'Forgotten Missionaries: St Augustine of Canterbury in Anglo-Saxon and Post-Conquest England’

Abstract

The essay provides a full overview of the alternate fortune of the cult of St Augustine of Canterbury and other missionaries, who hold a distinctive place in Anglo-Saxon hagiography. The essay takes into examination both literary and liturgical witnesses and both pre- and post-Conquest texts, in Latin and the vernacular. The narrative of the mission and of Augustine himself offered by Bede, although inevitably partial, shaped all the successive representations of the saint in the few literary witnesses dating from the Anglo-Saxon period. The Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum will remain the major source also in post-Conquest England and be largely drawn upon by Goscelin. For its part, liturgy has supplied a multifarious and in part overlooked evidence for the cult of Augustine from the eleventh century onwards. Like many other saints’ cults, that of Augustine is indissolubly connected with historical events. It is the Norman Conquest that will finally acknowledge St Augustine’s standing and establish him as the apostle of the English, albeit only temporarily.