ABSTRACT
The English nun Hugeburc of Heidenheim wrote lives of two kinsmen, Willibald and Wynnebald, and became the only female hagiographer of the Carolingian period. Hugeburc’s work represents an important milestone for the construction of institutional memory in a region undergoing Christianization. While writing hagiography can be seen as a feminist act, the power structures and world views inscribed in these works conform to dominant ideologies in the Christianization process. To assess the cultural work these texts perform, this chapter looks beyond the quality of Hugeburc’s Latin to better understand the hierarchies that the texts construct, revealing that while Hugeburc’s activities challenge a discursive arena that is almost exclusively male, her writings uphold a patriarchal and Christian world view.
