An absent father: Eadmer, Goscelin and the cult of St Peter, the first abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury

Abstract

Eadmer’s Life of Peter, the first abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, is one of his most enigmatic given that it purports to celebrate the sanctity of the founding abbot of a monastery with which his own church, Christ Church Cathedral, was in conflict. During the period when the work was composed the abbey mounted an increasingly aggressive campaign to exempt itself from the archbishopric’s jurisdiction to which the cathedral responded with a vigorous defence of its own rights. This essay resolves the contradiction by arguing that the Life is best understood as a subtle assault on the abbey and its pretensions to an elevated position in the celestial hierarchy. The methods of attack are exposed by positioning the text in its literary context, by reading it in conjunction with the account of St Peter in the cycle of saints’ lives that St Augustine’s Abbey commissioned from Goscelin of St Bertin, and by showing how both accounts of the saint were affected by the investiture contest in England. This brief and hitherto neglected saint’s life emerges as a particularly astringent example of how hagiography could be used to score points in a struggle for status and authority, one which yields telling insights into the personality of Eadmer and the culture of the medieval Church.