FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CHRIST: TEXT AND CONTEXT IN THE "VITA MILDRETHAE"

Abstract

The Vita Deo dilectae uirginis Mildrethae (BHL 5960) was written by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin during his residency at St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, in the final decade of the eleventh century.1 Goscelin was the most celebrated hagiographer of his generation, whose prolificacy in writing the ‘lives of countless saints’ would later render him, in William of Malmesbury’s estimation, as ‘second to none since Bede’.2 Very little is known about Goscelin’s life and what is known has been pieced together from tantalizing snippets found in his hagiographical works.3 He was a Flemish emigre who left the monastery at Saint-Bertin and moved to England while still a young man in the early 1060s. His move may well have been at the encouragement of Bishop Herman of Ramsbury and Sherborne, since Goscelin appears to have joined the Benedictine community at Sherborne. While in the south-west, he may have served as chaplain to the nuns at Wilton and it is possible that he may also have served Bishop Herman as a secretary-cum-companion. Certainly his service in the bishop’s household would explain his sudden departure from the locality following Herman’s death in 1078. Goscelin appears to have quarrelled with Herman’s successor, Osmund, who, by ‘serpent envy and a step-father’s barbarity … compelled [Goscelin] to wander a long way away’.4 Nursing feelings of exile, Goscelin appears to have led an itinerant existence before settling at St Augustine’s in the early 1090s. This peripatetic period, however, proved his most productive, and a great many of the works attributed to him, some thirty in total, were written during these years.5 Judging from his hagiographical commissions, Goscelin appears to have spent time at Peterborough, Barking, Ely, and Ramsey before being recruited to Canterbury to commemorate the grand translation of the abbey’s entire relic collection in 1091, a colossal project which occupied him for the rest of the decade.6