St. Christina of Markyate

Christina of Markyate was born with the name Theodora in Huntingdon, England, about 1096–1098 and died about 1155. She was an anchoress, who came from a wealthy English family trying to accommodate with the Normans at that time. She later became the prioress of a community of nuns.

Christina was born c. 1100 into a prosperous East Anglian family. Auti, her father, is likely to have been of Scandinavian descent, a merchant with large social ambitions and deep pockets; her mother, Beatrix, was most probably one of the many Anglo-Saxon women to be given a Norman name, in the hope of finding a place in the new post-1066 world. Through Beatrix’s sister, mistress of Ranulf Flambard, the Anglo-Norman bishop of Durham, this couple had access to the highest echelons of society, a place they hoped to cement through the fostering of Ranulf’s designs upon their daughter, Christina, at a time when the charms of the aunt were seemingly on the wane. But here Auti and Beatrix had failed to allow for Christina’s very determined views on the matter, and it is these, and the fulfillment of Christina’s own ambitions, which form the core of the Life. Initially thwarted in her wish to fulfill the religious vocation to which she felt she had long been called, Christina becomes eventually both the protégé of, and the spiritual adviser to, the abbot of St. Albans, and head of a small community of women religious. It is in this role that Christina merits a Life, albeit a seemingly unfinished work, together with, it is generally assumed, the present of a sumptuously illustrated Psalter. Why, for whom, and by whom the Life was written and the ways in which it manages to combine hagiographic topoi with seemingly realistic narrative events and details remains a source of inquiry. Likewise, questions as to how, when, and why the Psalter was commissioned continue to provoke discussion among historians and art historians alike.

St. Christina is remembered on December 5.