The Character of St Edith of Wilton
Edith of Wilton may have been the daughter of King, but she did not behave like one in the Abbey or the town.
961-984
King Ethelred the Unready 978-1016
Edith of Wilton may have been the daughter of King, but she did not behave like one in the Abbey or the town.
961-984
King Ethelred the Unready 978-1016
This post is number 5 in the series St Edith of Wilton
Flemish monk Goscelin spent much of his life in England just after the Conquest of 1066, researching the lives of Anglo-Saxon saints. One of his favourites was St Edith of Wilton (?961-984), a daughter of King Edgar. He often felt her presence on his visits to the Abbey where she had lived a century before.
freely translated from the Latin
AMONG her sister-nuns she played a Martha; to Christ she played a Mary; to everyone she proved herself most obliging in the services that devolved upon her.* All guests she enfolded in Christ’s very bosom; she was as conscientious about fast-days as if she were taking part in a feast-day; she joined in feast-days without losing her desire for simple living. Caring nothing for the world’s tastes, she busied herself with philanthropic assistance to the destitute and sickly, and thought more of lepers than grace-and-favour palaces.* Indeed the more someone seemed deformed by disease, the more ready of soul she was with fellow-feeling towards him, the more humane and prompt to serve. Rightly could she be said to be the blind man’s eyes, the lame man’s prop, the poor man’s food and clothing, and the comfort of all the desolate.
freely translated from the Latin
Based on Luke 10:38-42 and John 12:1-8, Martha represents hospitality and household duty, wheres Mary represents personal prayer and listening to the Gospel. Time spent ministering to the poor and sick of Wilton was a little of each: as Jesus says in Matthew 25:40, ‘Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’
Edith was a daughter of King Edgar (r. 959-975). For another princess who turned her back on pavilions and palaces to become a nun and dedicate herself to the service of the poor, see St Elizabeth the New Martyr.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.