medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
According to her late tenth-century Vita by Uffing, a monk of Werden (BHL 4143), today's Ida -- she has several homonyms in the sanctoral firmament -- was descended from Pepin of Landen and was the sister of two abbots of Corvey. The wife of Egbert, duke of Saxony, she lived a pious life and bore him five children. Of the three who entered religion, one also became abbot of Corvey and another became abbess of Herford. Two sons stayed in the world, married, and rose to positions of secular prominence. After Egbert's death I. retired from their castle at Hovestadt on the Lippe to a nearby convent at today's Herzfeld (Lkr. Soest) in Nordrhein-Westfalen, where she and her husband had previously endowed a church.
At Herzfeld Ida spent her remaining years in prayer and self-denial, engaging as well in works of charity. She had a marble sarcophagus made for herself but while she lived she had it filled daily with articles of food and dispensed these gladly to people from two nearby villages. Ida was buried next to her husband in a little oratory she had had constructed next to the church. Postmortem miracles were reported; over time, these made her tomb a pilgrimage site. In the tenth century, after a period of alleged decay, the monastery became a dependency of the imperial abbey of Werden and Ida's cult was renewed. Thus far the Vita.
In 980 the bishop of Münster conducted a formal Elevatio of Ida's remains, removing them from her sarcophagus and placing them in a portable shrine upon an altar in the oratory, which now became a chapel. The annual procession of her relics is said to have conferred a special blessing on pregnant women.
Herzfeld is now a locality of Lippetal (Kr. Soest) in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Its present Pfarrkirche Basilika Sankt Ida (consecrated, 1903) is an early twentieth-century replacement of an originally thirteenth-century predecessor (but largely rebuilt ca. 1506), shown here in a photograph from 1892:
http://tinyurl.com/q6a7s22
Relatively recent excavation has uncovered the putative site of Ida's resting place prior to her elevation of 980. Here's a view, with a cross marking what is said to have been the exact spot:
http://www.westönnen.de/zzz_alt/home/q3_2003/images/20030911_sen_herzfeld_8.jpg
Ida's sarcophagus, said to have been on display continuously since 980, is now displayed in the Confessio (that's her late nineteenth-century reliquary shrine above it):
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2260/2178644986_3ba204a459_o.jpg
Some period-pertinent images of Ida of Herzfeld:
a) as portrayed on what is said to be a thirteenth-century vault boss from the predecessor of her modern church, now mounted in the latter's chapel dedicated to her:
http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS6RwVSy8GccuXGaxSs3GG2WfhKtn5AzgqSQFXnvF03K82t0bre
b) as portrayed in a silver-gilt head reliquary of ca. 1500 formerly in the Basilika Sankt Ludgerus in Werden (now a _Stadtteil_ of Essen) on display in the crypt of Ida's modern church:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/berni-radke/17066054707/
A closer view:
http://tinyurl.com/cwrqx9f
c) as portrayed (scenes) on engraved plaques from her early sixteenth-century shrine mounted in the latter's modern successor:
1) with her husband duke Egbert at the building of the convent church in Herzfeld:
http://kirchensite.de/index.php?myELEMENT=72408
2) her death:
http://tinyurl.com/qayybxw
3) her funerary procession:
http://tinyurl.com/pdepwfl
d) as portrayed (with the stag that according to her legend sought her protection from hunters) on the earlier sixteenth-century baptismal font (1523) in her chapel in the modern church:
http://tinyurl.com/pd3xz4z
Best,
John Dillon
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