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Thomson, Simon C., “The overlooked women of the Old English Passion of Saint Christopher”, Medievalia et Humanistica 44 (2019): 61–80.

  • journal article
Citation details
Contributors
Article
“The overlooked women of the Old English Passion of Saint Christopher”
Periodical
Volume
44
Pages
61–80
BibTeX
Description
Abstract (cited)

The story of Christopher, the dog-headed saint, usually receives attention purely on the basis of his monstrous nature. Such analyses fail to notice the significance of two women who take a central position in "his" story, primarily because full versions of the text are only available in Latin. Having reviewed the narrative accounts of these characters in different versions of the passio, the discussion here moves on to consider when they may have first entered the legend and how early they were known in Anglo-Saxon England. It argues that recognizing the role played by the two women could make a significant difference to how the best-known English version of the Christopher story is read. This partial translation, copied into the same manuscript as Beowulf in the early eleventh century, has always been assumed to have been of interest on the basis of its presentation of a monstrous saint. The argument here is that, when the activities of the two women are recognized, the passio resonates strongly with other depictions of powerful women in the texts of the manuscript, and that this provides an instance of the potentially highly productive nature of engaging closely with often-overlooked European Latin prose hagiography.

Subjects and topics
Headings
Old English literature
Sources
Texts
History, society and culture
Agents
Saint ChristopherSaint Christopher
(supp. fl. 3rd or 4th century)
Widely revered saint and martyr whose legend is known from a variety of sources in Greek, Latin and vernaculars such as Old English and Irish. The Bollandists distinguished between 17 different Latin versions of his life (BHL 1764–1780). In these versions and its derivatives, he is frequently described as a creature from the race of dog-heads (cynocephali), who having attained the power of speech and converted to Christianity, preaches the word of God in the city of Samos, or elsewhere, and is finally martyred by a ruler named Dagnus or the historical Roman emperor Decius (fl. 3rd century).
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web page identifiers
Contributors
Dennis Groenewegen
Page created
November 2021
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