Abstract
Margaret, the other queen of Scots, is a noteworthy historical figure of eleventhcentury Europe (ca. 1045/6–1093), who has nevertheless not yet been the subject of a critical biography. The basic facts of her life, absent embellishments or interpretation, are briefly sketched out as follows. Her father was the Anglo-Saxon prince, Edward, who had been exiled as an infant after the death of his father, King Edmund Ironside (d. 1016), and the succession of the Danish conqueror King Cnut (d. 1035). Edward journeyed to the kingdom of Hungary, where he married a woman named Agatha and had three children: Margaret, Christina, and Edgar. In 1057, Edward the Exile, as he has come to be known, returned to England with his family as the acknowledged heir to the Anglo-Saxon throne of the childless Edward the Confessor (d. 1066). He died within days of landing in England, and any hope that his son would assume the throne was firmly quashed by the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Margaret and her family fled to the kingdom of the Scots, where Margaret married King Malcolm III. The couple had eight children who survived to adulthood, of whom three became kings of Scotland in succession and one became queen of England. Margaret died in 1093, within three days of the deaths of both her husband and her eldest son. She was buried at the Church of the Holy Trinity, later Dunfermline Abbey, which quickly became the center of a cult centered on her shrine. In the mid-thirteenth century she was the subject of a canonization process.
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Notes
For a recent view of Margaret see G. W. S. Barrow, “Margaret [St Margaret] (d. 1093),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Internet Resource.
John Dowden, The Celtic Church in Scotland (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1894), 281–286;
R. L. Grxme Ritchie, The Normans in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1954), 67–83.
Alan Macquarrie, The Saints of Scotland: Essays in Scottish Church History AD 450–1093 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1997), 211.
Archibald A. M. Duncan, Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1975), 117;
W. C. Dickinson, G. Donaldson, and Isabel Milne, ed., A Source Book of Scottish History I (London and New York: Nelson, 1952–1954), 42.
See David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton, “Introduction,” in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, ed. David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 1–13.
Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); György Györffy, Szent István király, East European Monographs, no. 403; Peter Doherty, trans., King Saint Stephen of Hungary (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs; Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Jacques Le Goff and Gareth Evan Gollrad, trans., Saint Louis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).
Marjorie Chibnall, The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991/1999);
Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma & Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
Lisa M. Bitel, “Introduction: Convent Ruins and Christian Profession, Toward a Methodolgy for the History of Religion and Gender,” in Gender & Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 1–15, quotes on 10 and 6.
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990/2008), 224.
Pauline Stafford, “Writing the Biography of Eleventh-Century Queens,” in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, ed. Bates et al. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 99–109.
Michael T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997/1999), 16.
Aviad Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 39–71.
See, for example, André Vauchez, La sainteté en occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome: École française de Rome; Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1981); Jean Birrell, trans., Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Michael Goodich, “The Politics of Canonization in the Thirteenth Century: Lay and Mendicant Saints,” in Saints and Their Cults, ed. Stephen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 169–99;
Susan Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England. A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
Gábor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe, trans. Éva Pálmai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
See for example: Ronald Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977);
Aviad Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap, 2008).
For the implications on the study of the history of women see, for example, Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 168.
Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), esp. chs 1–3; originally published as Les légendes hagiographiques, Subsidia Hagiographica 18a (Brussels: Bureaux de la Société des Bollandistes, 1906).
See Thomas Head, Hagiography and the Cult of the Saints: The Diocese of Orleans, 800– 1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 270, n. 155. Head also provides a summary of the hagiographical genre in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), xiii–xxxviii.
Barbara Yorke, “‘Carrier of the Truth’: Writing the Biographies of Ango-Saxon Female Saints,” in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, ed. Bates et al. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 9–60.
See Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), esp. 36–41.
Felice Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre: ‘Hagiographical’ Texts as Historical Narrative,” Viator 25 (1994): 95–113.
