Fashioning Abbot Geoffrey: Geoffrey of Gorron’s Copes, The Life of Christina of Markyate, and the St. Alban’s Psalter

Abstract

Sometime around the year 1110, an ambitious schoolmaster named Geoffrey of Gorron borrowed some copes from the monastery of St. Albans as costumes for a St. Catherine play. Disastrously, a fire destroyed the copes and with them Geoffrey’s ambitions: unable to reimburse the cost of the copes, Geoffrey offered himself to the abbey in recompense and, in time, rose to become its abbot. That, at least, is the narrative extrapolated from the Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani and repeated by virtually every study of Geoffrey and of his now more famous friend and confidante, Christina of Markyate. This article argues that we have taken the story of Abbot Geoffrey and the burnt copes too literally for too long, and that the accepted interpretation of the Gesta abbatum’s presentation of this incident has prevented us from reading the work of the linked themes of copes and cloaks across the Life of Christina of Markyate and the St. Albans Psalter as a rhetorical element in the fashioning of Geoffrey’s abbatial persona.