Geoffrey of Wells

Geoffrey of Wells (Galfridius Fontibus)^{[note 1]} was a mid-12th-century English hagiographer and a canon of Wells Cathedral, whose De Infantia Sancti Edmundi ("The infancy of Saint Edmund"),^[1] part of the burgeoning library of 12th-century legendaries concerning Saint Edmund,^[2] accounted the royal saint's childhood to have been full of adventure.^{[note 2]} He dedicated his "largely spurious account"^[3] to Ording, eighth abbot of Bury St. Edmunds,^[4] and spoke of the encouragement of another well-placed Anglo-Saxon, Prior Sihtric. The manuscript of Geoffrey's pious embroidery was among the manuscripts collected by the early 17th-century antiquary Robert Bruce Cotton, now conserved in the British Library in London.^[5]

References

1. Geoffrey of Wells, Liber de infantia Sancti Eadmundi, R.M. Thomson, editor, Analecta Bollandiana 95 (1977:34-42).
2. Gábor Klaniczay, (Eva Pálmai, translator), Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe (Cambridge University Press) 2002:162; "The history of the legend of Saint Edmund" Archived June 2, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
3. Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity (Oxford University Press) 2000:132.
4. Abbots of Bury St. Edmunds
5. British Library, Cotton Titus A. viii, part II, BL2393

Notes

1. Another Galfridus Fontibus was Geoffrey of Fontaines-les-Blanches: see Giles Constable, "Religious communities, 1024-1215", in David Luscombe (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge University Press) 2004:364.
2. For parallel apocryphal literature, see Infancy gospels.

Further reading

• Victoria B Jordan, Boston College, Monastic hagiography in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England: The cases of Edward the Confessor and St. Edmund, King and Martyr Archived 13 August 2007 at the Wayback Machine dissertation, 1995.