Saint Radegund

Radegund was born about 520, a daughter of Berthar, one of the kings of Thuringia. Her father was murdered by his brother Hermanfrid, and in 531, when the Frankish kings Theuderic and Clothar I defeated Hermanfrid, she was taken among the spoils and given to Clothar. He sent her to his villa at Athies, in Picardy, and had her brought up a Christian.

Clothar married her about 540; the Encyclopaedia Universalis gives 538. Her prayer and austerity were hard for the king to bear. When Clothar had her brother killed, she asked to leave the court, and at Noyon Bishop Medard consecrated her a deaconess. After a pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Martin at Tours, she settled on her lands at Saix, in Poitou.

Between 552 and 557 she founded at Poitiers a monastery for women dedicated to Our Lady. She refused to be abbess and lived there as a simple nun under Agnes, the first abbess. When Clothar later tried to take her back by force, Saint Germanus, bishop of Paris, intervened and stopped him. She and her abbess went to Arles, to the convent of Caesaria, and brought back for Poitiers the rule that Saint Caesarius had written for nuns.

From the Emperor Justin II at Constantinople she obtained a relic of the True Cross, and the monastery took the name of the Holy Cross, Sainte-Croix, in 569, according to the city of Poitiers; other sources give 567. For the arrival of the relic Venantius Fortunatus, the poet who wrote her Life, composed the hymn Vexilla Regis, still sung in Holy Week. Tradition says that Christ appeared to her a year before her death. She died on August 13, 587, when her monastery numbered two hundred nuns, and Gregory of Tours was present at her funeral three days later.

She was buried in the church of Sainte-Marie-hors-les-Murs, which she had built outside the walls for the tombs of the nuns, and the church took her name. Her tomb has drawn pilgrims since the sixth century. In 1562, in the Wars of Religion, the church was sacked and the tomb desecrated; her remains were burned, and a few charred fragments of bone were placed in a lead case and returned to the tomb in 1565. The sarcophagus stands in the crypt on an eleventh-century slab, and ex-votos cover the walls, among them a marble plaque from Queen Anne of Austria. Pilgrimage to her tomb revived in the nineteenth century.

Her monastery was badly damaged in 1569, and in 1792 it was sold and its nuns dispersed. The community regained the rank of abbey in 1932 and in 1965 moved to La Cossonière, at Saint-Benoît, south of Poitiers, where it keeps the reliquary of the True Cross.

She is shown as a queen with crown and scepter, or as a nun. In the church of Sainte-Radegonde two thirteenth-century windows in the eastern bays of the nave show her life and miracles, and she can be recognized by her blue mantle with fleurs-de-lis. In the crypt a marble statue by Nicolas Legendre, dated 1658, gives her the features of Anne of Austria. A seventeenth-century group in painted terracotta by Gervais de La Barre, brought from Sainte-Croix at the Revolution, shows the appearance of Christ to her, with the stone said to keep his footprint, the Pas-de-Dieu.

One of the patrons of Jesus College, Cambridge.

• Poitiers, church of Sainte-RadegondeThe church she built for the tombs of her nuns, with her sarcophagus in the crypt and the windows of her life in the nave.
• Saint-Benoît, abbey of Sainte-CroixThe Benedictine community descended from her monastery, at La Cossonière since 1965, which keeps the reliquary of the True Cross.