The Cult of St Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins ed. by Jane Cartwright (review)

This multidisciplinary volume on the cult of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins is the product of an international conference, which took place in Carmarthen, Wales, in July 2013. As Jane Cartwright notes in her Introduction, where she summarizes the legend of the British princess and her virgin companions who were martyred in Cologne at the hands of a band of Huns, the work "constitutes the first interdisciplinary collection of essays in English to explore the development of the legend of Ursula in detail, considering a wealth of different sources including physical remains …; literary texts …; artistic representations … and medieval music" (p. 2). The diverse source material treated by the volume's contributors spans a broad geographical range, from Iceland to Romania, and examines evidence for the cult of the virgin saints of Cologne from the fourth century to the modern period. Several of the essays are complemented by color figures at the center of the volume.

The first two essays outline the origin and development of the cult of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. In Chapter 1, Scott B. Montgomery traces the thousand-year evolution of the cult of the virgin martyrs of Cologne and demonstrates how the "shifting nomenclature" (p. 11) of the group reflects "the ongoing desire to maintain control over this most relic-rich of cults" (p. 12) and the increasingly important value placed on the assertion of individual identity leading up to the Early Modern era. Klaus Militzer's essay (chap. 2) concentrates on inscriptions and excavations in the basilica church of St. Ursula in Cologne, which allegedly housed the saints' remains. Excavations indicate that prior to the 1643 construction of the Golden Chamber, where the relics were kept, pilgrims came to the church to visit the more modest shrines of not only Ursula but also Etherius and Hippolytus.

The subsequent three essays shift focus to the ecclesiastical and liturgical influence of the saint and her companions. In Chapter 3, Helen Nicholson examines the relationship between military religious orders—the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Order—and the virgin saints of Cologne. She focuses on relics and liturgy especially, and discusses how, while local devotion probably influenced the orders' interest in Ursula and the 11,000 virgins, certain elements of the cult would have been particularly appealing to them. In Chapter 4, Kristin Hoefener documents the development and presentation of the cult of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins in medieval liturgical and hagiographic texts from fourth-century Cologne to the modern period. Since the final liturgical compositions examined by Hoefener are Hildegard of Bingen's chant collection for Villersen Brabant, her essay transitions nicely to Chapter 5, in which William Flynn discusses the relationship between Hildegard and the virgin saints of Cologne and the way in which Ursula influenced the famous visionary.

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 treat the legend and other nonhagiographic narrative accounts of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. Elizabeth J. Bryan examines the "colonial and mundane" version of the life of St. Ursula and her companions in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britaniae (1136-38), which "spawned a lively textual tradition of vernacular 'Brut' translations" (p. 119). She traces the 350-year-long development of the Brut translations, which "responded … in various ways to narrative pressures from a devotional tradition of Ursula the saint and martyr" (p. 137). William Marx's essay, which examines the Middle English Legenda aurea tradition of the Ursula legend, complements Bryan's discussion nicely, and examines the forms and contexts of the narratives and implications for use, reception, and readership. Marx demonstrates the way in which the "the chronicle tradition and devotional-didactic tradition" (p. 159) coexisted in medieval Britain and converged only in sixteenth-century verse. Jane Cartwright focuses on the Middle Welsh life, which is preserved in a single...