B. and the Vita Harlindis et Renulae

Abstract

The SUNY Press volume Holy Men and Holy Women which Paul edited in 1996 was crucial for showing the way with its dual focus on the materiality of hagiographical texts and their intertextuality, and so it was a great privilege fifteen or so years later to contribute to the 2013 collection of essays that came out of one Paul’s wonderful NEH Summer Seminars, that is, Writing Women Saints in Anglo-Saxon England. HMHW was important also for the equal footing on which it placed biographies of men and women: here I want to honour those values in Paul’s work, as well as his own generous support from an early stage in my career, by advancing a conjecture which would expand the oeuvre of a hagiographer from England, potentially giving us his earliest foray into the genre, writing about holy women. The hagiographer in question is known to us only by the first letter of his name, B., and was active during the second half of the tenth century. The holy women with whom I am going to try to connect B. are the sisters Harlindis (or Herlindis) and Renula (or Reinula, or Relindis), eighth-century founding abbesses of a monastery some sixty kilometres north-west of Liège, at Aldeneik, near Maaseik, where their relics became the focus of veneration, and for whom there exists a joint Vita (BHL 3755) which will be the focus of this article.