Geoffrey of Wells

Geoffrey of Wells (Galfridius Fontibus)^[1] was a mid-twelfth-century English hagiographer, doubtless formerly a canon of Wells Cathedral, whose De Infantia Sancti Edmundi ("The infancy of Saint Edmund"),^[2] part of the burgeoning library of twelfth-century legendaries concerning Saint Edmund^[3] accounted the royal saint's childhood to have been full of adventure;^[4] he dedicated his "largely spurious account"^[5] to Ording, eighth abbot of Bury St. Edmunds,^[6] 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 seventeenth-century antiquary Robert Bruce Cotton, now conserved in the British Library.^[7]

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. Geoffrey of Wells, Liber de infantia Sancti Eadmundi, R.M. Thomson, editor, Analecta Bollandiana 95 (1977:34-42).
3. 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"
4. For parallel apocryphal literature, see Infancy gospels.
5. Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity (Oxford University Press) 2000:132.
6. Abbots of Bury St. Edmunds
7. British Library, Cotton Titus A. viii, part II, BL2393

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 dissertation, 1995.