ABSTRACT
The history of St Albans Abbey’s relations with women is in some ways of relatively tenuous relevance for Christina of Markyate. Sally Thompson pointed out in 1991 that ‘the impression given throughout the Life of Christina is of personal friendship between the abbot and the lady recluse rather than of an institutional dependence’, and this remains true.1 Rachel Koopmans has recently offered a detailed historical case exploring the unfinished state of Christina’s vita and the failure of Christina’s story to be much celebrated in the abbey’s history after the death of Abbot Geoffrey de Gorran in 1146, or, indeed, after Christina’s own death. Christina, she argues, is not a living saint to be treasured but a troubling liability for the abbey, and one incurred almost exclusively because of Christina’s special relationship with Geoffrey de Gorran.2 But St Albans did have a number of associations with women, possibly from the ninth century to the later Middle Ages. It is important not simply to accept as a generic feature of the historiography of women that Christina had so little apparent afterlife in St Albans (or that hers remained so isolated as a contemporary female vita in twelfth-century England), but to enquire more specifically into the possibilities and expectations of Christina’s situation.
