The Conclusion of Christina of Markyate's Vita

Abstract

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.