Eadmer of Canterbury: Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan, and Oswald

Abstract

Eadmer of Canterbury (b. c.1060–d. after 1128) is best known as the historian biographer of St Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109). That he also wrote a substantial hagiographical œuvre has remained an open secret due to the lack of modern editions and translations. The present volume of three saints’ lives composed by Eadmer is therefore most welcome. The protagonists are three Anglo-Saxon clergymen, supporters of the so-called Reform movement in the tenth century. As archbishops, two had close ties to Canterbury, Oda (942–58) and his successor Dunstan (960–88); while the third was Oda's kinsman Oswald, archbishop of York (972–92). In Eadmer's own time the three men were local celebrities whose fame had been trumpeted in a number of publications. There were biographies for Oda and Oswald, while Dunstan's popularity was such that already three biographers (the anonymous B, Adelard and Osbern) had written about him. The question therefore arises as to why Eadmer felt it necessary to add to this considerable number of pen portraits. Intriguingly, his saints’ lives differ from his predecessors’ only in very minor matters of style and content which we must take, presumably, to have been corrections. In addressing the question of his motivation, the editors would have benefited from the substantial work on precisely this problem (though not explicitly applied to Eadmer) published recently by Monique Goullet and Martin Heinzelmann.1 They have argued that, on the whole, the process of hagiographical rewriting was an exercise in rhetoric and style encouraged in ecclesiastical schools (monastic and cathedral) as a way to train new generations of aspiring authors. With suitable subject-matter being relatively scarce in hagiography, in the absence of new saints, recent finds of new relics or new miracles, the existing lives had to be reworked to keep the hagiographical practice alive. Reworking consisted of changes in style (such as grammatical revision, expansion or abbreviation) and content (such as moralisation, events). As a consequence, the revisers can be regarded as authors and deserve study in their own right.