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Cultural conflicts in the missions of saint Boniface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

David Keep*
Affiliation:
Rolle College, Exmouth

Extract

A passing comment from a visitor from Fulda to the thirteen hundredth anniversary celebrations for the birth of Boniface at Crediton on 5 June 1980 aptly sums up the purpose of this paper. He observed that without the work of Boniface there could have been no Bismarck. Thus in a sense the Wessex missionary who was so much more a papal legate than an evengelist laid the foundation for the third as well as the second Reich when he consecrated Pepin III king of the Franks in 751. Whether like John Foxe ‘we find of him in stories, that he was a great setter-up and upholder of such blind superstition, and of all popery’ or like his latest biographer we consider that ‘a devotion and a perseverence equal to that which he so nobly exhibited will be needed if our fragmented Church is to become that one true family which the Saviour himself desired it to be’, there is no doubt that he worked for a supranational rather than an intertribal ideal. He has as much claim as Benedict to be the patron saint of a united Europe since it was his work which inspired the imperial decrees of 743, 754 and 757 which made the Rule obligatory. Christopher Dawson’s judgement that he was ‘the greatest Englishman’ is based more on his subtle blending of Frankish with papal influence over the Saxons and his diplomatic regularisation of the Frankish church. As a missionary he is one of a noble line of Celts, Angles and Saxons who converted the heathen. This tradition inspired his original visit to Radbod of Frisia in 716 and his work with Willibrord 719-21.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1982

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References

1 [The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe], ed Josiah, Pratt, 8 vols (London) 1, p 368 Google Scholar; (John Cyril], Sladden [Boniface of Devon Apostle of Germany] (Exeter 1980) p 217 Google Scholar.

2 David Hugh, Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford 1978) p 36 Google Scholar. The relationship between Boniface and the Rule of St Benedict is discussed by Christopher, Holdsworth in ‘Saint Boniface the Monk,’ in The Greatest Englishman [Essays on St Boniface and the Church at Credition], ed Timothy, Reuter] (Exeter 1980) pp 55-7, 60-64Google Scholar.

3 Timothy Reuter, ‘Saint Boniface and Europe’, The Greatest Englishman p 80.

4 Talbot, C. H., The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany (London 1954) p 35 Google Scholar.

5 Ibid p 58.

6 Ibid p 39.

7 Ibid pp 186-7; Sladden pp 158-9.

8 Letters 50 and 56, [The Letters of Saint Boniface trans Ephraim] Emerton (New York 1940) pp 81-2, 92. Reuter in a footnote commented ‘feasts in honour of the dead helped to strengthen the solidarity of kin-groups’ as evidence for the coexistence of paganism with Christianity, The Greatest Englishman pp 90, 76.

9 Ideal since he incorporated honorary new sees at Büraburg and Erfurt into Mainz. The Greatest Englishman p 79, 90 n 51.

10 Letters 51, 56 and 87. Emerton pp 84, 92, 162. Sladden deals in detail with the events of the Frankish synods and provides valuable suggestions about the Anglo-Saxon synod of 746 and the Frankish synod of 747 in his appendices pp 223-9.

11 Letter 10, Emerton pp 25-31.

12 Letter 59, ibid pp 101-2.

13 Letter 18, ibid p 43.

14 Letter 26, ibid p 55.

15 Letters 91, 80, 56, 78, ibid pp 168, 144-5, 93, 140-1.

16 Letter 73, ibid pp 124-30.

17 Bede, , A History of the English Church and People, trans Shirley-Price, Leo (London 1955) pp 7183 Google Scholar.

18 Letters 32-4, Emerton pp 61-4.

19 Gen. 38: 8-10; Deut. 25:5-10.

20 Letter 57, Emerton p 58.

21 Letter 87, ibid p 161.

22 Letter 7. Browne, G. F. Boniface of Crediton and his companions (London 1910) pp 294-5Google Scholar.

23 Letters 83, Emerton p 154.

24 Letters 50, 73, 80, 91, ibid pp 80, 128, 144-5 168.