Confessor Bernward

Bernward of Hildesheim, venerated as Saint Bernward and often styled a confessor, was a bishop of the Ottonian church in Saxony. He was born in the mid-tenth century into a noble Saxon family; later medieval sources name his grandfather as Athelbero, a count palatine of Saxony. Left an orphan while still young, he was brought up under the care of his uncle Folkmar, Bishop of Utrecht, and formed in the cathedral school of Hildesheim. Thangmar, the scholasticus of that school and afterwards Bernward’s biographer, was his principal teacher. Bernward entered the ranks of the Hildesheim clergy, was ordained priest, and in time was drawn to the imperial court, where he served as chaplain and as tutor to Otto III.

He was appointed Bishop of Hildesheim in 993 and governed the see until 1022. As bishop he combined pastoral administration with an unusually ambitious programme of building and artistic patronage. He improved the defences of his city and diocese and founded the Benedictine monastery of St. Michael at Hildesheim, whose church, begun in the early eleventh century and dedicated in 1022, he intended as his own burial place. For the cathedral he commissioned large-scale bronze works that survive as masterpieces of Ottonian art: the so-called Bernward Doors, with their paired Old and New Testament reliefs, and the Bernward Column, a spiral narrative column of the life of Christ. Tradition, already present in his medieval vita, also ascribes to him personal skill in metalwork and a close supervision of the craftsmen he employed.

His episcopate included a serious jurisdictional struggle with Archbishop Willigis of Mainz over the nunnery of Gandersheim, whose location on the diocesan boundary made it a prize of competing claims. The Gandersheim Conflict involved synods, the imperial court, and papal contacts, and it outlasted Bernward himself. Apart from that dispute, he is portrayed in the sources as a reforming diocesan, a friend of monastic observance, and a prelate of austere personal life. He died at Hildesheim on 20 November 1022 and was interred in St. Michael’s Church.

A cult developed at his tomb during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Pope Celestine III canonized him in 1193. His feast day is 20 November. Because of his role as builder and patron of figural and metal arts, he has been regarded as a patron of architects, painters, sculptors, and goldsmiths, and he is also a patron of Hildesheim. The church of St. Michael and the cathedral treasures associated with his name are today recognized as part of a UNESCO World Heritage site, and Bernward remains one of the best-attested artist-bishops of medieval Germany.