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" Archived June 2, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  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
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