The Legend of Chrysanthus and Daria in AElfric's Lives of Saints

In the last decade of the tenth century, at the request of his patron Æthelweard, the monk Ælfric translated into Old English a collection of saints' lives and homiletic pieces known today as the Lives of Saints.¹ Having already included such nationally celebrated saints as the apostles, Pope Gregory the Great, and Saint Benedict in the Catholic Homilies, Ælfric turns his attention in the Lives to those saints honored not by the English church but by monks in their cloisters. The collection's twenty-six legends represent a variety of saints (martyrs and confessors, lay and religious, male and female), yet some of his choices are easier to understand than others.² The stories of military saints such as George, the Forty Soldiers, and the Maccabees seem appropriate to a collection written for a devout West-Saxon royal military adviser, as do the lives of the monk-bishop Basil and the abbot Maurus, which provide prototypes for their English counterparts. More difficult to understand is Ælfric's decision to give prominence to the legends of the virgin spouses Julian and Basilissa, Chrysanthus and Daria, and Cecilia and Valerian. Only eight female saints are included in the Lives: four unmarried virgin martyrs (Eugenia, Agnes, Agatha, and Lucy) and four married virgin spouses, three of whom (Basilissa, Cecilia, and Daria) have husbands who are also saints.³ Focusing on Chrysanthus and Daria, I will demonstrate that for Ælfric the hagiography of chaste marriage was indeed relevant to the warlord Æthelweard, his son Æthelmær (who was himself a father), and a wider circle of like-minded laymen as a vehicle to spur them to greater asceticism and steadfast belief.⁴

Had not Æthelweard "obnixe" [obstinately] insisted that Ælfric include Thomas, he had planned to conclude the Lives of Saints with Chrysanthus and Daria.⁵ He might have chosen from late in the year a saint celebrated universally by the church such as Silvester or one specially venerated at Winchester, where Ælfric was educated, such as Birinus or Judoc.⁶ Therefore his decision to bring the collection to a close with this liturgically marginal couple indicates that the legend held a particular attraction for him.⁷ I suggest that Chrysanthus and Daria presented Ælfric with models of fidelity, both to one's spouse and one's Lord, that fully embodied for the layperson the Christian life lived "æfter rihte" [according to what is right], to borrow a phrase from a homily in the Lives.⁸ Read in the context of his sermons on lay virginity, the saints' "clænnyss" [chastity or purity] enables Ælfric to encourage the laity to obey church law regulating marriage and to heed its doctrine, and the legend urges on them an ideology of literal and figurative virginity which lies at the core of his notions of a holy society and his hope for national unity.⁹ As he says in his Mid-Lent homily in the Lives, "Gif ða gehadodan menn healdað godes ðeowdom / on gesettan timan and syferlice libbað / and gif ða læwedan menn libbað æfter rihte / þonne wite we to gewissan þæt god wile fore-sceawian / ure gesund-fulnysse and sibbe mid us / and ðærto-ecan us syllan ða ecan myrhðe mid him" [If cowl-wearing men observe God's service at set times, and live soberly, and if the laity live according to right, then we know for certain that God will provide for our prosperity, and peace among us, and, in addition thereto, give us the eternal mirth with Him].¹⁰ Were Anglo-Saxon Christians to emulate Chrysanthus and Daria, their purity of body and belief would, in the short term, bring them peace from repeated Viking invasions, and, in the long term, eternal prosperity.¹¹

Ælfric's sermons on lay virginity fall roughly into two categories: those that treat clænnyss literally and those that discuss it figuratively.¹² The broadest literal definition of lay chastity is that found in the Second Series sermon for Sexagesima Sunday: "Þæt is þæs læwedan mannes clænnys. þæt...