Simon C.
Thomson
Contributions to journals
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.
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.
