The Vita of Christina of Markyate has been celebrated as ‘perhaps
the twelfth century's most effective and revealing personal history
of a woman’. Indeed, the Vita's account of Christina's early
career is vivid and remarkably detailed: one can read at length of
Christina's saintly childhood, her efforts to escape an unwanted marriage,
her ascetic hardships living with the hermit Roger and her intimate
spiritual friendship with Abbot Geoffrey of St Albans. But while we know
a great deal about Christina's early career, more than for almost any other
contemporary woman, we know almost nothing about her later life. Her
Vita is incomplete, its text known only from a single fire-damaged
fourteenth-century manuscript, BL, MS Cotton Tiberius E i. Christina's
Vita is the very last item in the Tiberius manuscript. On the final folio, as
Christina is reproving Geoffrey for incorrect behaviour, the text breaks off
at the bottom line in the middle of a word: ‘que minus recte videbatur
gerere sapienter increpando, sa…’. As the last datable reference in the
Vita is to 1139, and Abbot Geoffrey died in 1146, the existing text of the
Vita appears to cover events no later than the early 1140s.