Christina of Markyate

English ascetic

• Born: c. 1096
• Birthplace: Huntingdon, England
• Died: 1160
• Place of death: Markyate, England

Christina of Markyate became an ascetic over the objections of her parents and others and attained the highest possible rank for a woman in the Catholic Church of that time, mother superior of a convent.

Early Life

Christina of Markyate (MAHRK-yeht), named Theodora at birth, was the daughter of Autti and Beatrix of Huntington, England. Her family members were part of the gentry, possessing not titles of nobility but land and social standing. The exact date of Christina’s birth was unrecorded, but most scholars place the date around 1096, almost two generations after the Norman Conquest of 1066. During this period, tensions remained strong between the Anglo-Saxon common folk and the Norman nobility. Because Christina’s parents bear Anglo-Saxon rather than Norman-French names, it is likely that they were members of the old Anglo-Saxon nobility co-opted into the Norman system of governance.

The Life of Christina of Markyate (twelfth century; English translation, 1959), a contemporary hagiography (biography of a saint, with an emphasis on showing the person’s holiness as an example for the reader’s spiritual edification) originally written by one of Christina’s chaplains, claimed that Christina was selected by God before birth for a life as a holy person. According to this account, Christina’s mother was visited by a miraculous apparition of a white dove, which in Christian symbolism has long been regarded as a symbol of the Holy Spirit.

When Christina was a young girl, her family visited the Abbey of St. Albans. After seeing the devotion of the monks, Christina was filled with religious fervor and swore a private vow of perpetual virginity. As a sign of her determination, she scratched the sign of the cross into the door of the abbey with her fingernails. On her return to her home, her vow was confirmed by the local priest, Sueno, canon of Huntingdon. Such private vows, unlike the formal vows sworn by a person entering a monastery or convent, were considered to be binding on the conscience of the individual, but they conferred no formal ecclesiastical status. As a result, the person making such a vow could easily come into conflict with the social demands that might impose a role contrary to the terms of the vow.

Life’s Work

Only a few years after her vow, Christina experienced just such a conflict. At the age of sixteen, she repulsed the immoral advances of Ranulf Flambard, bishop of Durham and former chancellor of England. By underhanded means, he contrived to have the young maiden brought to his bedchamber, and while they were alone, he immorally propositioned her. She kept her wits about her and tricked him into letting her escape through a carelessly worded promise to bolt the door. He failed to require that she bolt it on the inside, and she promptly slipped through and bolted it on the outside, trapping him within. He was so infuriated by this humiliating rejection that he arranged for Christina to be betrothed to his crony Burhtred.

Determined to fulfil her religious vow, Christina refused to be wed. Her parents saw her response as mere childish self-will rather than religious fervor and used every effort available to them to force her will. They denied her all contact with religious people and prevented her from attending any form of church services, and they surrounded her by all manner of worldly people who flattered her and undermined her determination. Her mother resorted to verbal abuse and also hired wisewomen to give her various concoctions to force her to fall in love with her betrothed. Her father hired men to rape her, but she outwitted every one of them. When she was forced to meet Burhtred, she sought to convince him to follow the example of several saints who, although married, lived in perpetual chastity and ultimately took monastic vows. Several visions are ascribed to her during this period, including one of the Virgin Mary.

Christina’s parents also called on Fredebert, the Augustinian prior of Huntington, to attempt to change her mind, explaining that perpetual virginity was not the only road to salvation and that virtuous married women could also be saved. She remained steadfast in her determination to fulfill her vow, arguing that if she turned back on it, even to obey her parents, she would be guilty of having abandoned a greater good for a lesser one. She appealed to Bishop Robert Bloet of Lincoln, who at first agreed that she should be permitted to fulfill her religious vocation. However, after a substantial bribe was offered by her father’s wealthy associates, he reversed his decision.

Having heard of the level of persecution Christina had faced both from her parents and from the ecclesiastical authorities, Ralph d’Escures, archbishop of Canterbury, encouraged Christina to flee. She accomplished this with the aid of Eadwine (also known as Edwin), an anchorite or religious hermit whom she approached, claiming to need spiritual guidance. He took her to the hermitage of Alfwen, an anchoress (female hermit) at Flamstead. There she set aside the fine garments that had been her custom as a daughter of the gentry and clothed herself in rough wool. Because she had to hide from her parents’ agents, she could not participate in the manual labor that was commonly undertaken by monks and nuns. Instead, she remained within a hidden chamber in Alfwen’s hermitage, continually praying and meditating on the psalter.

After two years with Alfwen, Christina had to leave that refuge. Her contemporary biographer gave no details of the reasons, but some scholars have surmised that there were differences between the two women, based on the absence of any further mention of Alfwen in the account. Christina departed to take refuge in Caddington with Roger, a monk of St. Albans who lived apart in a hermitage while maintaining obedience to the abbot.

