Lioba

Uniquely among the women of the Anglo-Saxon mission to Germany, Lioba has a proper Life: the Vita Leobae composed about 836 by Rudolf of Fulda at the command of Rhabanus Maurus, from the written notes of the monk Mago (†c. 831) and the memoirs of four of her disciples — Agatha, Thecla, Nana and Eoloba. Everything below is Rudolf's account except where another source is named.

Origins and early life

Her parents, Dynno and Aebba, were English, noble and devout, and long barren. In old age her mother dreamed she bore in her bosom a church bell, which rang merrily as she drew it out; her old nurse interpreted the dream of a daughter who must be vowed to God as Anna vowed Samuel. The child was born and named Thrutgeba, surnamed Leoba, "because she was beloved, for this is what Leoba means"; her mother consecrated her and gave her to Abbess Tetta of Wimborne to be taught the sacred sciences. Under Tetta she gave herself wholly to prayer, reading and the discipline of the cloister, modelling herself on the particular virtue of each sister in turn. A dream of a purple thread drawn endlessly from her mouth, which she wound into a ball, was interpreted by an aged nun with the spirit of prophecy: the thread was the wise counsel she would speak from the heart, and the ball its working turned now earthward in compassion, now heavenward in contemplation — and she would profit many by word and example in far lands.

Mission in Germany

When St Boniface, his German harvest great and his labourers few, summoned learned and virtuous helpers from England, he sent messengers to Tetta asking specifically for Lioba, whose reputation for learning and holiness had spread far; Tetta, though grieved, sent her. (Orthodox England dates the sending to 748, with a company of nuns.) Boniface received her with reverence and affection — "not so much because she was related to him on his mother's side," Rudolf says, "as because he knew that by her holiness and wisdom she would confer many benefits by her word and example." As he set Sturm as abbot over the monks of Fulda, he set Lioba as abbess over the nuns at Bischofsheim, where a large community was trained under her rule so well that many of her nuns became superiors elsewhere, "so that there was hardly a convent of nuns in that part which had not one of her disciples as abbess."

Rudolf draws her portrait at length: angelic in appearance, pleasant in speech, clear in mind, Catholic in faith, universal in charity; cheerful but never dissolved in laughter; so sparing with her own cup that the sisters called it "the Beloved's little one." Trained from infancy in grammar and the liberal arts, she read all the books of the Old and New Testaments, the writings of the Fathers, the decrees of the councils and the whole of ecclesiastical law, and had the Scriptures read at her bedside even as she slept — the young readers found they could not skip a syllable without her correcting them. She kept her community to a rule of moderation: rest after the midday meal in summer, no late vigils, "for lack of sleep dulls the mind, especially for study." She kept open house, washing the feet of guests with her own hands.

Miracles

Rudolf records four wonders of her lifetime. When a beggar-woman at the monastery gate bore a child in secret and drowned it in the mill-pool, and the village rose against the nuns crying that the crime was theirs, Lioba set the community to psalmody and procession; at her prayer before the cross the culprit, "as if surrounded by flames," confessed publicly — the first of her miracles done openly in Germany. When fire broke out in the village and ran toward the monastery, she had water drawn from the stream, cast into it salt blessed by St Boniface which she always kept by her, and had the water poured back into the river: the fire died as if quenched by a flood. In a storm so violent that the people took refuge in the church expecting the last judgement, she rose from prayer at the entreaty of her kinswoman Thecla, opened the doors, signed the storm with the cross, and three times invoked the mercy of Christ through the intercession of the Mother of God; the thunder ceased and the sun returned. And the dying nun Williswind, already wrapped in her winding-sheet, was restored when Lioba blessed milk and fed it to her drop by drop with her own table-spoon; she outlived Lioba into the days of King Louis.

Boniface's farewell, and her later years

Before his last journey to Frisia, Boniface commended Lioba to his disciple and successor Lull and to the senior monks of Fulda, exhorted her not to abandon the land of her adoption, gave her his cowl, and charged that after her death her bones be laid next to his in his tomb, "so that they who had served God during their lifetime with equal sincerity and zeal should await together the day of resurrection." After his martyrdom she persevered in her work, visiting and strengthening the convents of the region. Pippin, King of the Franks, and his sons Charles and Carloman treated her with profound respect; Charlemagne summoned her repeatedly to court and loaded her with gifts, and Queen Hildegard "loved her as her own soul" — though Lioba "detested the life at court like poison." Bishops welcomed her and discussed spiritual matters and church discipline with her. She was granted what no other woman received before or since: to enter the monastery of Fulda to pray, under careful regulation — by daylight, with one senior nun, her companions left in a cell outside.

In old age, when she had set all the convents in her care on a sound footing, she withdrew on Bishop Lull's advice to Schornsheim (Scoranesheim), four miles south of Mainz, and served God there night and day in fasting and prayer. Summoned once more to Aachen by the dying Queen Hildegard, she went for friendship's sake, took leave of her — "farewell, most precious half of my soul; may Christ grant that we meet again without shame on the day of judgement" — and returned to her convent.

Repose, burial and miracles at her tomb

A few days later she fell sick, received the viaticum of the Body and Blood of Christ from the English priest Torhthat, who had long ministered to her, and gave back her soul to her Creator. "She died in the month of September, the fourth of the kalends of October" — September 28; Rudolf gives no year (see Disputed questions). The monks of Fulda carried her body to their monastery with a great cortege; but fearing to open the tomb of the blessed martyr as his wish would have required, they buried her instead on the north side of the altar which Boniface had raised and consecrated in honour of the Saviour and the Twelve Apostles. Some years later, when the church was being enlarged, Abbot Eigil, with Archbishop Heistulf's permission, translated her bones to the west porch near the shrine of St Ignatius the martyr, "where, encased in a tomb, they rest glorious with miracles." (A further translation of her relics was made in 837, the year after Rudolf wrote — noted by Talbot from the later record; her final resting place on the Petersberg by Fulda is not asserted here from the sources consulted.) Rudolf, an eyewitness, records two cures at her tomb: a penitent whose iron ring burst from his arm as he prayed there, and a palsied Spaniard healed between her shrine and Boniface's crypt, who told of a vision of a venerable bishop and a young nun who together drove the black bird of his affliction out of his breast. "These two," Rudolf ends, "though they do not share a tomb, yet lie in one place, and never fail to look on those who seek their intercession."