Content area
Full Text
All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
During the 1130s, at the Benedictine monastery of St Albans in Hertfordshire, the Life of a local holy woman named Christina of Markyate (c. 1096-after 1155) was composed.1This Life, like many earlier and contemporary hagiographical accounts, begins with a miraculous sign witnessed by the saint's mother while she was pregnant, portending the spiritual graces that her daughter would receive. It then traces Christina's spiritual advancement from childhood through adolescence, highlighting her private vow of virginity made in about 1106, and her resolute determination to preserve this vow, despite repeated and often violent attempts made by family members, friends and ecclesiastical officials to ensnare her to marriage.2The second third of the Life recounts her flight to and secret reclusion in two separate hermitages, first at Flamstead and then at Markyate, and her eventual establishment and leadership of a community of women religious at the latter location.3The concluding third follows the progress of her friendship with the reigning abbot of St Albans, Geoffrey de Gorron (1119-46), detailing, with remarkable familiarity, conversations and counsels shared, material and spiritual benefits bestowed, visions and premonitions received, and rumours and defamations suffered due to their deepening intimacy and dependency.4The familiarity that the writer enjoyed with his narrative's subjects has long begged the question: Who was he? Final answers to this question have been frustrated, mainly because the writer never once positively identifies himself in the extant versions of his text. Yet, as this article will show, the Life, especially when it is read alongside related sources from St Albans and Markyate, contains many clues, hitherto overlooked by scholars, that suggest that the likeliest candidate for the writer was Robert de Gorron (d. 1166), Geoffrey's nephew, appointed sacristan and later abbatial successor.
To assess Robert's eligibility as the Life's writer, this article will first review the scholarship on the text's authorship and the challenges posed by the surviving historical evidence to make any definitive identification of Christina's biographer. Robert's vita in the Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani will then be assessed in order to establish his close relationship with his uncle Geoffrey and his credentials as the abbey's most celebrated...