The Veneration of Boniface in the Middle Ages

Chapter 15 The Veneration of Boniface in the Middle Ages

Petra Kehl

1 Introduction1

The veneration of Saint Boniface in the Middle Ages is concentrated in those areas closely associated with his life and death. The centre for his cult is Fulda in Hesse, Germany. Fulda is where in 744 he had a monastery founded, and today its successor, the Fulda cathedral, holds his body and other relics. Mainz was Boniface’s episcopal seat for the last part of his life and the cathedral there holds what we would refer to today as secondary relics of the saint. Mainz was also the seat of his pupil, Lull, who worked to preserve Boniface’s reputation by archiving his correspondence and ordered the first vita to be written, and so it, too, became a locus for the veneration of Boniface and the study of his legacy. Two places in what is now the Netherlands also maintained Boniface cults from the beginning: Utrecht, which was the starting point of his missionary activities, and Dokkum, where he was martyred in 754. Boniface occupies an important place in the history of both centres of veneration. Finally, in his homeland of England Boniface was celebrated as a national patron saint in the years after his death and he was included in the martyrologies of Bede and oth- ers, until the Norman Conquest.

2 Fulda

Because Fulda possessed the most important relic of Boniface it became the primary locus of his veneration from early on. After Boniface’s body travelled from the place of his martyrdom, Dokkum, through Utrecht and Mainz, it was given a central and prominent place in what is now the cathedral of Fulda, the successor of the monastery founded there on Boniface’s orders in 744. The community at Fulda interred Boniface in a tomb under the floor at the western end of the church, in a spot he had shown them himself. Sometime

1 This chapter focuses mostly on the medieval veneration of Boniface outside of Fulda. For a more thorough discussion of the development and implications of Boniface’s cult at Fulda, see the chapter in this volume by Janneke Raaijmakers.

358 Kehl between 765 and 770 the monks embellished the tomb with an arca and, prob- ably later, erected an altar.2 Gregor Richter interprets the word arca as “shrine,” suggesting a structure that rose above Boniface’s floor tomb but did not con- tain his actual bones.3 The tomb with the relics soon developed into the centre of the monastic life at Fulda as well as the local cult of St Boniface. Here the monks of Fulda revered Boniface as their special advocate, and gathered at his shrine to pray for any newly elected abbot before welcoming him as their fa- ther.4 On this spot they also commemorated their benefactors every Monday by lying flat on the floor, praying and singing psalms.5 The significance of the grave for Boniface’s cult inevitably influenced the architecture of the new church, the so-called Ratgar Basilica, whose construc- tion was started by the monks in 791 in honour of the martyr.6 In rebuilding the church the brothers deviated from the hitherto accepted norm: opposite the choir in the east they created a second one in the west particularly dedicated to the worship of Boniface. In this way the monks retained the patrocinium desired by their founder and at the same time provided their advocate with his own cultic site.7 In 819 Archbishop Haistulf of Mainz consecrated the abbey church. The coffin containing Boniface’s relics was raised. Then, intoning the Te Deum, Arch- bishop Haistulf, Abbot Eigil, Abbot Theotgar of Herrieden, and the Fulda monks Ercanbert, Brunward, and Hrabanus Maurus took the coffin onto their

2 Eigil, VS, c. 21, 156. 3 Gregor Richter, Die ersten Anfänge der Bau- und Kunstthätigkeit des Klosters Fulda, vol. 2, Veröffentlichung des Fuldaer Geschichtsvereins (Fulda: 1900), 59. Richter summarizes all the older literature. His findings are also confirmed by Hilde Claussen, Heiligengräber im Fran- kenreich (Marburg: 1950), 268. More recently, Eva Krause, Die Ratgerbasilika in Fulda (Fulda: 2002), reevaluated the entire body of archeological scholarship on the abbey church. 4 Candidus, Vita Aeigilis metrica, ed. Ernst Dümmler, mgh Poet. Lat. 2 (Berlin: 1884, repr. 1989), c. 14, 83–4. 5 Josef Semmler (ed.), “Supplex Libellus monachorum Fuldensium Carolo imperatoris porrec- tus i,” in Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, vol. 1 (Siegburg: 1963), 321. 6 Scholars have accepted this date as certain since Gregor Richter’s findings in “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Grabeskirche des hl. Bonifatius in Fulda,” in Festgabe zum Bonifatius- Jubiläum 1905 (Fulda: 1905), I–lxxvi.iii, note 2. Eckhard Freise, Die Anfänge der Geschichtss- chreibung im Kloster Fulda (Münster: 1979), 38, however, emphasizes that the three manu- scripts which give us the text of the Annales Fuldenses antiquissimi agree in the entry Initium ecclesiae s. Bonifatii for the year 792. 7 See Arnold Mann, “Doppelchor und Stiftermemorie: Zum kunst- und kulturgeschichtlichen Problem der Westchöre,” Westfälische Zeitschrift 111 (1961), 230, 233; Werner Jacobsen, “Die Abteikirche in Fulda von Sturmius bis Eigil: kunstpolitische Positionen und deren Veränder- ungen,” in Kloster Fulda in der Welt der Karolinger und Ottonen, ed. Gangolf Schrimpf, Fuldaer Studien 7 (Frankfurt am Main: 1996), 105–27.