good for
the seventh century. Pierre Riché has refuted this on the grounds that the region’s literary heritage would in
fact make a seventh-century text more plausible than a ninth-century one, given the Viking and Saracen
raids of the period: P. Riché, ‘La Vita S. Rusticulae: Note d’hagiographie merovingienne’, Analecta
Bollandiana 72 (1954) 369-77. The earliest surviving copy of the vita dates only from the fourteenth
century, although thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Provençal missals list Rusticula’s feast day; Riché, ‘La
Vita S. Rusticulae’, 370. See also V. Le Roquais, Les Breviaires manuscrits des Bibliothèques publiques de
France (Paris, 1934), passim.
105 Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, IV:26. Liliola is mentioned in Venantius Fortunatus’ de
Virginitate: Carmina VIII, 3, vv. 33-4 (MGH AA IV:1, 182. This implies ongoing contacts between Arles
and Poitiers, even after Caesaria II had died.
106 See also R. Le Jan, ‘Convents, Violence, and Competition for Power in Seventh-Century Francia’ in F.
Theuws and M. de Jong (eds.) Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages (Leiden, 2001) 243-269.
107 For Rusticula’s age, Vita Rusticulae 4.
108 Caesarius’ stipulations on the age on entry to the monastery are in RV 7.
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