British Library, Cotton Tiberius Diii, fos. 179v–186r. Derek Baker had argued that the Cotton Tiberius Diii manuscript was a later elaboration of the Ei text. However, J. Hodgson Hinde, Carl Horstmann, and Lois Huneycutt have stated, and it is now generally accepted, that Ei is an abbreviated version of the Diii version. John Hodgson Hinde, “Introduction,” Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera et Collectanea, ed. John Hodgson Hinde, Surtees Society 51 (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1868), lviii; Nova Legenda Anglie: As Collected by John of Tynemouth, John Capgrave, and Others, and First Printed, with New Lives, by Wynkyn de Worde a.d. m d xvi, ed. Carl Horstmann, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 2.168, n. 1;
Derek Baker, “A Nursery of Saints: St Margaret of Scotland Revisted,” in Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 119–142;
and Lois L. Huneycutt, “The Image of a Perfect Princess: The Life of St. Margaret in the Reign of Matilda II,” Anglo-Norman Studies 12 (1991): 81–97.
The Miracles of St Æbbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland, ed. and trans. Robert Bartlett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 92–93.
This twelfth-century date is confirmed by Julian Harrison in “The Mortuary Roll of Turgot of Durham (d. 1115),” Scriptorium 58, no. 1 (2004): 68.
Hinde describes the manuscript as “folio on vellum, in double columns, of the latter part of the twelfth century,” in Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera et Collectanea, ed. Hinde, lvii. Dauvit Broun describes it as “a huge manuscript containing nearly seventy hagiographical texts especially appropriate for late April, May, and most of June; it was obviously once part of a set of volumes which would have constituted a massive legendary of a kind produced in England from the eleventh century. It has, moveover, suffered grievously in the infamous fire of 23 October 1731.” Dauvit Broun, “The Church of St Andrews and its Foundation Legend in the Early Twelfth Century: Recovering the Full Text of Version A of the Foundation Legend,” in Kings, Clerics and Chronicles in Scotland 500–1297: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson on the Occasion of Her Ninetieth Birthday, ed. Simon Taylor (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 110–111.
D. E. R. Watt et al., “Introduction,” Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, 9 vols. (Aberdeen and Edinburgh: Aberdeen University Press, 1989–1998), 3.xvii–xviii.
Dauvit Broun, The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots in the 12th and 13th Centuries (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), 196;
Dauvit Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain from the Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 215–234. For John of Fordun’s Latin text, see Johannis de Fordun Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. William F. Skene (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871), cited by book and chapter. For the English translation see John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation (1872), trans. Felix J. H. Skene, ed. William F. Skene (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872), cited by book and chapter.
Alice Taylor, “Historical Writing in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Scotland: The Dunfermline Compilation,” Historical Research 83, no. 220 (May 2010): 228–252.
See Robert Bartlett, “Turgot (c.1050–1115),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Harrison, “Mortuary Roll,” 67–71. For doubts concerning Turgot’s authorship and an alternative hypothesis see R. H. Forster, “Turgot, Prior of Durham,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association n.s. 13 (1907): 32–40.
The name “Turgot,” loosely translated as “Thor god,” was perhaps considered by later transcribers as a less-than-suitable moniker for a Christian monk. “Theodricus” would therefore be a natural Christian substitute, incorporating the Greek, “Theo,” for God. There are numerous instances in which Theodricus is substituted for a more native name. For example Thierry, the twelfth-century author of a history of kings of Norway, is identified as “Theodricus monachus.” Yet the name Turgot, as well as others that referenced the god Thor, remained popular. The first bishop of Skara in Sweden was named Turgot. Robert Bartlett, “From Paganism to Christianity in Medieval Europe,” in Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus’c. 900–1200, ed. Nora Berend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 54–55.
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© 2013 Catherine Keene
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Keene, C. (2013). Introduction. In: Saint Margaret, Queen of the Scots. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035646_1
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