Angadrisma

Angadrisma, known in French as Angadrême and in various Latin and vernacular forms as Angadresima, Angadreme, Angradesma, or Andragasyna, was a seventh-century abbess and Christian saint of Neustria, in what is now northern France. Almost everything that can be said about her derives from hagiographical tradition rather than from charters or chronicles written in her own lifetime. That tradition presents her as a woman of the Frankish aristocracy. Some later accounts name her father as Robert and even identify him with a bishop of Tours, and she is occasionally linked by kinship to other Merovingian-era saints. She is said to have received her education at Thérouanne, in the Pas-de-Calais, under the missionary bishop Saint Omer (Audomarus), which would place her youth in the milieu of the evangelization of northern Gaul. No reliable source records a precise year or place of birth.

The central episode of her legend concerns a projected marriage to Ansbert, a nobleman who subsequently became bishop of Rouen and was himself honored as a saint. Angadrisma, who had resolved to remain a virgin and to dedicate herself to God, prayed that she might be delivered from the match. According to the vita, her prayer was answered by a sudden disfigurement of her face, often described as leprosy or a leprosy-like affliction, which caused Ansbert to abandon the betrothal and marry another. After she had entered the cloister, the disease disappeared and her former appearance was restored. She received the religious veil and was made abbess of the monastery of Oroër-des-Vierges (also called Oroer or Orroir), a house of consecrated virgins situated near Beauvais in the present-day département of Oise. The community is classified in later martyrologies and Benedictine menologies among the houses that followed the Rule of Saint Benedict, although the precise observance of a seventh-century Neustrian convent cannot be reconstructed in detail.

As abbess she governed her nuns until her death, which tradition places about the year 695. She was buried at Oroër. In the Middle Ages her relics were translated to the cathedral of Saint-Pierre at Beauvais, and she became an object of local devotion in that city and diocese. Liturgical calendars assign her feast to 14 October. She was never canonized by a formal papal process of the kind that developed after the twelfth century; like most Merovingian saints, she belongs to the pre-congregation period, in which cult was established by local bishops and by popular veneration. Historians regard the miraculous elements of her story as typical of early medieval hagiography, while still accepting that an abbess named Angadrisma was venerated near Beauvais in the early Middle Ages and that her memory was associated in tradition with Saints Omer and Ansbert.