Æbbe the Younger explained
| Saint Æbbe of Coldingham |
| Birth Date: | Unknown |
| Death Date: | 2 April 870 |
| Feast Day: | 2 April |
| Death Place: | Coldingham Monastery, Scotland |
| Canonized Date: | Pre-Congregation |
Saint Æbbe of Coldingham (also Ebbe, Aebbe, Abb), also known as Æbbe the Younger, (died 2 April 870) was an Abbess of Coldingham Priory in south-east Scotland.[1]
Like many of her fellow female saints of Anglo-Saxon England, little is known about her life.[2] She presided over the Benedictine Abbey at Coldingham.[3]
She is best known for an act of self-mutilation to avoid rape by Viking invaders: according to a thirteenth-century chronicle, she took a razor and cut off her nose in front of the nuns, who followed her example.[4] Their appearance so disgusted the invaders that the women were saved from rape but not from death, as the Danes soon returned and set fire to the convent, killing Æbbe and her entire community.[5]
External links
Notes and References
- Book: Farmer, David. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 2011. Oxford University Press. New York. 978-0-19-959660-7. 133.
- Pulsiano. Phillip. Blessed Bodies: The Vitae of Anglo-Saxon Female Saints. Parergon. 1999. 16. 2. 6. 1 February 2014. 10.1353/pgn.1999.0008.
- http://catholicsaints.info/calendar-of-scottish-saints-saint-ebba-virgin-and-abbess-and-her-companions-martyrs-a-d-870/ Barret, OSB, Michael. "Saint Ebba, Virgin and Abbess, and her Companions, Martyrs, A.D. 870". The Calendar of Scottish Saints, 1919
- Book: Bartlett, Anne Clark. Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature. registration. 8 February 2013. 1995. Cornell UP. 9780801430381. 39.
- Horner. Shari. 1994. Spiritual Truth and Sexual Violence: The Old English Juliana, Anglo-Saxon Nuns, and the Discourse of Female Monastic Enclosure. Signs. 19. 3. 658–75. 3174773. 10.1086/494916.