Because of ongoing unfavorable interest in Christina, Roger concealed her in a tiny cell in the back of his hermitage. There she silently suffered the agonies of daily deprivation for four years. The cell was so tiny that she could not even wear warm clothes in the winter, and in the summer the cell became a sweatbox. Because Roger barred the door with a rock too large for Christina to move, she could not attend to her bodily needs except in the evening when darkness would conceal her presence and movements. During this period of extreme privation, Christina is said to have experienced numerous visions of the Virgin Mary as well as spectacular attacks by the devil, apparitions that would have driven others insane. In one of the vivid temptations recorded by her biographer, her tiny refuge was overrun by hideous toads (toads symbolize Satan), but she remained steadfast in her prayer and eventually they vanished.

When Roger died, the sympathetic Archbishop Thurstan of York arranged for other accommodations for Christina. She stayed briefly with an associate of his until Robert Bloet, the bishop of Lincoln who had betrayed her, died. At this point Christina settled in Markyate as a recluse. She soon developed a strong reputation in the surrounding countryside as a holy woman and worker of wonders. A number of miraculous healings are associated with her, including that of a woman from Canterbury who had contracted the falling sickness (which may have been epilepsy or could have been psychosomatic in nature, particularly in the light of the extreme regularity of its occurrence). During this period, Christina herself suffered from a bout of paralysis, which may have been of psychological origin. After all efforts to treat her had failed and she seemed to be in immediate danger of death, she was suddenly cured by the attention of a mysterious woman. This woman was regarded by Christina’s biographer to have been a manifestation of the Virgin Mary.

As a result of Christina’s growing renown as a holy woman, a number of religious leaders urged her to lead religious communities in their areas. Thurston of York invited her to become the mother superior of a convent there, but she declined. She remained in her hermitage until Abbot Geoffrey of St. Albans created a convent associated with the monastery and invited her to become its mother superior. Although she accepted, such was the intensity of her religious fervor that she wondered whether she could truly testify to her virginity after all the trials and temptations she had endured. She is then said to have experienced a miraculous apparition in which angels crowned her with an elaborate headdress and hailed her as a virgin, approved by Christ himself.

Subsequently, Christina is said to have endured many visions and apparitions from both good and evil spirits. She also became the acquaintance of many wealthy and powerful individuals who approached her for blessings and spiritual advice. Her piety is said to have exerted a strong beneficent influence on Abbot Geoffrey and the other monks of St. Albans.

In 1139, Christina’s life intersected the politics of the age when Abbot Geoffrey was called on to travel to Rome and meet with Pope Innocent II . This meeting related to English king Stephen’s battles with two English bishops whom he regarded as excessively involved in worldly affairs and as having too much power. The Church objected to his desire to punish them himself because the discipline of clergy was an affair of the Church rather than secular authorities. While Geoffrey was struggling with this difficult journey, Christina is said to have received visions of his troubles and to have interceded with God to protect the abbot. As a result of her piety, Geoffrey’s superiors finally recalled him to England and spared him the journey.

Although the account of Christina’s life stops somewhat short of her death, she is known to have been alive and active in the religious community as late as 1155. King Henry II made a grant to her, and she is known to have given three miters and a pair of sandals to Pope Adrian IV, via Abbot Robert, Geoffrey’s successor at St. Albans. Her death is unrecorded but is believed to have occurred in 1160. She was subsequently canonized as a saint of the Church, and her feast day is December 26 (Boxing Day).

Significance

By swearing a vow of perpetual virginity, Christina was not merely rejecting sensuality. In a time when pregnancy and childbirth were life-threatening events, she was making a choice that would place her on a completely different life path. In addition, becoming a member of a religious order was one of the few ways in which a woman with intellectual interests could escape the narrow role strictures women of that time faced in the secular world.

Bibliography

Farmer, Sharon, and Barbara H. Rosenwein, eds. Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. A history that includes discussion of the often marginalized nuns and other spiritual outcasts of Europe during the Middle Ages.

Furlong, Monica, ed. Visions and Longings: Medieval Women Mystics. Boston: Random House, 1996. Lives of Christina and several of her female contemporaries, comparing and contrasting their experiences and relationships with their respective societies.

Goetz, Hans-Werner. Life in the Middle Ages: From the Seventh to the Thirteenth Century. Translated by Albert Wimmer. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. An overview of life during the Middle Ages, including a section on the role of the Church, monasteries, and religious recluses in medieval society.

Grégoire, Réginald. The Monastic Realm. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. A general account of monastic life during the medieval period and of its relationship to the secular world.

Schmitt, Miriam, and Linda Kulzer, eds. Medieval Women Monastics: Wisdom’s Wellsprings. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1996. Surveys the lives of several contemporary female saints and monastics in Christina’s time.

Stanton, Robert. “Marriage, Socialization, and Domestic Violence in the Life of Christina of Markyate.” In Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, edited by Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Argues that the original author of the Life of Christina of Markyate was critical of the cultural burdens placed on the nobility and the violence against Christina by her parents and fiancé, and that the author highlighted Christina’s influence on the concept of consent by both partners regarding whether or not to marry.

Talbot, C. H., ed. and trans. The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Recluse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. This volume contains the original Latin text with facing-page translations as well as an extensive introduction giving cultural and historical context.

Venarde, Bruce L. Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890-1215. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Discusses the expansion of female monasticism in the Middle Ages, including the social and economic contexts in which women lived a life of piety and devotion.