medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Most of what is known about Willehad (d. 789), an Anglo-Saxon missionary in Frisian and Saxon lands, comes from his probably ninth-century Vita (BHL 8898). This makes him a Northumbrian who went with the permission of his king (Alhred I) to the northern Netherlands, who commenced his work at Dokkum, the site of St. Boniface's martyrdom, who made many converts and destroyed pagan temples, and who miraculously escaped being murdered by an irate pagan. The Vita goes on to say that Charlemagne then sent Willehad into Saxony, where he worked in the area of Wigmodia along the lower Weser until Widukind's revolt caused him to withdraw to Frisia. After a pilgrimage to Rome Willehad went to Echternach, where he ministered to Christians who had fled Wigmodia and where he also spent some of his time in copying Paul's Epistles.
Still according to the Vita, Willehad returned to Saxony; after Widukind's submission and baptism he was made bishop of a diocese based on Wigmodia. He then is said to have established his see at Bremen, where he built the church in which he was buried (after having died at Blexen) and from which he was later translated to a new church serving the town. In fact, the diocese of Bremen was established only in 804/05, well after Willehad's death. The translation referred to in the Vita will have been that effected in 860 by archbishop St. Ansgar of Hamburg-Bremen into a predecessor of Bremen's originally eleventh-century cathedral of St. Peter. Since the central Middle Ages Willehad has been venerated in the northern Netherlands (where he's considered the apostle of Drenthe), northern Germany, and southern Denmark. Today (8. November) is his feast day in various places and his day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology.
Some period-pertinent images of St. Willehad:
a) as portrayed in relief (at left, holding a model of Bremen's cathedral; at right, St. Charlemagne) on a seal of the city of Bremen in use between 1230 and 1365 (this instance in the Staatsarchiv Bremen):
http://tinyurl.com/nngxvff
b) as portrayed in relief on one of the surviving bench ends of the early fifteenth-century Ratsgestühl (City Council pews; ca. 1410) in Bremen's Focke-Museum:
http://tinyurl.com/bj8h27d
https://pictures.abebooks.com/DRUCKWAREN/15450263487.jpg
c) as portrayed in relief (image at right; at left, St. Peter) in an early sixteenth-century guldiner (1511) of Bremen's archbishop Johann III. von Rode:
http://www.coingallery.de/Heilige/W/Willehad_2.jpg
d) as depicted (at right, holding a model of Bremen's cathedral; at left, St. Charlemagne) by Bartholomäus Bruyn in an earlier sixteenth-century mural painting (ca. 1532) in the Altes Rathaus in Bremen:
http://tinyurl.com/qj9c9lr
e) as portrayed in Bremen's Rinesberch / Schene chronicle of 1540 (Bremen, Staat- und Universitätsbibliothek, Hs. Brem.a.0856, fol. 4v):
http://tinyurl.com/2eocz78
Best,
John Dillon
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