medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The highly born Waldetrude (Waudru, Waltraud, Waltrudis, etc.; d. later 7th century) was a sister of St. Aldegonde and the wife of St. Vincent Madelgar, by whom she was the mother of at least one child, St. Aldetrude, abbess of Maubeuge. Others occur in the later hagiography of this family but that these actually were her children is questionable in differing degrees (the traditional younger daughter, St. Madelberta, is usually given a conditional pass on the basis of the similarity between her name and that of her presumptive father). According to her Vita, having experienced a religious conversion Waldetrude engaged in works of charity; after a while she convinced her husband that they should both retire from the world. Her way of doing this was to found on a hill called Castrilocus (or Castri locus; "Place of the Fort or Enclosed Village") a community of nuns of which she was abbess. As the bishop of Cambrai from whom she received the veil is attested from 653 and will have died before 671, these developments will have taken place in the third quarter of the seventh century. Though Waldetrude's community, which had been dedicated to St. Peter, did not survive the depredations of the Northmen, it was replaced on the site by another that was likewise female. The latter in turn was converted in the twelfth century into a house of canonesses (regular at first; secular from the thirteenth century onward).
Waldetrude's cult is attested liturgically starting from the ninth century. The latter is also roughly the date of her original Vita (BHL 8776; ca. 850). It was re-worked in the eleventh century (BHL 8777). Waldetrude's remains were accorded a solemn recognition and elevation in 1250. They were examined scientifically in 1997 and declared to be those of a woman who had lived at some time from the fifth century through the seventh and who had probably passed her fortieth birthday.
Though the site of Waldetrude's foundation was still called Castrilocus in the twelfth century, both it and the town that grew up around it came to be called Mons. It's now the chief town of Hainaut in Belgium. Some views of its collégiale Sainte-Waudru, begun in 1450 (the first of these extends over several pages):
http://www.waudru.be/fr/picture/050101.htm
http://amanda.umh.ac.be/stewaudru.html
Aerial view:
http://19jeci2006.fpms.ac.be/Waudru_Marchal_pict.jpg
Some period-pertinent images of St. Waldetrude:
as depicted (at left; St. Gertrude of Nivelles at right) in the late thirteenth-century Livre d'images de Madame Marie (ca. 1285-1290; Paris, BnF, ms. Nouvelle acquisition française 16251, fol. 104r):
http://tinyurl.com/y3k8cud
as depicted (being wed to St. Vincent Madelgar; grayscale image) by Willem Vrelant (attrib.) in a later fifteenth-century copy of Jacques de Guise's _Chroniques de Hainaut (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, ms. 9243, fol. 103r):
http://tinyurl.com/gsghu4e
as depicted (with Sts. Aldetrude and Madelberta) by the Master of Philippe de Croÿ in the later fifteenth-century Hours of Jean de Lannoy (ca. 1460-1493; Liège, Bibliothèque Universitaire, ms. Wittert 14, fol. 164r [digitised image no. 333]):
http://donum.ulg.ac.be/peps/MsW014/#/332/
http://tinyurl.com/jomofmv
Best,
John Dillon
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